THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507290005
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BETH BARBER
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
Before Havana and Washington agreed to close the rafters' route, did Daniel hop some barely seaworthy craft to Key West or a Coast Guard vessel to Guantanamo, whichever came first? Do I hope he did or not?
Daniel is maybe 20, a young Cuban who in the spring of 1993 worked in a tourist hotel in Old Havana, hotel and city flash-frozen in the late '50s. That's when time stopped in Cuba, when the world went on to revolutions of rising expectations, Cuba to a revolution of lowering expectations in the name of Castro's one unblemished achieve-ment: being one heckuva thorn in Uncle Sam's side.
For more than 30 years, that has been enough for Castro and had to be enough for Cubans.
Daniel practiced his English on tourists, and coached their halting Spanish, with a smile that lit the gloom of a hotel lobby with few working lights. Even they dimmed and died in the blackouts that frequently darkened the length of the Malecon. The Malecon is miles of pitted concrete boardwalk along the ocean where couples congregate, and court, and converse; and where Castro's security details have been seen to beat or abduct, occasionally shoot the citizenry.
Daniel didn't want to leave Cuba, not for good. But that 90 miles between the U.S. and Cuba - that he thinks should be a two-way strait. It will be, he was sure, someday.
I met Daniel when I was one of a score of journalists on a junket to Cuba organized by the National Conference of Editorial Writers. Cuba was even then, as writers in the July 23 Commentary section observed, a nation in idle, and hungry for everything a people can be hungry for: Jobs. Contacts. Hope. Food.
Why food? The answer then was simple: no market for yeast. Yeast is a byproduct of sugar cane, a prime Cuban export, explained a member of the State Committee on Economic Cooperation, which Cuba used to trade to East Germany for powdered milk. No more German ``Democratic'' Republic, no more milk.
``The Cuban government is not responsible for food shortages,'' he said, ``because it is not responsible for what happened in socialist Eastern Europe.
``At least,'' said this economic honcho, his face straight throughout this soliloquy, ``I don't feel guilty.''
And the children, the women, the men who asked foreigners on the street not just for Chiclets but for eggs and bread?
They are ``malcontents. . . . People who talk badly of their country to foreigners lack ethics. Sometimes I'm hungry, too. And so what? . . .
``We are the most independent country in the world, and we have paid for that.''
And paid, and paid, and paid. It is Cubans' recurring refrain: We have sacrificed all but our pride to preserve our independence of the United States.
The question is how long Cubans can live on pride. They cannot eat it. Their governors will not swallow it.
No one man should ever have such control over so many people as Fidel Castro has had over Cubans, certainly not a man who presents his people such limited and false choices. Castro's Cuba boasts of its free health care, but has no aspirin. It begged vitamins that spring for thousands of Cubans blinded by malnutrition. It boasts free education, but has few jobs. During the ``special period'' - the official Cuban euphemism for being broke - every Cuban has served at least a month a year in the fields, weeding acres with a hoe, plowing behind oxen. Where there were tractors, there were no spare parts or fuel. Cuba could not buy them, not because the U.S. embargoes them but because Cuba has had neither money nor goods to bar-ter.
Cuba boasts free elections, but has no opposition party, except in prison or exile. It boasts a free press, but has no opposition newspaper. It boasts a commitment to human rights, yet denies its people the basic three:
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Not to mention the freedom to leave.
Castro aside, poverty is not the inescapable price of independence. It is a crime, this making deprivation a virtue, this impoverishing Cuba's millions of Daniels whose ingenuity, enterprise, dignity, friendliness even Fidel's failed ideology has not quelled. Yet.
Do Cubans know Fidel's failures? Sure. Do they know what they need? Sure, starting with tourists' dollars and foreign investment - Canadian, Japanese - in corners of the paradise Cuba could be, like Varadero Beach.
What Cubans don't know is how to move to economic and political freedom without repudiating the Castroite past, negating years of sacrifice and, for officialdom, without risking the firing squad, Fidel's or his overthrowers'.
If Washington lifts the embargo next Tuesday, I asked 'most every Cuban I met, what happens in Havana on Wednesday?
Some officials shrugged: The embargo is their best excuse for failure. Others said, Bay of Pigs 2, meaning the expected onslaught of Cuban emigres from Miami; whether that's good or bad depends on whether they're wielding guns or greenbacks.
But Daniel just smiled.
I like to think he'll see the embargo lifted. Preferably from a balcony in Miami. MEMO: Ms. Barber is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star. by CNB