Rust Colored Hair -- segment from an essay draft, in-progress
Aboard the
chartered plane from Cancun, Mexico, the Cuban band rocked the cabin, playing
for we, the illegals, the ones who dared to defy the United States government’s
prohibition against traveling to the shunned island 90 miles off the coast of
Florida. A few dozen of us, gathered by Global Exchange to violate and
repudiate the U.S. blockade. The sanctions. And for me, the refusal to allow a
government to prevent me from visiting with people from another land.
This was the
first of two journeys for me to Cuba during the mid-1990s. Our defiance on this
one had a penalty, the threat of 10 years in prison and a $200,000 fine. We
were felonious. Troublemakers. And many of us broadcast our intentions
beforehand, including me, with a local television news report and write-ups in
regional newspapers. The closing shot of the TV interview showed me walking
away from the camera, along a Binghamton University path in upstate New York where
I was working toward a Ph.D., conveying something dramatic, my guess. A
troublemaker.
The plane
landed and we debarked, many amazed. No stamps on our passports when we passed
through customs. We boarded buses, were given flowers of welcome, and rode
through Havana, stopping once for some deliberation between the delegation
leaders, including Media Benjamin, now of Code Pink, and our hosts. When the
bus door opened, I stepped out, alone, with my flowers, crossed the road, and
gave them to an older woman among the onlookers. Spontaneous. Probably a
transgression of some kind. I wasn’t showboating. I had a gift to pass along. Contact.
The trip
became a gift, too. I wasn’t unfamiliar with so-called Third World
circumstances, having traveled to Nicaragua twice, including to the northwest
region along the Honduras border where the U.S.-backed contra forces marauded and
murdered displaced Nicaraguans in the parched region, who chose to live in
cooperatives, many of them radical Christian-based comunidades de base
ecclesiales, thrown off their former properties by cotton and sugar plantation
land thieves before the socialist Sandanista government revolutionaries came
into power. That was history then, though. The Contra attacks were no longer
necessary. The U.S. won. The Sandanistas were out of power. The base
communities considered an aberration, condemned by the conservative Nicaragua Roman
Catholic cardinal, the church. But a popular movement persisted despite that in
Nicaragua. It wasn’t “communist” like the Cuban island. It was a means of
survival, cooperative, collaborative in the midst of scarce resources, of a
people who had known the feudal oppression of a dictatorship, the Somoza
government.
Just a minute, though. Wasn’t it
the dictatorial Batista government that Fidel Castro and his band of insurgents
overthrew? And didn’t these usurpers seek assistance from the Eisenhower
government before turning ultimately to Russia? By the time of our journey to
Cuba, now entering its “Special Period” of increased impoverishment with the
breakup of the Soviet Union? ...
(c) 2014 Wes Rehberg
