February 22, 2006 News & Views » Guest Editorial

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Havana, Mi Amor 

Cuba, The Ultimate Guilt Trip

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Wretched excess is a constant theme in our media. I avoid Times sections like "Escapes" and "Styles," where it's chronicled without a smirk or a sneer, because I can't afford the grinding wear on my teeth. But Cuba, where serious citizens take as much pride in what they lack as we take in what we acquire, is the ultimate guilt trip for an American of even marginal sensitivity. It's not just that we spend as much for a mojito in the hotel bar as our bus driver earns in a week. It's knowing that it was our government, our cynical and myopic politicians and our century-plus of poisonous foreign policy -- Democratic and Republican -- that created and perpetuated most of the Cubans' misfortunes.

click to enlarge An aerial view of the Havana skyline.
  • An aerial view of the Havana skyline.

Cuba, up close, throws the most practiced denial back in your teeth. Right-wing rants against "America-bashing" lose all their traction where those skinny brown arms reach out for pesos. Everyone knows that Fidel Castro milks the impasse and relishes his role as a martyred underdog, an aging David still hurling stones at the rabid Goliath who refuses to fall. He might have compromised to help his people, even with dizzy old Red-haters like Jesse Helms dictating US policy in Latin America. But after aborted invasions and multiple assassination attempts by the CIA and the Miami Cubans, after 50 years of ostracism, crippling sanctions and mindless hostility from the mainland, it's hard to condemn a stubborn, disillusioned old warrior for digging in his heels.

His people regard him with a mixture of affection and exasperation, and most of them look forward to a post-Castro Cuba. But they remember what Americans have been educated to forget -- that Fidel's revolution was abundantly justified and that he started as the good guy, a radical idealist absurdly miscast as a tool of the Kremlin by the Cold Warriors in Washington. When Castro visited Washington in March 1959, fishing for friends and concessions, it was Vice President Richard Nixon, a notorious Red-baiter, who interviewed him and saw nothing but hammers and sickles. Tricky Dick sent him packing, even as Fidel protested "We are not Communists."

Since then our common history has been a tragedy of errors. Little wonder that travel to Havana is restricted, to most Americans forbidden. A haggard, hungry Cuba looming just beyond the bright lights of Miami is more than a constant reproach and chronic embarrassment to a superpower with humanitarian pretensions. It's a grim reminder of all our political failures and criminal interventions in Latin American. At a time of plausible arguments that Texas-bred politicians are devastating the Middle East to accommodate the petroleum industry -- their one certain allegiance -- it's not comforting to remember that the United States routinely ripped up Latin America, at a terrible human cost, in the service of sugar, rubber, tobacco, fruit and mining interests for whom foreign policy was custom-tailored. First came the suits and the greenbacks and then, when necessary, the gunboats and the Marines. Latin America was the testing ground for the corporate imperialism that has been this country's most depressing moral failure. Any blood-drenched dictator or death-squad comandante who declared for "free enterprise" was a US ally, any native leader who opposed the Northern robber barons and the local grandees was a Soviet agent marked, like Fidel Castro, for persecution and destruction.

To keep Wall Street smiling, we supported dictators and funded paramilitary fascists as they slaughtered peasants and tortured patriots who had never heard of Lenin or Marx. When I was a sophomore in college I took a course called "Latin American Literature in Translation" because some football players told me it was an easy "B." But it was the first course that ever pierced the heavy cloak of comfortable ignorance all sophomores wear. In every book we opened -- some pedestrian, some wonderful -- the villain, the bully, the devil incarnate was dear old Uncle Sam. Latin America is the monkey wrench in any sanguine interpretation of American history and foreign policy. It's our great guilty secret, and Cuba is the bony accusing finger that Washington wants as few Americans as possible to see.

Yet Cubans still believe in the good will of the American people. They even buy into American mythology. Ernest Hemingway is one of Cuba's most honored holy ghosts, a national icon with shrines and devotional sites to rival Che Guevara and the 19th-century poet-martyr Jose Marti. As tour guides, street hustlers and even jineteras (sex workers -- the Spanish word means a female jockey, as in "She who rides the tourists") tell it, they much prefer good-natured, free-tipping norteamericanos to stingy Russians and jaded Europeans.

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