Domingo Soto: Because Freedom Isn't Dumb

LETTER FROM COUNCILMAN NODINE
I got this email from my friend and city councilmember Steve Nodine

Missed the party but look forward to the Cuban Fiesta this week. Opposed to Castro but loving of the arts and culture exchange between our sister city!

My Response:

I went to Russia in 1979. A few of the things that I remember as striking were the very things that I was awed about when I went to Cuba. One of those is that for all of our supposed education and sophistication, you can't discount how much we all come to subsume our national viewpoint. We undergo institutionalization and come to believe, no matter how right or left, liberal, conservative, vegetarian, lesbian, or whatever you are - a general picture about ourselves and our relationships with other places. This comes to us served through our mostly vicarious experiences, like the news and entertainment media (lately one and the same). I found both places to be nothing like I imagined them and the people not to be in the state of mind that I supposed them to be.

If we have internalized nationalistic views, imagine the inhabitants of other places that have also been cut off by distance, lack of a "free press", privation, or education. Remember the wall? Who built the wall? Why? When I went to Russia I found that, first of all, the big bear we had all been propagandized to fear so much was on its last legs. I knew this by looking at the bleak existence that the people were living. At the goods, and their shoddyness and the fact that the system was ripping at its seams, primarily because everything was being diverted to silly military campaigns. I knew that from sharing my experiences with the Russians with whom we spoke. They considered themselves Russian's first and love their country but they were open to ideas and economic change.

Without meaning to, I probably caused more harm to the system when I spoke of having my own newspaper to a young communist who bragged about the CPUSA having a newspaper here. "Anyone can have a newspaper there," I told him, and he was incredulous. When we paid with our credit cards he wondered how that could be. The jeans he was willing to pay $300 for on the black market, we told him we could buy for $30. Reagan would later be instrumental in pushing them over the edge but it was my little satchel charge of information about how our system works that softened the way. There was millions of tourists laying the groundwork for Glasnost and Peristroika.

When you say that you are "opposed to Castro" you must mean the man and not the country or its people. You've probably missed a great opportunity to be rid of him. I think we have lost an opportunity to help some people who were suffering, help ourselves, and to see some good positive changes in Cuba. On my first trip to Cuba the country had been suffering five years of an economic depression that rivaled our own of 1929. You remember, people so driven by privation that they float over on an ice chest, children so hungry that they were going blind. The country was like a fighter on the ropes, struggling to regain its composure, breath, and vision. Dissent and grumbling was everywhere. About a third of the people hated Castro, a third still loved him, and a third just wanted something to improve and didn't care if you called it Capitalism or Fred. (Membership in the Communist Party in this country was at its peak during the Depression.) Things started to improve on my four subsequent trips and by 2002 the middle ground had shifted to the government's side. If anything, the virulent anti Castro sentiment is, at the very least, underground or has moved to Miami.

In 1995, the normal life there had been bleak. Even Minrex was reusing paper to give us as passes. The cops on the street did not even have the basics. Now, it looks like a regular consumer society, thanks to the Germans, Mexicans, Spanish, French and Canadians. That's the good news. The bad news is that the last time I was in the Plaza de Armas I saw one of those little cameras that we put up on Dauphin Street. The last time I was there I could tell that the cops were tracking me (suspected black marketeer) via those little lapel radios our cops use to talk to each other. If you talk to the "middle class" Cuban (Yes, they are there.) his or her concerns sound like those of the Springhillian. Crime is increasing and the average Cuban is now happy to see a cop on every corner (and one in the middle) and no longer sees it as anything but for their own protection.

"Castro" grows stronger every day. It is ridiculous to think that the leadership rules only through domination. Ask the hardline communists Wendell Quimby, Joe Thomas and Bob Donlon what they saw there. Ask other Mobilians who have gone over if we aren't screwing up in more ways than one. But, more to the point, why do you insist on missing out on an opportunity to win them over to your point of view or to have some actual experiences upon which to base your opinion? Don't want to go there and give that awful regime your hard-earned cash. Gee, okay. But, at least talk to others and let some of them come here - and quit adopting this shrill "no. nothing." attitude.

(PS I am posting this on my weblog. If you would like to respond, please do so and I will post it.)