The Fromson File

Cuban Memories I have a dream, a dream that some day a successful suit will be filed in a Federal court forcing the U.S. government to recognize that passports are travel not political documents. One legacy of the Cold War was the ability of the State and Justice Departments, with pressure from the White House and a compliant Congress, to prevent Americans from traveling wherever and whenever they chose. Our passports had Communist bloc countries blacked out in the front pages so that we could not travel to places like Bulgaria or Albania, North Korea or North Vietnam. Not that the governments there would welcome Americans. But why did we have to make it easy for them by obstructing travel first? The excuse was that it was a matter of national security, the possibility of war and of protecting Americans from danger in high risk areas. All of this struck those of us who were foreign correspondents in the businesss of war reporting to be an irritant and a total nuisance. Which brings us to Cuba. For years, in an effort to placate a loud but relatively small group of Cuban exiles resident in south Florida, and to a degree in New Jersey, the U.S. enforced a ban on travel to Cuba. For years, some but not many Americans ignored the ban by going to Canada from where they could join travel groups in Montreal and other cities and fly directly to Havana. Changes Occur But a change did occur in Washington under President Clinton. The restrictions were relaxed and Cuban Americans were allowed to travel to Cuba to visit aging relatives and bring them clothing, foodstuffs and money. Washington also quietly allowed a limited number of Americans to visit the island as part of a People to People program run by several travel agents. The participants were members of university alumni groups, museum curators and people interested in the arts, music, education and architecture. Upwards of 35,000 Americans have successfully managed to travel to Cuba in recent times. But the People to People program has been cancelled by President Bush, effective at the end of the year, for no apparent reason other than politics. President Bush obviously wants to help his younger brother, Jeb, in the coming election year. He also wants to solidify the Cuban American vote in south Florida and is probably convinced that by emphasizing a hardline once again, he will be guaranteeing support for his own re-election. Beating the System Until the late 90s, American journalists had a difficult time obtaining visas from the Cuban government and clearance from the Justice Department to undertake travel to Havana. The Cubans began to relax their policy and news organizations like the Associated Press, the Dallas Morning News and CNN now have full time correspondents based in the Cuban capital. But from the time Fidel Castro came to power and the next 35 years, the process of reporting from Cuba was at best minimal. For a decade, beginning in 1987, I circumvented the restrictions so that a group of working journalists under my direction could see Cuba for themselves and not make judgments based on how the anti-Castro lobby and each Administration had portrayed it. The journalists were participants in a fellowship program I created in the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They were from the U.S., Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and Argentina. Taking a page out of my reporter's notebook of experiences before joining the university, I did not ask for the U.S. government's permission or documents authorizing our travels to Cuba each year. The Latin Americans did not need any special authorization because their governments already recognized the Cuban government. When the journalists completed eight months toward a Master's Degree at USC, we devoted the remainder of the year to study and work in Mexico City where it would be easier to obtain travel permits to Cuba. Shortly after arrival in Mexico City each year, I contacted the Cuban Embassy and a travel agent specializing in tourism for Cuba. We simply bought tourist packages for ten days to two weeks. Year in and out, our journalists came from a wide spectrum of the American media: the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union, the Orange County Register, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, St. Petersburg Times and the Associated Press. From Latin America, there were reporters for La Jornada, Reforma, El Norte, El Universal in Mexico, El Tiempo in Bogota and other publications. We also had an occasional candidate from Europe. The Cubans knew precisely what we were doing and they went along with the game. They never stamped our passports with Cuban entry permits. That enabled us to return to the United States without indicating that we had been to Cuba. Nonetheless, we met freely with foreign diplomats, including the heads of the U.S. Interest Section who in any other country would have had the rank of ambassador. Uniformly, they were cordial and free with their analysis of conditions in Cuba. One of our younger journalists from the Netherlands actually was the first to report that Castro was imprisoning AIDS victims in Cuban hospitals while they were being treated. How was the story uncovered? A tip from a Dutch diplomat. A Different Image We also met with Cuban officials, high and low, including the foreign minister. In one meeting, a correspondent from the Chicago Tribune expressed a desire to interview him after the news conference. What was it about, she was asked. Well, she said, as an African American she was struck by the subtle racism of Cuba. Everywhere she turned she saw only fair-skinned Cubans or what are sometimes referred to as white Cubans who were models in magazines, advertising and publicity campaigns. Never was there any indication of the existence of Afro-Cubans, the dark-skinned people who make up a sizeable portion of the country. What she did not know was how blatant the racism in Cuba had been before the Batista regime was overthrown in 1959. Until then, the Afro Cubans could not attend the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, live in the same neighborhoods or even walk on the same side of the street as white Cubans. So I was told by a former member of the Communist Party Central Committee, an Afro-Cuban himself. I often wondered if that was the kind of democracy the exiles in south Florida wanted to restore in a post-Castro Cuba. The foreign minister did not seem bothered by the question and he replied, "You must understand that racial problems have been part of Cuban life for a long, long time. We only have had the revolution in place for 30 years and change comes slowly." That change was evident in the sense that Havana had a larger percentage of Afro Cubans than ever before. They were no longer confined to Cuba's sugar plantations. In many ways, Havana seemed to be a black city. From the first to the last visits our program sponsored, we were exposed to a Cuba that was startlingly different from what we had been led to believe it was. Obviously, the heavy hand of a dictatorship always was present. In the first years I went to Havana, cops would invariably rough up Cubans seen to be talking to journalists in our group. That stopped after a while, although human rights activists never were spared harassment or arrest. One outspoken woman showed us a document she had written, outlining the complaints of dozens of Cubans who were unafraid to speak out in favor of greater freedom of speech and advocacy. Shortly after we left her apartment, secret police agents forced their way in, searched for the document she had shown us, then forced her to tear it up and eat each strip of paper until she had swallowed the entire statement. However much Cuba was changing, the more it seemed to stay the same under the Castro regime. Irritated Mexican journalists would ask me why I was so tough on Castro. I replied I was no tougher on him than I was on Chile's Pinochet. Given my earlier experiences in totalitarian countries, I had what I thought was an understandable aversion to dictators of all stripes. Nonetheless, there was another side to life in Cuba. In Havana we ate in Cuban restaurants, browsed in various marketplaces, stood in endless lines waiting for buses that never came. We jogged on the Malecon, Havana's waterfront, and struck up dozens of conversations with young Cubans, who were shocked to learn we were Americans. We went to nightclubs, visited the homes of ordinary Cubans, stood in more endless lines in Havana's central park waiting to buy an ice cream, toured the ubiquitous list of factories, either manufacturing cigars or assembling bicycles. Whenever we casually discussed social conditions in the privacy of Cuban homes, our hosts still were so fearful of detection that when they referred to Castro, they never did so by mentioning his name. They would point at the inevitable photograph of him on the wall. We devoted Sundays at the seashore, not at a beach reserved for foreigners but one frequented by Cubans. We danced well into the night with Cuban journalists at a beachside house owned by one of them. We socialized with Cubans doctors who had served in Angola. We hung out with marvelous filmmakers, urban planners and Cubans who did not fit the conventional picture of life on the island that was portrayed in the United States. We sat in on a rehearsal by Cuba's great jazz pianist Chu Chu Valdez and his band, Irekere, who at the time could perform everywhere in the world except the United States. Before visiting Cubans at their homes, we made sure to raid the hard currency store and buy enough meat and other products that normally were unavailable to our hosts who were without the privilege of owning U.S. dollars to make purchases there and therefore unable to buy luxury goods like milk, cheese or chicken. I sat one evening with a family whose roots in the revolution had been deep and passionate. They once were ardent supporters of Castro who had become disillusioned. An elderly woman, whose late husband was a distinguished Cuban diplomat, had invited me to dinner one evening with her daughter and son-in-law. The daughter was a psychiatrist, forced to ride a bicycle 15 miles every day to and from work because the existing fuel shortage made it impossible for her to use her car. Her husband was a former journalist, so chagrined by the censorship and conformity of the regime, that he had turned to writing mystery novels. One year, we traveled the length of the island and discovered that Cubans, be they in Trinidad or Cienfuegos in the center of Cuba or Santiago on its southernmost tip, were uniformly hospitable. The further we got from Havana the more open people seemed to be. Going by bus most of the time on the only two lane highway that stretches from one end of Cuba to another, it was difficult to imagine a country that somehow was envisioned in Washington as any kind of a military threat to the United States. Regime Change Moreover, it was clear that the more Americans who traveled to Cuba, the more money that was spent, the more business was free to invest there and more importantly, the human contacts that would be forged inevitably would bring change to the island the exiles are convinced can never happen without them. They are dead wrong. They live in a world if illusion if they truly believe they will somehow be welcomed back to Cuba to pick up where they left off in 1960 or the years thereafter. If we truly want to imagine the end of Fidel Castro’s long grip on Cuba, the way to hasten it is by more, not less contact with Americans and the United States. Americans of all walks of life should have the right to decide for themselves whether or not they want to visit places like Cuba. Only then will meaningful policy-making be affected by public opinion. Until the restrictions on travel end, Cuban-American relations will remain frozen in place pretty much the way they have been since Castro came to power more than four decades ago.