In today’s NYT there is an article about the people-to-people trips now legal for more Americans traveling to Cuba. Since the recent controversial trip by Beyonce and Jay-Z on one of these officially-sanctioned trips, there has been more attention in the media to travel to Cuba.
These travel restrictions, part of the larger 51-year-old embargo on this Island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida, are anachronistic at best, and just plain bizarre under any measure (except by right-wing extremists) ~ like the embargo itself. According to the article,
The first trips of the Obama era began in August 2011 and since then Americans, once so rare as to be almost exotic, have become a common sight, particularly in Havana. (NYT, “Rare Cuba Trips by Americans…” August 1, 2013)
If August, 2011, brought about this narrow opening of access of more Americans to the Island, “flooding” Cuba with middle-class, white, retired Americans, then my husband and I might just have hit on just the right timing.
“It is a place and a people so close, yet off limits to us that it creates the natural desire of wanting what you can’t have,” Piegza [a travel agent] said. It is, he said, a place many travelers want to see before they die. (NYT, “Rare Cuba Trips by Americans…” August 1, 2013)
On July 22nd of that year, we married, and three days later we were in Havana for our honeymoon (dubbed by a clever friend as our “Commie-moon”). Somewhat like the tourists described above, Cuba was a place neither of us had been to and wanted to see before we died. But much more so, it was a people and a culture, a political system (with all its aspirations and flaws), that we wanted to see before it died.
Given that hhe enemies of the cold war have been replaced by others (is it China? Is it Islam?), and given that the aging dinosaurs-like Cuban leaders have not been skillful at building capacity among the following generation, who couldn’t see that this grand experiment, with all its glories and delusions, would be shifting shape? What would stop this island nation, facing (as ever) the challenges of providing for its people, from being sucked into the imperialist-grounded tourist trade that makes too many of the Caribbean nations exotic playgrounds for those who have wealth and leisure?
In that week before people-to-people trips were officially allowed, we ran into only two other Americans, one of whom was on the same plane as we were. We saw lots of tourists, but they were mostly from Holland, Scandanavia, and Eastern European countries. So at that point, in no way were Americans “a common sight.” But we were a welcomed one. Cubans responded to us, when they learned where we were from, with surprise and delight. It was abundantly clear to us that the barrier for American citizens traveling to and in Cuba was wholly of the U.S. government’s making, not the Cuban government’s and not the Cuban peoples.
For the West Virginians in Cuba in 2013, their trip was organized by Washington-based Cuba Educational Travel. That meant conversations with artists, historians, teachers, priests, and small business owners, who described their work and lives in a country that is slowly modernizing its economy. (NYT, “Rare Cuba Trips by Americans…” August 1, 2013)
We met lovely people, both in the big city of Havana, and in the small town called Viñales. Both locations cater to tourists, so I am under no pretenses that the little I saw in the week I was there was limited by time, by geography, by access, and by cultural expanses. However, we choose not to seclude ourselves in the beach resorts, as many European and Canadian tourists do and we traveled completely on our own. So, some of what I saw and experienced I hold to be true and accurate, as well as informative and compelling.
- It is true that people cannot speak freely there. It is true that when we had lucky moments completely and safely alone with some people – unexpectedly on mountain tops; when we gave a single mother and her daughter a ride home; or on a long walk in the countryside – people shared their woes and sources of pride, engaged us in our differing and sometimes contradictory understanding of historical events, expressed their disgust with the political system.
- We experienced the abundance of community when the hostess of the casa particulares (the Cuban version of B&B) where we stayed called on friends and neighbors to ensure the feast she cooked for our dinner was beyond abundant (and by far, the best tasting and freshest meal we had over any restaurant we frequented).
- There was a delightful artist ~ Esther ~ whose artwork I loved, whose studio I visited twice. When I returned the second time, on our last day in the country, I sought her out specifically to give a bracelet I had been wearing on the trip. She so touched, not just by the gesture, but by my remembering her, that she gave me one of her paintings. Tears of joy in our eyes, we took a photo of us together that I cherish.
As someone who has worked with families with young children living in poor communities in the U.S. for the past twenty years, I pay attention to stress levels of adults caring for children and how those children are treated. I have seen stressed parents take out their anger on children and I have seen poverty exacerbate this in terrible ways.
Cuba is not a rich nation. It is a much poorer nation than the U.S., and yet poverty looks quite different there than here. There is a guarantee of housing for anyone who wants it – yes, crowded housing, as families divide and subdivide the property they own, but still, homelessness is a relative non-starter there. Neither in Havana, nor the small town where we stayed in a residential neighborhood, did I ever once observe impatience towards children, much less treatment that caused me to wince or worry. This has made a deeply positive impression on me and I have tried to understand why it might be so. Wouldn’t poverty have the same influence, regardless of where it exists?
Of course, I can’t know for sure why this difference existed. However, I have spun some plausible speculations as to why. The most convincing (for me) is that it might not be poverty per se that brings out the worst in parents. It could be the economic divide between the Haves and Have-Nots, and its girth. In Cuba, at least in 2011, and regulated by the government, hotel desk clerks made 15 Cuban pesos per month, while pediatricians made 25. That is a ratio of 3:5. In the U.S., hotel clerks make $24,00 per year while the average salary of pediatricians is $128,000 – a ratio of 1:5. And this isn’t even looking at those extreme stats floating around the internet that say CEO-to-worker pay ratios have ballooned 1,000% since 1950 in the U.S.
Yes, yes, there is the alternative market, where many people make money, not only for extra things, but for subsistence. This is not a full endorsement of the Cuban economic system. But I can’t help but wonder if it could be that it’s not poverty that stresses some families out, but the not having what they think others have, complicated by media-driven materialism that stokes the fires of “I must have this” and “We aren’t good enough unless we have that”?
I love Cuba and its people, including Fidel. The bill you have signed to further tighten the blockade hurts me deeply. I travel to Cuba whenever I can to take medicine and the small, perhaps insignificant comfort of my presence, to those whose courage and tenderness have inspired me practically my entire life. (Open Letter to President Bill Clinton, 1996, Alice Walker)
Knowing the restricted access to goods caused by the American embargo, and inspired by one of my heroes (Alice Walker), I knew it would be important to make at least the smallest gesture against this. Through the generosity of my dentist at home, and knowing that Cuba has a sugar economy that impacts the oral health of its peoples, we brought small bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We gave them to a wonderful pediatrician whom we met through the owner of where we stayed in Viñales, who planned to give them out to the children she saw in her practice.
The day we arrived back home from our trip, the newspapers in the U.S. where alight with news that Raul Castro, the current president of Cuba, had announced a significant policy shift. Cubans, starting in Havana, would be allowed to sell their homes for their own profit. While lauded as a positive move towards supposed capitalist prosperity, such a change also undermines the national commitment to guarantee housing security. For if one is allowed to sell one’s own house, that individual is forgoing their right to their home.
In addition that tragic “side effect,” there was additional speculation about who would have the funds to buy property in Cuba. Certainly not most Cubans, at least those still on the Island. Those in the U.S. with money, who are mostly of European-descent, would have the financial resources to invest in properties, thus likely undermining yet another partially-realized ambition of Cuba: evening the racial playing field of their culture and nation.
Though that decision, announced on the day of our return, was not the very beginning of the end, it was yet another signal that the demise of a certain time and way of Cuba is coming soon. At the risk of being accused to romanticizing a repressive political circumstance, I am blessed to have been witness to a moment in time and intend to testify on behalf of its beauty and unsightliness, and the truth as I experienced.