Letters from Cuba
Letters from Cuba
Today marks our seventeenth day in Cuba as part of the Pastors for Peace construction brigade. Like most days in Cuba the weather is fair. It is just after breakfast and the yellow school bus has left with our skeleton crew to continue work on the school for children with special needs in Puerto Esperanza, a small fishing town in the province of Pinar Del Rio.
I have included photos of our experience and work here in Pinar Del Rio, as well as some of my writing in the form of journal entries written after work in my little dorm room surrounded by other hard working and well-thinking Americans of different backgrounds. Some of the entries are complete stories and others only beginnings or endings, but in the interest of time I hope that they can shed some light on what it is like for us as international workers in Cuba. Likewise I hope that other brigadistas, including those who have returned home, with continue to add their own perspectives to this blog in whatever form comes most naturally to them. I will continue as I can, from here.
I have taken part of the day off from work today and am sitting in a small office surrounded by a flock of chickens, who have somehow survived two of the worst hurricanes in Cuban history, and cluck around my feet happily as I am faced with the daunting task of transforming the last two and a half weeks into words.
We have not had reliable access to the internet, so material has to be sent back to the states with whatever brigadista happens to be heading home The majority of the brigadistas, on a two week schedule, have returned to their lives in the US, leaving a half dozen of us to continue work on the school alongside Cuban construction workers. Needless to say, work has been productive.
The school, mostly an empty shell of brick and cement walls, has gone through a major face lift. Classrooms were cleaned out and new flooring tiles laid, electrical lines have been run and light bulbs hung. Some walls have been removed and others built, door and window frames and new windows (made in the unique Cuban style of ship lapped wood) have been constructed, as well as new plumbing for showers and sewer transfer boxes made of brick and mortar.
We live at a rural Pentecostal church named “El Pesebre” (The Manger) outside of Puerto Esperanza. We are fed three square meals per day and sleep in dormitories behind the church. Each morning we wake to the sun rising over the mountains of the mogotes (mountain ridge) which lays to the south, across the agricultural fields and livestock and tobacco barns of Pinar del Rio.
For someone who has never before visited Cuba, I find the trip as refreshing and inspiring as these early morning sunrises. We are in a disaster zone, but by the way that the Cubans respond, as compared to the disasters I have witnessed in the United States, one might forget, and think that all is normal and well in Pinar Del Rio because life goes on and no aspect of regular life remains interrupted for very long. There is much to say about Cuba and little time, currently, to write it.
Our work has been as much about solidarity as it has been about material aid. The most important thing is that we are able to take what we learn about this amazing country and its people home with us -- to learn from their struggles some of the lessons they have learned over the years, and also begin to dismantle the lies about Cuba that have been fed to us by our own government.
As the future of the world becomes more uncertain, learning how to take care of each other and our communities in the face of adversity, loss of material resources, and natural disaster also becomes more important.
--------- October 20 ------------
It is a long red eye from Seattle to Houston, then Cancun, where I meet the other members of our ragtag group. They have flown in from all over the country and together there are about twenty of us.
There are no direct flights to Cuba from the US, and as part of the blockade the US government expressly prohibits US citizens from visiting Cuba. Even traveling via Mexico we are breaking the blockade, and as is the policy of Pastors for Peace we do so openly. Unjust laws need to be broken.
We are in Havana. I am standing in front of a customs window, and a beautiful woman behind the counter with a serious look on her face takes my passport. She shouts something at me that I don't understand then gives up and returns my passport. Then something amazing happens. She looks directly into my eyes and smiles so broadly and with such sincerity and fraternity that it takes my breath away. I am totally unprepared. "Bienvenido," she says. I take my passport and leave the room. This is a different world.
We load into an old school bus and other things happen that seem incongruent with my world. Small things but symbolic. Kids playing baseball beneath an overpass. Someone driving an oxcart down the road. A man with a garden hoe in the right-of-way, planting food. We are in a beautiful city, unloading our luggage at a social center named after Martin Luther King Jr. and eating dinner in a dining hall with political banners covering the walls. I recognize one of them from the G8 protests in Germany last year. Dinner is followed by speeches from local officials. We enjoy ourselves but our crew is eager to get to work and tomorrow we will drive several hours to Pinar Del Rio and the village of Puerto Esperanza, where our project awaits us.
------------ October 25 -----------
We are in a little dormitory connected to a Pentecostal church. The sun rises every morning between the time that we wake up, and when we sit down to breakfast. In that hour we stand outside the doors of the dormitory and rub our eyes, take cold showers, and watch our host warming up our breakfast over a fire behind the building. Through the fields and beyond the trees we can see the mountains of the mogotes. After breakfast we load into an old school bus that Pastors for Peace once donated to the Cuban Council of Churches many years ago.
We join a crew of Cubans and go to work hauling tiles and rock and leveling floors, while other members of the brigade run electrical wires, fit pipes, frame doors and windows, or lay brick, depending on their skills. Always we are working side by side with Cubans, and people from the town come to see us work or ride by on bicycles or little horse drawn buggies that are very common here. Our work has been productive. We have a shortage of tools but an excess of hands, and we compensate with laughter.
The school was originally built for children with special needs, from learning disabilities to autism and for the time being the children study down the street at a makeshift facility. Evacuation plans were so extensive and neighborhood cooperation so effective, that class was barely interrupted by the hurricanes. It was merely relocated to another area for a time.
Within two days the government had returned to Puerto Esperanza with potable water and electrical workers were restoring power to the area. Clinics were reopened and classes resumed within a couple of weeks. As nearly the entire province was relocated, residents in other areas offered up their homes to include more families as reconstruction was underway.
Later, in Viñales, the nearest town of respectable size, a man that I spoke to pointed across the street to a large two story colonial style building. "It is the cultural center for this town. As you can see the roof is damaged and has not been repaired yet. This is because the first and most important focus has been to repair homes. Only once everyone is back in their homes will we work on projects like this. The people’s own lives are the primary responsibility of reconstruction." According to the civic government of the Pinar Del Rio province, as of a few days ago, only one family remained displaced.
With over seventy children the school has nearly sixty faculty members. The student to teacher ratio is about 10 teachers per 13 students. The people that we talk to, including the headmaster who visits the work site every day, are very proud of the school. Every area of Cuba has a school like this with a focus on integrating special needs children into the regular education system by the end of primary school. Here there are, literally, no children left behind. One of the former students works with us, showing me this morning how to grout the tile that we laid in one of the classrooms.
The videographer who is with us returns one evening with footage of the children, shot at their temporary facility. They look healthy, intelligent and happy.
On the first day at work we met four teachers of the school in computers, mathematics and economics. For economy the children study how the school functions -- the budget, materials, and administrative functions. By the time they reach secondary school they will be integrated into the normal public schools with the rest of the children.
We work hard and are well fed -- every meal is based on rice and beans, but our hosts at the church, out of goodwill and necessity, use variations and additions, so that one does not become tired of it. The church itself is active and some days, during the evening services, music and songs fill the area.
Life of course is very simple. From what I gather we are the only group of this kind in Cuba. There are no other international brigades besides a group of German farmers and gardeners whom we met on the first day. Our position is unique, and it is clear that it means a lot symbolically to many Cubans.
One of our crew fell through the roof on the second day, slightly injuring him. The whole town soon knew the story. People stop us while we return home to make sure he is okay. When one of our electricians cuts his finger he is taken two blocks to the nearest clinic and returns in a few minutes with a fresh bandage.
People smile more than I am used to -- and touch each-other more. A hand on the shoulder, a hug or a handshake -- It doesn't matter why.
--------------- October 27 ------------
Our crew includes 3 electricians, one originally from Guyana, an expat who now lives in Havana, and an older man who has been on caravans to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chiapas over the last thirty years more times than he can count.
On the first day one of them produces a suitcase from his luggage full of switches, outlets and electrical boxes -- which because of the blockade are very hard to find in Cuba. They work with a local electrician named Papi running wires of different colors and by the end of the day have completed several rooms.
The light bulbs, compact fluorescents which are expensive in the US but plentiful here, are Cuban. They provide light in every home, because some years ago, when blackouts were more common than guava trees, a program was started to provide fluorescent lights for every home in the country. Distribution was coordinated by the schools. Children carried boxes of light bulbs up and down the streets of every city, knocking on doors and explaining the purpose of their mission. "If we all use these then we will save power, and will not have to live in the dark anymore." Since then power has become more reliable.
By now two of the electricians have returned home, and work is slowed because new channels for conduit have to be chiseled into the concrete and brick walls of the school. We trade ladders and chisels and those of us without other tasks take turns with whatever hammer, chisel, and ladder can be spared.
We also have four journeyman carpenters. Originally they are from Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, and Rhode Island. I am among the small group of us who are apprentice carpenters, or as they are called, "ayudaderos." We mostly bounce between jobs. We have a brick mason from New Jersey and a diesel mechanic from the Midwest, a videographer from the south who has been around the world and two painters -- from Jamaica and New York City. I wish you could be here to hear the conversations.
-------- October 28 ----------
Today was the anniversary of the disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, one of the heroes of the revolution whose airplane disappeared one night over the sea, returning to Havana shortly after the revolution. Children from all the schools in the town gathered at the harbor, clutching bouquets of flowers to be thrown into the sea as part of the local ceremony. They looked healthier than the children where I come from. Poorer, but healthier than the wealthiest children in the U.S.
I was moved by the ceremony, and threw a flower of my own that one of the children handed to me with a smile and a kiss on the cheek.
The work, though difficult, continues to go well. I spent much of the last two days hammering on the corner of a cement rafter for the addition of a new porch. It was a particularly hard spot and I was swinging from the scaffolding, above my head with a sledge hammer. We work with a very finite amount of materials. Even the wood and nails required to make concrete forms are in short supply. Nails are reused multiple times, removed from the wood and pounded strait again. Hammers are coveted, as are shovels and wheelbarrows. The only things we see an abundance of are bricks, roofing tiles, and cement mix. Cuban workers approach us from time to time, hoping we will give them a tool or two when we leave. "A hammer would be a great help in my house." We have to come up with a strategy for this. Tools must be given in a way that they can be used by everyone. Most of us plan on taking no tool home.
Having spent some time doing cleaning and reconstruction work in New Orleans I am struck by the differences here. As it turns out we are not in the kind of disaster zone that I expected. We are simply in a place that has been hit by a hurricane or two, and are witnessing a recovery which, all things being equal, we should consider normal and expect to see at home, were Gustav to come to one of our respective cities with its destructive 200 mph winds. New Orleans was a million times worse.
The difference is shocking. New Orleans was a nightmare. Cuba feels like a strange dream -- the dream of normality. It is hard to describe. Systematically everyone is cared for here, but they also struggle. Shoes are old and falling apart, but no one is homeless.
We went to a theater production at the special school last night and tears came to my eyes. We were dancing with the children who had the worst disabilities in the province, in a disaster zone, two months after two Katrinas, and nobody looked the slightest bit worried.
Disasters, I am learning, are generally man made. When we are unprepared or respond poorly they take their greatest toll It usually falls upon the poor. Disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, war, privatization, the aids epidemic, or the crash of the stock market all have this in common. Working in New Orleans after Katrina we saw continuing disaster all around us in the poverty, drugs, mental illness, high blood pressure and diabetes, incarceration, and the violence that follows oppression like a sad shadow.
Everything is different here. We do not walk through a collective nightmare. Certainly the belts, already tight, are being tightened again because Cuba has lost a third of its food crops, and the reconstruction projects are enormous, but the difference is in the way people take care of each other and pitch in. To say that Cuba lives under a totalitarian state is a lie. On almost every level the government is made of and run by civil society. Children begin to vote at age 16, and count the ballots for their local elections. To assume that Fidel was dictator imposed upon the nation is a fallacy because it ignores the strong mandate of the majority of the nation and the spirit of cooperation that defines the Cuban people. Not to mention that the heroes and the stories of the Cuban revolution are a part of daily life in this rural area, and their spirits are kept alive in the homes, schools and folk songs.
According to members of the brigade who have been here many times, it is common for some people to say that they don't agree with Fidel, but most of them will also admit that they couldn't have made it this far without him.
You must forget everything you ever learned about Cuba. Find a way to see it yourself because Cuba is -- so far as i can tell, and forget about perfection -- the best place that I have been, and it is strange here, to be working on the ground with people that for 50 years the United States government has declared to be our enemies. On the other hand it is no great wonder that our government does not want us here.
When one of our crew falls through the roof, slightly injuring himself, the whole town soon knows the story. People stop us while we return home to make sure he is okay. When one of our electricians cuts his finger he is taken two blocks to the nearest clinic and returns in a few minutes with a fresh bandage. People smile more than I am used to -- and touch each-other more. A hand on the shoulder, a hug or a handshake -- It doesn't matter why. I cannot explain it at all. I have stepped into another world.
That first night, at a small cafe in Havana, we stayed up late with some of the local organizers talking about hurricanes and social movements across Latin America. In our group from the US there are many community organizers. I didn't want to breach the subject of global warming because it must be hard to talk about, in a place as tied to the climate as this. But one of the Cubans was quick to bring it up, because like taking care of each other, it is normal to think about the future. But to the Cubans the hurricane fits into an even greater context. "And this is what I don't like about the Al Gore movie," says the man I am talking to, "because we still need a marxist analysis... Because the capitalism exploits the poor and the nature as one." I think about what he says. Cuba's "harmony of the poor" as someone put it, is not a government illusion. It is the basis for their society. It is in how they raise their children to play together and in the folksongs of the revolution that they sing. As usual Cuba seems to be on the front lines. No one is required to work here, but they are required to live communally. Those that do seem to have a quality of life greater than almost any I have seen at home in the United States. It is only by working together and raising strong children that they have survived intact, and will continue too whatever crisis may come. We can no longer let "market forces" decide our fate
--------- October 29th --------
Today 185 countries voted at the United Nations to end the blockade against Cuba. Three voted in favor. Two abstained. Every year Cubans gather in front of television sets to watch the UN General Assembly and the Cuban delegate's speech. Everyone watches as the votes pour in, massively in favor of ending the blockade. Every year the US and some shrinking coalition vote against it. Every year it continues. This is one of the reasons that materials are hard to find, and tools improvised. At the construction site we have to build our own ladders out of scrap wood. It is not uncommon to see people hammering scrap metal into auto parts. Behind the church there is a dirt road that services the farmland to the east of us which lays beneath the hills of the mogotes.
Throughout the day one can watch farmers in carts pushing oxen harnessed two at a time in old wooden yokes or riding bareback on horses down the road, to and from the farms.
After the fall of soviet communism Cuba entered what is now called the Special Period, when the entire country was suddenly without fuel -- until then the Soviet Union had bought cane from Cuba at a set price, and in return supplied nearly all the petroleum used in Cuba. Nearly overnight Cuba had to massively restructure their economy to compensate. Food once distributed from the fertile rural provinces into the cities was rotting in the fields because there was no way to transport it.
In response, families were encouraged to move to the countryside and thousands of homes built for them. Urban areas like Havana were transformed into crop producing urban gardens. Parking lots and rooftops became farms. At the same time livestock became important again for plowing, harvesting and transporting food. By necessity the entire nation was forced to move towards sustainable, local, organic agriculture.
In Pinar Del Rio the most common form of transportation that we see are small two person carts that can be pulled by a single horse. Horses are a part of daily life as are pigs, chickens, cows, oxen, and goats. When the horses are not working they are tethered by the side of the road, mowing weeds and grass by grazing. Work today was productive. Concrete forms were made for the addition of a new porch, more electrical lines chiseled out of the brick walls of the classrooms, and the sewage lines and transfer boxes finished and buried. Digging lines is easy because the ground is mostly soft clay, and nothing is buried very deep, because it never freezes here.
I personally have found a new focus: landscaping. It solves the problem of standing around waiting for the tools to finish one project or another. And if I cannot find a shovel or pick to level ground, I toss rocks, broken glass, and roofing tiles out of the yard, making big piles that can be picked up later. I like to stay busy and they seem to have given up trying to convince me to stop.
The Cuban workers take their role as our foremen seriously, whether they are showing how a job should be done, or like this just telling us to stop because we are wasting energy. My first aid kit so far has been very handy -- throughout the day I am treating all manner of scrapes, cuts, and ingrown hairs. I apply tea tree oil and band-aids and flush eyes. The polyclinic (free to everyone) is only two blocks away, but I get the impression that to interrupt work and go there is kind of embarrassing for something so minor. Additionally the first aid kit is a source of amusement for the locals, and they seem to enjoy sitting down with me (indeed proudly) for a small treatment. I try to explain to them how we don't have free healthcare in the united states (no dinero, no salud) so the pack is important to me and i take it everywhere. Their expression becomes serious and they shake their heads.
A few days ago I visited the Polyclinic with another volunteer. It was something to see. Cubans are respected around the world for their doctors -- they export more physicians to the third world than the World Health Organization does, and train international students (including from the US) for free in Havana.
The clinic for the municipality was very bare-bones, but well staffed. An old cement building with paint stripped from the walls and a single long bench to sit on in the waiting room. The wait was very short, and we were admitted immediately to a small office down a small corridor. The doctor was frank, and after providing his diagnosis stood up and shook our hands. He didn't even have latex exam gloves. But he had the same light in his eye that I see from most of the professional service workers that I have met here. It is a combination of a tired body and an active mind. He was not burned out, or alone.
A stubborn will to live on the basis of his ideals amidst routine lack resources and the constant demand of human needs. At least that is my impression -- It is hard to place because I have never seen that look in the United States.
*** Logan is a photographer and blogger from the Pacific Northwest. His writings can be found at www.thedispatch.info
