I stumbled upon this book (published merely months ago) while searching through the library's catalog; I felt that I needed to get as many viewpoints on Cuba as I could, since I was not alive during the Bay of Pigs and I was too young to remember the fall of the Soviet Union. To my embarrassment, the only piece of news that I can remember regarding Cuba was when Eli Gonzales was found, at the age of 6, on a raft off of the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, and then the years long battle of which conutry had the right to host him. I remember once my parents watching a news segment on the poverty in Cuba, and I was too young to understand the situation at the time; the image that I can recall most vividly is of a boy in dirty clothes and sandels, chasing a soccer ball in a dusty road, with a delapidated buildings in the background, and trash strewn in their yards.
My interest piqued in Cuba when, through Transitions Manitou, I saw a documentary about the ingenuity of its people; after the Soviet Union fell following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union pulled out all of its annual funds from Cuba. The people of Cuba were left to pick up the pieces on their own and somehow find a way to survive. The documentary showcased the plucky spirit of its creative people whom turned empty buildings into aprtments, made buses out of old Soviet trailer trucks, and turned empty plots of land into flourishing organic gardens that would feed schools and whole communities. They created community Universities and hospitals and came up with alternative ways of job training and trade, such as sending nurses to other Latin American countries to work in exchange for medicines and equipment for Cuban hospitals.
These are the stories of an oppournity-seizing people which I hoped that I would find in Havana Real. I found something else entirely.
Sanchez's account was that of a people, not empowered but their creativity but of a people still defeated by an oppressive lack of freedoms, the freedom of voice, the freedom of choice, and most astonishing to me, the freedom to buy enough nutritious food. Sanchez's is an account of how Soviet sponsorship birthed Generation Y; how Raul Castro promised a glass of milk with every breakfast, a promise that was later cut from the recaps and the official printed transcripts; how the people still used ration cards; how the government added peas to coffee to make it last longer; how people became fanatical upon hearing gossip of a shipment of a product; how obtaining nutritious meals was impossible due to two currencies with unfair exchange rates; how every first grader, since her own grade school years, graduates to become a Pioneer; all of these things were both fascianting and illuminating. Towards the middle of the book I felt slightly exhausted by the metaphors for the motifs of struggle and freedom, but I had to remind myself of the possibly that she (and the other Cubans whom she inspired to begin blogging) could be a person who could by feeling empowerment for the first time; that must have been very exciting for her and fellow Cubans. Here's me, an American with a college education, who did not starve as a child, who was not taught ideology in primary school, who looked at her account critically and found the book wanting of concrete evidence of some of her accounts and accusations. But looking at pictures of her starved skeleton of a frame, could she have had the time and resources to do journalist research? I ask not rhetorically, but in all seriousness.
I was also puzzled as to why, as oppressive as she shows the Castro regime to be, the Cuban government has not imprisoned her. However, Sanchez reveals that machismo is rampant in Cuba, so perhaps the government does not view her as too much of a threat as she is a woman. Furthermore, Sanchez is the recipient of numerous international and European awards for her blog; imprisonment from the Cuban government could inflame reactions from foreign nations. Alas, I am speculating.
As a production critique, there are some accounts that I did not understand. For instance Yoani had a friend whom starved himself to death in prison, and there wasn't a whole lot of detail on his account. There were Spanish words and bits of Cuban culture that I could not contextualize. There are notes and endnotes throughout the book; it would have been helpful to have notes in instances such as these.
But going back to the content, I thought afterwards for a long time, trying to digest what I saw in contrast to what I read. I do feel that both the documentary and Sanchez are true in their experiences. The documentary showcased the univesral human spirit that allows us to see opportunities through nothing, to seize their lives and experiment. Sanchez represents a demographic of people that--for reasons that social scientists struggle to figure out--continue to fall prey to top-down paradigms. Hers is a people that is still underrepesented, still impoverished, still defeated. The best example of this collective defeat was in a blog entry accounting the time that Sanchez and a friend were pulled into a van from a populated street and beaten in broad daylight; she called out for help, but no one came.
But what both mediums show when put side by side is a dichotomy inherit in any social structure, a dichtomoy of enterprising individuals that find a way to live comfortably and improvished victims that despite their efforts continue to struggle, who survive by illegal activities. Though less extreme and with less (adequate) media coverage, we, too, have this dichotomy in the United States. Through my studies, I am beginning to surmise that this dichotomy exists in every nation, developed or developing. But what differentiates Cuba's dichotomy to that of the US or another developed country is the magnitude of Cuba's poverty and lack of collective human rights as Yoani Sanchez reveals.
What is exciting about Yoani's experience is that she represents a trend of peoples who utilize technology and the internet as a way to solidify and mobilize their causes; paradoxically, as Adbusters toted in their 2009 Virtual World/Natural World issue, the internet is the "ultimate anarchy." I wonder why the people of Cuba haven't revolted yet.
Yoani Sanchez has penned and published a slew of books; Cuba Libre, in particular, I am interesting in reading.
Further reading:
- http://www.vocescubanas.com/ (the website that Yoani helped to initiate of blogs written by Cubans and translated into English, French, German, Polish, and other languages by volunteers throughout the world)
- www.desdecuba.com/generationy (the English version of Yoani's blog)
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