|
Gordon Shepherd
Dear Friends,
It’s been several years since I’ve posted anything in this space. Just before Thanksgiving last year I took a Roads Scholars trip to Havana, Cuba. Maybe this is not the right forum for me to report my reflections on that experience. Maybe what I’m posting today is way too long and of little interest to most of you. If that’s the case, please accept my apologies. But, of course, nobody’s obligated to read what I’ve written and it’s not going to be on the test, so here goes! 😊 Meanwhile, warm best wishes to all of you and to all of our other South High Classmates, wherever they may be.
HAVANA, 2024
After divorcing in 2023, I decided I should travel on my own while I still had decent health and the financial means to do so. But instead of Italy or Greece or famous destinations in other European countries, I booked a trip with Roads Scholar for Havana, Cuba.
November 21-25, 2024
With Donald J. Trump back in the White House in 2025, the small window into Cuba is rapidly closing—especially with Marco Rubio as the new secretary of State. Efforts by Barack Obama and subsequently, Joe Biden, to normalize relations with Cuba no doubt will be reversed to the max, so I’m very glad I went when I did. It’s not a luxury tourist destination but that’s not why I chose to go there. On my way back through U.S. customs in Miami, the customs official asked me what the purpose of my trip was. I should simply have said tourism or something like that. Instead, I hesitated and then, as the custom official raised his eyebrows, I said: I went to Cuba to learn more about the Cuban people, about their lives and culture and their prospects for the future. This, apparently, was not quite a good answer and I was interrogated further with skeptical follow-up questions about the purpose of my visit to Cuba. Not a big deal but, by comparison, going through customs in Havana was a breeze.
I was greeted outside the San Martí International Airport by our Roads Scholar guide, Karina Sánchez, a Havana native. Karina is 45, speaks excellent English, and turned out to be very informative and practiced at managing senior citizen tourist-educators from the United States. More about Karina later.
The hotel booked for us by Roads Scholar was El Grand Aston La Habana, constructed primarily as a tourist hotel situated a short drive from the historic Bahía de Habana—Port of Havana. El Gran Aston is separated from the shoreline of the Straits of Florida by the Malecón Highway, a broad esplanade, roadway, and seawall whose construction commenced in the first decade of the twentieth century when Cuba was under U.S. military rule following the Spanish American War. I would guess that El Grand Aston is about 20-years old with comfortable but not swanky furnishings. The hotel provided internet services for laptop devices and smart phones but electrical connections were not always reliable. The island, including Havana, was severely impacted by two November hurricanes and recovery efforts were still underway. One relatively minor inconvenience was the dysfunctional toilet plumbing at Grand Aston—a problem common in all parts of Cuba today. We were politely requested to refrain from flushing toilet paper so as not to clog the plumbing and, instead, dispose of it in bathroom waste baskets for the maids to collect when they cleaned our rooms. Not an enviable job. This said, hotel personnel were unfailingly courteous and many, if not most, spoke passable English.
Upon arriving at the hotel I was surprised to discover that among my small group of 22 fellow travelers and educators, I was one of only five males, and three of us were retired sociology professors! One of the other sociologists was a guy by the name of Richard Rizzo who grew up in Brooklyn but ended up going to college in California and teaching at Sonoma State University. Good guy, down to earth and practical with a real interest in international travel. His wife is currently in Germany (she has a PhD in German lit) and they will meet up in Manhattan for Thanksgiving where they rent a small apartment for frequent trips to New York to visit Rizzo’s son. The other guy, Scott Feld, was a former faculty member at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, who currently lives in Chicago and commutes two times a week to teach a grad seminar course at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Scott grew up in Manhattan and, as an undergraduate, attended SUNY Stony Brook as a math/sociology major. Scott went on to get his PhD at Johns Hopkins and, even more unbelievable, joined the Stony Brook faculty the year after I left SUNY with my own PhD! When Scott and I discovered we had just missed one another at Stony Brook, we immediately began sharing memories of mutual acquaintances. According to Scott, the only C grade he ever got as an undergraduate student at Stony Brook was from my dissertation advisor, Erich Goode. Seriously. It doesn’t get any more random than that. There I was in Havana, Cuba reminiscing with a guy I had just met about Erich Goode and other Stonybrook faculty from the 1970s. As an aging academic, Scott is a very easy going, mild mannered guy with slightly unorthodox interests in sociology. He’s a mathematician who specializes in social networks/collective decision making and thinks most social theory is bunk. In any case, I liked him. He’s going blind and I ended up taking him by the arm when we dismounted from our tour bus and walked with him and guided him up and down steep street curbs and stairs so he wouldn’t stumble and fall when we were taken for guided tours on old Havana’s cobblestone streets.
One other interesting Roads Scholar traveler that I got acquainted with was Nurit Yehushua, a retired networks systems engineer from San Diego. Nurit was born and grew up in Romania. Both her parents were Jewish but she didn’t know this until she was a teenager. Her parents concealed this from Nurit in order to keep their government jobs and social standing in communist Romania. When Nurit learned that she was Jewish she resolved to go to Israel, joined a kibbutz, and eventually obtained a degree in computer engineering at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. She married, moved to the United States, had children, and eventually divorced. Her daughter lives in Las Vegas and, of all places, her son (and her two grandchildren) now live in Provo, Utah, where he works for a tech company and loves the area’s powder skiing resorts. Finding this out was almost as randomly crazy as learning that Scot Feld was both a Stony Brook alumnus and former Stony Brook faculty member. Nurit is fluent in four languages: Romanian, Hebrew, English, and French, and she can read and understand Spanish as well.
While in Havana I also met a number of remarkable Cubans. Among them: Samuel Zagovalov of Havana’s Jewish Sephardic Center spoke to us of the rich history of Judaism in Cuba and the wholesale departure of Jews from the Island following the 1959 revolution due to subsequent fears of Soviet influence and the suppression of religion. Many migrated to Miami and others to Israel. Currently there are only a few dozen practicing jews left in Havana without a rabbi to lead them or provide religious services. When we left the center I dropped a twenty dollar bill in the donation box—a pittance, but in exchange I obtained a modest crochet doily depicting the island of Cuba with a superimposed menorah in the center.
Fernando Funes is the charismatic owner of a commercial farming enterprise (La Finca Marta) whom we visited on the outskirts of Havana. Funes is highly educated in agricultural science and is a passionate environmentalist. Though relatively small, Finca Marta (named after his mother) is dedicated to producing a wide variety of agricultural products for local markets as well as some exports abroad. Funes is the leader of a government approved farm co-op movement that he quixotically hopes can continue serving as a model for addressing Cuba’s critical food import dependence.
University of Havana professors Alberto Faya (a professional musician) and Ayleen Robaina (an architect) both gave us riveting power point lectures in their specialty areas of Cuban music and Cuban architecture respectively. We also visited the art gallery of artist Samuel Riera who sponsors an “Art Brut” project that facilitates the artistic expressions of young adults with handicaps and special needs problems. While there I purchased two beautiful pen and ink renderings by Riera. One was a portrait of a weather-beaten campesino peering stoically from beneath the brim of a Cuban straw hat with a background of mountains and palm trees behind him in the distance. The other was a portrait of a tousled, dark-haired boy standing on an old Havana cobblestone street with his eyes open wide and a mesmerized look on his face. Who or what, one wonders, is the boy gazing at?
Inline Image Not Displayed
Inline Image Not Displayed
In addition we visited the Habana Compass Dance company where I flunked the bongo test under the professional direction of Alberto Córdoba. To my chagrin, both Scott and Nurit passed with flying colors. Scott explained to me that his vision loss makes him more sensitive to auditory stimuli and he could follow the more complicated rhythm beats that Alberto modeled for us that I stumbled over. The next two days we followed Karina on several walking tours. These included The Arms Square and Cathedral, Plaza San Francis of Assisi, and Plaza Vieja while lunching at local street cafes on ropa vieja (shredded beef) with rice and beans and other traditional Cuban fare. There was plenty of both car and foot traffic in this part of Havana, which is kept manicured and well maintained. And, yes, many of the cars are old, 1950s Detroit models, refurbished in bright colors and maintained with homemade Cuban auto-parts, but there are European and Russian made vehicles on the roads as well.
Random contact with Cubans on the street was limited. As an obvious tourist group, we stood out to city panhandlers who were wary of Karina on our walking tours, but they weren’t shy in approaching group stragglers, including me, for money. After breakfast on my second morning in Havana I stood on the steps of the hotel facing away from the Malecón Highway and watched parked taxi cab drivers across the street as they conversed and waited for possible riders into town. A guy came out of an adjacent building, waved and made eye contact with me and then sauntered across the street.
He asked me if I had any cigarettes. I replied, “No Fumo.”
“Ah! he said, “habla Español ud.!”
“Un pococito,” I admitted.
We then commenced a brief conversation in Spanish. He told me he parked cars for the hotel and I asked him his name: “Juan Dominquez, a su servicio,” he said.
When he asked me my name I told said: “Roberto Pastor.”
“Es un muy buen nombre,” he responded.
“Sí,” I said.
He then got to the point. Reverting to English he asked me what I wanted: “a Cuban cigar, a girl for a massage?”
“No,” I said, “no me interesa en nada de eso.”
“Okay,” he said, still speaking in English, “the thing, is my little 4-year old daughter needs milk. Could you spare me money to buy her un paquete of powdered milk?”
“Sí, como no,” I replied, and pulled two dollars out of my wallet. “Will this be enough?” I asked.
“Sí, sí! Roberto, es ud. muy generoso. Gracias!”
Juan Dominguez smiled and waved to me as he walked back across the street. I smiled too and said to myself: “I’m not here to pass moral judgment. An interesting encounter and a chance to practice my rusty Spanish in Havana, Cuba were worth a lousy two bucks, regardless of what Jaun’s going to do with my money.”
Cuba today is in dire straits and I fear for its future. It’s never recovered from the Covid pandemic and, of course, it’s been strangled by the U.S. embargo for 65 years. Pobre de Cuba, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca a Los Estados Unidos. If anything, Cuba’s situation is more desperate today than it’s ever been. Turning to tourism as its economic salvation after the implosion of the Soviet union and its financial support in the 1990s, Cuba subsequently promoted itself as a tourist destination (primarily to Europeans and wealthy Asians). But, according to Karina, the pandemic of 2020-2022 put a catastrophic exclamation point on the country’s economic downhill slide and, to this day, tourism has never rebounded. Havana is crumbling and, largely due to the US embargo, Cuba has few capital resources for investing in its recovery, let alone in development projects for the future. The official exchange rate of Cuban pesos for U.S. dollars is 120 to one. The street rate is 300 to one. My occasional tips, offerings, and street handouts weren’t so meagre after all.
Bright and highly educated, our Roads Scholar tour guide, Karina Sánchez, is professor of French and Spanish at the University of Havana. Also on faculty at the university, Karina’s husband is a professor of chemistry. Both receive approximately $15.00 U.S. a month in salary from the university and both work extra jobs. Karina’s husband moonlights as a chef—he says cooking is chemistry—and Karina, of course, works for Roads Scholar on as many tours to Havana as she can manage. Of the two, I surmise Karina’s Roads Scholar earnings surpass anything else the two jointly contribute to the family income. They are childless, so that is another economic factor in their favor.
Cubans in general are well educated, resilient, prideful, and I would add, patriotic. Cuba’s priority support of free public education and universal health care are the two shining light accomplishments of the 1959 revolution. Cubans’ public education and health care today are as good or better than anywhere else in the world, including and especially in the United States. But government bureaucracy is a huge mess and restrictions and regulation of every form of economic activity is a stifling burden. I didn’t detect any obvious signs of civil unrest, however, or hostile opposition to Cuba’s one-party socialist regime.
People like Karina and her husband—though pridefully hard working and resilient—are fearful for the country’s future. Rather than continuing to sacrifice for the revolution, younger Cubans are leaving the country in droves to pursue careers in Europe, Canada, and even the United States (via Mexico or Nicaragua), where their education and skills are more highly rewarded. According to some of our Roads Scholar speakers and lectures, Havana has lost close to a million people over the past decade —mostly young people looking for greater employment opportunities. Sad, sad, sad. Fidel Castro’s revolution proved to be a colossal economic failure, but current right-wing authoritarianism globally and unfettered capitalism are future pending disasters of another kind.
Guantanamera! Where’s Pete Seeger when we need him?
The morning of my departure back to the U.S. I was greeted by Karina on the steps of El Gran Aston Hotel at 5: 30 A.M. Mine was the earliest Roads Scholar flight scheduled out of Havana that morning for Miami and I was the only one of my group who boarded the bus with Karina to the airport at that early hour. It was a 30 minute ride and Karina and I shared a seat while chatting amiably. She asked me what I was doing now that I was retired. When I told her I was writing a book about baseball’s greatest players her eyes sparkled in the dim early morning light. She grew up in Havana with her grandfather, she told me. He was a huge baseball fan who took her as a child to see professional baseball played at El Estadio Latinoameicano in Havana’s Cerro neighborhood, and he also followed Major League Baseball in the United States. Karina asked me if I had ever heard of an old-time Cuban ballplayer by the name of Martín Dihigo—Cuba’s greatest player and her grandfather’s favorite. Yes! I had just finished drafting a chapter in my baseball book about the Negro Leagues’ greatest players, including Dihigo, who had played both in the United States and Cuba during the early decades of the twentieth century. Karina and I were both delighted to discover that we shared esoteric knowledge about a Cuban sports legend.
Here are some other tidbits of conversation with Karina that stood out to me. I asked her about Fidel. Had he remained close to the Cuban people after he came to power? Did he concern himself with the details of public policy? Did he care about the lives and problems of ordinary Cubans living in Havana? Karina sidestepped. Fidel made speeches and concerned himself with ideology and the big picture of Cuba’s oppositional struggle with the United States, she said, but withdrew to live in a high security estate on the outskirts of Havana. Because of security concerns, he seldom made public appearances in Havana and did not actively participate in the cultural life of the capital city. It was Raul, his brother, who had greater contact with the people and managed the day to day institutions of the country.
Shifting from our talk about Cuba’s erstwhile revolutionary leaders, Karina seemed to take delight in narrating Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba in 2016. When the news media first reported his planned trip to thaw US-Cuban relations, Cubans on the street would say: “They say he’s coming,” but then shrug and follow up with, “quien sabe?” Later, with Obama’s plans firmly set, they said: “He’s coming, yes, maybe Obama’s really coming.” Then a Cuban interviewed by the press called President Obama a brave man with a brave heart for coming to Cuba. He would be the first U.S. President to set foot on Cuban soil since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The brave heart reference spread quickly. Now in the streets of Havana people were saying: “He’s coming! Brave Heart is coming!” A U.S. president and his wife and children who actually looked like many Cubans were coming to their island.
Why not imagine that this is what explains the mesmerized gaze on the adolescent boy’s face captured by Riera’s pen and ink portrait? For a short moment the breezes of hope blew softly that the world could become a better place.
When we got to San Martí International Airport I gave our bus driver a twenty dollar bill and for Karina a hug. “I’ll send you a copy of my brother’s and my baseball book when its published,” I promised. To be honest, though, I’m not sure how I’m actually going to do this. Will the U.S. postal service continue delivery to Cuba under Donald T. Trump’s rampagingly destructive, “America First,” administration? Will I ever be able to take another trip to Cuba to deliver my book in person? Good questions without good answers.
P.S. One other anecdote from my trip. The last evening my Roads Scholar group spent in Havana, we were feted by a caravan joyride in 1950s US cars—down the esplanade Malecón Highway and all around the city’s broad paseo avenues and adjacent neighborhoods. All of the cars were convertibles and you could choose which one to ride in. Along with a 90-year old Londoner and an 80-year old gal from Philadelphia, I got into a teal green, 1955 Mercury Monterey. Our chauffeur was a middle-aged Cuban woman with the gruff exterior of a NYC taxicab driver. When our ride was done and we disembarked at a quaint restaurant in Old Havana, I said adios to the driver and began to walk across the street. I didn’t get far when she called out: “Espéreme, señor! You left this behind.” And she held out my wallet which had slipped out of my back pocket during the ride. I thanked her profusely but she demurred. “No hay de que,” she said, “it was the right thing to do.”
Yes, whether in Conway, Arkansas, Salt Lake City, Utah, or Havana, Cuba, it was the right thing to do. My faltering faith in humanity was given a modest boost by a woman taxi-car driver in Havana, Cuba.
|
