Steven’s Cuba Blog

Turning the page.

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.

On Snail-Mail and Email in Cuba

Communication with my friends in Cuba has been proving to be quite the daunting task.

Example #1 -
I wrote an email to a friend there, which was immediately bounced back to me with the following error header:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

xx@xx.vcl.sld.cu

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550 Mail from <steve.mans@gmall.com> to <xx@xx.vcl.sld.cu> prohibited from your location (UNKNOWN@UNKNOWN ip=72.14.204.194)

Now, it’s obvious that the message was rejected, and never made it to the recipients’ inbox. However, I later received a reply from the recipient who told me that she received my message - a few days late. I asked her to forward me the message, which she did… and the header was obviously manually truncated/modified from the original message. My SMTP skills are a little bit soft, but… it’s pretty obvious that the message was screened, bounced, and then queued for review somewhere.

There is actually a physical person between me and her scanning all of our email.

That is so not cool. The more I try to figure out how to extend the work I’ve been doing around Cuba, the more I run into really really discouraging shit like this.

Example #2 -
I’ve just received mail (regular, snail-mail) from some friends, and the letter was obviously opened, then put back in the envelope and taped shut again. No comment. Oh, and it was a “Hey, how’s it going?” kind of letter, nothing more.

I can’t help but wonder how much more progress Cuba would be making technologically, economically and socially if they invested as much effort into improving the system as they do in spying on their citizens. I understand the need to protect the revolution - it is worth protecting, IMHO - but the state’s fear of the Internet is due to its own misunderstanding of it. Information is indeed power, but the state should be more worried about its citizens feeling watched than about them emailing with friends.

Open up net access - not just email, but full, uncensored access - and the relations Cubans and Cuba build with the rest of the world will flourish. Most Cubans I’ve met already feel that the majority of their problems are directly related to the policies of the United States, and not only to the Cuban government. Let them talk about it, let them get the message out.

Like someone once said, “Our greatest natural resource is Cubans”. Give these Cubans a voice, and they will do the work for you in terms of educating the world about Cuba and correcting misconceptions and propaganda spread through the American media.

Join CODEPINK for New Year’s in Cuba

Cuba is one of the most beautiful and fascinating countries on Earth���and George Bush says you can’t go there. Well, we’re going anyway, and we invite you to join us!

This New Year’s CODEPINK will be organizing a large group of fun-loving and freedom-loving Americans to break George Bush’s ban on travel to Cuba. Join co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Academy Award winning producer Paul Haggis, as we visit with farmers at their co-ops, doctors at their family clinics, dancers at the National Folklore Group, and young people at the ballpark. Don’t miss this historic chance to dance salsa, drink mojitos, and visit beautiful beaches - all while defending our constitutional rights!!!

The federal restrictions barring travel to Cuba are not only counterproductive and outmoded in this post-Cold War context, but also a violation of our constitutional freedom to travel.

The Bush administration says we can only travel to Cuba if we have immediate family there. Well, we do. Cubans ARE family - Somos Familia. And while we’re there, we’ll be holding a mutual adoption ceremony in order to demonstrate that family transcends political boundaries. In the ceremony, each participant will be paired with a Cuban brother or sister. After all, we are all part of one human family and there should be no artificial barriers dividing us.

Read more…

Disaster in Havana - Ernesto’s blog

Ernesto’s blog (live from Havana!) has some facts and photos about the damage in Havana by Hurricane Wilma.

Marti Emerging (not my photo)

A bust of Jose Marti bust emerges from the water flooding a Havana street. I was standing at the payphone in the background just less than 2 weeks ago.

Question about Google and Cuba

The answer to this is probably painfully obvious, but I would like to ask (I’m opening up [moderated] comments on this post) if anyone knows whether Google’s Cuba search portal has caused any trouble for them, legally. Boris says that it’s no big deal since Google doesn’t “have a presence in Cuba, nor do business with Cubans in Cuba”.

However, Google is still an American company, owning a .cu Cuban domain name. The Cuban state obviously has no problem with this, but wouldn’t this cause problems for them with the U.S. State Department? I thought that it was prohibido for Americans to even own .cu domain names?

Epilogue

I’m back in Montreal - I’ve been back for a week actually (and I still haven’t seen the sun yet).

After 1900km of biking - and countless more on the bus, the train, driving, in the taxi / cocotaxi / bicitaxi, and on horseback - I went as far west as Pinar Del Rio and as far east as Santiago de Cuba (one of my new favorite cities). I stopped in almost every city and town in between - big and small - and had wonderful conversations, made new friends, and discovered things about Cuba - and about myself.

I’m going to be writing two reports on this specific trip - one basic “this-is-where-I-went-and-what-I-did” affair, and a second one which will be more a socio-politic-techno-psychological (say that three times fast!) observation based on what I saw and the discussions I had with Cubans.

Also, keep an eye on the parent URL of this blog (http://ahoracuba.com) in the next few weeks… although my hopes of getting Cubans blogging were kind of soured by the discovery that most of them can’t even legally access the web, I’ve got some ideas up my sleeve.

Also, one of the major news sources out of Cuba - http://cubasi.com - now has an RSS feed. And no: while I wish I had something to do with it, I didn’t…