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If You Get the Chance, Go to Cuba Someday

Thu, 05/10/2012 - 08:52
Submitted by Betty Dodson

I received this email from an old friend, Beck, and it reminded me of when Carlin and I went Cuba. It was right after we first met and were just getting to know each other. It was 10 days of joy that ended in our running out of money.

That's when we discovered that no one could wire us any US Dollars. Fortunately I found an extra $200 tucked in a side pocket of my bag. An old habit from the past that saved us. Cuba was inspirational. Here's Beck's email:

"Cuba is in the news. After all it’s an election year in the U.S. While there last month watching TV, CNN reporters gravely face a camera, in the background a palm tree, Havana’s blue harbor and Castilla de Morro, the ancient fort from Spanish colonial days. The reporter weighs in on what is occurring in this foreign island, in the same cautious and wondering tone usually reserved for places like Afghanistan, the sub-Sahara or North Korea. Now, the reporter lets us know that the Pope is coming to this alienated island to shed ecclesiastic light on this outlaw nation, bringing the church’s authoritative message of moral responsibility and openness, pillars of the Catholic clegy. But how, the reporter wonders breathlessly, will Cuba respond?

A couple weeks before this Carol and I had been wandering the streets of Havana’s old town, an area of classic Spanish architecture now being refurbished after years of neglect. Narrow streets with shops selling everything from fine art to Che t-shirts, charming Boutique hotels, gourmet restaurants tucked away in shaded courtyards, plazas with outdoor cafes anchored by grand churches now transformed into music venues. Crowds fill the streets and it feels more like New Orleans, with its unique blend of old world traditions and gay spirit.

One of the highlights in Havana was hanging out at the hotel bar where Earnest Hemingway stayed (room 511) during his time in Cuba. The bar is a large high ceilinged airy place that brings back a sense of the 50s, decadent and exciting. The high walls are covered with photos of Hemingway smoking, fishing , shaking hands with a victorious young Castro. Although it’s a famous tourist destination, the bar retains a classic authenticity.

On a tropical evening Carol and I go to the Cafe Taberna, home of the Buena Vista Social Club to spend the night listening to the classic Cuban rhythms and voices of the masters (given a new audience by Ry Cooder years ago). The large high-ceilinged room is filled with music lovers from around the world as the 14 member group, its old male singers in fedora’s and mamas with attitude, took turns bringing the international audience to their feet in a sensuous celebration.

Music and dance are the languages of Cuba. An annual jazz festival was being held in Havana that week and one of the sites was at our hotel. Several highly talented young all-women groups played smart tight sets with confidence that comes from a background of solid training, inherent in Cuba’s cultural dedication to the arts. One night, another group --piano,drums, and guitar -- played sounds that to me were completely new, ranging from flowing dark moods to very fast & buoyant musical conversations between the piano and drums, original music you could easily get lost in. Whatever isolation that the U.S. thinks it has imposed on Cuba, the country has not stopped listening to and integrating great music from around the world, and putting its own stamp on it.

Their love of music is matched by their passion for dance. At our resort hotel, staged dance performances were featured nightly, nine dancers with tightly choreographed one hour shows with different themes each night. They could easily have been on major stages in the U.S. and certainly on one of the popular network TV shows. From what we heard other visitors report, most of the twenty five or so hotels in the beach area of Veradero have their own top quality dance groups.

The beach resort of Veradero is typical of the beauty of a Caribbean island. Wide white sand beaches reach out to turquoise water. Lounging and looking out, I image Miami 90 miles away. I’m sure that some Cubans long for the dream of its affluence and glitter. But back in our room we turn on again CNN and suddenly get the incessant roar of American news broadcasting -- tense and urgent reporting live from the scene of an exciting Romney and Santorum standoff at which the vital subject of their positions on birth control are analyzed, while more wise and cooler pundits back at the studio weigh in on the impact for voters in the evangelical Southern states. At this distance the madness of the U.S. popular culture is set in hard relief. It seems, and is, hopeless.

And despite all of Cuba’s troubles, I applaud them. For over 50 years Cuba have held off an incessant American empire that has, in the name of democracy, with cruel foreign policies and savage military force have devastated populations in in Central America, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan countries throughout Africa. Somehow Cuba has survived. While Mexico, Columbia, Guatemala, and other countries are ravaged by the drug trade and WalMart capitalism,, Cuba has not become a victim as either a conduit or consumer.

Struggling to survive the economic embargo that the U.S. has relentlessly imposed for the last 50 years, Cuba has managed to create the best national health care system in the Americas. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the U.S.; child mortality of those under 5 years old is lower than any country in the Americas. The medical system is so effective that one of Cuba’s primary exports is its doctors to less well off countries. They are doing some very fundamental things right.

I had the chance to experience their medical system while there. I picked up an eye infection, “pink eye”, a couple days after I arrived. There was a strong wind blowing every day and something in the tropical air (I had arrived from the pure rain-mist of the northwest Pacific) became increasingly irritating and painful. After several days Carol demanded that I go to see a doctor and by this time I wasn’t resisting. When we checked how this could happen, the people at the hotel said simply go to the clinic located five miles away. Without calling ahead, we got a cab and arrived at a whitewashed set of buildings and were immediately greeted by a nurse and doctor. The doctor’s manner was Cuban-warm, like the proprietor of a some family restaurant, caring and concerned and quietly proud of his work place. After a very efficient examination, he prescribed medications, then led me into another part on the building that was its pharmacy. The pharmacist took over and shortly I had my drugs. The whole process took 25 minutes and cost $80. The medication did the job and in a few days I was better.

Who goes to Cuba? Everyone except Americans. Over one million Canadians travel to Cuba every year. The streets and hotels are filled with visitors from England, France, Eastern Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and an increasing number of Asians. Even the Pope. Americans travel to China and Russia. But evangelical Southerners from the USA, or even New Yorkers, aren’t allowed to go to Cuba. Miami, loaded with the grandparents who ducked out with Batista, says no. The U.S. can’t seem to handle the idea that this tiny country has defied their ancient claim of hemispheric dominance.

If you get the chance, go to Cuba someday."

Beck

We Suggest: 
Live From Cuba Podcast
Dodson and Ross in Cuba
Cuban Artists to Perform in US for 1st Time Since 2003
Christy Turlington Burns: Every Mother Counts
Liberating women one orgasm at a time

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It's Neither "Either/Or" But All of Us, Together

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 20:11
richard chilton

This article has relevance on this website because its two principles spent 12 days there; while among earlier postes each had spoken of mixed experiences, there are, as one can imagine, both negatives and positives when visiing any state country, including the United States.

 
The problem with BOTH the United States and Cuba is "isms" - capitalism AND communism. Both are reactionary to the needs of Humanity.

Henry Luce - the conservative founder of Time/Life magazines - once call'd the 20th Century "The American Century."  During that time the United States was responsible, both directly and indirectly, for killing more people than any other state empire on earth, ever; only the religious empire of Chrisitianity has killed more.

Think about this.  Communism emerged as a REACTION to the excesses of British and German capitalism of the mid-19th Century.  This was some 60 years after the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred primarily due to the role of scientific applications of inventive technology first applied cross-culturally throughout  Europe in the 18th Century, which has its own roots in the Enlightenment and breakaway from the Church with new, dramatic, socio-economic and political thinking of the 17th Century.

Western "civilization" became what it is through a history of conquest and violence.  Tens of millions of people throughout the last 20 centuries were slaughtered as a result.  The epitome of such thinking, on the religious side, are all the wars conducted under the banner of "Blood of Christ" from the First century to today; on the State side, what occurred with the atomic bombings by the hand of the U.S. in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when there was no reason to do so but, as General Groves, head of the Mahattan Project, said in 1949, "(i)t was easier for Truman to say 'yes' than say 'no.'"


In 1893 the Untied States had its first - and worst - Depression because it went bankrupt when it couldn't pay the accumlated debt service to foreign investors from the conduct of the American Civil War.  Today the Untied States is bankrupt because we're paying debt service to the banks (owned by both capitalist AND socialist investors) from World War I - we only retired the debt from the Spanish American War in 1998.

No. It is time we drop such nonsense as saying "families are being ripped apart because of the tyranny of communism" when the same is happening, but on a much greater and far more human scale of suffering, through the inequality of capitalism as practiced in the United States.  Neither economic construction works, because neither is premised on looking at Humanity's relationship to the planet and each other as primary. 

What is needed is for women and men to recognize that the answer is not any one "ism" or belief or even a combination of same, but in coming up with som'thing completely new, that takes into account all the experiences of diversity that exists on the earth and the actual reality that climate change will trump ALL of this, and soon. Somehow, the glue that is the positive role that human sexuality plays in celebrating life through pleasure rather than fear in a completely different world than what we experience today, that is what we as a species need to "keep our eyes on the prize." 

Thank you Richard.

Betty Dodson's picture
Wed, 05/16/2012 - 13:31
Betty Dodson

I forgot who said it but how true it is: "We learn from history that we don't learn from history." I always appreciate your in-depth perspective on so many subjects, especially "isms." We so totally agree. Nice to hear from you on our website. Come back soon.

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