A rainbow was the last thing I expected to find in Cuba. This was, after all, our hemisphere’s epicenter of evil back in the 1960s. I had to practice hiding my rotund body under a grade school desk because Cuba had Soviet missiles pointed at us. After suffering such an indignity, you’d think I’d prefer sailing to Dante’s Inferno rather than to Castro’s Cuba. Alas, Norwegian Cruise Lines has no Inferno itineraries. So, off to Havana we went.
(All photos by Melissa Nelson)
And there it was, this strikingly brilliant rainbow, glowing like a celestial chandelier above the Havana Harbor. There was, to be sure, no pot of gold in sight, only remnants of a broken and crumbling infrastructure in a country where time, in many ways, has stood still since 1959. Yet, this stunningly beautiful rainbow, casting its glow on a people who persevered through one existential threat after another, is a perfect metaphor for Cuba. This country shouldn’t be judged by its storm clouds alone. You have to look for the rainbow, as well.
If you want a vacation destination totally void of nuance, contradictions and complexities, a place filled with perpetual smiles, sunshine and laughter, get thee to a Disney property pronto. The Havana port of call is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve been frustrated by knowing Cuba only through the endless dialectic of the left and right, and have longed to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it, up close and personal, go there now, before our president completely closes the door on that opportunity.
Cuba is an island of warts and wonders, an ideological Rorschach test, designed to slot you on a scale from Che Guevara to Oliver North. Fidel Castro is dead and his brother, Raul, just retired, but the legacy of their 1959 Revolution is very much alive and on the minds of the tour guides ushering Americans through the streets of a country once considered our mortal enemy. From the windows of our tour bus, we see collapsed roofs and walls splitting apart. Window glass is missing and paint has long vanished. As we take all that in, like we were inspecting the damage of a Category 5 hurricane, our guide quickly notes the complete absence of homelessness, “thanks,” she says, “to the Revolution.”
Yes, the tour guide works for the government, the commies who inherited the Revolution. So does most everyone else in Cuba. But her spiel was far from empty spin. Based on independent fact-checking, there was far more accuracy in her three-hour presentation than in, say, a random Trump tweet. She correctly boasted that every Cuban is guaranteed quality health care at no charge, along with a free education, up to and including graduate school. She accurately noted that the Revolution eliminated illiteracy and gave everyone a place to live.
And then came a question from the back of the bus: “What’s the average income here?” The poor woman sighed, knowing that her pitch for a very beloved Cuba was about to sink into the international weeds of cultural dissonance. This, after all, was a bus tour, not a microeconomics lecture hall. Her quick answer: about $50 U.S. a month. That might be slightly exaggerated. Most sources peg it at $25 to $30. She quickly added that those amounts have very different meanings, depending on whether you live in Cuba or the U.S. That’s a tough message to get through to American vacationers who had just been charged more than a month of Cuban wages for bottled water on their cruise ship.
But she was right. Money means drastically different things in these two countries. The goal of Cuba’s 1959 Revolution was to dismantle private wealth in order to create a life where people’s basic needs were taken care of by the government. To this day, Cubans stand in lines daily to receive a loaf of bread and other rations. Their housing is paid for, as is their medical care and education. That means a medical doctor, a teacher and a store clerk all make about the same amount of money, and all get the same services from the government. Job selection is based on interest, skill and satisfaction, not economic opportunity.
It’s not easy for us Americans to wrap our heads around a system that devalues money. We are so accustomed to using our adjusted gross income as we did our GPA in college, as a measure of our worth and value. The American Dream is rooted in the belief of working hard in order to move up the economic ladder. That makes it tough for us to understand a place like Cuba where people are supposedly content in their subsistence, without ever having the chance to improve their lot.
The truth is that both these countries, despite their ideological animus, are more alike than they are unalike. Yes, one is rooted in capitalism and the other in Marxism. But both systems have produced amazing flashes of a quality life. And both have experienced dismal failures, a result of opposing operating systems running amuck. Cuba remains economically cut off from the world, struggling to survive. Yet, it manages to educate, feed and house its people, and provide them with top-notch medical care. On the other hand, dissidents are jailed without due process and there is no freedom of speech or other hallmarks of democracy.
Yet, here in the good old U.S. of A., we’re not exactly without our own warts. In fact, we just elected one as president. The great middle class has been rapidly shrinking. Some 20 percent of the nation’s wealth is owned by 1 percent of the population. The bottom half takes in only 13% of the income. Millennials are saddled with absurd amounts of college debt, even as their job market declines. Meanwhile, 32 million Americans can’t read or write and 28 million have no health insurance.
Unlike in those Soviet-inspired missile crisis days of yore, Cuba no longer poses a threat to us. Much of the economic embargo we imposed on our southern neighbors in the early 1960s, was lifted during the Obama Administration. Trump then reinstated the bulk of those sanctions. That was a severe blow to the Cuban people, with no benefit to U.S. interests. It’s time to return to that détente mediated by Pope Francis. Let’s lift those meanspirited sanctions. Somewhere over the rainbow, let there be solidarity between the people of Cuba and the United States.