CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

As Cuba teeters on the brink of an escalating US assault, my thoughts drift back to a trip my wife and I took to Havana and Trinidad (the Cuban city) in 2017. Shelly and I fell madly in love with a place so strangely unique that it wrestles with your intuitive sense of possibility. Everything in Havana screams of paradox, of things that cannot possibly coexist anywhere else. If Trump and his goons destroy Cuba the loss will be immeasurable. At the risk of seeming hyperbolic – when the Cuban revolution dies, the planet will be a shell of itself. For Cuba may be the global leader in the three most precious resources on earth – music, imagination and resilience.

The following is what I wrote at the time.

The drive to Havana does not portend to usher one into a great and legendary city. Havana is surrounded by…..nothing….a field, a palm tree here and there, a broken down house that may or may not be inhabited and modest roads of a lane or two that hardly seem destined to soon converge into a city of two million – famous for music, culture, history and a political revolution whose iconic leaders (their images, at least) drove the inner moral destiny of every American dreamer who struggled to find hope in the late sixties and early seventies. One does not drive into Havana, it emerges with sudden, relaxed fury – like a surrealistic dream cloaked in the vagueness of motion. Where else can one find a world chauffeured about in brightly colored and repainted US cars from the 1950’s? These cars are not some collector’s fetish, but the backbone of a strange society, a fantasy composed by necessity and the imagination of a people willing to stand up to the world’s most ill-intentioned empire.

Consider this: the ancient US cars, build to embody the expansive material flamboyance of American ego, flaunting tons of steel and flaring tail fins of conquest, built to be driven and discarded, have become immortal tools for a great socialist revolution.

We had come, among other things, to drop off a suitcase of asthma inhalers at Havana’s only synagogue. The place of worship doubles as a pharmacy that distributes free medications to all members of the public. That is how Cuba works, every institution has an additional mission – to circumvent the murderous and eternal US embargo .

The Jewish Community of Havana looks just like…well…Havana – interracial families, Black folks, old folks with Yiddish accents. Cuba has fused all of the contrast and scope of humanity into a mosaic that might exist nowhere else. Our tour guide from the shul, a middle aged Black man who I will call Leonardo, confesses that his Russian wife gave him no choice regarding his conversion, but immediately waxes into a euphoric quest to describe his Judaic/Cuban identity – “only in Cuba, and nowhere else on earth, are Jews completely safe. We don’t even lock our doors at night,” he boasts. With great pride he tells us that both of his sons currently serve in the IDF in Israel. The contradiction stuns me – does Leonardo know that only Israel, among all the nations on earth, has failed to condemn the US embargo on Cuba?

We meet a woman, Rose, a leader at the Havana shul, who points out a number of framed photographs of Fidel Castro taken during a visit to the Havana Jewish community some 20 years ago. “You hear that Fidel hated religion, but that is a lie,” Rose tells us, “He showed us great respect and curiosity. He asked me how many Jews lived in Havana. The actual number is 1,200 but I said 1,500. It sounded so much more impressive.” People who hear Rose’s comment erupt in laughter.”

The streets of Havana offer a vast collection of surprises that fall outside of the range of US experience – first and foremost, the people and the infrastructure have been seemingly decoupled. The buildings have fallen into terminal disrepair with enormous chunks of coral lying in the streets (Cuba is a coral reef, and limestone and coral form the walls of ancient structures). The streets feature vehicle-swallowing potholes, and packs of rather friendly stray dogs wander here and there – we are told that people care for them as a sort of community project. Trash piles up on corners, but people look well dressed, healthy, full of confident energy, and far more fit than a comparable cross-section from the US.

Old people sit on folding chairs in groups. Children play stickball with broom handles and bottle caps. Teenagers blare music and fiddle with cell phones. You feel a sense of ease that does not belong on such broken streets. People in Cuba live remarkably long lives in the midst of poverty – comparable to life spans in affluent nations. We see roadside stands selling burgers and fries, but none of the industrial chains of arterial destruction that have colonized the dietary trade routes of American existence. Cuban poverty does not originate with........

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