This Other America: Part IV, Migrations

During the last day of my stay in Santiago de Cuba, I had the chance to meet third generation Cubans whose grand' parents came from different parts of the late 19th century declining Ottoman empire, in pursuit of the American dream.

Friday
We met Y. in the morning over a breakfast that lasted three hours. She came with family pictures and a drawing of the family tree. She is a third generation half Lebanese. Her grand' father came to Cuba, or to 'America', during the second wave of immigration from lebanon after WWI and the fall of the Ottoman empire. In his book 'Origins' Amin Maalouf writes that, contrary to common beliefs, the great famine of the beginning of the 20th century in Lebanon, brought by clouds of locusts that ravaged the cultures and the fields, was not the major cause of Lebanese immigration. Although, it might have played a role later and prompted a second wave of immigration, the majority of Lebanese had left before, at the end of the 19th century. He attributes the massive Lebanese immigration of late 19th century to the political instability in the Ottoman empire prompted by the revolt of the young turks against Sultan Abdul-Hamid and the subsequent religious persecutions against Christians in the Ottoman empire.

Interestingly, the same day, my husband's Canadian colleague, who is a Jew, and who got to know the local Jewish community during his many trips to Cuba, invited us to celebrate Hannukah with them. We went. It was a fine evening. The community is small, some 65 people, and they all come from the former Ottoman empire. Jews prospered for 500 years in the Ottoman empire fleeing persecutions in Europe. At the end of the 19th century, they were 500000 jews in the empire. It was the Jews of Thessaloniki, in what is now Greece, that inspired the revolt of the young turks against the Sultan at the end of the 19th century. One Jew was even a member of the three committee party of younf turks that annouced the dethronement of Sultan Abdul-Hamid. It is widely known that Turkisk governments inspired by the ideologies of young turks, and not the sultanat per se, conducted actually most of the religious persecutions against Christians in the empire. There was probably resentment from Greek Christian communities against Jews, afterward. This might have led Jewish to leave Turkey because on one hand, there are no known persecutions of Jews by Muslims in the ottoman empire*, and on the other hand, most of the Jews lived in multiethnic, and not purely Islamic areas**, close to Christians. The example that is often given is Thessaloniki.

Maalouf mentions Thessaloniki as a melting pot where jews, Chritians and Muslims lived together and as the place of birth of the new eastern enlightenment. The young turks, as well as Ataturk, were inspired by the spirit of Thessaloniki. One may ask how the reformists of the Ottoman empire, inspired by the enlightenment, could have been held responsible for the ethnic massacres attributed to the Ottoman empire ? One explanation Maalouf gives, and I think it is worth taking into consideration, is attributed to the nationalism of the secularists. He makes a difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is the love of the country as a land made for all its people. Nationalism is the love of a certain ideal of the country, which is, most of the time, an ethnic ideal. The nationalism of Turkish secularists was prompted by the faltering of the Ottoman empire from threats coming mainly from Europe, the land of Christianity. The more Europe became threatening to the central authority of the empire and the more Chritians living in the center of the empire felt unwelcome. Turkish nationalism was born and its project was ethnical and it was one of withdrawal and reassembly around an ethnic identity within a certain territory defining the nation. And this is how the ethnic persecutions of the late 19th century came to exist in a empire rather historically tolerant toward its ethnic minorities. Many Christian communities resented then Jews because of their prominent role in the young turks movement which was later responsible for their persecutions.

At the same time, tensions between religious communities rose in the empire. There were massacres against Chritians in Lebanon, and many lebanese felt unsecure in the political instability. That was one reason for them to leave, and they left, preferably, for countries where their religion was accepted. this is why most of the immigration of that period was to Latin America and Cuba where Catholicism is dominant. Maalouf, while searching the history of his family in Cuba, was helped by a recently published book (1999) on Arab components in Cuban culture (Componentes Arabes en la cultura Cubana). There is not one province in Cuba that does not have citizens originating from the near eastern part of Ottoman empire. My own grand'parents lived, had children, prospered, and made a small fortune in Cardenas in the province of Matanzas, for 14 years before returning to Lebanon.

Maalouf's evaluation of the most intense period of Lebanese immigration to 'America' derives from his analysis of the correspondance between his grand'father with his brother in Cuba at the end of the 19th century, and from other family documents. It is however a scholarly informed evaluation.

Y's grand father left Lebanon for Cuba just after the first world war, as did his brothers for other destinations in 'America', except one who stayed in Lebanon. At the end of WWI, Lebanese have already witnessed the faltering of the Ottoman empire, ethnic massacres, a famine, and the crash of a 500 years Ottoman rule and social order. This is when my own grand'parents left also. Apart her family name, Y. does not seem to hold in her any trace of Lebanon and Lebanese identity. She does not speak the language, does not know the history and did not seem to be much interested in what happened to the country since her grand'father left. Y. descends from the second marriage of her grand'father to a Cuban woman, her grand'father had a son from his first marriage to a Lebanese woman who died, and this branch of the family lives in Havana. She, her siblings, and her mother, keep also in touch with a cousin who live in Colombia. Her grand'father died in 1990 and they still keep his original passport, the one with which he left Lebanon for Cuba, but she could not show it to me, it is with her mother who lives in the province of Las Tunas. In 1995, the only brother of her grand'father, who stayed in Lebanon, died (they were 7 siblings in the family) , and the colombian cousin traveled to Lebanon to collect the inheritance. It might have been a relatively large one because the grand'children received something like 1500 dollars each.

Y's family history could have been mine except that my grand' parents left Cuba with all their children in 1934, returned to Lebanon with a small fortune and bought the land of other members of the family who stayed in 'America', a land we still keep until today and a land that my father does not want to sell. It is for this land, to administer it and to keep a careful eye on it, that my grand'mother, the real business manager of the family, even when the family was in Cuba, removed her oldest son, my father, who was a young man at the time, from school. He loved school and excelled in it. I know this very well because I did my high school years in Lebanon under the watch of the man who was my father's teacher, and I was always reminded of the excellence of my father. My father never forgave his mother for this but developped, against his own dislike for the whole enterprise, an infinite love for the land. He used to tell me that when he was young, he would very often enter into bitter arguments with his mother and take refuge in a book under the shade of an olive tree in the fields, sometimes sleeping there for the night.

When I was a child I felt all this. Children have the ability to feel hidden and well repressed emotions because they focuse only on this, their survival and well being depend on this; on their ability to make themselves objects of love and affection and to detect both within the people who surround them. I felt the bitterness in my father toward his mother and, contrary to my grand'father, who was a sweet dreamer, and with whom I remember many tender moments, I never remember such a moment with my grand'mother. I remember however opposing my grand'mother on everything with force to an extent beyond any Lebanese family standards for polite children, having to incur the reprobation of my mother but with the implicit agreement of my father. As long as my father was approving, I could be against the whole world, and even against my grand'mother, his own mother.

Siblings to my grand'parents are a bit everywhere in the 'Americas'. My father kept contact with many of them, especially in Argentina and Mexico, through letters written in Spanish. We never learned Spanish, my father did not want us to learn it. It was his secret garden and he would never allow anybody to enter his secret garden, not even me. The civil war in Lebanon, the now advanced age of my father, and our inability to read and write Spanish, all contributed to a loss of contact with my father's cousins in the 'Americas'. It is only very recently and at the prospect of my travel to Cuba that I made an effort to learn Spanish.

I looked at Y. Tomorrow we will be leaving Santiago to spend a week in Havana. I just loved Cuba and its people. I imagined this country in my dreams when I was a child. I constructed it from my father's stories, songs, and memories and made it my own. And now I am in this imaginary country meeting people whose grand'parents might have immigrated on the same boat as mine. I wished my grand'parents could have left some family in this country. I wished I could walk to a house, knock on the door, and bridging the seventy years that separated the family, announce to the person who would open the door for me that I am her family, her Lebanese family. We would embrace and she would tell me the history of the family in Cuba through wars, liberations, and the revolution, and I would tell her the history of my grand'parents and my father in Lebanon, and what happened to them after they returned to Lebanon, and what became of Lebanon since, and how we are immigrants again...

*A source to read about the link between the young turks movement and the roots of Zionism.
**I am stil looking for serious sources about the recent history of Jews in Turkey because most history accounts do not provide information about the turn of the century (19th-20th) history, the period of the rapid fall of the empire and of religious persecutions.

Links to: Part III, Part II, Part I

Note on other places we visited in the area of Santiago:
I recommend the visit of the Granpiedra in the Sierra Maestra with an altitude of 1226 meters over the Caribbean with old coffee plantations and a beautiful botanical garden that you can visit under the guidance of one of the gardeners. We visited also the city of Cobre, from the name of the old copper mine nearby, where the church of the Madonna of the Charity, most commonly called the Madonna of Cuba, is located and where Jean-Paul visited in 1998. It was the day of the liberation of El Cobre by Fidel and there was a danse procession in the streets progressing over the rythms of Conga...It is said that Hemingway donated his Nobel prize in litterature to the shrine but it is not on display because of attempts of theft.

This Other America: Part III, The Road Through Guantanamo

This picture was taken in the center of Guantanamo, a prosperous town of 200000 with a university, a military school and a hotel. Guantanamo is also a province.

It was tuesday, and my husband, after a half day work with his Canadian colleagues, was scheduled to visit with them the Cuban team offices on thursday afternoon. We had a day and a half before us and we thought that this unexpected free time might be an opportunity to visit Baracoa which is on the other side of the Island, north to Santiago, on the Atlantic Ocean. This is where Christopher Columbus touched the American continent for the second time on his first expedition, the first landfall being the Bahamas. We went around 5.p.m. to the hotel's travel agency to arrange for the trip and were told that they didn't have enough passengers to make the trip for the next day. We then inquired at another agency which referred us to an official taxi driver who was willing to do the trip only for us with a slightly higher fare and on the condition we can rest for the night in Baracoa and return on Thursday. He would make for us the reservation for the night in a licensed private house (Casa Particulare) in Baracoa and would stay for the whole trip at our service driving us around Baracoa. We checked his car; a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta with all the commodities and the suspension necessary to negotiate the mountain road in the Sierra Maestra between Guantanamo and Baracoa. Despite this, the journey to Baracoa during the last hour of the three hours and a half, 256 kms trip, will make me sick.

Wednesday

The next day, we were riding through the Cuban countryside on a road bordering the Caribbean until Guantanamo and then abruptly crossing the most eastern part of the Sierra Maestra to reach Baracoa on the Atlantic. Guantanamo is the only city between Santiago and Baracoa. The mountain road starts after crossing the city of Guantanamo and ends only in Baracoa.

After an hour drive and many stops to take pictures of the beautiful scenery, I told my husband that I was grateful because he decided to undertake such a trip. Santiago was a bit depressing as a city to watch and to walk in. In contrast, the countryside was luminous. The houses did not look more rich, more spacious, neither better, but as the decaying constructions were surrounded here by gardens and a luxurious nature, their cruel rusticity and modesty became more nuanced to the eyes. The road cut through gorgeous fields, giant trees, herds of lambs, goats, birds and cattles, under a blue sky. Forgotten are the grey buildings and the decaying houses of Santiago, the crowded wagwas and trucks transporting passengers, the old Cuban vehicles and motorbikes emissions and their suffocating smell, and the noise, omnipresents and companions to every dweller in Santiago. The villages roads were busy with schoolchildren. There are no yellow buses here. Public transportation is nearly non existent. There are semi public private arrangements for transportation but this is not affordable on a regular basis and by everyone. Children, dressed neatly in colorfoul uniforms indicating the school cycle, raspberry pink for elementary, walk to and from school, sometimes as much as 4 kilometers one way, in the morning, at lunch time, and in the afternoon.

Crossing the eastern part of rural Cuba, and on the 256 kilometers distance that was our road in both ways between Santiago and Baracoa and around Baracoa area I became convinced that Cuban socialism might be a good solution for rural economies and rural societies. And may be this is true of all forms of socialism. The Cuba I felt in this part of the country was different from the city, it lived in a kind of a self sustained economy that didn't seem to be in an acute need of the world and that defied the embargos. The mountain road we traveled between Guantanamo and Baracoa was the gift of Fidel Castro to the people of his native area. A giant poster planted in Baracoa, citing Fidel, claims proudly: 'Llevaremos Baracoa al mundo' (We brought Baracoa to the world). There is exuberant life in Cuban rural areas, a joyful and decent life. I thought that the road will be empty except for few small villages. In reality, there were many villages on the road and sometimes small communities living in traditional houses with roofs made of Palm tree leaves. Every village had its dispensary and its school and its local committee for the defense of the revolution. Cultures of Bananas, sugar cane, chocolate and coffee alternated. Horses, dogs, and herds roamed free in the fields. In some parts, it looked like a green cowboy country. We stopped in the mountain at a three houses community living around a coffee plantation. A mother came out with her 6 month old baby. Outside, the family dog was guarding the porc and a Guyava leaves perfumed water was boiling over a fire. The woman explained that this is a traditional bath for babies to bring them good health. We took some pictures and promised to stop on our way back to buy coffee.

Before ascending the mountain road we had stopped at the Guantanamo local market in the center of the town. The activity in the market was as in other producers markets and there was a huge poster giving consumers the nutrients and calories found in the products. After leaving Guantanamo we drove near the entrance of the Guantanamo base controlled by Cubans and which is at 25 kms only from the US controlled base. The taxi driver told us that, according to treaties, the US must return Gunatanamo to Cuba in 2033. Here we have a solution to this shame I thought. Not sure, look to what happened to Panama. I had asked the driver previously if I can make a picture of the base entrance and he said that it is even forbidden to stop near the entrance. He promised that on our way back from Baracoa the next day we would choose a spot on the mountain road and take a picture of the actual US controlled base, which we did...I thought of Guantanamo prisoners and of the many innocent men sold by Pakistanis in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan and held by the US in conditions which will be a permanent stain on our modern western consciousness for generations to come. I thought of these men held in cages under the caribbean sun, cut from the world, and I wondered that only 25 kilometers, and less if you think that the Cuban base stretches some 15 kilometers from the road toward the US controlled base, separate actually a world made of barbarism and cruelty from this exuberant and joyful nature. I felt anxious and started talking to the taxi driver to alleviate my own malaise. I told him my indignation and he told me that most Cubans feel the same. Cuban official television had covered every aspect of the US's shameful treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and their non respect of Human rights. The conversation extended to Cuban politics and, as most Cubans, the taxi driver was anxious for a little change, anxious for the economy to get better in his country, but for all the money and wealth of the world, and like most Cubans, he would not want to see Miami Cubans and US rule return to impose their will.

Our casa particulare in Baracoa had a terrace overlooking the sea and all the commodities. It was modest but convenient and our hostess was charming. Around Baracoa, we visited the beach where Columbus landed for the first time on the Island and where a replica of Columbus's cross was planted. The real one is kept in the cathedral in a glass box. It was reduced to a tiny cross by locals who thought that having a piece of wood from the cross was going to bring them luck. We visited the Yumuri area, a village, a river running into the ocean, a gorge, and a chocolate plantation, east to Baracoa. Our visit to the chocolate plantation was escorted by two improvised guides, two men, and 8 local women, who all hoped for a little tip. The two men tried to provide us with some cues into how they collect Chocolate and process it and tried to earn their tip by having such initiatives as climbing Coco trees and collect fruits for us and harvesting some Chocolate fruits for us to discover, while the women only complained to me about their living conditions. They told us that they work only three months a year, that their salaries were low. We must have left them with the highest amount paid as a tip in Cuba and we regretted that things had to be this way. We felt that tourism becoming important in the area, people were starting to change and to count more and more on an arbitrary income instead of trying to earn it the traditional way. Villagers in the mountain around coffee plantations were definitely different but there was no sustained flow of tourists there. The incident had spoiled my visit to Yumuri...

In the center of Baracoa, there were many European tourists coming from nearby famous Holguin's beaches for a day or two in a pilgrimage to Columbus's shore in Baracoa. Baracoa is also surrounded by gorgeous mountains with different shapes, shades and heights. At the end of the day we went to the beach and returned to eat a cooked meal at the terrace of the private house we were staying in for the night.

On the road back, we took with us in the car a Cuban whom the taxi driver knew and who was a schoolteacher and director of a primary school. He was so grateful that he answered all our questions on the school system, something we were very curious about. In Cuba, every class has its own videosystem to help the professor in his teachings (actually we glanced at such a class in a school in Santiago that was located near the hotel) and a computer, even if the class is made of one pupil, something that happens sometimes in rural areas. Even University students don't have this density of computers at their disposal in Cuba. But this is a socialist regime which believes in the building of young minds. The teacher told us also that there is one teacher for every 15 pupils. Sometimes one for ten, depending on the work they have to do. The school in Cuba is interested in the children and their minds, something that may make carreer oriented and busy western parents jealous because they don't have these standards and this commitment from the school system which I believe is increasingly not interested in the young minds of our children but rather in getting rid of the children while meeting the obejctives imposed by our governments on making sure that education meets the Market needs. I volunteered in my children's school for 12 years and I was close to the parents preoccupations and increasing demands for the school to relieve them from the burden of the education of their children entirely while at the same time providing children with all what is necessary to succeed later in life, education, a good conduct, and a compliant character, a disproportionate demand, I thought sometimes. But I can tell you that a Cuban style school system is a dreamed solution for parents. However, while providing children with whatever necessary to grow up good adults without the help of their parents - it is commonly thought in Cuba that the school don't even need you to educate your children, it takes charge of the whole process- it may not provide them with what is necessary to succeed economically because it is not in the objectives of the system. Also, the structure of their school system must cost a lot of money if applied in our societies and our governments are not ready to invest heavily in education. The neoliberal market logic is such that it takes and does not give. While being very greedy to schools, teachers and the education system as a whole, it doesn't bother investing in education because, according to this logic, there is no direct causal relationship between education and the growth of material wealth. I wrote my children an email the day after this encounter reminding them how much, we parents, have to invest in a deficient school system in our countries in order to support their education and how Cuban parents were very much aided in this task by the school. While strolling through santiago, we passed along many music schools teaching children classical music. How many of us can afford, after paying for our children basic needs, to pay for music lessons which are not part of the regular curriculum at school ?

I also found Cuban children to be polite in general, calm, and well behaved.

At the dinner that evening I only ate the fried Yukas, the rice and beans. We prolonged the night on the terrace sipping a local strong coffee, discussing the day's encounters and visits, and listening to the sound of the chants coming from the cathedral. Many christian and other cult places are active in Cuba since 1995 but the Santeria remains the religion of the majority of Cubans. I remember that my father used to tell us about the strange rites of this religion he witnessed there as a child, rites involving sacrifices. At thirty past ten, the religious songs were replaced by the sound of music coming from the Trova house located near the cathedral, until late...

I woke up in the middle of the night and, from one of the room's windows I could glance at the eastern part of the Island where the Yumuri river joins the sea. I thought about the fate of the region's Natives who were exterminated by the colonisers and left no trace except some local legends. One of them is that the Yumuri river's name is related to the Sapnish 'Yo voy a mourir'. Natives, goes the legend, committed suicide by jumping from a cliff bording the river in an attempt to escape the cruelty of their Spanish masters while shouting: 'Yo voy a mourir'. Another legend is that the Spanish masters, having been informed of the intent of ther slaves, convinced them not to kill themselves by threatening to committ suicide in order to follow them to the other world and punish them...Cuba, and especially Santiago and Baracoa areas, became, in the sixteenth and sevententh centuries, central to all Spanish expeditions in the Americas providing the ships with food and slaves and receiving the mechandise collected from the rest of the American land and destined to Spain.

Outside our modest room in Baracoa, a thunderous rainfall had already started, eclipsing the sound of music coming from la casa Trova.

Tomorrow we will go back to Santiago where, before leaving for Havana, I will make two interesting encounters, one with a local Cuban Lebanecita, a third generation Lebanese, and another with a small community of Turkish Jews who emigrated from Turkey to Cuba, at the same time many lebanese left the troubled Ottoman empire of the end of the 19th century for the Americas. Maalouf's book 'Origins', which I was reading, will provide me with some key information to understand both communities and the diversity I was witnessing in the modern Cuban identity...

Link to part I

Link to Part II

UPDATE: I am updating here with an article presenting a different view on the thoughts expressed in this post 'Why Miami dances on Castro's grave'.

Read also from the link below (Le Monde, French) how Edmundo Garcia, A cuban exiled to Miami was fired twice by local TV stations under pressure from the far right Miami Cuban community for, well, not writing exactly as a journalist what the community wanted him to say and write...Dictatorships exist also in so called free countries and they are the dictatorships of pressure groups. The Cuban Miami community has created its own US bred dictatorship...

Les déboires d'un journaliste cubain à Miami, capitale de l'exil
LE MONDE | 10.03.07

©

This Other America: Part II, Oriente

Part I

Our journey to Cuba was going to be a subtle mix of work and leisure. My husband was recently involved in a collaborative scientific academic work that required his presence there to see the local Cuban facilities used by his collaborators and introduce them to some techniques. Since we came to Canada 15 years ago we never traveled to Cuban beaches, very popular among Canadians. First, because a beach vacation is never our way of relaxing from work and second, because we are old fashioned travelers, we don't travel for our pleasure only but we travel to increase our knowledge of the world we live in.

We started to prepare the Cuban journey with private Spanish lessons in October in order to be able to speak and make ourselves understandable. Athough most Academics in Havana speak English or French, it is not he case among others across the country where the only foreign language they know, when they know one, is Russian. I felt lucky seizing this opportunity to discover the Castillan language, the fourth I will be speaking and hopefully writing some time in the future. Another interest I had in this trip was related to my father's family history. My Grand' parents having settled in Cuba for about 14 years, the fourteen years it took my father to grow up from a 2 year old to a young man when Cuba was under American influence between the 1920s and the 1930s, the country was always in my mind as the homeland of my father's youth. My childhood is full of memories of stories and songs from this imaginary country, told and sang around my childhood bed by my father with much admiration, affection and always a tear in his eyes.

At the end of the 19th century, the ottoman empire was rapidly declining, unable to adapt to the new political, social, technological and economic changes that started to take over the established social orders in many European and western societies. This wave of change was felt in all the corners of the empire including Lebanon where well informed and educated Lebanese, and some less informed but driven by emulation, were willing to leave their country, villages, family and land to settle in 'America'. I discovered that one of Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf's family members had emigrated to Cuba during this period and that Maalouf wrote a book (Origins) in which this member was a central character. Maalouf is a wonderful storyteller and I promised myself that I will make this journey with his book by my side. Also, two of my husband's Cuban professional collaborators had ties to Lebanon; one was a third generation Cuban 'Lebanese' and the other was married to another third generation Cuban 'Lebanese' and they both kept the Lebanese family names unchanged.

For the first part of the travel my husband was going to be in company of a Canadian colleague who has been doing this kind of collaborative work for more than ten years now. I knew that we were going to meet all these people in a social context. I wrote my husband's colleague an email one week before leaving asking him if he would recommend bringing some gifts and what are the gifts that will be appreciated given that this is a rationed country and that items that are not subsidised can be very expansive to buy. His answer came quickly: ''These people (the people he was talking about were professionals, doctors, university professors, etc...) are very poor. Please don't bring with you maple syrup or any other Canadian extravaganza. Soaps, pencils, pens, balls for Basket and Baseball, CDs, Musique CDs, notebooks, biscuits, etc...'' These professionals have the highest paid salaries by the government, the equivalent of 25 euros per month...Items subsidised by the government can be bought at very low prices but they are rationed and they are few because the government buys at very high prices on the international market so it subsidises only the most basic elementary needs of its population. Cuba, I will discover later during my travel, is obstinate socialism in an ocean of hostility and embargos which grew to warlike proportions in their consequences after the fall of the main support for this socialism, the Soviet Union.

We were going to spend the first week in Santiago de Cuba, an eastern city on the Caribbean, starting point for the Cuban revolution, close to the Sierra Maestra, and the second week in Havana. On the day of our arrival we were invited to a dinner preceded by a guided tour of the city by one of the hostess's daughters. As soon as we arrived I looked for an internet connection at the hotel (run by a Spanish hotel chain) to keep in touch daily with my two grown up children who stayed in Canada. At the hotel business center open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. five old slow computers were available for internet or any other computer interface at the rate of 6 Convertible Cuban Pesos (1 CCU= 1 Euro) per hour. Internet is not easily accessible in Cuba. The country and its people do not have the finanical means for a wide network at the national level serving the whole country and one has to remember that internet is in the guardianship of the US, Cuba's worst neighbour and ennemy. Cuban universities for example have very few connections for their professorsbut not one for their students. Cubans cannot open a private internet connection at home. Our hostess for our first day in Cuba had a computer with a flat screen bought for her daughter during one of her travels outside Cuba but she had no internet connection, something unthinkable of right now.

Sunday, Santiago de Cuba

We had left Canada the day before and transited by Havana for one night because there are no direct flights from Canada to Santiago. There was a delay at Havana airport on the day we flew to Santiago because of the presence of Haiti's president in the airport. Security measures are normal in Cuban airports and there was no humiliating hand search. However, this is the first country I visit where a wall and closed doors separate the international section of the airport from the rest.

The natural setting of Santiago is beautiful, between the Caribbean and the Sierra Maestra. One hour after our arrival, one of my husband's Cuban colleagues, M., sends us her two daughters and the boyfriend of one of them to guide us in a discovery tour of the old city. It is decided that my husband and his three Canadian colleagues will ride in a taxi to the starting point of the tour and that I would ride with the Cubans. Normally Cubans are not allowed to let strangers in their cars and I will understand later that this is the only way the government, who owns or have a share in all taxi companies , can prevent private drivers from working illegally as taxis without paying the daily 60 euros tax to the government. One has to understand that there are no taxis for Cubans living on the island because they cannot afford a taxi, fares being as high as those practised in our countries while salaries are ridiculously low. But this does not seem to prevent some, we will learn later, from trying to earn money with their old private car and they seem to access the market with the connivence and the benediction of official taxi drivers who can cash on a referred client while driving offcially another one. It is risky to ride in a private car in Cuba and I did so for about ten minutes. The three young people in the car, contrary to their parents, spoke a little English and I spoke my recently learned Spanish and we were able to make a decent conversation. The driver was a mechanical engineer driving a 50 year old Lada, his girlfriend, a history teacher, is specialised in Cuban history and her sister is a computer scientist working on a prospective Ph.D. The historian and her friend disappeared after driving us and reminding us that we should be home for dinner around 8 p.m. We started our discovery of old Santiago from a park near the sea and went up the hill to a renovated yellow mansion called 'Casa Amarilla' that is now the museo of la lucha clandestina (museum of clandestine struggle). In the park, children were playing. When they saw us they approached asking for dineros. The buildings in this part of the city were in decay. However, there was an effort to maintain the park clean. As we climbed the hill in the direction of 'Casa Amarilla', Santiago is called 'The city of stairs', we glanced at houses; nearly empty except for some chairs and a TV set. Many houses had pictures of El Che along with pictures of the virgin Mary. El Che is very much loved in Cuba. One can see ten times more pictures of El Che than of Fidel. There is no personality cult toward Fidel here. Later we would realise that, except posters wishing him a happy 80th birthday, there were no streets, places or statues for Fidel in Cuba. After reaching la 'Casa Amarilla' it started to rain. We took refuge under a porsh of a renovated building in Tivoli, the French quarter of Santiago. French expelled from Haiti after the independance came to Santiago, which is at 150 kms by sea from Haiti. Haiti was the first free black republic in history but is not so free from neocolonialism today. The French who came to Santiago imported with them the savoir faire for coffee plantations, a major economic resource for the whole area. The recently renovated houses in this historic quartier made the rest of the city look more depressing. It was night when we walked to the balcony of Velasquez (Diego Velasquez de Cuellar), the first governor of Cuba, to contemplate the city from the top of the hill. From there we went to plaza de la catedral, the city real center, to drink a refresco at a hotel bar. We walked near a school building which is still relatively well maintained and were told that it was the high school of young Fidel and Raoul, who are from Santiago. We walked the dark and tight streets now animated by little motorcycles, young people and even children, passing by the house of Jose Maria Heredia, plaza de Martes and the many traditional music houses that were bracing for a night of singing and dancing. Private houses were also diffusing their own music at very high volumes into the streets.
Earlier, at Plaza de la catedral, we wanted, my husband and I, to buy a memory card for our digital camera from a photo shop that was recommended by the hotel. We had a full card but we usually keep our memory cards when they are full even when photos are transferred to the computer. In a shop more than half empty there was our brand of memory card offered at five times its regular price in Canada, the equivalent of a six month salary of a doctor in Cuba. I wondered, and still wonder up to now, who can afford to buy this overpriced card. We decided that we were going to use our old one.

At M.'s house, we were expected. It is a decaying three storey house for a four generations family of highly educated professionals. On the first floor lives the grand'mother, C., I will meet her later and in another circumstance. On the second lives the oldest grand'daughter of C. with her four year old son, a beautiful woman and a doctor whose doctor husband is serving a two year assigned work in Venezuela for the Cuban government in exchange for cheap oil sent by Chavez to Cuba at quarter the regular price. Our guide, the computer scientist, lives with her sister for the time being. We had to cross the house on the second floor in order to be able to reach the third and last one which had a terrace overlooking the street and houses the only daughter of C., a university professor and head of her department with her husband, a plastic surgeon and their youngest daughter, the historian. Every floor had the equivalent in space of three small rooms. M. Had prepared a tasty dinner made of white rice, black beans, fried Yukas and Plantains as well as a cabbage salad, picadillo and camarones (very small shrimps). The meat for the picadillo (which is ground beef meat cooked with onions) and the camarones were bought on the black market by the family and my husband's Canadian colleague had compensated for the price. We had brought some wine with us and the grand'mother had prepared a coconut desert. We sat with the only male member of the family, the others busying and eating while standing around the tiny table. I told them I was familiar with the Picadillo because it used to be the only meal my father knew how to prepare without my mother's help. After dinner we went to sit on the terrace to chat with the father who traveled a lot as a doctor, working on assignments for the Cuban government as far as Lybia, and who was able to make a conversation with me in Arabic by using some of the words learned during his two years stay in Lybia.
In this one house, two doctors would have served a total of six years away from their families in faraway countries for the regime to pay back countries who help Cuba financially but need its human resources and scientific savoir faire. We will realise later that the people who are most frustrated with the regime are young professionals. They know that their work's monetary value in other countries is sometimes 200 or even 500 times higher for doctors and they know they they cannot leave because they would not find easily a decent work in other countries. A university graduate in law, acquaintance of the family, was working as a secretary in Miami. The regime knows this state of things and allows professionals and Academics many subsidised travels to foreign countries which allow them to breathe, make some additional money and let the steam out a little bit. We learned also that candidates for immigration are allowed by the regime to leave relatively easily.

The neighbours music becoming loud, the young started to dance and we all followed. In Cuba, one is obliged to listen to the music of his or her neighbours and never to her own music and vice versa because as soon as the neighbour's music stops you raise the volume of your own music if you want your music to be listened to after all.

Tuesday, Santiago de Cuba
Yesterday I was not able to connect to my mailbox. The Internet was slow and I lost one hour trying to connect unsuccessfully. It is hot and humide here. I feel tired and may have started a sinusitis because of the air conditioning at the hotel. Yesterday also we visited Castillo del Morro, a fortification guarding the entry of the Santiago bay in the Caribbean and built by the Spanish in the 17th century to repel pirates attacks on the city. From the castle walls, the city of Santiago seemed more beautiful and prosperous. The castle offered an exclusive view of the city and its surroundings. I wished that my dear son, who was studying for his exams for the first session at college, could have come with us to realise that the much dreaded pirates did not exist only in his imagination of a little boy and that great empires like Spain had to build fortresses to guard their cities from their attacks. At the site of Castle del Morro, two female guardians followed us asking for soap, medication, perfume and many other things. I explained that I did not have those things with me but they seemed not to understand and left us only after their boss came after them with an admonishing face.

After visiting Castle del Morro we asked the taxi to drive us to the city center near the cathedral. We wanted, my husband and I, to make the same tour we did on the first day but this time in plain daylight. The historical buildings we had seen the day before in the evening seemed uglier under daylight. One feels dispossession and poverty in this part of the city despite the recent renovations. I never visited bidonvilles but this part of Santiago can easily pass for one of them. During our wanderings, we were approached by a young man who heard us speaking in French. He spoke a clear and concise French learned at the French mission in Santiago. He offered help for a tour in the area. He insisted he was not going to be annoying or ask for money. As we explored non touristic areas around the center I started to become a little worried. But my worries disappeared as soon as I was able to see through the motivations of the young man for following us: he just wanted to speak French and probably wanted to gain a little money but this was not his chief aim. His father, he told us, a renowned local musician, left the family for a French woman who was visiting Santiago as a tourist and later followed her to Lyon. He does not send any money to his family in Santiago. Alfredo was now 25, a father of a 4 year old and the brother of two younger than him. The women, his mother and his wife, work and earn a small living and he is studying the mechanics of bicycles on half day courses and has nothing to do for the rest of the day. He made us discover more of the French Tivoli quarter and even guided us near a typical grocery store where Cubans buy their subsidised food . The store was empty. A cat that gave birth to kittens who were around her was guarding the entrance. We asked Alfredo some questions about the rationed allowance and he answered: 5 pounds of white rice, one pound of black beans, one pound on oil, one soap, on pound of sugar, milk for families who have children younger than six or elderly or breast-feeding mothers. These amounts are per person and can be bought at cheap prices in stores subsidised by the government. Anything more or different must be bought by individuals with very low earnings at prices set by the international market, which is out of reach of the low salaries of most Cubans except those who work in the tourism industry and receive tips from tourists. Despite all this I have not seen thin people, most Cubans are rather a bit overweight, when not obese. There are no skinny anorexic women. They also don't complain and if it wasn't Alfredo we would not have learned these details about food from our hosts.

When the streets became really dark, I asked Alfredo to take us to the nearest taxi and gave him a tip and thanked him for the tour. He was grateful. He wanted to suggest a private taxi owned by one of his friends and I made it clear that I could not accept such a thing and endanger myself and my husband, giving that private taxis are illegal...

At the hotel that night we dined surrounded by a horde of fat and obese tourists visiting Santiago from nearby touristic locations mainly beach resorts for a one day tour. Typically, these tourists stay one night in Santiago. White European and Canadian tourist males would go to the hotel bar and ask the barman for a female company which the barman would find instantly, having his own network of Cuban girls. I saw many middle aged white men walking around the pool area in the hotel, hand by hand with local beauties.

The day after, I was a bit lost and ill. I sent my children a very emotional letter. At thousand kilometers from me and many seas between us, they were the recipiendaries of my thoughts, emotions and hasty judgements. On this day, four days after touching the Cuban soil, I wrote them:

''Frankly, I don't like the food here that is being served to tourists, what I like most is what Cubans hate most because they can only have this to eat; rice and beans. It appears to me that the revolutionnary regime has made many interesting and admirable achievements in the fields of education and health but it stayed confined in an ideology that is hurting the economy and the people. We should never stay prisoners to one ideology', we should always stay free'

But this was a reaction based on a sample of Cuban life limited in space and time. My attempt to understand the country will be guided by the next logical question: Do Cubans have the means to choose their governance ideology and do they have the means to really be free ? What real freedom is ? Are we, in hte Western free market society free ? More nuances will enrich my first impressions much later...The first nuance is obvious: people speak freely their mind here. We are not watched as tourists when we speak to Cubans. There is no apparent oppression or secret police presence among civilians. I have traveled for example in Syria and I can tell the difference. Forced personality cult for the head of state was evident in Syria while here we merely see a mention of Fidel. And at the government owned hotel in Damascus everytime we would open the door, there was a woman, always the same, just walking the hall near our room as by accident. I did not feel and would not feel such a controlling presence anywhere in Cuba...

And in all this uncertainty I wanted something to rely on close to me. What else can be more close than an engaging book and an engaging story activating the connection between part of my identity and the country I was visiting ? This is when I started reading Maalouf's 'Origins'.

P.S. Read here the latest post from Cosmic about western bigotry toward the Cuban revolution...