The hack goes to Cuba

NOTE: I hadn't intended on posting this one so soon, but given the events in Cuba yesterday, I figured it was timely. Also, don't forget to enter the Dog Blog Competition! Entries accepted through tonight.


It's shocking, really, to think that the Duluth paper sent me to Cuba. I didn't know anything about Cuba. I'd never met a Cuban. I speak very, very, very limited Spanish--pretty much enough to order a beer and find my way to the bullfight--and not any Cuban Spanish at all.

But a group of Duluthians was headed to Cuba to explore a sister-city relationship with Pinar del Rio, and I made a pitch to go along. And my editor said yes.

The group was made up mostly of doctors; to make it legal, it was billed as a professional fact-finding trip, since tourism was outlawed and a sister city trip could be considered tourism. The United States had--and still has--a trade embargo against Cuba, though the Cubans referred to it as an illegal blockade.

There were about 10 in our group. We flew to Mexico, spent a day or two outside of Cancun, and then flew from Cancun to Havana. There is no mark in my passport that shows I've been to Cuba; they gave us paper visas to enter Cuba and took them back when we left.

There are so many stories I could tell you about that trip... about how beautiful Havana was, and how stopped-in-time it felt. The whole city looked like it hadn't been painted in about 50 years. There were gorgeous balconies and tall windows and ornate wrought-iron Spanish style architecture, and roosters that woke me up, crowing somewhere outside the window of my Hotel Inglaterra room early every morning.

In Havana, we walked along the Malecon and watched the lovers and the fishermen, and we toured elementary schools and met beautiful schoolchildren, in their neat red-and-white uniforms, the girls with pierced ears and huge dark eyes, the boys with red kerchiefs around their necks. One school we visited was in a crumbling mansion with cracked walls and broken tile floors, but the children sang and danced for us and looked clean and friendly and happy. One girl kept stealing glances at me and smiling, and hardly realizing I was doing it, I took out my earrings and handed them to her.

There were political billboards everywhere, many more than in Russia, and much more passionate. Instead of brawny workers smiling as they walked out of factories, these billboards showed feisty slogans and pictures of Che Guevera.

Venceremos! (We shall overcome.) Cuba si!

One billboard showed a Cuban man shaking his fist at a cartoonish Uncle Sam. The Spanish translated roughly to, "We are not afraid of you, you imperial bastards!"


At night, the streets were completely black; fuel was precious, and they did not turn on the street lamps. More than once I was almost run down by a bicyclist I could not see in the dark--just a last-second jingle of a bicycle bell, and then a quick rush of air as it zipped past.

One evening we went to La Bodeguita del Medio, one of the bars that Hemingway had loved, and had mojitos. The walls of all the tiny rooms were covered in autographs. We could not find Ernest's, if it is there.

And then we went off to Pinar del Rio, which I knew as the home of baseball player Tony Oliva. This was to be Duluth's new sister city.

I don't have the same kinds of stories about Cuba that I do about Russia; there was no fantastic surprising connection between our cities, as there was with Petrozavodsk and the American Midwestern Finns. Cuba was bawdier, and livelier, and more colorful. But it was also harder for me to understand; unlike in Russia, I did not meet very many people who spoke English, and nobody seemed particularly interested in the sister city friendship, or even in the United States. They were friendly, but they were not awed to see us as the Russians had been.

Because of an enormous shortage of gasoline, there were few cars on the road--and virtually no new ones. The cars we saw were the gorgeous finned 1950s cars that you've heard about, and all of them were in mint condition.

Most people got around by bicycle--often two and three to one bike--or by grimy buses that belched dark clouds of exhaust. Ox carts and mule carts were also fairly common, especially outside of Havana.

The buses were always jammed; a New York Times piece I had read before my trip described people as clinging "like spiders" to outside of buses. I loved that phrase, but I never saw that, exactly. But still, the buses were very full.


And sometimes people would just wait by the side of the road for someone to pick them up; it was considered good form to pick people up if you had room in your vehicle. So pickup trucks and Army trucks were often jammed with standing-room-only passengers.

Because this was a medical exchange, we toured neighborhood clinics and learned about their system. The infant mortality rate in Cuba was lower than in the United States, and the doctors in our group were curious to know why.

The reason was fairly simple: Many, many neighborhood clinics, and free medical care.

The neighborhoods in Cuba were set out in a grid; and in the center of each neighborhood was a clinic.

When you moved to a neighborhood, that clinic became your clinic, and that doctor became your doctor. If you moved away, the clinic handed you your medical records in a cardboard box and you brought them to your new clinic in your new neighborhood.

Our trip took place in 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the USSR to send it supplies and buy its sugar, Cuba was starting to hurt. Basics such as medicine and even soap were in short supply; many of the clinics maintained back gardens, where they raised medicinal herbs.

Still, every clinic was scrupulously clean. The doctors were friendly and seemed to be forthcoming. Everyone lamented the "illegal American blockade." But I suspect it was really the collapse of the Soviet Union that was making their life so difficult.

One day we took a side trip to a fishing village. The sky was inky black; a storm was rolling in. I watched as two men in rubber boots hurried up the dirt road, trying to beat the rain. They held a heavy piece of cardboard between them; on it was a very large fish.

Even out in the countryside, people had small neat concrete block homes with electricity and running water. Most people had gardens, and chickens. There were no luxuries, but it seemed that everyone had the basic necessities of life--shelter, clean water, medical care.

One of the men in our group spoke Spanish, and one day he and I did an informal poll; we stopped everyone we saw and asked them what they had had for dinner the night before.

Chicken and rice. Chicken and rice. Chicken and rice.


A note on the photos: The top photo is photographer Joey M. and me, with two young men from Havana. I can't remember who they were or how we met them, but I think they just wanted to have their picture taken with two Americans.

The next two pictures are from Havana--a building I could see from my hotel, and the Hemingway bar.

And the next two are from Pinar del Rio, a smaller town, with shorter, more modest buildings than Havana. But just as beautiful, and just as much in need of paint.

The schoolgirl on the right is the one I gave my earrings to. And the last picture is a typical propaganda poster; this one was near Pinar del Rio.

COMING NEXT WEEK: More stories of the Hack.