By Jordana Hart, Boston Globe Staff, 4/18/2000
HAVANA - The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center is a spartan place. Eight white fans whir softly in the meeting hall, and metal shutters are closed against the tropical heat enveloping Pogolotti, the capital's historic Afro-Cuban neighborhood.
There are no posters of Castro or Che, no obvious signs of revolutionary euphoria in the community center, only a simple, painted portrait of King, robed and serious-looking as he stares out across the hall.
That a community center bearing the name of the slain civil rights leader is the driving force behind a new brand of civic education here makes perfect sense, says Raul Suarez, the Baptist minister who runs the center.
On Sunday afternoon, Suarez stood before US Representative James McGovern and 48 presidents and scholars from universities across Massachusetts. They sat in a large circle, the largest delegation of US educators to visit Cuba in at least 40 years. They are here to consider establishing exchange
progams with Cuban scholars and students, their way, they said, to promote an end to the four decades of US economic sanctions against Cuba.
''I believed in 1979, and I believe now, that our policy doesn't make sense,'' said McGovern, the Worcester Democrat who organized the five-day trip with Representative J. Joseph Moakley, Democrat of South Boston, and the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit organization that promotes
human rights, democracy, and social justice in the region. ''It has sustained Castro for 40 years as a convenient excuse. Every time things get tough, the embargo is the excuse,'' he said in an interview.
Suarez's power in these parts is clear: He is not a Communist Party member but has twice been elected to parliament by a neighborhood district that loves him.
The center, he said, emphasizes the principles of personal responsibility and community organization and leadership, though he is careful to note that the work is done in the ''spirit of revolution.''
Naming the center after King in 1969, the year after the civil rights leader was slain, was an obvious decision, Suarez said. After all, King was known already in Cuba as a heroic black man who preached nonviolence and reconciliation.
''Everything for us right now is about reconciliation,'' said Suarez, a small forthright man who has been a minister for 41 years.
Unusual in Cuba, the King center is, by all accounts, free of ties to the Castro regime in that it sustains itself with thousands of dollars donated by Oxfam as well as humanitarian groups from Canada, Norway and the Netherlands. Some American relief workers here describe the center's ties with
the Castro regime as an ''uncomfortable friendship.''
The King center does the unusual work of seeking to get Cubans, accustomed to looking to government for basic needs like food, cheap housing and health care, to assume more personal responsibility. Suarez brings in academics and community leaders from the United States and abroad, even
sympathetic US leaders, to help train a small cadre of Cubans on how to organize meetings, use media such as videotape, and use methods of attracting regular folks to the meetings.
The hall where the Americans sat Sunday still resonates with the voices of US Representatives Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel, of Jesse Jackson and Castro himself, all of whom addressed Cubans who packed the hall to hear them. Mel King, the MIT professor and Boston community organizer, has
visited the center three times, most recently in November to run workshops.
McGovern and the others listened to Suarez's mixture of revolutionary fervor sliced with declarative support for social change. ''No country has such a perfect democracy that it should be exported everywhere,'' Suarez said. ''Every country has to look for its own process based on its own
reality. We have promoted this idea and brought it to our president. We want change, but it must come from within and from a spirit of revolution.''
Suarez also pushed for more powerful activism among US churches, many of which he said are already largely opposed to the embargo - and supportive of sending Elian Gonzalez home to Cuba with his father.
''The churches have been with us on these issues and created an opinion that the US government has had to listen to,'' Suarez said. ''The churches will begin to shake the power of members of your government.''
In a judicious way, Suarez seems to be trying that tactic here. In the center's neighborhood, for example, Suarez and others have trained local people to work with neighbors to build basic houses, a direct response to the critical housing shortage in Havana.
Many of the US delegates said the training appears to lay the groundwork for preparing Cubans as their country opens up. But some also noted that it is also important for Cubans to learn to fend for themselves as it becomes clearer they can depend less and less on their government to provide
food and other basics for them.
''Compared to Central America, we are not dealing with such poor people here, but they do need to be mobilized,'' said Miren Uriarte, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Uriarte, who is Cuban-American, returned to live here between 1994 and 1997 as part of an
exchange program with the University of Havana. She was among the first to train Suarez and help him develop the center.
Every year since 1992, about 200 Cubans have traveled from across the island for weeklong training sessions at the center. Uriarte said those who finish the training go back to their hometowns and become watchdogs of sorts, for example, making sure that bakeries and pharmacies are stocked with
goods.
Suarez likes the notion of this web of civic-minded Cubans teaching others. But he said that as foreigners become more involved, they must let the process continue the Cuban way.
''We are accompanying the Cuban people in a prophetic way,'' he told the Americans. ''Cuba is not the hell some make it, but it is not the Kingdom of God either. Cubans need to learn more, but with the respect from the US for our ways.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 4/18/2000.
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