Nicaragua/Cuba Learnings - a visit
DRAFT – not for quotation
WITNESS TO THE WORLD
By Virginia L. Senders, Ph.D
I was one of a delegation of fifteen who went to Nicaragua and Cuba under the auspices of the 21-year old organization, Witness for Peace. Our special study topic was “Inside and Outside the Neoliberal Economic Model.” (Stop! Don’t go away! It was really a wonderful opportunity to compare these two countries whose histories had led in such different directions.) Our delegation leaders were “long-termers,” young men and women who worked for WFP on a semi-permanent basis, spoke fluent Spanish, and prepared for and led short-term delegations like ours. Three of our long-termers were Americans, and the fourth, Ariel, Cuban. Ariel was with us throughout our week in Nicaragua, so we had a chance to get to know him as a friend before he became also a representative of the country we were visiting.
Nicaragua! My first visit to that country had been in 1985, when the Sandinista Party led the government. What an exciting, hopeful place Nicaragua was then! During 1979-80, their first year in power, (replacing Somosa) the Sandinistas had changed most of the population from illiterates to beginning readers, wiped out polio, greatly reduced infant death rates, made basic health care universal, extended human dignity to peasants who had been little different from the beasts of the field. There was great hope.
There was also great fear, because the United States, after some initial economic assistance negotiated by President Carter, had determined, under Reagan, to wipe out Sandinism, using all possible means: economic (an embargo), diplomatic,political, and military. In addition to bombing one of Nicaragua’s main harbors, the US created and financed a guerilla army, the Contras, to carry on so-called “low -intensity warfare” against the population. This led to the creation of a large defensive military force by the Sandinistas. One after another, Nicaraguan families mourned the deaths of their sons. In the US Congress, the Boland Amendment prohibited material aid to the Contras, but Reagan, with the support of people like Oliver North, found ways of circumventing the law –illegally selling arms to Iran to raise funds for the Contras . And what followed that, in 1990, was the defeat of the Sandinistas in the polls by a peace-hungry people and the installation of Violetta Chamorro as a supposedly “unifying” president.
Fourteen years have passed – years that included the devastating Hurricane Mitch of 1998, which cost Nicaragua more than a thousand lives and wiped out much of its infrastructure, including roads and bridges, and the nation’s agriculture. The airport terminal, which I had last seen just before the hurricane, is unrecognizable: a modest wooden building with a large waiting room and a few stores has been replaced by a huge, gleaming, metal and glass structure that would do honor to Boston. . The billboard that advertised breast milk as the best food for your baby has been replaced by one that promotes Toyota, and the names of all the great multinational corporations are everywhere. At the malls in Managua you can buy almost anything. There are still horse-drawn carts plodding along the roads, but also large limousines and shiny new sedans zipping by. There are, we were told, some new millionaires, and there are young women who labor in the maquiladoras for $2.30 per day. There is also hunger, for unemployment runs from 60% to 75%. . Child malnutrition is rife. Education is said to be free, but parents must pay 10 cordobas a month for each child and then provide uniforms, so swarms of children are found at traffic intersections, selling ice in plastic bags or packs of “cheeklets” in the heat of the sweltering Managua noon. They compete with the grown-ups who encircle your bus selling tortillas, drinking water, shoe laces. Picking the city dump is full-time employment for a group of people who live near it. They collect and bundle discarded plastic bags, then sell the bundle to another set of people who wash and line-dry the bags and sell the collection to another person for a meager price—certainly not enough to feed a family. Hospital care is costly and medicines are too expensive even to consider, so only the rich go to the hospital.
In short, over those fourteen years, Nicaragua has become a good capitalist state, a part of the so-called Neoliberal enterprise, contributing its greatest resource, cheap humanpower, to global corporations. As happens in such a state, a few have profited greatly and many have suffered. This visit to Nicaragua was my fifth, and I had seen these changes taking place over the years.
As always on a WFP delegation, the long-termers, Amy and Jared, had made all our advance preparations, and now we followed their schedule. We lived , ate, and met at the headquarters of CEPAD, the united protestant churches of Nicaragua, sleeping in dormitories, meeting and dining under the shade a galvanized roof, while a large green parrot watched and made occasional comments: “A-di-os!” Some of our instruction was classroom style but there were lots of field trips and time for reflection afterward. We toured Managua and, equipped with cordobas, went to the main farmers’ market and tried to buy food for a family of seven. Five o’clock saw us at the Batahola Community
Center, a large progressive Roman Catholic community with wonderful murals showing the blending of everyday life, Sandinista heroes, and religious figures. The Missa Campesina was celebrated, with a well-practiced chorus of children playing recorders. An energetic priest preached a homily around the theme that “the Church should be the most democratic institution in the world.” The large congregation was composed of adults and children, Nicas and gringos, all actively participating and clearly enjoying themselves.
We learned about Neoliberalism (See box) by listening to Amy’s lecture, and from Ana Quiròs, a civil society leader who discussed its effects in Nicaragua. Briefly, the policy calls for global trade, with each nation contributing its greatest resources, under the administration of a central institution like the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. Nicaragua’s greatest resource is considered to be cheap labor, so materials are flown into the country, transported by truck to a large fenced-in area to be converted into finished products by an army of young women working in a factory called a maquiladora. The finished products are then trucked back to the airport and sent on to retail sale in many countries including the US. Except for the workers’ wages, the whole process does not impact the Nicaraguan economy at all. We met with some of the workers over dinner at the Witness for Peace House, where they could speak freely of their working conditions, unions, and wages. Some had recently been on strike and lost their jobs because of it. “But we would do it again,” they said. They wanted better wages and more humane working conditions. We visited the Mil Colores maquila the next day, watched the girls
making blue jeans from pre-cut parts, learned from their employers about the rules of their workplace, which were not cruel, but rigid and dehumanizing, including searches on entering and leaving the property, and pregnancy tests with dismissal for positive results. The girls we saw were paid about $2.30 per day.
In contrast, we saw tee shirts of organically grown cotton being made at a women’s sewing cooperative by the very women who owned the business and determined their own production practices.
The next day we left our comfortable accommodations at CEPAD and moved by minibus to the countryside, where we were to meet with a group of leaders of the farming community. Comfortably seated under a large mango tree (which eventually attacked four members of our group by dropping mangoes on their heads) we learned of the people’s lives and problems.
After a conversation with these active, thoughtful campesinos, we came to the scariest moment of the whole trip: we were sent off two by two, to live with individual families. Carol and I were assigned to the home of Nicholassa. Her husband drove a taxi in a nearby city and only came home late at night, while she cleaned houses and was not home when we arrived. Her daughter, a girl of about twelve, introduced herself with poise and courtesy, welcomed us and showed us our quarters, a cubicle just big enough for two mattresses with an aisle between them. The youngest of the six children was cared for by a married daughter nearby. Television in the main room occupied all the children while they waited for their mother and dinner. This was a relatively prosperous home: it had not only a TV but a tile floor. After Nicholassa got home and welcomed us, dinner
was soon handed to us on plates in our room. We found the latrine in the back yard, avoiding the pig as we made our way out in the darkening evening.
In this community, Arenal, we visited the agricultural cooperative, where the farmers met us in a hall decorated with larger-than-life portraits of Sandinista heroes and told us of their struggle to maintain a cooperative approach, in contrast to the export-based one their government would have liked to see. In a final conversation under the treacherous mango tree, one of the women said,
“It is a disgrace that we have allowed our revolution to be taken away from us….In Cuba, they have kept theirs.” Many Nicaraguans, a few of whom have actually visited Cuba, look on it as a paradise.
. So it was with considerable curiosity that I looked forward to our week in Cuba, a country I had visited as a pure, innocent, uneducated tourist in 1952. At that time, I had enjoyed a beautiful beach, comfortable hotel accommodations, and noted, in Havana, the numbers of beggars, prostitutes, and lottery ticket sellers on the streets. Visitors more educated and aware than I was knew that at that time Cuba was considered the US bordello. What would I see now?
Our friend and now leader, Ariel, prepared us. “Cuba is not a paradise” he stated emphatically. Yet he was proud and happy to show us his country, to introduce his wife, his eight-year old son, Daniel, and his mother. They joined Ariel in inviting us, on our first night, to a party at his house. I was laid low by health problems, but the delegates who went commented on the beauty of the house, much of it the result of Ariel’s own personal craftsmanship.
My first impression of Cuba was “time travel!” On city streets and intercity highways there are a few American cars --almost all are from the fifties – I recognized an old Buick from its enormous fins. There are many horse-drawn vehicles, including one common type that seats ten or twelve people on facing benches, lots of folks on bicycles, and some getting rides in bicycle “rickshaws” similar to those I have seen in India, and many, many pedestrians. There is a notable absence of the noise and stink of automobile exhausts, and everything moves slowly. Taken together, these sensory conditions created in me a feeling of calmness, and even peace. They were my introduction to the country that has resisted and made adaptations to a US embargo for forty-five years.
We settled in at the Martin Luther King Center. This complex is attached to the Ebenezer Baptist Church and headed by the Reverend Rául Suárez, who addressed us the next day. Said he, “The Kingdom of God is not up there in the universe. It was a mistake of the church to take the Kingdom of God out of the world and stick it in the sky….We decided on our name [the MLK Center] to connect our Christian faith to the context (in which) we are living.” And he added “Churches do not always understand the violence of poverty and ignorance and the lack of health care. Every day more people die from poverty than from Hiroshima and Nagasaki…violence doesn’t only happen in war.” [Witness for Peace Newsletter, Vol. 21, Number 1, spring 2004, p. 9.] The Center is a distribution point for medical donations. We, ourselves, had been urged to collect whatever we could in the way of supplies and equipment and bring them with us, and other groups, like Pastors for Peace under Lucius Walker, Jr., annually bring in busloads of contributions. Gradually the Center has become closely affiliated with Witness for Peace, whose delegations are always housed there.
Our schedule in Havana whirled us through lectures, museums, reflections, field trips, parties and performances. We talked with a family doctor, who lives in the midst of her working class community and is responsible for the care of all of its inhabitants. We visited a museum that honors those who worked in the literacy campaign early in the revolution. It was fun to be there when our bus driver discovered that his records as a teacher in that campaign were preserved forever in the museum’s files. We also went to the Museum of the Revolution, where Ariel was our incredibly informed and articulate guide.
After half a week in Havana we packed again for a few days in Santa Clara, a historically important city in the center of the island. The Methodist Camp Canaan, where we lived and ate, was well-built, large, and quite beautiful—and was happily not in session. Our single or double bedrooms were in a comfortable staff house—what luxury! We visited a cigar factory in the morning and were impressed by the extreme degree of quality control lavished on each cigar. Ché Guevara entered our consciousness in a big way, as we visited the monument and memorial devoted to him and his men, and increasingly we were meeting Fidel-- in the conversations of our hosts, and occasionally on billboards along the roads. As we heard more about him, we were reminded of the important words of Gladys Hernandez, the economist who had talked to us in Havana. She had said,
Fidel is THE ONE.
But there will be others.
There are others already prepared.
We don’t want him to die!. [She becomes very sad.]
This country has been free for forty years—and I mean real free! When he dies it will be like Ché Guevara. He takes care of sectors of the population who never had care before.
. Field trips continued – to a maternity center and a performing arts school. We learned that women undergoing problem pregnancies, or pregnancies in problem settings, might receive free live-in care that would give them rest, nourishing food, and nursing attention at a center in their own province. Being well-born seems to be the first right of the child. Any child in Cuba receives the highest priority in health and education. We thrilled to the music and drama we saw at the special music and performing arts school and were interested in learning that its graduates would be assured work in their art under government sponsorship. Traveling from one destination to the next in our yellow school bus, we noted again the varied forms of transportation, and enjoyed watching the school children – primary grade children in red shorts or skirts and white shirts, higher grades in navy blue with white shirts, and high school teen-agers in gold-colored skorts (very cute!) or, for the boys, long pants. Again, the best seemed to be reserved for the kids.
Then, back in Havana, came the climax of the trip: a visit to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations in the morning and to the United States Interest Section in the afternoon. The first was in a very beautiful modern building where the gardens inside blended with those outside and everything was comfortable and modern. We were ushered into a large conference room, seated around a long table and provided with ice-water and plates of cookies and candy, and listened, through our translators, to a statement by the Ministry representative. He summarized the history of US/Cuban relations and brought it up to date, including Bush’s latest Executive Order, just coming into effect. The essence of that story must be repeated to provide the context for all that we had seen and heard:
The policy of an embargo against Cuba has been in place since 1960, even before Cuba was designated a socialist country. At that time, 40% of the productive land was owned by the US, and 90% of Cuba’s trade was with the US. The embargo was a deliberate act to suffocate the Cuban Revolution. Another policy was to build an opposition in Cuba. These are still the basic policy of the US.
The trade embargo didn’t hurt as much as expected until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, and with it went 85% of Cuba’s external trade. The GDP plummeted 35% over the next four years, starting what is called the “Special Period,” a time of desperate economic hardship. Caloric intake fell by 38% causing an average weight loss of 20 pounds per Cuban. The US tightened the economic screws, figuring that when the people were desperate enough they would rebel against their government, but support for Fidel did not fall as predicted (nor did the Bay of Pigs invasion produce the expected uprising of the Cuban people.)
The history from the time of the Spanish-American War is well and compactly told in the WFP Publication (Op. Cit.) In 1999 the Elián Gonzalez crisis brought Cuba right into the center of American consciousness and, surprisingly, showed how much opinion had shifted: a majority of the US public favored a return of the boy to his father in Cuba instead of permanent lodging with his relatives in Miami. Recent polls show that both the American public in general and Cuban-Americans considered separately all support free trade with Cuba in medicine and food, and free travel. Both houses of the US Congress have formed a bipartisan Cuba Working Group, moving toward changes in relationships that would benefit both countries. Only the Executive branch sees things differently.
In May of 2004 Bush promulgated a new set of Executive Orders, summarized in the box, which introduce one set of deprivations and restrictions for Americans and an additional set for Cuban-Americans, along with US aggressions toward the island. We heard some anxiety about these from the people we met, but there was also a calm assurance that despite the increase in suffering, Cuba would get through without giving up its revolution (meaning its welfare programs.)
All this the Cuban Foreign Affairs representative discussed with us, and then he added some good news: tourism is booming (for everyone except US citizens) and there is high hope for the pharmaceutical industry, which has just created a new and unique vaccine for meningitis.
In the afternoon we had an appointment with the Dan Sainz of United States Interest Section, held in the building that used to be the Embassy. We went through a metal detector, left our cameras outside, and sat in straight rows in front of a long table containing a pitcher of water and two glasses for the speaker. Mr. Sainz greeted us and said,
“Well, Cuba is a difficult country to understand. There is no soap, but they are always clean. There is no food, but there doesn’t seem to be any real hunger. You don’t hear them complaining about him, but you see them stroking their chins (he gestures, mimicking the caressing of a beard) and you know they’re talking about him.” When we referred to what we had heard from our guide (Ariel) he told us that Cuban guides were highly trained and able to convince and fool the people they lead – “They’re the best!” he said. “There is no question that Cuba is a police state.” As I reflected later on his words, I concluded that he was sealed off by both his impregnable belief system and his life style from any contact with the Cuba that we had come to know and admire. So the US continues to contemplate an invasion of the island, or at very least, the assassination of Fidel and his brother, Rául. The embargo will not be ended, we were told, until the country has held a “free election” in which neither of the brothers is a candidate.
Alternately sad and angry, we prepared to leave this land of kind and resolute people. The Cubans, like the Nicaraguans, distinguish between the American people and the American government. As guests we feel comforted by the distinction, but it seems to me that if we accept it, we are denying that the US is really a democracy.
Our trip has ended, but our task has not. We have seen real suffering in two countries, one of which is hurting under a Neoliberal economic model, while the other is being cruelly punished for refusing that model. Our responsibility now is to spread the word and change the acts. Three of us have met with Congressman John Olver—not to convince him but to thank and support him. His voting record and recorded statements are exemplary. We were there to offer him support and evidence if he could use them. He had scheduled us for half an hour but he gave us an hour and a half. He was willing to consider sending one of his aides with a future WFP delegation. We are fortunate in having such a Congressman.
Now we are out to spread the word, to educate as we go, through talks, articles, and public letters. In the First Congressional District of Massachusetts, Liz Kelner of Shelburne Falls and the Reverend Kate Stevens of Charlemont are available with slides and reports , as am I, from Amherst. As long as such suffering is perpetrated in our names, our responsibility is to change it. We encourage you to invite one of us to speak at your church, organization, or study group.
