Photos courtesy of Laroye Aña
Architecture is one of many
avenues into the heart of a people. I remember my first impression during my 1991
book tour of London’s streets. They told me the story of empire, of
exploitation of subject people under the colonialism allowing the massive
upward accumulation of wealth that would make those orderly streets possible.
On a recent vacation in Cuba,
mostly in La Habana, I glimpsed a city in which a great many of its streets are
a photographic negative of London, streets that resemble the bombed-out streets
of Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza, streets that bleed from a 61-year-old economic war
that is every bit as deadly and destructive of a country and its people as any
shooting war; and just as decay is a slower form of combustion, so economic war
is just as savage. It just takes a little longer.
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| Calle de la Salud, La Habana |
This statement by Bruno
Rodrigues Parrilla, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign affairs, speaking to the UN
General Assembly in 2011 sums it up:
“The direct economic damage
caused to the Cuban people as a result of the…blockade exceeds a figure of 975
billion dollars, estimated at the depreciated U.S. dollar value in comparison
with the gold standard.
“Article 2(b) and 2(c) of the
Convention of Genocide of 1948 define ‘serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group’ and ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ as acts
of genocide….
“The objective pursued by the
blockade [is to]…weaken the economic life of Cuba, denying money and supplies
to Cuba, to decrease…monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation,
and overthrow of government.”
Although many of my readers
have made more frequent visits to Cuba than my own single one, (under the
“family visit” provision) and will have had far more telling experiences
than I, I can’t help wondering why not
one of them has ever described this devastation, nor have they shared details
of its human toll: a population that manages to live on an average salary of
$27.00 a month. That includes its doctors, which currently have sent a brigade
to Italy to deal with the pandemic du jour. Cuba has medicines to treat
thousands of possible cases of COVID-19.
Cuba is a society blessed with a phenomenal degree of
connectivity, the fruit of a vital culture consisting of art, music, dancing,
and song as its main expressions. No one is homeless in Cuba, there is no
opioid crisis, there is not the hopeless despair one sees in a country hollowed
out from within. Because the forces attempting to hollow it out and defeat its
revolution, codified by the Toricelli Act (1992; and the Helms-Burton Act
(1996) come from without.
In contrast to the
dereliction of many of its buildings, in La Habana one sees an amazing
reconstructive effort underway, certainly in the prime tourist centers of Plaza
de la Cathedral, and Plaza Vieja especially, where one finds a curious array of
museums including an automobile museum, a Simon Bolivar museum, a firemen’s
museum, a museum dedicated to the history of rum, and the one I found most
spectacular, a science museum dedicated to the 19th century life and
discoveries of von Humboldt whose Renaissance mind occupied itself satisfying
its curiosities about meteorology, geography, and air chemistry among many
others. He collected over 70,000 botanical specimens from all over Latin
America. The amazingly rich variety of Cuba’s unique vegetation, which
triggered von Humboldt’s imagination with its beauty will never desert the
Cubans, no matter how damaging 61 years of the U.S. blockade has been to its economy.
The state of the art museum
occupies a neatly restored colonial palace, each exhibit designed to engage the
viewer actively, and there are occasional mock ups of the instruments von Humboldt
favored for his explorations. How was this museum financed despite the U.S. blockade?
By the German government. It displays all the fastidiousness one finds in any
Goethe Institute. La Habana’s main museum, Las Bellas Artes, rivals any museum
in the world for the richness of its modern art collection.
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| Saturn teaching his children to walk by Pedro Pablo Oliva |
Ever since 1982 when UNESCO
declared La Habana a world heritage site as having the most colonial buildings
left standing in all of the Americas, various creative ways have been
discovered by some of the 186 vs. 2 countries
which routinely oppose the U.S. blockade to circumvent its strictures. We see
some of those results in the revitalized Habana of the Plaza Vieja district,
and the efforts of the State itself capitalizing on tourist revenue. One of the
most noteworthy developments is the repurposing of Nuestra Señora de Belen,
whose convent and church have been reconfigured into senior housing with 18
apartments, a swimming pool, a physiotherapy center, and an ophthalmology clinic.
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| Nuestra Señora de Belen |
One unforeseen result of the
the U.S. blockade has turned Cuba into a living laboratory of the kind of
de-growth with which, if we are to realize a planetary future, we must engage
in worldwide:
•universal health care
(Americans might get ideas if that continues.)
•transportation by horse and
human pedaling in Habana which increases as one ventures into the agricultural
districts to the East.
•city center banned to
traffic.
•bookkeeping and inventorying
by hand, a skill which may come in handy when power fails.
•scarcity of fossil fuels.
•dearth of material goods,
which stimulates creative ingenuity, and eliminates “shopping” as a palliative
compensation for depression brought on
by government-originated depression.
•active programs of education
and general literacy.
•and despite deprivation, no
one is homeless in Cuba, no miles and miles of tent cities, there are no opioid
or suicide crises, and no traffic jams.
(For a full bibliography and
timeline up to 2011 of 117 U.S. initiatives to stifle Cuba, see Rodolfo
Davalos-Fernandez: Embargo or Blockade: the instrumentation of a crime against
Cuba, Havana, Editorial Capitán San Luis, 2018.)
Demand Congress take immediate
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Stop Sentate from extending
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Or call your Senators
and urge them to vote NO at 202 930-8115
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COVID-19 at
Note: The Bay Area is now on full "shelter in place" order after earlier orders on Sunday saying that people over 65 should self quarantine.Travel is restricted except for essential needs - food.
I too would weep. Why is the U.S.--the country of my birth and residence -- engaged in such actions? The blockade of Cuba has provided unexpected blessings....and shows up markedly the fatal defects of "our" U.S. profit-consumer-oriented focus--in the end a pyramid scheme that will topple.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read your report on Cuba, I, too, would weep.