Havana's ties to terrorist hotbeds and tendency to open your mail are
oddly comforting these days, the Tribune's Laurie Goering observes.
Laurie Goering. Published November 7, 2001 in the
Chicago Tribune.
HAVANA -- When I returned to Cuba the other day for the first time since the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, my landlord rushed to give me a hug.
"Thank goodness you're back home where it's safe!" she said.
I had to smile at how the world has changed. Not too long ago, it was my
friends and family living in the United States telling me to be careful out
there. Now I'm the one asking them to watch out.
What constitutes a safe place in the world is changing fast.
For five years I lived in Rio de Janeiro, where street kids fell to the guns
of off-duty cops and petty crime was widespread. But those of us rich enough to
live outside the slums felt safe. Brazil had no enemies in the world.
We were beyond the reach of Cold War rhetoric, nuclear weapons, Arab
terrorists. In Rio's warm sunshine, all that seemed a world away.
No more. Last month a letter reported to have been tainted with anthrax
arrived in the Rio office of The New York Times, into the hands of a friend who
works there. She immediately started a course of antibiotics, and later a lab
analysis determined that the substance on the letter wasn't anthrax after all.
Still, that once-safe corner of the world doesn't seem so safe anymore.
Somebody also blew up a McDonald's in Rio, at night when no one was around
to be hurt. A year ago we would have laughed at what surely was a symbolic blow
against the emblem of creeping American culture. Now everything has taken on
darker overtones.
Even here in Cuba people are looking over their shoulders. When a trio of
visiting Arabs in white robes and turbans strolled down Old Havana's main
shopping street one day recently, the crowd parted before them, staring and
pointing and murmuring.
And when an electrical transformer exploded outside the home of the new
press officer of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a crowd of journalists
gathered there for a cocktail momentarily froze, silent and worried.
"It's OK, it's OK," somebody said finally. "We're in Havana!"
In some ways Cuba may be one of the safest places to weather the current
storms of war, even if the weather itself hasn't been too kind with the recent
hurricane.
While Cuba was listed once again this year as a state that sponsors
terrorism, it lies well down the U.S. list of current terrorist concerns. Nobody
argues that Cuba has anything to do with the current crisis, and a group of U.S.
analysts last month wrote an open letter suggesting that Cuba should be removed
from the terror list.
On the other hand, Cuba's 40 years of warm relations with the likes of Libya
and Syria mean the terrorists of that region aren't very interested in creating
trouble in Havana. No one is seeding anthrax here, although everyone keeps an
eye out. A computer technician tells me that a keyboard covered with innocuous
white dust was hustled to a lab in Havana for tests the other day, just to be
safe.
A few Cuban quirks may make Havana a particularly safe place.
Foreign journalists sometimes complained that their mail was opened they
received it; now no one complains. In fact, with the worldwide tourism slowdown
since the September attacks, I've been thinking that Cuba needs a new marketing
slogan, highlighting its at least temporarily secure spot in a less-secure
world.
The island's airplanes for years have had beefy security guards and locking
and barred cabin doors, the better to deter hijackers bound for Miami. Maybe the
next round of tourism posters needs to show exactly that.
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0111070337nov07.story
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