Change isn’t always for the better

Queque and his brother Nelson are completely un alike. The two of them are only separated by a few years and grew up in the same crib, but you couldn’t imagine two more completely different brothers. Queque embodies the typical MacGyver-esque attitude of the Cuban people. There seems to be nothing he can’t put back together, lately he’s been trying to figure out how to jump the meter on the electricity that the house uses to avoid the escalating costs of energy in Cuba. But the only time you see a book lying around is if a passing tourist left it behind.

Nelson on the other hand is a language professor at a nearby university and not only speaks English fluently but seems to be the only one on the island who doesn’t have the Scarface-like accent. He seems to be interested in just about everything, full of questions about abstract ideas.

This works out great for me because Nelson supplements his typical paltry Cuban government salary by teaching Spanish to foreigners. In 4 short lessons with Nelson I got a far better understanding of the subjunctive tenses in Spanish than I did in two months of class in Buenos Aires. Of course we never covered the subjunctive in our class in Buenos Aires but that’s beside the point.

But the other day Nelson, Joost and I were sitting around in-between our lessons. Lessons might be too formal a description for what typically happens, which is that we shoot the shit for a couple hours in between refreshing beverages and intersperse a good amount of learning randomly throughout our meandering conversations.

We started talking about what was going to happen to Cuba after Fidel finally dies. And the truth is, no one has any damn clue, but everyone expects chaos. 47 years have passed by since the Triumph of the Revolution and I think at this point Castro has outlasted 11 US Presidents.

But we all could agree on one thing, it’s pretty likely that the US Marines will be involved. That saddens me deeply because I’m pretty sure that’s the worst possible outcome for just about everyone involved. If you think Iraq is bad just wait until the US forces head 90 miles south of Key West, Nelson assured me. Cubans don’t particularly seem to hate the US, and they certainly, on average, seem to have no love lost for Fidel. But I’ll be god-damned if I can imagine any Cuban who wants the US to invade except for about 1.5 million zealots in southern Florida.

Cubans, while generally brainwashed by their governments’ propaganda, know full well the history of US – Cuban relations. And it’s fairly true that nothing the US has ever done has helped the Cuban people. After Cuba finally gained it’s “independence” and the Spanish were vanquished, a series of successive regimes in Cuba were subservient to the power of the US. And of course we treated it like a tiny little island to be taken advantage of which also happened to make a great vacation destination until Castro and Che finally triumphed.

Yeah if they had just played nice they probably would have wound up like Puerto Rico, second, make that third, class citizens but still enjoying the highest living standard in all of the Caribbean. Instead their national psyche seems to be embodied by that guy on the street corner heckling “my friend, cigars, girls, casa particular?” to all the passing tourists.

Really the US trade embargo is the best thing that ever happened to Fidel Castro. The blame for all the problems that Cuba is facing right now can easily be deflected from their own government. Castro has never faced a hint of a real threat of an uprising from his own people. He controls everything that comes in and goes out of this island and points the finger for all its problems squarely at the White House. And most people seem to agree.

Since you hardly ever see any Americans in the streets of Havana it’s impossible for Cubans to cut through the propaganda they’re fed and understand what the reality of the country that they’re taught to hate and despise. Nelson told me that if only Cuban people could talk to Americans and see that their not the 3 headed monsters that we’re taught to believe maybe we would start to question everything else our government tells us and wonder why we don’t have the same standard of living.

The rest of the lesson didn’t go over so much politics, but I did learn about how to convert the passive voice in English to the 3rd person in Spanish. Now if someone would just teach me to dance salsa I’d be all set.