In 2004 and 2005, I spoke at education conferences in Cuba. One was the Learning Conference. The second was locally organized. These will remain some of my fondest memories. Cuba is an amazing country and the people are warm and full of life.
While in Cuba, I became friends with Raúl Corrales, Fidel Castro’s personal photographer from 1959 until 1992. Here’s a New York Times story about him.
Here are some of my pictures from the trips. Click on a picture to see it larger.
Below the pictures is some of my travel journal.
This is from the journal I kept while traveling there.
July 9, 2004
I started this journal on June 23, 2004, the day I left Chicago for Miami headed for Cuba. I hate to start with the worst thing about Cuba, but I find it necessary to note here that I have changed some details in my journal to protect people from the repression of the Cuban regime. This said, I find Cuba to be a remarkably open society about most things.
The fact that there is dissent and repression in Cuba must be taken in perspective. For instance, I am free, in the States, to say whatever I want about anything short of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, but, due to lack of access to media, I might as well be shouting “theater!” in a crowded fire, to quote my one of my heroes, Abbie Hoffman. In America, we have many freedoms which we cannot fully exercise or freedoms that come at the expense of others.
My freedom to become rich must necessarily come at the expense of other people, which is why 27% of American wealth is in the hands of 1% of the citizenry, while poverty rises and we can’t even afford good education for our nations children.
Recently in America, the FCC gave away the license to broadcast High Definition Television to companies that already hold the broadcast licenses. Not only do they get to monopolize speech over these channels, but, as an American citizen, I was never asked if I want to part with this collective asset of our nation.
For these reasons and more, I urge you to put the notion of repression in perspective. I, like many of my readers, would love to see a true Prensa Libre (free press) in Cuba, but for now we will need to suffice ourselves with the fact that all Cubans have food and shelter; they have universal access to healthcare and Cuban literacy is nearly 100%, a significant rise from 59% under Batista. Last but not least, we need to remember, as I was reminded frequently in Cuba, “the Revolution is a process,” and, unfortunately, it is a process that we, as American taxpayers, are obstructing and trying to dismantle.
Enjoy your read,
David
June 23, 2004 – 10:00 AM
I’m about to leave for Cuba via Miami to give a presentation at The Learning Conference in Cojimar, just east of Havana. I wrote the proposal for the paper at the urging of my professor, Dr. Patrick Roberts, at National-Louis University. This will be the first time I present at a conference, but I am very comfortable with my subject matter. I will be discussing a pedagogic approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but I’m really just using this as a pretext to go to Cuba.
Why Cuba?
This requires a long answer, but I will try to be concise. My grandfather made a lot of money selling pan-release when my mother was in high school and he used some of it to build a vocational school in Israel through ORT. My mother accompanied my grandparents to Israel to see the school and fell in love, twice, once with the country, but also with the lifeguard near her hotel in Tel-Aviv. This led to a long series of visits to Israel both before and after she married my dad.
When I was 2, just after the Six Day War, my father (not the Tel-Aviv lifeguard), inspired by the movie Exodus and news of Israel’s miraculous victory, wanted to bring the whole family to Israel. Unfortunately, the next time I came was after my parents divorce when I was 9.
The following summer, I was shipped away to a Socialist-Zionist summer camp in Three Rivers, Michigan which completed the triangle of my identity, Jewish, Zionist and now socialist. This delicate balance led me to spend 3 years of high school in an Israeli, agricultural boarding school followed by service in the Israeli Defense Force and my later marriage to an Israeli woman. In my life, I have lived 10 years in Israel.
After the army, upon completion of my studies at UCLA, my mom promised me a trip to the Soviet Union as a graduation present, but I met my wife and moved to Tel-Aviv. Mom got off cheap and I never got the chance to see the biggest socialist experiment in the world. My experiences with kibbutz living have had to suffice for all these years until now. Now I can see a socialist country in action, and I can’t tell you how excited I am.
Same Day – 1:30 PM
American Airlines flight 1986 has been postponed at least three hours while the airlines searches for a new plane, and all I can think of is how lucky I am I chose to spend the night in Miami before departing to Cuba. “Shit! I’m gonna have to cancel dinner with Stacey.”
Stacey, my high school friend in Miami, is a family medicine doctor, who is letting me spend the night. She’s also the source of the medicine I’m gonna bring to the synagogue in Havana. The word on the street is that Cuban’s are in dire need of medicine which is hard to come by due to the blockade, a fact that is not just ugly, it downright embarrasses me as an American.
Stacey fits nicely into my story, as well, because she was the American Jewish girl that dated and eventually married (and divorced after having a beautiful daughter) an Arab at our Israel Agricultural boarding high school. You see, the paper I’m giving at the Learning Conference in Havana is a pedagogical approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, in many ways, is the story of Stacey and Usama’s life.
I finally arrive in Miami near midnight, and being the clever business person I am, I prepared myself with a rental car figuring that I will need to get to Stacey’s and back by taxi, since the offer to pick me up at the airport expired when the first plane was cancelled. The car also gives me the freedom to stop by the Rascal House, a fixture in my autobiography because when I was a child, my grandmother was a snow bird and spent her winters in Miami, where we would visit her. Our annual trips to Grandma’s Ami, as we understood from the invitations to “My Ami” were filled with breakfasts at the local, Jewish Mecca, Wolfy Cohen’s Rascal House.
My ticket is for a 1:10 departure with a 10:10 check-in and my intuition tells me I should be on time. As is my wife’s claim, I love to hear, “you’re right David,” and this time I am the one to say it. The line for my charter wraps around an elevator shaft and continues for nearly a city block. A woman who is also going to the conference gets in line behind me and we start sharing outlines from our presentations. Her’s is a Socratic dialogue which she has a hard time describing. She takes great interest in mine, which leads to a lengthy discussion of the current situation in Israel and the peculiar time us lefties are in having to support Ariel Sharon in lieu of the attacks from the extreme right within his party, a situation very reminiscent of the Labor party’s defense of Menachem Begin’s peace making efforts with Egypt.
Hours later, still in line, a rumor mill erupts. Apparently, the Bush administration is tightening the noose on Cuba and the State Department is further restricting visits. At first, we are not sure if our plane will depart, then we hear that we must be out by June 30, the last day of the conference. There are now 60 of us academics waiting to hear our destiny. I call the travel agency to get the inside scoop. After June 30, American’s traveling to Cuba will not be allowed to bring home things purchased in Cuba. My first thought is that when my friends read this in the New York Times they’ll drop their fantasies about presents of Cuban cigars and rum. There is also a restriction on the weight of our bags. This is harmless to me because I planned to leave most of my clothes in Cuba after reading in a book called Full Count: The inside Story of Cuban Baseball that Cuban’s love all things related to baseball, so I prepared a wardrobe full of Cubs jerseys which I planned to leave with friends of friends from America.
My friend Larry, the arts commissioner of Santa Monica, has prepared me with photographs and small gifts for his friends here in Havana. This is a common strategy for making introductions that lead to extended hospitality. Once Larry sent me to visit his friends in London, and I ended staying at their home for my entire month long visit, with my girlfriend. Larry’s friends include artists, journalists and museum curators, so I’m sure the visits will be very fulfilling.
When we finally get boarding tickets, I am surprised with a first class seat. This would be great if it happened on my flights to Israel, but Cuba is a mere 40 minutes from Miami and first class basically means a bit wider place for my tuchis.
The plane takes off and lands accompanied by the genuflecting of the Cuban woman sitting next to me. I must admit that her superstition was contagious and I said the Shema prayer to myself silently as we landed on Communist soil.
Flights to Havana are pretty infrequent and the plane taxis less than a football field from the entrance to the Jose Marti International Airport. The benefit of first class kicks in as I disembark first from the plane, all the time considering the idea of making a spectacle of myself and kissing the ground at the bottom of the stairs.
After passing through Passport Control, I learn that my hotel reservation at the Pan Americana in Cojimar has been changed. They are moving us to Megano, another beachside village further east of Havana. There is not explanation for the move.
Exiting customs turns out to be rather difficult as the officials want to know why I am traveling with a computer, video camera, digital still camera, still camera, baseball mitt and hundreds of baseball cards. I show the official the passage in the book I read about Cuban baseball which describes the Pena, a group of men who meet in Parque Central in Havan to discuss baseball and explain that I intend to brig the cars. I also suggest that it won’t hurt the any if some of the cards don’t arrive. This idea receives a big smile and I leave a dozen cards out of my suitcase.
When I finally leave customs, my bus is gone and the Cuban tourism people arrange a private taxi to take me on the 45 minute drive to my hotel. Keenly tuned into my surroundings, I am struck by the complete absence of advertising and near absence of litter. Lenny Bruce has a funny routine about how he wouldn’t like to live under Communism because he wants more than one choice of soap, and I imagine that the upside of this is no advertisements vying for my pocketbook.
I spend very little time in my room at the hotel, which is modest and very hot. I use the phone to call a photographer friend of Larry’s. While writing this, I realize the major benefit of literary documentation of my visit. The photographer, whose identity I can hide by leaving out his name, happens to be very content with the Revolution, but were he not, I wouldn’t be able to list his disapproval along with his name without running the possibility of getting him in trouble.
Juan (a pseudonym) is a successful photographer from the second generation of Cuban photographers. Maria (also a pseudonym) is an art historian. They live in the Verdado neighborhood of Havana which shows many signs of being middle class. The entrance to their apartment has an intercom system and when I enter the apartment itself, I am reminded immediately of my lifestyle in Tel-Aviv. The floor has thick marble tiles, the ceiling are high and the windows are open without the screens we are used to in Chicago.
Juan and Maria are essentially married. They have a daughter and have been together for over 20 years. The reason for the informality of their commitment to one another is economic. When people in Cuba marry, they get one apartment. If they don’t marry, the system provides each person with an apartment. Apartments in Cuba cannot be sold, but many people rent their extra space out for supplemental income. For my first Cuban friends, the second apartment provides a place to work on their art.
Artist, I learn, is a highly respected profession in Cuba, something I wish we’d learn up north. Artists are privileged with Internet access and e-mail accounts on Cubarte.cu. and their work is shared in many ways throughout the country. Any citizen can attend the theater and opera or enter one of several museums for virtually nothing and culture abounds. I’ve only been in Cuba a few hours and I’ve already been privy to a variety of different sounds and tonight, after visiting and having dinner, I will go see live jazz at LaZorra y El Quervo, a place Larry designated as the best jazz club in Havana.
From a scrap of paper I used in a restaurant and the Jazz Club
I’m in Havana just five hours and I’ve fallen through the cracks in my socialist dream. Here at Gringo Viejo Restaurant Particular, named after the 1989 movie starring Gregory Peck. In Cuba, most things are owned by the state, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government has allowed a limited experiment with private business. Particular is the Spanish word for these private ventures and many of them are small restaurants or taxis.
At Gringo Viejo, I sit between discussions in German and Spanish, reminiscent of the time I spent in the hallway of my middle school after being ejected from one of my two foreign language classes for inappropriate behavior. Of course, inappropriate is relative and I feel very inappropriate spending $15 on dinner when outside of these walls the average citizen is surviving on approximately the same money for a month.
I learned this in the airport discussing with Juanita (pseudonym) a woman from the tourism ministry who told me she went to college to study teaching but never set foot in a school because the money dealing with tourists is much better. Cuba has, essentially, 2 economies, one in dollars and one in pesos. A US dollar is worth somewhere between 25 and 35 pesos, but the number is not clear because the embargo makes it very difficult to officially trade currencies.
The worst part of the dual economy and private business, as I see it, is that it teaches people to cheat the system and to treat work as a means to a financial end. In America, people work to feed their families; some provide a lot and some don’t, but the work is really the sale of our time, effort and intelligence as individuals in exchange for something which paves the way from subsistence to luxury and power. Unfortunately, most of us don’t travel far on this road.
In my perfect world, work is our contribution to the greater good of society and money isn’t necessary because we don’t sell ourselves to acquire the things we need. While Cubans live on $15 a month, they don’t have to worry about health care, education or shelter. When money is introduced into the equation, everything becomes a commodity and doctors, for instance, end up deciding that medical school and hard work are not worth the $20 they receive monthly.
People always try to tell me that this is human nature, but I don’t accept it. Humans are the only species born so totally dependent on communal support. When I worked with cows in high school in Israel, I would deliver baby calves and the minute they entered the world they were capable of walking to their mother’s and eating. Human babies can’t even turn over at birth and would die without the complete support of the society around them. Even from an evolutionary perspective, you gotta believe that the road from the complete dependence of babies to the aggressive competition between adults is loaded with lessons about how to be in the world. For this reason, I believe that the lessons can be different and that people can be raised to work for their common good.
Just think about this for a moment, Fidel is by far not the worst dictator in the world. He doesn’t gas his people, he doesn’t fill his own pockets at the expense of the Revolution. So why is he so despised by the US? Because we a scared to death of having a successful example of social and economic equity in our backyard. We would have riots in the streets. People wouldn’t stand for it any longer.
Fidel may repress expression and censor dissent, but his experiment is “For the people” by the few. In the US, the experiment is hardly “for the people.” It is a system for some of the people by a privileged few. I don’t think I could garner the financial resources necessary to run for Congress, and I’m clearly not one of those who benefits from the current craze of tax breaks. In this light, Cuba and socialism seem very appealing. I wonder how I’ll feel as the visit progresses.
June 25, 2004
My Havana Libre and Pina Colada haven’t had the adverse effect I anticipated and I wake up early enough to write. With no desk available, I end up seated on my throne facing a stool that seats my laptop. My doctor has warned me that my toilet reading is a prescription for hemorrhoids, but he never said anything about computing so I commence with my commitment to myself, a minimum of one hour per day of writing to reflect on my adventures.
At 8:30, I shut down and head to the shower so I won’t be late for the taxi driver who, last night, agreed to return in the morning. I guess he was working on Cuban time, as they call it here, because I find myself alone at the entrance to the Villa Megano, my hotel. Fortunately, the receptionist has spotted me and took it upon herself to make the necessary call. Within minutes I am on my way to Cojimar loaded up with baseball cards and magazines, the envelope of photographs from Larry and my video and still cameras.
Cojimar is my first stop. This is the fishing village where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea. It is also home to Raul Coralles, an old friend of Hemingway’s and Fidel Castro’s first personal photographer after the departure of . Raul is 79 years old and lives in a modest villa with his wife. He looks very good for his age, has his full head of hair and lets it wrap his head with a beard, which is common for this country. We sit in bamboo chairs and I proceed with the expected small talk about Larry and his wife Judith. Raul takes a look at the pictures and immediately calls his son Raul Junior who also appears in the group. Raul tells me that he is a very fortunate man to have his son 2 blocks from his home and a daughter 3 blocks away. He says that his grandchildren regularly raid his freezer and take the dogs for walks.
In the yard are two fresh water turtles the grandchildren have collected and three parrots; one, I am told, suffers from stress, which is the reason for his loss of feathers. There are also two dogs; one black and one white which strikes me as a metaphor for Raul’s photography.
I was born in the center of the country, the youngest of six children. My father was an engineer and my mother was at home with the children. When I was 14, I worked as a busboy in a hotel in Havana. One day at work, I got my hands on a copy of Life magazine featuring documentation of the Depression era with photographs by Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans. It was at that moment that I decided that if I was going to have to work my whole life, I was going to do something that I enjoyed.
I took the money I collected from my tips and bought a camera. It was one of the first plastic cameras and I started taking pictures. Then I got a job at a photography agency. I was a janitor and I was able to learn all the elements of photography; developing film, printing.
One day the boss got a call from a big client and there was nobody in the office to take the job. I told him that I could do it and he said, ‘What do you know about photography?’ I told him that I could do the job. I think he decided that it was better for him to send me on the job and blame me if it went wrong than to not satisfy the client, so I went out and shot the pictures. Then I returned, developed the film, printed the pictures and responded to the bosses call.
‘Did you take the pictures?’ he asked me. ‘I did.’ I told him. ‘Then give me the film so I can have someone develop it.’ ‘I developed it,” I told him. ‘O.K. then give me the negative so I can have it printed.’ ‘I printed the pictures.’
Then he said, ‘From this day on, you will never clean this building again.’ I was scared because I thought I was loosing my job. ‘Tomorrow you start working as a photographer,’ he told me. I was so relieved. I worked there for a while until I got a job at a newspaper, the News of the World. This job lasted until closed the paper. I was nervous, but I got another job at an advertising agency. This was around the time of the revolution when Fidel asked me to be his photographer. He said, ‘How much does the Revolution have to pay you to work for us?’ I told him 500 Pesos, which was what I was making at that time. He said, ‘Half. The Revolution is young and we need the money,’ and I agreed.
At this point in the conversation, Norma, Raul’s wife enters with bowls of fruit from me and Raul Jr. who entered during his father’s story. The fruit includes fresh pineapple, mango and guanabana, a fruit I have never seen or tasted before. The irony of this is that I was told before arriving in Cuba that if you drive through the country you will see fruit growing in the fields, but it never makes it to the people. It’s exported to neighboring countries to support the revolution. When I tell this to the two Raul’s, the response is great laughter.
The older Raul is a big supporter of the revolution and is insulted and entertained by the lies of the imperialists. He continues to tell me that he became the personal photographer for Fidel and traveled with him on trips to both North and South America. He was also the Photo-documentarian of the revolution until he retired in 1992. I asked if he ever considered fighting with the rebels against Batista. He said that the entire country was against Batista, but everyone one contributed in his own way. Then I asked if he thinks that anyone can learn to be a photographer. “Anyone can develop negatives and make prints. You must be born with a photographic eye.”
While we speak, Raul has invited another one of Larry’s friends to visit. Pedro (a pseudonym) is also a photographer, a generation behind Raul and very complimentative of the people whose shadow he lives in. Unfortunately, Pedro has agreed prematurely to my video taping and he is less than candid about his choice of words when discussing the revolution.
In order to warm Raul to the idea of my taping, I told him the story of my socialist, Zionist upbringing and how my mother promised to take me to the Soviet Union as a gift upon graduating UCLA. The gift was delayed, I went to live with my wife, then girlfriend, in Tel-Aviv, and the Soviet Union collapsed without waiting for my visit. For me, I told Raul, this is the chance to see socialism in action which is something I’ve only seen on a small scale in kibbutz, Israeli cooperative farms.
Pedro, it seems, is making a commercial for the Revolution and not speaking from the heart, and I decide that my documentary work will need to be two faceted in order to accommodate the self-censorship of the locals. I turn off the camera and the conversation flows more freely.
I am a photographer. This is my job. Other people work in factories. I take pictures. We are all contributing to the Revolution. This is a process.
With my obvious American perspective, I ask if it is better to be a photographer. My thinking is materialistic, not revolutionary.
Some people love to work with machines. I love to take pictures. I think that working in a factory could be very satisfying.
“What do you consider to be the role of the artist in the revolution?”
In my work, I talk about myself. This is from my perspective. How I see the world.
“But why should some people get to express themselves creatively for work, while other’s work in factories?”
Not everyone is an artist. We train people from very young. Some become artists. They benefit society. In Cuba we have a lot of culture. All the people go to museums and galleries. They hear music and see operas. This is a big success of the Revolution.
I share my interest and unique perspective on the issue since my master’s degree is in Arts, Entertainment and Media Management and I teach in the same department I graduated from. As arts managers, our job is to bring the art to the people, and I can’t over emphasis how difficult it is to engage people in the so-called ‘high arts,” dance, classical music, art exhibitions.
Everything comes at the expense of something else. Your life in America comes at the expense of people all over the world. Americans pollute the environment as if they are the only country on the planet. The problem is that you have too much. You don’t appreciate anything. In the fifties, families had one car, now most drivers have a car and this creates traffic. You waste a lot of time on the street.
I was once walking in New York with friends and I asked why we are walking so fast. We weren’t going anywhere and had no schedule. They said this is our way. We do everything fast. Time is money. When time is money, you miss the beautiful things in life; the smells, the beauty, the sounds. Most of the things you have are things you were told you need or solutions to problems you were told you have. You dress the way you are told, your image of how your body should be comes from the media.
I’m reminded of the Lenny Bruce comedy routine where he knocks communism. ‘I don’t want to live in a country where there is only one choice of soap.’ He says full of satire. In America, we celebrate the freedom of choice when the only reason choices are offered to us is to make money. I proceeded to let Pedro direct the conversation.
Do you think you are safer after 9-11? You entered Afghanistan but didn’t catch Bin Laden. You conquered Iraq and captured Hussein, but you can not force people to accept democracy. You’re not safer today because you made enemies all over the world. You have no respect for the United Nations. Why do you think you can decide how other people will live?
At this point I have to stop him and play devils advocate. “Don’t you think it is important for someone to step up and stop injustice? Look at Kosovo? What about Rwanda?” Pedro’s answer is insufficient. “This is different,” he says. I push the issue, “We change presidents every four or eight years. You have the same president for the entire life of the Revolution. When is it OK to intervene?”
It’s OK to intervene, but the world should decide. The United Nations represents every country. Why should the United States decide by itself?
This doesn’t work for me even though I don’t say anything. I agree to the principle of the United Nations, but in 1975 they made a terrible mistake with the decision that every peoples right to a country is fine until the people happen to be Jewish. The Zionism is racism resolution, which has since been retracted, is a terrible case of inconsistency, let alone outright anti-Semitism. I don’t take this path because I don’t want to skew my data by giving up too much of my personal opinions.
Unfortunately, a tourist shows up at the Corrales home to buy some of Raul’s prints. Raul Jr. offers to take us to his house and we all board an ancient Fiat and drive the 2 block journey. I am traveling with 2 bags; one my media pack, (cameras, tapes, film and tripod) the other, a huge suitcase filled with medicine which I must bring to the main synagogue this evening before the Shabbat services.
Raul Jr. lives in a large villa on a small bay. His house is two stories tall and includes a small swimming pool. All windows are facing the sea. Upon entry, Pedro and I are given cigars, my first in Cuba. We light up and get the tour of the house. Raul Jr. is the father of girls, Claudia is a 19 year old student, Arlene is 28 and his eldest is a son currently on vacation in Oregon. The Corrales family has made it their work to bring Cuban art to the world. This supports the goals of the Revolution and allows them to travel abroad.
Raul and his spouse, Myra, have not married despite the family they have built together. This is just a technicality. Raul says he doesn’t need a piece of paper to tell him that he is committed to ‘this woman’ or that he has a responsibility for his three kids. Clearly, this is the case because the Corrales’ are as close as any family I have seen.
The other benefit of not being married is that Myra has her own apartment down the street, where Arlene lives and has her painting studio. In Cuba, every adult is provided with a home, couples get one apartment to share. Apparently, it has become customary for married couples to divorce in order to acquire the second space.
Arlene takes me up the path to her studio which is housed in an old mansion which is now an apartment building for several families. When I was preparing for the trip, somebody told me that after medicine, the thing Cubans need most is plaster and paint. This building is a clear example of this, but the concept of needing plaster and paint is really much deeper than it appears.
In Cuba, the priorities are significantly different from America. While we are very concerned about appearances, Cubans direct their resources towards other things. This country has almost no illiteracy and numerous schools have been built since the Revolution. Health care is universal, and medicine wouldn’t be a problem if the U.S. would lift the embargo and allow medicine to be sold here. Right now, the U.S. is the main supplier of medicine to the world and they strictly forbid overselling to countries that will subsequently gray market the medicine to Cuba.
In Chicago, we spent fortunes on tourism gimmicks that are meant to increase our quality of life and bring tourism dollars to our city. Cows on Parade, the campaign a few years ago to decorate the city, was really a case of trickle down economics. We subsidized the tourism industry by paying for the cows which were decorated by local artists, and then displayed and promoted as a ‘must see’ tourist attraction. This highly successful campaign was copied all over the world, as I remember the Lions in Jerusalem last year. It brought a lot of money to the city, thus jobs and profits for the industry, but it was paid for with tax dollars.
In Cuba, art is highly subsidized, and it is a substantial attraction for the tourism industry. The difference is that the jobs that are created contribute to the social and cultural well-being of the country and the industry that benefits is the peoples. This is the state investing it itself and reaping a fair benefit which serves everybody equally.
Back to Arlene, her art is reminiscent of the Italian Futurist or the Surrealists. Arlene says she has been compared to Dali. She paints in oils and acrylics and has two styles of painting; painting for art and painting for tourism. “Touristas,” she says in Spanish, “want bright colors. This is why I have the acrylics. For myself, I paint in oil. It is alive.”
On our way back to Raul Jr.s, we stop by a studio where artists sit outside and paint from photographs. I can see my father cringe as he only paints from life and often complains about the lack of natural light in Chicago. The paintings are not to my taste, but the idea of artists painting as their contribution to society is highly attractive to me. We have this on such a small scale in the States with the grants given by the National Endownment for the Arts, but it is strictly token as the entire NEA budget is nearly $100 million dollars reflecting the per taxpayer investment in art at less than $1.00 compared with Germany, Italy and France which all exceed $10 per person.
Back at Raul’s, we eat fresh Marlin which he jokingly calls “Cuban Marlin, not Florida Marlin.” As a Cub fan, my contempt for anything to do with Florida Marlins is extremely high after the Bartman fiasco and the Cubs getting within 5 outs of the World Series. Raul is always joking and tells me that this is the Cuban way. He is both very proud of his Cuban identity and frustrated by the system. By Cuban law, I probably shouldn’t be eating at his home because the government would suspect that this is black market commerce and that he is serving me for money. It must be hard for Cubans, who are such hospitable people, to be restricted from sharing the hospitality with the very people who come to visit them.
After lunch, we have an obligatory coffee and I show the computer games I produce to the family. “We need this in Cuban schools,” Raul explains, but I respond with my professional opinion that the absence of computer games in schools is probably a good thing. In America, from all my observations and reading, we don’t teach computers as a skill for education, we use computers as a substitute for educators. I am not a Luddite by any means. If anything, I’m a technophile, but if there is one thing I am absolutely sure about it is the fact that personal time with a qualified educator and interaction with classmates is much more valuable than sitting 18 centimeters from a monitor and doing something that doesn’t remove people from their physical learning community.
Next, I show the Corrales pictures from my personal, digital albums; Chicago, Israel, my family. Their interest is so sincere, and we spend a lot of time discussing my children’s names, especially Itamar because it comes from the Bible. Arlene tells me that her religion is from Africa, Santa Ria. She explains that she chose Santa Ria when conventional medicine was ineffective at helping with medical problems she was experiencing. Santa Ria is often associated with voodoo and witchcraft. It is a secretive religion and my only understanding is that it came with the slave trade and accommodates the notions of sainthood brought here by the Conquistadores.
The conversation about religion reminds me that I need to get to Havana for Friday night services at Bet Shalom. Arlene, Raul and I travel in an even smaller Fiat this time. The synagogue is in the Verdado neighborhood. We arrive and are instantly introduced to the president of community affairs. She is busy with the expected arrival of a New York City mission but takes time away from the group to receive me and the suitcase full of medicine.
As I frequently like to do in my video work, I hand the camera over to Arlene and she documents the handover. Apparently, my medicine is better than the over the counter stuff most missions bring. We are invited to stay for dinner after the services, but the Cuba Marlin is not fully digested and we gratefully decline.
Services are pretty traditional, except for the fact that there is a bnei mitzvah and the community is celebrating its continuity. Just before the service commences, Arlene is asked to shut off the video camera which makes me wonder whether this is a security issue or a violation of the Shabbat. As soon as the service ends, we leave and head to Jose Figuerro’s apartment, which is nearby. Jose greets us warmly and we leave him with another small gift.
Raul graciously takes me on a driving tour of Havana and we try to see the Havana Music Club, but I’m wearing shorts and am not permitted to enter. Instead we drive around Havana Viejas, Old Havana. There are few street lights but lots of pedestrians. Friday night is a big party night in Havana as is evidenced by the masses.
When we arrive in Cojimar, Mrya has dinner waiting for us; octopus stew and rice. While not kosher, my sin is cancelled out by the synagogue visit. Dinner is followed by the requisite cigar and coffee which we enjoy on the porch while watching the fishermen leave for the night’s run. When I ask about arranging for me to go fishing, I learn that only fishermen are licensed to fish and they aren’t allowed to take me. I’ll need to go see the fishermen in a tourist center. With this information, I drop my excitement about fishing in Cuba. I don’t like to be with tourists when traveling.
Once again, I spend the night on a mattress on Myra’s floor. Arlene and Yipsi share a bed next to me as we all share the breeze of a noisy but helpful fan.