Cuba - Si and No!

It was late in the evening when we arrived at the Havana airport. A school bus, yellow and very very old, bought second hand an eternity ago from somewhere in the States, waited to take our group to the Martin Luther King Center, where we were going to stay. Repaired countless times, it labored up steep hills, carried the twenty-five of us without mishap through the narrow cobbled streets of Havana and through the countryside. It groaned and moaned, but miraculously made it. For me it became a symbol for Cuba, plodding, creaking, but defiant.

What were my first impressions? A beautiful but decaying Spanish-built capital, little traffic, ancient Renaults, beat-up Chevies, Ladas, a few new Japanese rental cars! People walking, bicycling, pushing carts, occasionally sitting in horse-drawn carriages or two at a time in those strange bright yellow little taxicabs, ingenious plastic structures built around and over a motorcycle? Intoxicating Latin beats poured from open windows, car radios, backyards. The streets were strikingly clean no rubbish, no homeless, no beggars, no one in rags! No elegant people either! But attractive people of mainly Spanish and African origin! Their startling combinations of dark skin with blond or red hair, light skin with thick dark hair and many variations thereof reminded me of Brazil's similar mix of races. And what a joy to see all these red-cheeked children in their neat school uniforms!

I had been in Havana for a long weekend in December l958, just a month before Castro overthrew Batista's corrupt dictatorship in a bloodless coup in January l959. I remembered the sensuous way women walked, obviously at peace with their voluptuous curves. Today many women flaunt their bodies in spandex., regardless of their girth. I admired a young woman, still slender, walking hand in hand with her small child, her lovely shoulders erect. She did not walk, she floated along to an inner rhythm, like water gliding over rounded stones in a creek.

The embargo is still on and Americans risk heavy fines, if they go illegally via Mexico or Canada, but we traveled under a special US Treasury license as member of a Witness for Peace delegation. This grassroots faith-based organization was founded in the eighties in opposition to American policies in Nicaragua and has since been involved in other Central American and Caribbean countries. Our specific goal was to observe what was happening on this island as a result of the 43 year-old US embargo. We had a full ten-day schedule. It included a visit to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a talk about Cuba's renowned health system, a lecture by a Baptist minister about church/ state relations. We met with members of a "transformation workshop" in a poor section of town, that dealt with Havana's grievous state of housing. We listened to a concert by students of a famous music school, had a look at Cuba's educational system. In the evenings we had our ears filled by noisy but intoxicating Cuban music. On one occasion we even learned to dance the cha cha cha . And there was more.

We had been startled on our first ride from the airport by the tall, brightly lit, statue of Jesus standing prominently above Havana Bay close to an old Spanish fort. It had been commissioned by the wife of Batista, the last thing she did before she fled with her husband in l959 and has remained fully illuminated at night ever since. It was our first inkling, that this communist regime was pragmatic, cut from a different pattern. Santeria, an African-Cuban religion, and evangelical groups flourishes unhindered. The Catholic church remains the largest independent institution. All restrictions on religion were lifted in l991 and in the following year the constitution was amended to declare Cuba to be a secular, not an atheist state. When Pope John Paul ll visited in November l996, he pleaded for a broadening of the role of the church and for a prisoners' amnesty. In fact, 300 were subsequently freed.

Cubans are proud, and justly so, of their achievements in health and education which are considered a person's birth rights. Literacy rates and life expectancies are one of the highest in the world, higher than those in the United States. At a neighborhood health center we met an attractive and obviously devoted family medical doctor. She told us that the emphasis of health care is on prevention. Almost all Cuban babies are born in a hospital and carefully monitored during their first months. Mothers continue to get advice about their care and diet. Birth control is widely practiced and families, on average, have no more than two children, rarely three. Doctors are highly trained, including students from foreign countries, who will practice in their home lands. Cuba has exported medical teams from Nicaragua to Yemen and has more doctors overseas than the World Health Organization.

However, the demise of the Soviet regime in 1991 and the end of subsidies in l992 led to a steep decline in living conditions. We experienced first hand, that water and electricity are periodically shut off. We drove by decaying, once elegant mansions, now tenements for several families, whose washing dried on graceful, but rusty iron-wrought balconies. The effects of the embargo has become increasingly severe, since it forbids imports from the States only ninety miles away. Only one exception was made after last year's worst hurricane in half a century, for the limited sale of food and needed drugs. We heard bitter complaints from an official whom we met at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He reminded us, that in 1961 the Castro regime offered compensation to foreigners, whose banks, land holdings and industrial concerns were expropriated. France, Switzerland and other European nations accepted. The United States refused and broke diplomatic relations. A quid pro quo followed. Castro declared Cuba's allegiance to the Eastern bloc. The United States responded with the embargo and sponsored the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs. However, after the September ll attack thirty years later Cuba offered its airspace, blood and other medical help, a gesture which got little publicity in the American press.

Our lodging was far from downtown Havana in a low income neighborhood which, although swept and clean, was decidedly drab looking. Could this also be blamed on the embargo or on the lack of Russian subsidies, which stopped with the demise of the Soviet regime? Or was this the inevitable effect of a Communist system, that provided health care, education and a minimum living standard, but was unable to stimulate the economy, because it stifled initiative and risk taking?

We spent three most enjoyable days driving in our creaking school bus to Puerto Esperanto in Cuba's far west. We passed orderly fields of tobacco, manioc, beans or pineapples. We saw banana groves and lime trees against a background of distant hills. Just before reaching our goal we past unique limestone formations, honey combed with caves, just one of three places in the world where such mountains exist.

In Puerto Esperanto we stayed at a visitors center, accommodating groups like ours in dormitories. Our host, who had built it and successfully ran with the help of his family, told us about growing up bitterly poor on this very land, where his father worked and was paid a pittance by the foreign owner of a vast estate. He recalled how he was unable to take his mother to a hospital when she fell seriously ill. Later he got an education and finally became a Baptist minister. After Castro came to power the land was distributed among the peasants. Nowadays they can sell whatever they raise above a fixed amount delivered to their cooperative. Their children go to a nearby school and a doctor, who cares for about one hundred families, and a health care facility are within easy reach. We visited a fishing cooperative and where told a similar story. Fishermen could sell their surplus above a set minimum on the open market. On a dock ancient boats were being repaired with infinite care and a minimum of materials and tools. Everything was scarce. It was even difficult to find a rickety chair for this old lady to sit on. As we left, the head of the collective, who had hundreds of wrinkles and laughing eyes, put his arm around my shoulders and said "Que bonita!" which I took to be a compliment for being twice as old as he was.

On the way back to Havana, we stopped at another collective, where pineapples, tobacco and bananas were grown. The head of the collective plied us with the juiciest, sweetest pineapples I have ever eaten. His lively little daughter ran circles around us. Her young mother, who taught at a nearby school, tried unsuccessfully to stop her from chasing ducks and dogs. Their straw thatched house had flowers planted in front like all the other farm houses we had seen on the way. No doubt the rural poor, who remembered their life under Batista, gained the most from the revolution and seemed to devoted to Fidel, as they fondly referred to him.

However, to every Cuba si there is a no. All the way back to town, the road was lined with people waiting, waiting, waiting. For a rare busãone of those monstrously long onesã or for a kindly truck driver or a private car willing to give them a ride. And apparently, eventually they always will make it. We also glimpsed dreary dilapidated apartment houses for workers, built six stories high from concrete blocks.

Living conditions for the urban population have decidedly worsened. A younger generation, born after Batista, chafes at the bit. A few market oriented reforms have been introduced, tourism and foreign investment are encouraged, usually in the shape of joint ventures with foreign firms. An unfortunate by-product is a black market, prostitution and moonlighting . Cubans are allowed to start small businesses, such as restaurants which , however, must not seat more than 12 customers. The dollar has become a legalized second currency This, however, causes a social rift in a formerly egalitarian society between wage earners paid in devalued pesos and those capable of earning dollars, for instance in the tourist hotels. Stores have opened, where rare goods were available, but only for dollars. Almost everything seems to have two sides in Cuba. Human rights are violated, political dissent suppressed and people suffer in prison under abusive conditions. In every city block, a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution spies on the inhabitants, makes sure that they toe the official line and go to the big rallies to hear Castro speak for hours. That committee also gets involved in family quarrels. There is no beating of wives and mistreating of children in Cuba!

If the embargo was designed to help topple Castro, it has had the opposite effect, because it helps focus discontent on the US. "We are suffering under the embargo, but we are struggling through and we have kept our dignity" was the conclusion of the Foreign Ministry official. Clearly national pride has been harnessed in the cause of socialism. Castro's revolution had been a direct successor to JosÈ Martin's rebellion against a colonial power. The airport and the huge Plaza de la Revolucion are named after Martin and not after Castro. It is impossible to estimate, whether he would be reelected in an open plebiscite, but even the American official, who received us for questioning at the US Interest Section, allowed that he might very well win.

Back in the United States, whenever I see a yellow school bus, I feel a twinge of nostalgia. Under this blue sky, in the midst of such beauty, even a humorless ideology such as communism, mellows. Cuban¼s love to smile, to laugh, to dance, to make music. Even the guards on duty tend to smile at a pretty girl. When Columbus first saw Cuba, he declared that he had never seen such a beautiful place. Winston Churchill, who visited in 1898, said that he would like his bones to be interred on this island. Not to mention Hemingway, who is fondly remembered.