No shits, no giggles

Dear Editors of the Fine Publication that recently published the article "Was Castro Good for Cuba?" -

I sincerely thank you for publishing this piece, as it raises a number of important issues. These issues, for reasons personal to me, my Cuban parents and my Cuban grandparents, will always be a topic of discussion around our dinner table. I am privileged to be among the first generation of our family born in the United States, and thus was able to approach the article with a bit more of an objective stance than the older members of my family. Even still, however, there were elements to the article which were difficult, if not absurdly impossible, to swallow.

Most glaringly, having a Spaniard defend the argument for "yes" introduced perhaps the single most damaging inaccuracy in the entire piece. While I can appreciate that a well-seasoned, widely read journalist and writer such as Ignacio Ramonet might be able to craft some intelligent reasons for such an argument after a few visits and so many hours of interviewing Castro, the argument for "yes" would have been far more powerful had it been made by a native Cuban who lives in Castro's Cuba today. At first I was puzzled by the choice of a non-Cuban author because, though freedom of speech and of the press are not amongst the liberties that the citizens of Cuba currently enjoy, I would imagine that Castro might make an exception for a press document that would eulogize him. I wasn't puzzled for long, though, as I realized that one would be hard-pressed to find a Cuban citizen, living among the economically and politically cachectic people of Cuba, who would sing the praises of a man who has allowed a once glorious country to crumble into heaps of rubble. Indeed, it is much easier to find someone who enjoys the liberties of a country in which he does not need to give up simple pleasures like toilet paper, steak, or the right to accumulate wealth. It is much easier to find someone who enjoys a medical system in which he does not need to keep the equivalent of $6 USD (which amounts to anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of one month's salary) stashed away for cab fair in the event of a medical emergency because one cannot depend on an ambulance. Yes, much easier to bring in Ignacio Ramonet…a Spanish author who does not even see the irony in the question that he, himself, posed in reference to all of the pro bono cataract surgery that Cuban surgeons are offering to the poor of other Latin American countries: Is seeing one's children and the landscape of one's homeland not a fundamental human right?? Yes, Mr. Ramonet, it is. However, Cubans don't get to enjoy that right as they do not have a functional, much less a comfortable, transportation system in which to tour around their homeland. And even if they did, they couldn't afford to use it. And even if they could afford it, they're not allowed to stay in their own country's hotels, eat in their own country's restaurants, or bathe in some of their own country's beaches. So, while Cuban infants may indeed benefit from a lower infant mortality rate, the trade-off is surviving to live a restricted, albeit educated, life on an inescapable prison island. To support this political and economic system, and furthermore, to argue that Castro has the support of the majority, requires all the intention and focused energy of a toddler who, in the throws of a temper tantrum, has his eyes clenched shut and his fingers jammed snugly into each external ear while humming loudly. Only then can the reality be sufficiently drowned out. It is frankly disappointing that an intelligent man like Mr. Ramonet subscribed to such techniques to arrive at his conclusions.

Despite the fact that the harsh realities of life in Cuba precluded the ability to find a Cuban author for the "yes" argument, the discussion did not suffer from a lack of impassioned opinions. It was a lively discussion, each author having facts and statistics of questionable validity to support his argument. As a physician who knows full well that one can scour the medical literature to find data and statistical evidence to back directly opposing treatment options for the very same medical malady, it is with a grain of salt that I take in each side's supporting arguments. However, no matter how many political prisoners and extrajudicial murders there have been or have not been, no matter how many uprisings have occurred or not occurred, no matter how much Cuba's average annual gross domestic product has grown or not grown…there are at least a few simple truths, all of which rise above the distraction created by the data-wielding on each side of the argument, to suggest that when all is said and done, Castro has NOT been good for Cuba.

And those simple truths are as follows:

Castro assumed power four decades ago by means of violence, and has since never offered the people of Cuba an alternative option for leadership by any other party or any other leader.

The people of Cuba want change. They want change so desperately, that thousands and thousands have risked, and continue to risk, their lives to escape to a better place.

This is hardly a legacy to be proud of.

And so we wait. Here in the States and, surely, in Cuba, we wait and we hope for a truly "Cuba Libre.”

Sincerely,
LCG

to Cuba with love... (part 3)

It’s one of those SF winter mornings. Thick, ominous, low-lying fog…threatening to blanket our day, deny us our light.

Except today…

Here comes the sun.

I watch from our balcony as the sun, using its rays as arms, casts off the city’s blanket.

And I smile. I feel warm in the middle of January. Warm knowing that we* succeeded in making someone who is sad momentarily happy.

The gift made it to Cuba on Jan 6^th.** El Día de Los Reyes. How fitting.

* My family, myself, Dochechka, The Brit, and my dear, dear, traveling friends who took the challenge of having to hunt down my family with little more than the phone number of a neighbor. An INCORRECT phone number, they discovered.

** In order to know what the hell I’m rambling on about, you have to have already read this, this and this.

Pics of this morning's sunrise coming soon.

Tis the season...

...to be jolly. Except, given the subject of the last two posts, one would well know I was headed for anything but jolly. I was doing quite well in the sad department. And for the first time in my life, checking a bit into the bah humbug department. If I’d heard another Bing Crosby song about roasting chestnuts…surely there would have been a roast. But not of chestnuts.

So the last place I thought I’d willingly find myself yesterday morning was amongst the throngs of frantic holiday shoppers in Union Square…with Bing Crosby’s roasting chestnuts wafting out from every storefront. But, I did, indeed go. Willingly. Happily, actually. (So needless to say, noone’s chestnuts got roasted, and noone got elbowed or sworn at, even. Bravo, me.) Since I last wrote, contact information for my family in Cuba has materialized, so having my friend deliver a package to them while down there for her vacation is suddenly a realistic goal again. And money is going to be a very big part of that. Hence needing to go to the branch of my bank in Union Square, the only one with an international currency exchange.

Money, medications, pictures of all of us together during my July visit, and some nice chocolates went into a little Christmas package…and my dear friend graciously took it from me midday yesterday.

I am jolly at the prospect of that making it to them.

So jolly that I think I’ll refrain from leaving the “ñ” out of the word “Año” in my Christmas greetings to a few choice assholes that I obligatorily send cards to every year. Instead I shall write it properly…

Feliz Navidad y Feliz Año Nuevo a todos.*

* 'Año' without the ñ = 'Ano.' And 'Ano' means 'anus,' or, as I like to more appropriately put it: 'asshole.' But in the spirit of Christmas, I’ll be nice even to them. (Again, bravo me.)

To Cuba with love...(part 2)

I signaled to Dochechka and The Brit to join me inside Tia’s house. Then, without waiting for them, I stepped into the darkness behind her door. My eyes readjusted and I saw that there were two others just inside: Prima, my Tia’s niece (my Mamacusa’s cousin) and Prima’s husband, El Barrigon. We all congregated, awkwardly, in the center of the house’s front room, which was slowly registering on my retinas. Aged marble tiled floor with several missing tiles. Dingy walls. Antique, formerly beautiful furniture curiously pushed off to one cramped corner. Piles of 2 X 4’s in an opposite corner. Dust that evidenced a room never used except to simply enter and exit. I couldn’t figure out why, and it must have been written on my face as El Barrigon pointed up and began to explain. The ceiling had given way one day, and the contents of the room upstairs, complete with neighbor and all, had fallen through. That event took place about a decade prior. Suffice it to say, the use of their front room ceased then and there.

We were invited to pass through into the “livable” part of the house. Just beyond the front room, the harsh midday sun poured in from the centrally located patio and exposed the rest of the house. The layout was typical of a Spanish-style home: high ceilings, crown moldings, multiple rooms, all of which connected to the central patio. In it’s day, it must have been beautiful. But the years had cracked the moldings, browned the walls, warped and shifted the floor, aged the furniture, chipped the porcelain figurines and apparently, collapsed the ceilings. Whatever space was not otherwise occupied with a Virgin Mary statue or a cross was filled, instead, with pictures and trivial trinkets…odes and shrines to a better time. The time before the revolution. Everything here in Cuba seemed to be referenced with a “before” or “after.” And anything from the time of before was framed, hung up on the wall, and cherished.

We passed through Tia’s room to Prima’s room to the dining room where a young man, about my age, sat. Prima and El Barrigon’s son: El Curioso. He looked at me with an unexpected recognition, immediately stood up and hugged me politely. I started to explain who I was and he nodded, saying, “Si, si…la hija de Mamacusa!” He knew who I was. From pictures. There were piles of them. He led me to the stacks of photos on the worn dining room table, in the drawers of the tired china cabinet, on the shelves of the overflowing bookshelves. There, chronicled in those photos, was the American chapter of our family’s story…for those of us who “got out” before it became impossible to leave. They’d been here all along, within the walls of this aging, collapsing house, bearing witness from afar to my first steps, my childhood ballet recitals, my awful fluffy-haired high school days, my med school graduation. My moments had been their moments. They knew me. They knew my aunts and uncles and their children, my cousins. It was just too overwhelming to take in all at once.

Frankly, the entire visit was an onslaught of overwhelming. Just moments prior, on the other side of door, these people were just characters in my grandfather’s tales. Characters whose lives, admittedly, I knew little to nothing about. What I learned that day over hours of talking, laughing, crying…truly changed my world. Changed my identity.

I sat down opposite my Tia, who beamed back at me with a smile that was uncannily familiar, and we stayed up til nearly 2 am disturbing everyone’s sleep with our chatter. She wanted to know about everyone. So I filled her in. The weddings, the kids, the achievements. The death of her sister three years prior. I’d been the one to explain to my grandmother her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. I’d been there when she decided to go home to die rather than stay in the hospital. She’d spent her last days in her own bed, surrounded by family, blissfully in and out of the delirium of renal failure. She’d slipped away painlessly. Tia was comforted to learn this. She hadn’t been permitted to leave the country to go to her sister’s funeral.

Before El Curioso had turned in for the night, he’d chimed in with a stream of questions about the world and the US. What are the states like? Is there really a difference in culture between the east and the west coasts. What do we think of our president? Does everyone love Madonna as much as they did here? Funny, the People magazine that Dochechka had purchased for the plane ride had a few pictures of Madonna. We brought it out and handed it to him. Wide-eyed, he gleefully accepted it and spent the next few hours studying the pages and then studying them again.

They don’t get People magazine in Cuba. Among a few other things. Things like: The internet. Consistent power and water. Beef. Chicken. Toilet paper. Ownership of their house. Rights to form associations or accumulate wealth. (Whether one is a doctor or a gas station attendant, the monthly salary is the same: the equivalent of $20.) The privilege to stay in any of the country’s hotels. (Not that they have the financial means to stay in one anyway.) Free speech. A choice in whether or not to swallow the force-fed propaganda. (There is no avoiding it, as if it isn’t on one of the three television stations, it’s printed on the cover of the sole newspaper, or broadcast on one of the two radio stations.) A way to leave the island other than to marry a non-American foreigner or take to the water.

Viva el socialismo! With its free education…if one wants to call history as written by Fidel “education.” Free health care…if one wants to call no access to basic medications and treatments “health care.” Rationed food…if one wants to call the mealy bread and the abysmally limited ration of beans, rice, and vegetables “food.”

This is life in Cuba. Why anyone, if given the chance to escape, would come back to this voluntarily is beyond me. And yet that is exactly what Tia did. In the early 90’s, she’d been given a rare traveler’s visa to see her sister in Florida. She stayed for 6 weeks. Soaked in the liberty. Fattened herself on the seemingly endless amount of fresh food. Talked shit about Fidel in more than just a whisper without looking over her shoulder. Laughed because there were things that were actually funny, not because things were so miserable that she would cry if she didn’t find something to laugh about. It was all there, documented in the stack of pictures. Why didn’t she just stay? Claim political asylum like all the rest? Why on earth did she come back? When I asked her this she looked at me square in the face with a resolution I recognized. Then, with her wiry, malnutritioned finger, she quietly pointed to Prima, who now laid fast asleep on her sagging mattress next to El Barrigon. Then she pointed to El Curioso, also sleeping. Familia.

I looked at her frail, cachectic frame, at the fire behind those sunken eyes, and in the night time silence of her cramped and crumbling house on this prison of an island, I saw her for the angel that she is.

Or rather. The angel that she was. In this life.

When I first started writing this yesterday, I thought it was going to be a story with a somewhat happy ending. A fellow surgical resident and good friend of mine had just decided to go to Cuba for vacation at the end of this month and she’d graciously asked me if I wanted her to hand carry the package I’d been trying to send to Tia since I’d returned. I’d tried first, in my ignorance, to mail the package (laden with laxatives and vitamins for Tia, anti-inflammatory pain medication for Prima’s arthritis, pictures from our visit, a few new shirts for El Curioso, and money [hidden within a double layered envelope that I convincingly hand crafted to try and evade the Cuban government inspectors that would invariably search the package]) from the US. I learned that sending anything other than books was not allowed. Then I tried from Mexico. The post office advised against it at the time because for some reason, all mail sent to Cuba recently was being returned. Then I tried from Canada. It left without a hitch from the post office…only to return a week later with a notice of having violated the 2kg maximum weight restriction for packages. Finally! The package would make it. And now that it was going by hand, I could include more money. And maybe even a few silly, trivial Christmas presents.

But this evening, I received word, through neighbors with a phone who called Tia’s only living sibling in the states, my grandmother’s brother, that Tia passed away this morning. It’s unclear the cause. But one thing that is clear is that the government has wasted no time in reclaiming the home that had been assigned to Tia for her use. A house that Tia has lived in for decades. Now that she is no longer breathing within its walls, it belongs once again to the government and Prima, El Barrigon, and El Curioso need to vacate the house. Through our weak and inconsistent lines of communication, I’ve learned they plan to go to Havana. But where in Havana? Now I’ll have no way of knowing how to get anything to them.

In all of my adult life, I’ve never known a pain like that of having to leave Tia and the rest of them in that house this past July with little more than a stack of money and a People magazine. It wasn’t even a comfort to know that the money amounted to half a year’s salary for one of them. I wanted so badly to bring them back with me. To pack their starved bodies into our suitcases and stow them on our plane. But instead, I had to hug them goodbye, which I did tearfully and repeatedly, and get back into the rental car to leave. Truly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to talk myself into doing. Truly the most pain I’ve ever felt.

This is no less painful.

My only comfort is the idea that for one of them, things are better now. My angel Tia deserves it.

To Cuba with love...(part 1)

When I think of my seventy-seven year old great aunt, my Tia, I picture the smallness of her life and feel, with unwavering certainty, that she has been cheated. A woman with a spirit as large as hers shouldn’t have been caged as she has been. The confines of her existence have been determined not so much by any bodily pain her untreated gallstones, incisional hernia, or her fractured hip ever caused her but more by the simple fact of her geographical location.

Cuba. Before July, all I knew of it was what years of my grandfather’s seemingly bloated, biased and impassioned stories had deposited in the recesses of my mind. It was a place of opulence and unimaginable beauty, where movie stars from the world over would vacation, where the best cigars on earth were made, and where my entire family is from. Once upon a time. Now, as of 1959, it was a place decaying from the inside out thanks to one individual: Fidel. No matter how my grandfather’s stories about Cuba start out, they always end with that simple conclusion.

I decided I had to see it for myself. So, in July, The Brit, Dochechka and I went. Cuba, a mere 90 miles south of Florida….and yet, ideologically and politically, worlds and ages apart. Communism and an embargo have widened the divide from 90 miles to an infinite expanse of shark-filled waters. I felt somewhat guilty flying in…knowing that I’d be able to just fly right back out…and leave when I’d had enough. Leave, as my mom, dad, aunts, uncles, and grandparents did in the early sixties. But I felt that it was important for me to see the stories in real life.

I was surprised to discover for myself that my grandfather, the great exaggerator, had not exaggerated. It was beautiful. If one looked past the collapsing Spanish colonial architecture, the peeling paint, the filth, the beggars…one could imagine unparalleled beauty. Long ago. But now, indeed, it was decaying. Decaying as anything would if left for decades without a single day of maintenance. And that was just Havana.

In Matanzas, on first impression, it seemed slightly better. As we roamed the numbered, nameless streets for Tirrey entre Calle San Juan Bautista and Calle San Francisco (the street names my mother had given me), I felt hopeful that maybe my Tia’s house wasn’t in as bad a shape as some of the Havana homes. Also, I grew increasingly and somewhat nervously hopeful that she wouldn’t mind an unannounced visit from an American relative who she’d never met before. She didn’t have a phone. So there was no way to inform her of our visit beforehand.

After finally encountering a gentleman old enough to remember the names of the streets before they were numbered, I found her door. One unremarkable door in a line of many tall, narrow doors…all with peeling paint and tired knockers. I raised my hand to knock and paused, heart in throat, suddenly confronted with the idea that I was connected with the stranger on the other side of the door. It was a surreal feeling. And it seated itself in my churning stomach. I looked behind me to my right at the government bakery just at the corner and realized everyone inside was looking at me. A pasty white girl with a newly acquired sunburn, clearly not from around here, about to knock on la viejita’s door. I turned my back to them and knocked, sheepishly. No answer. I looked back at The Brit and Dochechka, both waiting in the rental car, and shrugged nervously. I knocked again. Nothing. A little harder. Still nothing. The nervous churning in my stomach gave way to disappointment. I couldn’t believe I’d come all this way and she wasn’t home...

I stepped over to her neighbor’s door, which was propped open and knocked there. A shirtless, weathered old man appeared from behind a sagging wall and looked at me quizzically. I pointed in the direction of my Tia’s house and asked, in Spanish, if she did, in fact, live there and if he knew where she might be right now.

He looked at me and asked, “Familia?” I nodded yes.

He smiled, “Americana?” Yes. We exchanged smiles as he told me that la viejita (the old lady) was home, but that she was very hard of hearing, so I just needed to knock harder.

And so I did. I put all my effort into it. And waited. I looked over at her neighbor who waited outside his door, reassuring me that she’d come. Just give her time. Minutes went by. Then, finally, I heard a weak voice from behind the door, “Quien es?” Who is it, she asked.

“La hija de Mamacusa.” The daughter of Mamacusa, I said into the crack of the door.

The door slowly opened, and for a moment, all I saw was darkness. I heard her voice say, comically, “Bueno, quien en el carajo es Mamacusa?” Well, who the fuck is Mamacusa? Yep, with a mouth like that, she was definitely family.

Then she stepped into the sunlight. I was immediately taken aback. For a moment, it was as if my late grandmother had stepped out from behind the door. A skinnier, more fragile looking version of my grandmother, but a striking resemblance nonetheless.

I fumbled, as I stared at her with a growing lump in my throat, for the words to describe that my mother is her dead sister’s daughter, “Mamacusa es la hija de tu hermana.”

She looked at me more closely, curiously, then connected the dots of relation a second later. Tears. Hugs. Smiles and exclamations of disbelief. And an insistent invitation to come inside…

(to be continued…)