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Chorus Of Praises, Counterpoint
Of Whispers
By Lonnae
O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page D01
HAVANA --
For a while, the blind girl's song is lovely. Her
fingers move easily across the keys, and her command
of the piano and musical phrasings give her tune a
sweet, elusive familiarity. Then she starts to
cough. Just 20 a little at first, then she
interrupts her playing to cover her mouth and
convulse. Still, she keeps returning to the keyboard
until an instructor, who is hovering nearby, reaches
down and gently guides her away.
Her three
classmates walk to the front of the room and hold
hands. Slowly, they start to sway. They sing of
revolution, three stanzas full. Their long coltish
legs or short chubby thighs rustle the pleats of
their national school uniforms, and their strong
voices and sightless eyes make them poignant and
vulnerable. Alina Garcia, 13, president of the
National Youth Pioneer Union for the Abel Santamaria
school for the blind, watches the scene with a group
of visiting reporters from the United States. Her
eyes dart back and forth like an urgent line of type
repeatedly frustrated by the carriage return, but
her voice is steady and composed. She wants to be an
architect, she says. "It is better to live in a
society where I can be someone in the future," not a
society where some people can't afford to go to
college.
To a
first-time visitor to Havana, the Abel Santamaria
school, located on the grounds of an old military
base, seems like much of the city: A place of
distended proportions -- a spareness of material and
a surfeit of ideas. A place that proclaims that
people are more important than things. At eye level,
it can be compelling and beautiful, unless you also
need things. Unless you're a blind girl who seems to
need an inhaler.
It is a
place where you can see a great deal, and still not
be clear about what you're seeing at all.
At the
National Literacy Museum, you find letters and
pictures from the campaign that deputized teenagers,
among others, to teach everyone in Cuba to read a
few years after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
As you ride around the city, every quarter-mile or
so you see towering billboards and signs across
buildings announcing 45 years of the "triumph of the
revolution." They say "We will overcome" and "Our
ideals are not for sale."
Esprit de
corps seems to be what Cubans advertise instead of
Drink More Bud. And it can make you hungry for a
U.S. triumph that's not about buying things. Wistful
for a culture that isn't so papered over in
advertising that we can't see our own public service
announcements.
For
complicated political and economic reasons -- the
island is authoritarian, impoverished, embargoed --
Cubans are deprived of things. While supposedly the
news media report on problems with the country's
infrastructure, criticism of the Castro government
is not allowed. And much of the daily technology and
access to information we take for granted is either
prohibitively expensive or practically prohibited.
That means you don't see Cubans on cell phones or
PDAs or laptops. They're not holed up in the house
watching HBO or playing video games. They don't have
devices and distractions, so what they have is
conversation and connection. The charm of a simple
life has been forced on Cubans. And, at least for a
time, it draws you in willingly.
That's the
dicey part about hearing only the bad about a place
-- finding good things can defy your expectations
and bend your mind toward subversion.
Maybe it is
blowback from more than 40 years of exiles'
invective against Castro's government or recent
revelations that the U.S. Treasury Department spends
more to track violators of the Cuban embargo than to
search for money hidden by Osama bin Laden and
Saddam Hussein. Maybe it is the unseemliness of a
U.S. congressman from Florida, Republican Lincoln
Diaz-Balart, calling for Fidel Castro's
assassination on a Miami radio station last March.
Or perhaps it's that most Americans can't visit and
judge for themselves that makes the island seem so
different from what you've heard and what you
expected. Maybe it's those pictures of Che all
around Havana making you perverse.
Cuba is a
communist country, but a 50-foot marble statue of
Jesus Christ blesses passing ships in Havana Bay. It
predates the revolution, but supposedly the lights
have never been allowed to go out. All about the
city are statues of heroes from the Cuban wars of
independence in the late 1800s: Jose Marti and the
black general Antonio Maceo. (Like the island, which
was about one-third black and mixed-race at the
time, Cuba's military was multiracial until the
United States, which occupied Cuba from 1899 to 1902
and from 1906 to 1908, forced it to segregate.) But
as you ride past El Parque de la Fraternidad, it is
the bust of Abraham Lincoln -- sans any reference to
the white sale that accompanies his annual holiday
in the United States -- that provides the most
unexpected and moving tribute. That causes your own
shiver of connection.
Cuba is a
Third World country, but spend a week in Havana, a
city of more than 2 million, and you won't see any
homeless people. Housing is a hallmark of the
revolution, even if much of it is crumbling. Still,
it is a poor place and there are poor people like
the women who walk the rows of the Old Havana Fair,
where artists sell original oil paintings to
tourists for $45, and beg. One thin, scarred young
woman pulls a sleeping toddler from her breast. She
has taught the little girl to stick out her hand and
gesture toward her mouth. My baby is hungry, the
woman says with bad teeth in bad English. Disturbing
juxtapositions are part of the unofficial tour of
Havana. It's a lot like Freedom Plaza, just down
from the White House, in that way. Or like any other
city in the world.
In Cuba,
they say the next front in the revolution is the
battle of ideas: whether, and how, their socialism
can self-correct social inequality and economic
privations, and compete with free-market countries
for the souls of its people. Young Cubans (60
percent of the population was born after the
revolution) are more exposed to U.S. images and
ideals than their parents and so are more aware of
what they may be missing. And for young black Cubans
(while 89 percent of Cubans in the States are white,
the island is 60 percent black or mulatto) who are
aware of the widespread racial discrimination that
marked Cuban history before 1959, this battle can be
deeply personal.
Neivi
Cuesta, 28, who heads public relations for Havana's
five-star Parque Central Hotel, says she loves the
elegance and bite of Pulitzer-winning American poet
Gwendolyn Brooks, a black woman who wrote of things
"rageful and resolute." Together we recite "We Real
Cool" over soft drinks in the hotel lobby. Cuba is
her world, but she desperately wants that world to
get bigger. Despite "the triumph of the revolution,"
she says, "it is difficult to please people's
desires."
Her
grandparents had little money to send their children
to school, and before Castro came to power, her
mother had planned on being a teacher. Now her
mother is a surgeon, her aunt is a dentist, her
uncle is an engineer.
"I don't
think, in fact I know, we would not have had the
educational opportunities we have had," Cuesta says.
But: She wants to travel, to buy her own car. She
has visited Canada, so "I know all the things I
could have, but I want to have them here," she says.
"I think we should think of a way so that we can
have the things we need and still support the
revolution."
In Havana's
Central Park, a pair of young black Cubans, Manuel
de Jesus Rodriguez and his buddy Lorenzo Caballero
Martinez, are restless and discontented.
The 18-year-olds live in Guantanamo,
a city in Cuba's southernmost province. They say
their lives are bad, the revolution is bad.
Rodriguez says
his parents earn little money for clothes and shoes
and that businesses in the tourist zones, where
dollars are more plentiful and life is better, hire
mostly whites. His bitterness, hard and knotty, is
just another texture of the city. Yes, they say,
they have free education and health care and, at
least in theory, a job guarantee, but they are young
enough to take these things for granted while
Western images of plenty dance in their heads. The
revolution has covered many of their basic needs,
but what about the deep-seated needs of young
educated Cubans to get beyond the basics?
This is the
challenge of their times, says 51-year-old Cuban
filmmaker Gloria Rolando. In 2000 she made a film
about the Cuban army's 1912 massacre of 6,000 blacks
in southern Cuba who were demanding an end to
policies of racial discrimination. Rolando, who was
7 when Castro came to power, says Cuban families and
communities must remember how the society treated
poor people and people of color before the
revolution. That even if things are bad now, they
used to be worse. When her grandmother was young,
Rolando says, blacks were forced to walk around
their local park; only whites were allowed to walk
through.
As for
shortages: "The young generation wants material
things -- 'I want this, I want that,' " she says. "My
mother is 77 and she is now inside the university
for older people. I don't have the latest fashions
in clothes or shoes, but I have the example of my
mother and she continues struggling and learning."
While some of
Cuba can seem in a state of perpetual contemplation,
on the weekends, crowds of Habaneros take their big
ideas with mojitos on the teeming sands of Marazul
beach. A reporter in our group floats the idea that
it is impossible to find the most beautiful woman in
Cuba, because each one is more beautiful than the
last. A popular saying has it that all Cubans are
part Carib or part Congo and people occur in lush
combinations of parts and colors. One group of
bikini-clad young women sway to salsa rhythms and
talk about things they have, like education, and the
things they want, like shoes.
Our Cuban
companion says they are "working girls," trying to
cash in on their curves. The women say they are hard-working
chambermaids and schoolteachers.
As always in
Cuba, it's hard to say which is true.
On a final
night in Havana, you think back to an earlier
interview with Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's
national assembly. It seems both haunting and
hyperbolic. He fears a U.S. invasion, citing John R.
Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms
control and international security, who calls Cuba a
state sponsor of terrorism and warns that Castro is
"developing a limited biological weapons effort."
Throw open the
French doors of your hotel room, and there is bustle
and hum in the late Havana night. You realize it's
probably a view that few Cubans, who aren't even
allowed into the sleeping floors of the swank hotels
for foreigners, have ever seen. Looking over the
city, for a moment you wonder, could we actually
bomb these cultured, complicated people? Then you
close your doors against a sudden rhetorical chill.
"Un Mundo Mejor
Es Posible." A better world is possible.
The signs seem
more plentiful on the drive to Jose Marti Airport.
The group seems more reflective than when we first
arrived. In the end, or perhaps merely in that
curiously self-absorbed American way, visiting Cuba
makes you think deeply about the United States.
About a country of people who fought for the right
to criticize their government, and now fight about
whether doing so is patriotic. About a tradition of
multiple political parties, even if they often seem
impossibly out of touch, and of a fiercely free
press, even if it is unable to tell us the number of
Iraqis who have died in the war. About a country,
mostly, of religious tolerance and a bloody, unjust,
but sometimes beautifully transcendent history.
Still, you
deeply wish your kids could see the literacy and
tenacity and beauty of old Havana before it falls
into the Gap.
Flying over
Havana Bay, 90 miles from Florida, it comes to you:
Visiting Cuba doesn't make you long for communism,
only bigger ideas in your democracy.
Staff
researcher Don Pohlman contributed to this report,
portions of which have appeared on <http://blackamericaweb.com>blackamericaweb.com.
A9 2004 The Washington Post Company
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