Island that Dared (43 page)

24 October.
Some light relief (sort of) in today’s post. Miami’s public school system has banned a children’s book about travel to Cuba because so many parents complained that it shows pictures of schoolchildren smiling and therefore portrays an ‘idealised’ and ‘overly-favourable’ vision of the island. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Miami-Dade County School Board, claiming that the ban violates the First Amendment.
Vamos a Cuba
was first noticed by hard-liners after a child brought it home and her father, who describes himself as ‘a former political prisoner’, flew into a rage. Funny ol’ place, Miami. I never saw a group of Cuban schoolchildren who were
not
smiling.

15 November.
The amount spent on bribing journalists by the US
government
’s Cuba Transmissions Office proves the importance of a steady flow of misinformation. The
Miami Herald
’s publisher recently resigned when it was discovered (through the US Freedom of Information Act) that two of the paper’s most virulently anti-Castro journalists, Pablo Alfonso and Wilfredo Cancio, had been paid, since 2001, US$175,000 and US$150,000 respectively, as ‘retainers’. The publisher, Jesus Diaz Jr, talked of ‘violating the sacred confidence between journalists and the public’. He added that the nine journalists who accepted payments would not be disciplined because ‘our policies prohibiting such
behaviour may have been ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood over many years in the newsroom’. The journalists concerned also worked for Radio Marti and TV Marti, described by many British reporters as ‘the Cubans’ source of objective news from outside’.

17 April 2007.
In yesterday’s
Guardian
Duncan Campbell reported: Barclays Bank has told the London branches of two Cuban organisations (Havana International Bank and Cubancan) to take their accounts elsewhere in what is seen as the latest example of pressure exerted by the US on British companies to enforce its embargo of the island.

When challenged by the
Guardian
Barclays replied:

We operate in a number of jurisdictions around the world and that requires careful monitoring to ensure compliance with different
regulations
.

Last year the Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Suisse closed all accounts with Cuban connections, indirectly referring to Cuba as ‘one of the sensitive countries’. In July 2006 the US Treasury Department added the Netherlands Caribbean Bank (an ING joint venture with two Cuban state-owned enterprises) to their list of companies with which US companies and private citizens are forbidden to do business. Early this year, the Austrian bank that sounds like a pantomime character – BAWAG – closed more than a hundred Cuban accounts citing ‘US sanctions’. An infuriated Foreign Minister, Ursula Plassnik, then informed Parliament that she had started administrative proceedings against BAWAG for breaking EU rules against applying anti-Cuban sanctions on European soil. Showing the sort of independence unknown in a Britain eviscerated by the ‘special relationship’, she proclaimed, ‘US law is not applicable in Austria … We are not the 51st of the US states’. In reaction to Barclays’ compliance, Colin Burgon MP observed, ‘Those who prattle on about national sovereignty and losing rights to Brussels are strangely quiet on the fact that the US is passing legislation which dictates policy in the UK’.

12 May.
It’s interesting that despite all Washington’s efforts to isolate Havana, Cuba now has diplomatic relations with one hundred and eighty-one of the one hundred and ninety-two nations in the UN General Assembly where rejection of the US blockade is almost unanimous. Also, Cuba has been elected to ‘chair’ the 118-member
Nonaligned Movement, recently returned from the near-dead in response to US plans for ‘full-spectrum dominance’.

29 June.
My personal favourite, among the heroes of the Revolution, died on 18 June, aged seventy-seven. Vilma Espin was Raul’s ex-wife; they met in 1958 when she – a MIT student and daughter of a senior Bacardi executive – exchanged her palatial Santiago home for a
guerrilla
camp in the Sierra Maestra. They fought side by side in the mountains, married in Havana in January 1959 and in due course had four children. In their very different ways, each became a pillar of the Revolution – Vilma much the stronger. Most obits refer to her as ‘Cuba’s unofficial first lady’ which description, with its connotation of ‘a first gentleman’ in charge, would certainly displease her.

While still a bride, in November 1959, Vilma led a delegation to a congress of Latin American women in Chile and on their return Fidel asked her to found the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Under its aegis, more than nineteen thousand women who were household
servants
in 1959 received special schooling to equip them for alternative jobs. The FMC played a crucially important part in the setting up of Cuba’s novel rural education and public health systems.

As one of Cuba’s most powerful leaders, Vilma drew up the 1975 Family Code which gave women equal rights and gave many men a nasty shock. They were now obliged, by law, to do their fair share of childcare and housework. Such laws never take instant effect but if the legislators are not merely posing they do gradually remould attitudes. I noticed a surprising number of young and not-so-young husbands being more domesticated than one would expect given their
machismo
inheritance.

Writing in
The Nation
(28 June) a Havana journalist, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, remembers interviewing Vilma in the early ’90s when
prostitution
was seeping back on to the streets as tourism expanded. Said Vilma: ‘Don’t forget that
jineteras
are not mere prostitutes. They are
our
prostitutes and we must not demonise them, because we run the risk of attacking the victim instead of attacking the wrong.’

Rosa pays tribute to Vilma as – ‘ … the first person to talk to our people about gender equality and, specifically, about the rights of homosexuals and trans-sexuals to a full life, swimming against the tide of the sort of Victorian Marxism which in our country blended with a native plague of machismo that caused much suffering to quite a few.’

About eighty-five per cent of women belong to the FMC, making it
one of Cuba’s most influential institutions, and when the government declared a day of national mourning many thousands of both sexes streamed through the Karl Marx theatre in Havana to pay homage to Vilma.

9 July
. This is Operation Miracle’s third anniversary. The WHO estimates that curable blindness handicaps at least thirty-seven million throughout the Majority World. With this figure in mind, Fidel visited Havana’s Ramon Pando Ferrer Opthomological Institute, on 9 July 2004, and proposed ‘Operation Miracle’ to its director, Dr Marcelino Rio Torres. When
el comandante
could evade the bureaucracy, things moved fast in Cuba. Within a year fourteen thousand had benefited from free eye surgery and by now sight has been restored to almost seven hundred thousand from all over Latin America and the
Caribbean
. Thirty-eight opthomological clinics, staffed by more than six hundred Cubans, have been established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mali, and Panama. In all, throughout the Majority World, some forty-two thousand Cubans (doctors, nurses, teachers, agronomists, engineers) are at work.

Recently, Felipe Perez explained to a group of bemused Minority Worlders, ‘We don’t hand out what is surplus to us, what we do is share what we have.’ This prompts cynics to ask, ‘But what would all those well-qualified Cubans be doing at home? Given an over-educated
population
and limited job opportunities on the island, doesn’t Cuba need to have them occupied abroad? Isn’t all this internationalist
humanitarianism
a safety valve?’

Those cynics have a point – but they’re missing another point, to do with the Revolutionary ethos. Well-qualified Cubans don’t have to work for a pittance in remote regions. They could defect and earn
comparatively
big bucks, as of course a few do. But astonishingly few … And what about the forty-seven thousand (to date) young foreigners who have graduated for free from Cuban universities?

Last month Dr Carlos Dupuy Nunez, leader of the Henry Reeve Brigade, spent three weeks touring England. In response to the 2005 earthquake, he and two thousand four hundred volunteers spent seven months working in Azad Kashmir. Most aid agencies moved out after two months or less. Within six days of the quake, eighty-six doctors were on the scene; within weeks the Brigade had set up thirty-two fully equipped field hospitals.

One interviewer asked Carlos, ‘Why does such a small country send so many doctors abroad? And why to Pakistan, to help a country that’s a main US ally in the “war on terror”?’

Carlos replied, ‘It’s not for glory, it’s not for material wealth, but for solidarity. Our health system is based on internationalist principles. When I first applied to medical college I got a form asking “Do you feel able to give your services for free to any people in the world?” I said “Yes”. When you grow up in this kind of society, you feel like that.’

Those keen to profit from ill-health don’t know how to cope with Castroist humanitarianism. The various brigades’ existence and
effectiveness
can’t be denied and they are among the Revolution’s most
admirable
achievements. Some even argue (a dodgy argument!) that they cancel out the injustices inflicted on jailed ‘dissidents’ who have tried to change the anti-capitalist regime that makes such endeavours possible.

Writing in the
Tablet
(2 September 2006), Paraguay-based Margaret Hebblethwaite (the ex-nun widow of the ex-Jesuit Peter Hebblethwaite) reflected on the thirty-five-year dictatorship of the recently deceased Alfredo Stroessner. She continued:

‘And what about the other long-running dictator, Fidel Castro, who has also been in the news for reasons of health? It seems strange to someone in Paraguay to hear him described as a dictator, for his dictatorship is of a different class. In most Paraguayans’ perception, Cuba is the country that most holds out a helping hand. Our doctors in Santa Maria are Cubans, on two-year contracts, because no Paraguayan doctor wants to live in such an economic backwater. Our blind people and cataract sufferers are flown to Cuba for free eye operations. Our bright young school leavers are given scholarships to study medicine in Cuba. If any country has put its money where its mouth is, it is Castro’s Cuba … When Castro came to Paraguay for President Nicanor’s inauguration, he received the biggest round of applause as the various presidential cars unloaded their occupants (closely followed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela – the other icon of resistance to the US). Castro later addressed a crowd in a football stadium and spoke for three hours solid. Even that did not put people off. Those who were there said he was impressive.’

Here we see the tap-root of US anti-Castroism. Forget ‘Communism’. The threat to Capitalism Rampant comes from Castroism’s
proof
that a non-capitalist regime can significantly reduce Majority World suffering. To free-marketeers the accumulation of personal wealth – material
wealth – is the valid primary goal of every sensible person. Castroism preaches and practices concern for the poor, whose numbers increase in proportion to the free-marketeers’ global successes. It’s a new idea, this holding out of helping hands – an ethical/spiritual rather than a political revolution, a mind-set remote from Kremlin doctrines. And its potential, as a global influence, terrifies all rampant capitalism and drives the US species to frenzy.

A few weeks ago Fidel pointed out that Cuba could train seventy-five thousand doctors for the price of Britain’s new Tridents – seven point two billion dollars. It’s good to know he’s still doing his sums!

31 July.
The first anniversary of what one must now think of as Fidel’s retirement. And the Revolution goes peacefully on its way.

Companies and financial institutions accused of ‘associating’ with Cuba have now been listed on the US Securities and Exchange
Commission
’s website to enable investors to avoid business links with ‘state sponsors of terrorism’. (One doesn’t know whether to laugh or swear –
Cuba
as a sponsor of terrorism!) The Institute of International Bankers has protested that ‘This action has been taken without prior public notice or consultation with reporting companies and other interested persons’. European tycoons are complaining that nine out of ten banks won’t open accounts for companies operating in Cuba. Yet increasing trade with many countries – especially Venezuela, China and Spain – are vitiating the blockade; last year the Cuban economy recorded a ten per cent-growth rate. Now US pressures are affecting individuals more than the state; when a Cuban children’s theatre group was invited to a drama festival in Buenos Aires the Argentinean government refused them visas. When a Miami-based consortium bought Spain’s
Pullmantour
cruising company two hundred and twenty Havana workers were sacked. US-owned hotels around the world have sacked their Cuban musicians. Specialist US computer programs and equipment are being denied to blind Cubans – and so on and on …