"Rust Colored Hair" -- updated segment, nonfiction story draft, Cuba journeys --
Aboard the
chartered plane from Cancun, Mexico, the small 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 and its 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
trip 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 my 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, maybe even exotic.
Strange, I thought. The question raised in the report: “Will he get there?”
The plane
landed and we debarked, many mesmerized. Immigration did not stamp our
passports when we passed through customs to hide evidence of our arrival. We
boarded buses, were given flowers of welcome, and rode through Havana, stopping
once for deliberation between the delegation leaders, including Medea 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. Why I came.
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 area, who chose to live in
cooperatives, many of these 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 U.S. backed Somoza
government.
Just a minute, though. A
question. 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 administration before turning ultimately to Russia? A Cuba
now entering its “Special Period” of increased impoverishment with the breakup
of the Soviet Union at the time of our journey to Cuba?
A few features of the “Special
Period” clearly stood out:
One, the second language taught
in schools switched from Russian to English, including the courses of study
open to teachers at the University of Havana. Walking alone away from our group
through Havana streets, a small group of children followed me asking if I was a
Russian. I said, no, I’m from the USA, which brought exclamations of surprise
and greetings in English. One man walked alongside me, one of the new English
teachers, trying out his own expertise in the language. He invited me to his
daughter’s birthday party (a ruse for me to bring a gift, likely U.S. dollars).
I smiled and declined. Still, we chatted.
Another feature, despite the
proclamations of an egalitarian society, Cuba had two separate economies, the
peso and the dollar, and the twain wasn’t supposed to meet, though it did via
the underground market. Those who worked in the dollar economy – tourism and
international commercial efforts – lived better off than those in the peso
world, an elite of sorts. On both of my visits, my dollar lured prostitutes,
vendors, restaurants, hotels and other amenities available to international
visitors.
A third, though openly
interracial – with Afro-Cubans making up about 65 percent of the population –
one social policy analyst noted in her study indications of racism at the
micro-levels of the distribution of goods and services, a distribution that at
that level favored the more European looking Cubans. She did not hesitate to
expound on her findings during an inter-American conference that I took part in
at the University of Havana in 1995.
A fourth feature showed up as a
plus, the availability of sophisticated medical care and the continued effort
by the Cuban government to send teams of medical caregivers to other countries
and to offer this care to victims of the massive Chernobyl nuclear plant
meltdown in Ukraine. ...
(c) 2014 Wes Rehberg
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