Reflections from a week in Havana
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone says, “Cuba”?
For many Americans, it will be thoughts of political tension in the 60s, of Fidel Castro and a Communist regime or of the island’s mysterious nature, enhanced by a United States trade embargo. One of the major takeaways from my recent weeklong trip to Cuba is of a thought process that also works vice versa: many Cuba citizens will think about the embargo upon hearing the words “United States.”
The difference, however, is that while Americans can forget about the island approximately 225 miles south of Miami, Cubans do not have this luxury. The embargo is, according to our tour guide and lifelong Cuban resident William Burrowes, the country’s biggest problem – more than inefficient housing and an inadequate transportation system and even more than anything put forth by the Castro leadership since the political revolution of 1959.
Throughout the week, my University of Massachusetts classmates and I traveled around Havana and the surrounding countryside. We visited a policlinic, one of the levels of a healthcare system, completely free to Cuban citizens. Then, we stopped at an organopónico and witnessed a farming system that used oxen rather than tractors and hand-planted crops instead of machinery. The farm provides food for Havana, the capital where 20% of Cuba’s 11 million residents live.
At Ciudad Libertad, we learned about Cuba’s successful 1961 campaign to fight illiteracy. More than 100,000 volunteers – including our bus driver Nefal, who was 16 at the time – left Havana to teach peasants in the countryside how to read and write. By the year’s end, more than 96% of the population was literate, an increase of over 20%, according to museum curators.
Today, Cuba has a 99.8% literacy rate and Cuba’s “Yo, Si Puedo” (“Yes, I Can”) program has been introduced to more than 20 countries worldwide.
Havana is a beautiful city, especially the Old Havana district, where aged architecture sits captured in time as 1950 Fords and Chevys drive through the streets. There are courtyards, palm trees and other vegetation and the cobblestone paths were clean, many of them reserved for walkers.
There is an esplanade – the Malecón – that winds along the side of the ocean, inhabited by fishermen by day and young folk by night, with the occasional wave splashing over the edge.
I had imagined Fidel – and his brother Raúl, the current leader – to have a physical presence in the city but there were few banners with their names and no statues. According to Burrowes, it is illegal to honor a living Cuban in such a way. The people instead turn to Che Guevara, a guerilla war hero and major player in Castro’s 1959 takeover. Guevara died in 1967 but today his image is immortalized on huge banners that hang from windows and souvenir products for tourists to buy at roadside markets.
Despite the elegance of the city, it is impossible to ignore Cuba’s problems and even Burrowes made no attempts to sugarcoat them.
It is a nation with extremely low wages, where citizens receive food rations and where buildings are crumbling after decades of disrepair. Some Cubans have been granted permission to establish private businesses in their homes.
Many, though, travel the streets trying to earn convertible pesos (a special currency for non-residents which is 24 times the value of the normal peso) by convincing tourists to go to certain restaurants, to take their photos or to listen to their music.
Would all of the problems go away if the embargo was lifted? That’s impossible to say, but many Cubans like Burrowes seem to cling to that hope.
Chris Shores is a Spring 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.