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Post-Castro, Cubans Can Look Forward to the Future (Ed Kardas Commentary)

5 min read

Editor’s Note: Ed Kardas, professor of psychology and director of the Honors College at Southern Arkansas University, was part of an SAU delegation to the University of Artemisa in Cuba last week. They were working on a concrete mural project when long-time leader Fidel Castro died. MagnoliaReporter.com invited Kardas to write about the impact of Castro’s death, and we’re reposting his thoughts here with their permission. You can see the original post here.

The first time I heard Fidel Castro’s name was on Jan. 1, 1959, when I was nearly 10 years old and living in Havana. Last Saturday, again in Cuba, I heard the news that he had died. A lot of history has fallen in between those two personal bookends.

I lived in Cuba for three years, from 1957 to 1960. I was there because my father was a State Department foreign service officer. Havana was his post then, having served previously in Bogota and Buenos Aires. So, I grew up bilingual in English and Spanish.

His last post was Santiago de Chile and we left there when I was 14. Since then I have not spoken Spanish on a regular basis. Since May 2015 that has changed because I have visited Cuba four times attempting to set up an academic exchange program with one or more Cuban universities.

That process began when [Southern Arkansas University President] Trey Berry sent me to Cuba with a group out of Little Rock sponsored by the chamber of commerce. It was my first time back to the island in 55 years. Much had changed, I found out. Also, I managed to take the first steps toward SAU’s goal of setting up an exchange program.

Cuba itself was as I remembered it: hot, moist and green. Unchanged too were the cars. The chrome monsters I loved from the 1950s still rumbled down the streets albeit with Mercedes Benz and Toyota engines often replacing the long since worn out Detroit iron that originally powered them.

But much had changed. Once proud buildings now were old and empty shells. Many looked as if they had not seen a paintbrush in years. Now unlike in the past, all the people could read and receive medical care. Fidel had taken care of that. But, he had also exiled a generation while taking their property and killing many of their family and friends. So, I could understand the joyous demonstrations in South Florida after his death was announced. Many of those were my old classmates, the sons and daughters of the rich Cubans who could afford to pay the tuition at the American style school (Ruston Academy) we all attended.

In 1959, however, the rest of Cuba greeted Fidel as a savior. He had defeated and banished the dictator, Fulgensio Batista, the man who had seized power early in the 1950s after free elections. 

Batista’s actions spurred Castro to attack the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. We learned last week that many of those who died in the attack were from Artemisa. We saw the large concrete monuments displaying their youthful faces lining the highway entering the city. In addition, their bodies are interred in an impressive mausoleum in town where a giant copper-colored cube sits atop their graves symbolizing the victory they never lived to see.

I won’t recite the history of Cuba after Castro seized power. Those accounts are readily available elsewhere. I will, however, argue strongly that it is a shame that Cuba is so geographically close to us yet so distant in so many other ways. Cuba is a unique place. It’s at once cosmopolitan, hip, rural, educated, vital, electric and safe. It’s also Socialist, a low-key police state, and run with an incredible amount of red tape.

Socialism means many things including that nearly everyone makes the same low wage regardless of their job. It means that everyone has a job, be it teaching at the university to handing out toilet paper at a public toilet. It means that all own their own place to live. It means that there’s a feeling of solidarity caused by the need to live with so little. To me, it’s similar to my father’s tales about the Great Depression. Listening to him convinced me that those hard times were among the happiest of his life. So to is it in Cuba. The near universal suffering binds them together but does not oppress them because they are all in the same (leaky) boat. They must all cooperate to keep it from sinking.

As to the police, the local joke is that of Havana’s 2 million inhabitants half of them are police. That may not be too far from the truth. Unarmed police are seemingly on every corner. Every building of the university has two policemen or women at their entrances. Cuban campuses are closed with guards at the gates. Lost while looking for my old house, my taxi driver stopped in the middle of the quiet, suburban street and yelled at an outhouse looking shack at the intersection. A uniformed woman appeared from inside and gave him directions. But, regardless of that heavy police presence I was never stopped, never asked for papers, and never harassed.

While driving through Havana I asked the driver about some of the large office buildings we were passing. Almost inevitably the answer was that they were some government department or another. 

There is a lot of red tape in Cuba and a lot of people making sure all of that red tape does its job. Simply planning our academic exchange took four months. Once we received our invitation to come to Artemisa we learned that no changes were possible. One student we had planned to bring decided not to come. “May we substitute,” we asked.

“No,” was the answer.

“Could we substitute another student in his place.”

“No.”

“December would be a better for us, can we come then?”

“Sure, if you want to begin the process again. We gave you permission to come in November, not December.”

We now know how to better deal with Cuban governmental agencies. We have the wisdom and the welts that come from experience to prove it. We did win a few minor skirmishes though. Our Cuban counterparts were able to convince their bosses that it would be a good idea to allow the sponsors who had donated the necessary materials to visit the site where those would be used even though they did not possess the proper paperwork. Unfortunately, those materials never made it out of the Customs House and we were forced to find paint locally.

There were many examples of red tape, but the real story is that Cubans (and us eventually) have learned how to cope and how to accomplish their goals in the face of overwhelming odds and barriers. It’s the Cuban way, they say. Castro changed Cuba of that there is no doubt. The oligarchs are gone. Everyone can read. Daily life is hard, but it’s hard for all. They and their nearest neighbor (the U.S.) have been squabbling for far too long. It’s time to put the past behind and look to the future. 

That’s what we at SAU are doing. Maybe Fidel’s death was a necessary step for that process to begin. Veremos. (We will see.) We hope to bring our Cuban artist friends from Artemisa to Magnolia next summer to work on a big project on our campus. After that, who knows?

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