Cuban rock climbers irk
Castro regime
Naples
Daily News, December
7, 2006.
Seventy feet up a sheer limestone cliff
known as La Cuchillita, or Little Blade,
17-year-old Roylandi Gonzalez held onto
a ledge by his fingertips. Then he glanced
down to check the harness around his waist,
grabbed hold of the rope that was tethered
above him and started shimmying downward.
Over the past several years, adventurous
Cuban youths like Gonzalez, schooled by
an influx of foreign rock climbers, have
turned this western town into an extreme-sport
mecca. Climbers test their mettle on dramatic
crags, barely touched by man, which soar
above a green valley designated as a United
Nations World Heritage Site.
But climbers who have conquered Vinales's
jagged peaks and imposing walls are now
bumping up against a more formidable obstacle:
the Communist political system. As Gonzalez
touched earth and removed his hard hat,
he cast a wary eye for park rangers and
police.
"They threaten us and chase us off
the hills," he said. "There's
something about rock climbing that really
seems to worry our government."
As Cubans begin contemplating life after
Fidel Castro, rock climbing has emerged
as an improbable political battleground
between the government and young Cubans
eager to embrace the latest foreign fashions.
In 2003, amid a broad crackdown on civil
liberties and fraternizing between tourists
and Cubans, the government announced that
rock climbers henceforth would be required
to obtain a special permit. But the government
has never granted the required permit to
the many climbers who have requested one.
Many Cubans and foreigners have continued
climbing.
Adrian Perez Martinez, a 20-year-old art
teacher with a joker tattooed on his shoulder,
says that police showed up at his house
recently to warn him against climbing, especially
with foreigners.
"Good Cubans don't do this,"
he says they told him. "Climbers use
drugs. And you shouldn't take foreigners
to militarily significant areas." Indeed,
some caves in the climbing area are designated
as civil-defense sites in the event of a
U.S. invasion.
Some of the official anxiety over climbing
seems to be based on Cuba's revolutionary
history. The revolution that brought Castro
to power in 1959 was launched from a clandestine
encampment in the Sierra Maestra Mountains
on the eastern end of the island. Castro
became intimately familiar with Cuba's highest
mountain, 6,500-foot Pico Turquino. "The
Revolution was the work of climbers and
cavers," Castro once said, according
to a history by Antonio Nunez Jimenez, a
prominent revolutionary leader and naturalist.
Now the Cuban government may be worried
that history will repeat itself. "The
system is paranoid about Cubans' private
activities, but especially when those activities
are occurring in hills away from sight and
when foreigners are involved," says
Vitalio Echazabal, one of the first Cubans
to take up rock climbing in the 1990s. "The
authorities would ask, 'Are they spies?
What are they plotting up there?'"
Echazabal got so fed up that he defected
to Spain during a climbing expedition in
2001, one of three Cuban climbers who have
escaped the island during international
sporting events. About a half-dozen other
Cuban climbers got off the island after
marrying foreigners they met on the hills.
The exodus of climbers has only served
to intensify official suspicion of the sport.
"Climbers are very independent people,
and the Cuban government has a real hard
time with anything it cannot control - even
a form of recreation," says Armando
Menocal, a 65-year-old Wyoming lawyer who
is the leading international proponent of
Cuban climbing. Menocal, who runs the Cubaclimbing.com
Web site, has been caught in the climbing
backlash himself.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Menocal, who
has family ties to Cuba, started training
Cuban climbers, mapping local routes and
importing donated equipment. But after having
made about 15 climbing trips to Cuba over
the past eight years, Menocal has been turned
back by immigration officers at the Havana
airport the last two times he tried to get
into the country, most recently earlier
this month. The authorities, he says, offered
no explanation.
The 100 or so climbers remaining in Cuba
would certainly welcome his return. Without
official funding, Cuban climbers rely on
equipment sent by Menocal or donated by
tourists. Jose Luis Fuentes, a 20-year-old
climber, says his shoes were given to him
by an Italian, his rope by a Canadian and
his harness by an American. "You speak
a common language with other climbers no
matter where they come from," he says.
He isn't sure it's a language Cuba's leaders
could understand. "Older people just
think we're a bunch of crazy kids,"
says Fuentes.
Climbing has attracted a special breed
of Cuban youth since Menocal and some American
friends used a slide show to recruit a core
group of about half a dozen Cuban climbers
in 1999. One Cuban went AWOL from his military
unit to go on an outing with Menocal, subsequently
earning two weeks in the brig.
Official eyes were watching. "The
Cubans were always being persecuted because
it was not looked upon favorably to socialize
with foreigners," says Craig Luebben,
a rock-climbing guide and journalist from
Colorado who has made several trips to Cuba.
As the pressure increased, the Cubans and
their American climbing partners would avoid
appearing together publicly, arranging separate
transportation to a rendezvous at the secluded
climbing site, Luebben says.
Climbers say official government climbing
policy has been inconsistent. A few years
ago, Hollywood, a cigarette brand partly
owned by the government, launched an ad
campaign featuring a Cuban climber. Yet
at around the same time, Menocal on trips
to Cuba was called before two different
government authorities and told climbing
wasn't permitted.
The inconsistencies continue today. On
a recent day at the park visitors center
near the Vinales climbing site, there were
large posters of climbers in action. Nevertheless,
the park ranger on duty insisted that climbing
without a permit wasn't allowed under the
2003 law. "It's not something one should
even consider," he said, though he
had no idea how one might go about getting
a permit.
The climbers are regrouping under the leadership
of Alexei Suarez, a medical worker who sometimes
reaches his second-story Havana apartment
by scaling the wall. He has been talking
with government officials, trying to better
climbing's image, and he says the Cuban
sports ministry has been very supportive.
"We are loyal Cubans who want to make
Cuba famous for climbing champions,"
Suarez says.
From The Wall Street Journal
©2006
Naples Daily News. All rights reserved.
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