Travels in a Complicated Cuba

By Melinda Welsh, Sacramento News & Review. Posted December 11, 2003.

I boarded a charter plane in Miami thinking a trip to Cuba would involve awesome beaches and a Cold War-, frozen-in-time-style society, where truths come only in black and white. Yes, simple would have been good; black-and-white would have made writing easy.

But as it turned out, Cuba is eight million shades of gray.

Between its battered economy, sympathetic social goals, lack of basic freedoms, proliferating prostitutes and cultural richness, the country turned out to be as complex as a logarithm.

What makes Cuba so muy complicado?

For starters, here is a country that thinks it's an idea -- i.e., socialism -- that teaches people to work according to their capacity and receive according to their needs. But mix lofty sensibilities like that in with the sunshine, the rum, a new tourist-dollar economy and El Commandante, Fidel Castro's long-standing game of jeopardy with a sworn enemy to the north, the United States, and you end up with a convoluted political cocktail.

The delegation I traveled with was fated to be among the last legally licensed "people-to-people" tours of the island by Americans. Sponsored by the San Francisco-based Global Exchange, our trip was educational in nature, with participants encouraged to learn about Cuba from its people. Last year, 30,000 Americans traveled to the island under this now moribund license. Another 30,000 traveled on religious or academic licenses, the kind that will still remain valid after the new law goes into effect; an estimated 50,000 traveled there illegally.

It cannot be overstated that, since 1959, Cuba has made huge gains when it comes to hunger (nobody in the impoverished country goes without food), literacy (all Cuba's children can read and write) and health care (everyone on the island has free medical care.) Embarrassingly, the island ranks better than the United States in the latter two categories.

But Cuba is ruled by a one-party government run by Castro -- a man who, at 77, has outlasted eight U.S. presidents. It has no free press, and people who criticize the revolution sometimes get thrown in jail, often for a very long time. Even stalwart supporters of Cuba had to take a step back from their hyperbole last spring when Castro threw 75 dissidents in prison with seemingly little provocation.

One has to wonder how long the high positives and troubling negatives can continue to coexist in Cuba. In fact, in these days in which globalization is all the rage and even China has opened its doors to the best and worst of American capitalism, many people believe the island represents the end-stage application of socialism in the modern world.

Yeah, but when my husband and I asked a toothless man on a random street corner in Havana what he thought about the future of his country, he told us socialismo would survive and delivered an on-the-spot lecture on Cuba's right to sovereignty and the difference between a people and its government. "Your president is a stupid man ... stupido," he told us. "But in my country, we understand that the people are not the same as the government."

A few weeks before leaving for Cuba, members of our delegation became worried when President George W. Bush held a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, announcing moves to further intensify the 44-year-old, U.S.-sponsored economic blockade of the island. Basically, the embargo bans most U.S. trade with Cuba and prohibits most U.S. citizens from visiting the island. Though both the Senate and U.S. House subsequently voted to oppose Bush and cease enforcement of travel restrictions, their plan was not destined to win. Bush played hardball and threatened to veto, causing a backroom deal that tightened the travel ban and reinforced the end of people-to-people travel.

The news didn't stop anyone who had signed on for our journey. We gathered in Havana in late October at Al Capone's regular address in pre-Castro Cuba, the historic Hotel Nacional. We were ready to experience the country's beauty, ponder its paradoxes and learn what we could from its people.

The Curse/Boon of Tourism

Yamile Martinez, our guide, has deep brown eyes, a flashing smile and a love of much that is good about America. Fluent in English and trained as a teacher, the Cuban woman, 28, is fully modern with a passion for rock 'n' roll music and American movies. She is equally ardent about her country's heritage of revolution -- about how Castro and Che Guevara came down from the mountains and led the 1959 revolution that freed the peasants from the rule of Fulgencio Batista during the days when American mob boss Meyer Lansky and his pals ran the island as a Mafioso paradise.

Martinez was charismatic and resourceful. But she was clearly uneasy about her country's future and her own. Among other worries, she was preparing to be out of a job by month's end because of the end of people-to-people travel from America.

Like 11 million other Cubans, Martinez survived the Great Depression-like years of the "special period" during the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The island was under an economic blockade from the United States and had come to rely on the giant communist country as its chief benefactor and trading partner. The demise of that government was nearly catastrophic for Cuba. "We had not enough food," said Martinez. "Electricity was scarce. There were no lights, no oil, no transportation."

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