"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.
Uh oh. All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.
As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.
I had plenty of stories to tell. We arrived the day after the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. Banners with Fidel’s likeness proclaimed its success. Our bus ride through Havana suggested otherwise. Dilapidated buildings, streams of vintage U.S. cars, and stacks of post-Revolution fortress-like apartment buildings lined our path to the Parque Central Hotel. We passed Revolution Square where officials once corralled tens of thousands of Cubans, some accounts say upwards of a million, to stand in the Caribbean sun to hear El Lider’s six-hour speeches.
It sat empty today, a vast parking lot of a space. A tower, 358 feet of revolutionary fervor, rose in the center. A tan office building that bordered the space on the right was decorated with a five story high metal sculpture of Che Guevara’s head. It seemed a high honor for an itinerant revolutionary who left Cuba after only six years for greener pastures in Bolivia, where he was executed after that revolution failed. Still, his image is everywhere.
We checked into our hotel, a replica of an older European hotel, with mahogany furniture and heavy draperies. We drew them open and gasped. We call it a slum; they call it normal. Welcome to Cuba, the land of the-emperor-has-no-clothes.
Before our departure from Miami, our tour leaders had given us just two pieces of advice:
1) Do not use the word “humanitarian” in front of the Cuban airport officials. They officially don’t need any help, and it might complicate our entry into the country to suggest that they do.
2) Watch the tour bus driver. Even though he claims to speak no English, he could easily be fluent and spying on our official tour guide Celia, an engaging single mom. If so, he would be ready to turn her in if she spouted any anti-regime opinions.
Other than that, they were circumspect. Listen, they told us, talk to Cubans, observe, explore, and draw our own conclusions. At the end of the trip, they would be curious to hear our impressions.
I closed the email and reached for the phone. My tech person took down the site, and I waited for the verdict. In the few hours the site was up, who might have read it? Travelers and ordinary Cubans did not have access to the Internet, but such a state must have people monitoring chatter like mine. I worried. I couldn’t sleep. What if something I said was turned against Celia? I felt watched. And controlled. And afraid. I comforted myself that I had taken care to change her name, and never identified the tour or leaders. Could they track them down anyway? What had I done?
My worry took me back to what I’d learned about Fidel and his death grip on the country. He started out with the pure-sounding intention to overthrow the cruel and corrupt dictator Batista in order to create a fair society after centuries of exploitive rule. Once in power though, he leaped in another direction and announced that he was a Marxist. He took over private property and threw out foreign businesses. Affluent Cubans couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Cuba became the place where everybody gets the same and nobody gets much.
To convince the rest of the populace to go along with the plan, he instituted public executions by firing squad, on TV for easy viewing, of people who disagreed. Here was a new incarnation of the powerful and bloody oppression they were used to, only this time it was of their own. Which brought me to my central – and very American - question: how could this last after 50 years of disappointment? Where was the protest?
The answer was in the brilliance of that death grip. Each block has an official to monitor the compliance of the citizens. Children earn kerchiefs for learning devotion to the State, which helps get them into the best schools. The best jobs – like those in the tourist industry – go to favored loyalists. The lively black market is a back door operation that most participate in, but does not openly challenge the status quo. The whole structure of Cuban society was tilted, so that the balance of power stayed unbalanced.
Finally, I got the call. Both of them were on the line. They liked the site. They were glad the trip made such an impression. They’d never had anyone go to such lengths to document a trip. And they were grateful for my willingness to alter it if need be.
Their greatest concern, they explained, was for Celia. If one of her tourists left with a poor impression of Cuba, she would be blamed. I removed a few details, renamed a few other characters we’d met to make her more difficult to identify. The site went back up, and I exhaled, free again from censorship and worry.
This final episode of my Cuba experience ended with a three-day taste of life as Cubans live it every day. Now I watch with interest through the eyes of Cuban bloggers, and news reports of recent reforms. Cubans can now have some types of small businesses, a million people are being removed from the State’s payroll. Cubans are promised the opportunity to travel. For our part, American travel restrictions are lifting, with brand new licenses being granted to tour companies for more than just humanitarian trips.
It is change in its infancy, but maybe this time real change can come without a revolution and all its promises, but with gradual evolution of freedoms that allow more for more, instead of less for everyone. And eventually, the freedom to say what you see.
CBH – 08/11
