Turning the page.
November 22, 2007 at 10:14 pm | In Social, Current Events, Culture, Epilogue | 3 Comments
Not having posted anything here in over a month - and not having posted anything of substance in longer than that - I’ve been feeling ambivalent as to how to continue writing about Cuba, which is ironic because I’ve never been short of words in the past.
I’ve already said that I love Cuba, and nearly everything about it and its people. It’s the closest place on Earth to home that I can find, yet it’s also maddening that there is so much that seems to be left undone. But I am not Cuban. I don’t live in Cuba, with all its beauty, its problems, its dreams, its hopes, and most of all, its people. Some of the most sincere, no-bullshit, and fun people I’ve ever met are in Cuba. I, however, won’t ever know what it’s like to wake up in the morning knowing that the Playas del Este are only a short bike ride from my house. I won’t know the frustrations of being a working professional, trying to improve the lot of my society… yet struggling to make ends meet, while the bartender who serves me drinks is dressed in the latest fashions. I’ll never understand the joys of being a student in a Cuban grade school, or the indignity of being stopped and having my ID checked when I’m taking my girlfriend out for the night. I won’t know how difficult it is to try to acquire a car in Santiago de Cuba, or how easy it is to just live off the land and be at peace with oneself off the coast of la Isla de la Juventud.
When I started this blog, I took an oath with myself to try and stay as non-partisan as I could. I talked about my trips, the things I’d seen and how they affected me, personally. I talked about current events, trying to keep my own feelings and opinions, and the way things appeared as filtered through the prism of my own eyes. Most of all, I wasn’t ever trying to tell Cuba’s story, but only my own, as I passed through the valleys and towns that dot the island’s landscape. Despite all this, I was treated as someone with a political agenda, on both - as if there were only two - sides of the political arena. Those on the left called me a selfish liar, a sellout and a profiteer when I’d mention things like how I had to wait in lines longer when I was mistaken for a local Cuban. I received my very first death threats - two, to be exact - shortly after returning from my first Cuban trip, a two-month bicycle odyssey that changed my life and was the reason for this blog’s existence. Both of those threats were via emails that can be tracerouted back to Miami, Florida; seems I’m not very popular on Calle Ocho.
Now, it’s been almost exactly one year to the day that I haven’t returned to Cuba. I’ve lost touch with many of the friends and colleagues I’d met - though not all - and haven’t followed Cuban developments as well as I had in the past. I do, however, have a will to continue writing and refocus my attention on Cuba and Cuban affairs. I avoided doing this over the past few months because I had something of an apprehension to writing something that seem too partisan or biased, on either side of the fence. Now that I’ve distanced myself a little from the subject matter, though, that fear has dissolved into a drive to say what I feel is right, as seen from my own eyes. Rightists will call me a communist and Leftists will call me a fascist, and you know what?
That’s just fine with me.
I think it’s amazing that a well-known writer in the Cuban exile community can make a thinly veiled suggestion that Havana should be hit with Nuclear Weapons, and not have anyone else in the media even make a mention of it. It’s also ridiculous that I cannot even invite friends in Cuba to visit me without going through a wholly unreasonable ’screening process’.
A bunch of cranky, greedy old men with bad memories and their suburb SoBe grandkids who have never even been to Cuba basically control a huge swath of the political spectrum in the most powerful country in the world. If you are are a presidential candidate in the US, you pretty much cannot win without Florida, and that means that you cannot win on an agenda that doesn’t include the continued aggression and punishment against Cuba and its people, at the behest of the aforementioned bloodthirsty villagers with torches and pitchforks. In a very real sense, as someone of Iraqi descent, I feel that Cuban-Americans share a huge deal of the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, and the slaughter of countless innocents.
On the other hand, things inside Cuba aren’t that much better. When I was in Eastern Europe a few days ago, I felt an eerie deja vu of 80s communist or ex-communist party members dining at fine restaurants with a beautiful girl 1/3 of their age hanging off their shoulders (actually, Budapest still felt like that a little) while the real ‘proletariat’ didn’t see very much improvement in their lives during a revolution which was supposedly intended to make everybody equal. Cuba is in a very real danger of being overrun by corruption, and even if it wins that fight, the sheer amount of bureaucracy required to get the simplest permit or license is enough to put most people off from ever achieving what they set out to do in the first place.
So, we are where we are. Now what? No one knows, least of all me, but the least I can do is to continue speaking my mind and writing about Cuba - a topic that everyone seems to be an expert on and no one wants to compromise on.
