|
|
|
|
Report from Cuba on the Venceremos Brigade
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Terry Burke, W A M M
|
|
On Monday, August 3, eleven Minnesotans defied the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and walked with 140 other Americans in the Venceremos Brigade across the Peace Bridge from Canada into Buffalo, New York. In a spirited, empowering action, they walked across the bridge chanting and singing. In U.S. customs, they committed civil disobedience by declaring to customs agents that they had been to Cuba but refused to share specific information that could be used to prosecute them.
This Travel Challenge was in open defiance of the U.S. government’s ban on travel to Cuba without official U.S. government permission. On the same day, four Minnesotans who were part of a Pastors for Peace contingent of 130 also participated in the Travel Challenge and walked into U.S. customs, crossing at the Hidalgo International Bridge from Reynosa, Mexico.
Liisa Roeder and I are WAMM members who were part of this Fortieth Venceremos Brigade trip. My husband, Andy Berman, was also a member of the Second Brigade trip in 1970. We are part of a long history of Americans (9,000) who have traveled to Cuba since 1969 to do agricultural and construction work in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.
Since 2002, the VB and Pastors for Peace have openly challenged U.S. Treasury Department rules by returning to the U.S. en masse and declaring their travel to Cuba. About 400 of those travelers received letters from the Treasury Department demanding payment of fines. The Brigadistas subsequently demanded hearings but the government has not followed through to prosecute any of them.
Bill HR 874 in the House and S 428 in the Senate have been introduced to lift the travel ban. To her credit, Senator Amy Klobuchar is a co-sponsor of the Senate bill, but Senator Franken’s position is not known. Contact Franken’s office to demand that he also become a co-sponsor.
Early in his administration, President Obama lifted travel restrictions on family visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, but has done nothing since then. During his presidential campaign, he said that he was willing to sit down with Cuban leaders without preconditions. Although the U.S. economic blockade is on the back burner for policymakers, it still causes extreme hardships for the Cuban people. It has created an effective stranglehold on the Cuban economy for the last 50 years.
For example, Cuba is the world’s number two producer of nickel. Yet other countries are reluctant to buy Cuban nickel because U.S. law forbids the importation of any Cuban product or anything manufactured with a Cuban product. So Germany or Japan or China hesitate to manufacture a television set or any equipment with even a small piece of Cuban nickel. They could not sell the item to the U.S. market.
Former President George W. Bush tightened the blockade with a new rule that foreign ships that visit Cuba cannot dock in U. S. ports for six months – which also obviously limits the foreign ships that are willing to dock in Cuba.
In a meeting with the Federation of Cuban Women, their leadership spoke about how effects of the U.S. economic blockade are felt more by women. They talked of the hardships caused by hour-long waits for a bus before and after work (because of a shortage of buses and fuel) and then trying to make dinner and take care of their families with two fewer hours in the day. While they have universal health care, free education, and minimal rent, the blockade has made food prices much higher. It was disturbing to begin to understand the hardship the blockade has caused Cuba for five decades as we got to know the warm, friendly Cubans who worked and volunteered at our camp.
This was a life-changing trip for me. I’ve never lived with other Americans and people from a developing nation in the kind of very basic conditions I experienced in the work camp in Cuba. (In my one trip to Nicaragua, we stayed in hotels on a tour.) It was truly a privilege to get to know several Cubans. I have a 20-year-old daughter with autism who has never gotten more besitos (kisses) in her life. It was moving to experience the Cubans’ accepting attitude towards disability.
One of the programs from the early years of the Revolution was to provide a child care worker for families who have a child with a disability so that the mother could return to work. If the mother wants to stay home, the state pays her as the caregiver. Here the U.S. provides a hodgepodge of such services. When my daughter was two, we came up on a waiting list and were given seven hours a week of respite. I don’t know of any U.S. state that provides 40 hours of care a week from infancy for a child with disabilities.
Over the week I had a number of conversations with a university student who was working on her Ph.D. thesis on Catcher in the Rye. I especially remember her enthusiasm in describing what her neighborhood organization meant to her. The little I knew about the neighborhood organizations had come from the U.S. media and I’d thought they were primarily political. She was enthusiastic in describing how her block organization had helped her family make the kitchen and bathroom workable when her family first moved to Havana two years ago, how neighbors would have her and her father over to dinner when her mother was out of town, how she could rely on them if she needed something, how her neighbors were such an important support system in her life.
In contrast, I know friends and family members here who would benefit from an organized, supportive community – people here who live relatively isolated lives and are alone in struggling with life’s challenges, people who don’t even know many of their neighbors.
I was impressed to be in a country where for 50 years there has been universal health care, free education, low rents, food subsidies, unemployment of about 1 percent, many programs to support people. Pregnant women are entitled to 18 weeks fully paid leave (six weeks before birth and 12 after), plus an additional 40 weeks at 60 percent pay, after which they are assured of returning to their same job.
There is also the option of paid paternity leave, but not many fathers as yet have taken advantage of it. According to the UN, Cuban literacy is the highest in the world. They have stressed having an educated society.
I’m planning to return to Cuba within the year – hopefully on a trip that looks at programs for people with disabilities and women’s programs. I want to talk with more Cubans, see more of the country, and test my first impressions.
It is amazing that the Cuban Revolution has continued and prospered despite 50 years of the crippling economic blockade, hundreds of assassination attempts against Castro, thousands of incidents of violence and harassment by the Cuban Mafia and the CIA, and an unrelenting propaganda campaign here and abroad. Every year, 700,000 Canadian tourists vacation in Cuba, while it is still against U.S. law for U.S. citizens to travel there without permission.
If you’re interested in traveling to Cuba, please contact the WAMM office. Some WAMM members are exploring an authorized women’s delegation to Cuba in early 2010. |
|
|
|
© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
|
 |
|
Complete September 2009 Index - click here
|
|
 |
|
|
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
