Tribune correspondent Laurie Goering follows a visitor who
finds reality a mismatch to dated Cold War rhetoric about...
Chicago Tribune. May 15, 2001
HAVANA -- Mark W. Stiles, a Texas Democrat, spent four days recently
exploring the streets of Havana and couldn't believe what he saw.
"It's 180 degrees different than what I expected," said the
businessman and hunting buddy of the more famous Texas "W."
"The streets are clean," he marveled. "People are real
friendly. There's no AK-47 on every corner. Nobody's living on the streets and
everybody's teeth are good. People are continually asking us questions."
The former state legislator says he came away charmed by the warmth of Cuban
people and surprised by some of the island's successes, especially in health and
education.
'Look at the people'
Not that everything's perfect in Cuba, of course. But "I think we need
to look past the rhetoric and Fidel [Castro] and look at the people," says
Stiles, a big man with a Texas-size drawl. "We need to take the emotion out
of this."
That's the anti-embargo message that Stiles hopes to get across to his old
Texas friend's White House aides--and it's one that a majority of Americans who
visit the island end up sharing.
Americans, whose views of communist societies these days may be drawn mainly
from movies, decades-old wars and personal experience with surly Eastern bloc
waitresses before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, never seem quite prepared for
Cuba.
The island, for all its pervasive poverty, does not reek of misery, like so
many Latin American countries. Streets are relatively clean. Passersby bumming
dollars often speak two languages.
Children are in school. Doctors make house calls. And families occasionally
go to the beach for the weekend, drink rum and eat ice cream.
No hard feelings
Most important, to the surprise of American visitors, Cubans show no hint of
bad feelings toward their neighbors to the north. The two governments may be at
odds, but the two peoples, for the most part, see no reason to get caught up in
it. Relations are warm.
"The people are clamoring and grabbing to embrace us," said a
surprised Stiles, who served eight terms in the Texas legislature.
That impressive warmth can, however, lead visiting Americans to take home an
incomplete view of Cuba.
Few American visitors, particularly officials, take the time to travel
widely outside Havana.
Few stay in homes of average Cubans, visit the places where electricity
doesn't work consistently, where baths are taken in a bucket, where the wait for
a bus to work can be hours long, where government permission is needed to buy a
car.
The other story
It's hard to remember sometimes, amid all the lovely music and warm smiles
and charming street-corner games of baseball, that Cuba is also a place where
asking for multiparty elections, criticizing government policies or carrying a "Down
With Fidel" sign can land you in jail.
The nearly four-decade-old U.S. embargo against the island has done nothing
to change that, though--and that's the message Stiles, like many U.S. visitors,
hopes to carry to the politicians in Washington.
"Obviously, 40 years of what we've been doing haven't worked," the
burly Texan said. And when "things don't work, that means we go in another
direction."
That will be difficult, largely because of the growing prominence of
pro-embargo Cuban-Americans in Bush's administration. Otto Reich, Bush's
designated assistant secretary of state for Latin America, is director of the
stridently pro-embargo Center for a Free Cuba and was a key lobbyist for passage
of the embargo-tightening Helms-Burton Act.
Debt to pay
Cuban-Americans in Miami also can legitimately claim to have played a
central role in putting the president in office, making it unlikely Bush will
move against their pro-embargo agenda.
To change that, Stiles thinks that Bush needs to send to Cuba his own
fact-finding team of friends and officials, people he trusts and people who "would
have another opinion apart from the Miami people."
Then, "if what President Bush wants to do is keep the embargo, so be
it," he said. "I'll be with him. But he ought to have some people come
down and look at this."
Just as important, Stiles said, he thinks it's time for Bush and Castro to
put aside decades of finger-pointing and start talking, for the good of people
on both sides of the Florida Straits.
"How do you get anywhere by crossing your arms?" he asked. "Somebody
needs to lock [Castro] in a room until he makes a deal." | 