More thoughts on Cuba

I just got back from visiting my family in Florida this week and there was a common theme in many of our conversations: How much the current situation in our country remind them of what happened in Cuba 50 years ago.

In my last post I said how what was happening with the car dealerships reminded me of hearing about what happened with my grandmother and her beauty salon and in conversation one day she told me that listening to what has been happening reminded her about that also, same with my dad.

When I visited my grandfather, my mother’s father, he kept coming back to the similarities between what happened then and what is happening now. He kept saying that he has seen this before and that people just don’t understand what the consequences are.

While I was visiting with him we went through some old pictures including my grandparent’s wedding pictures and as we were looking over the very few pictures he had from Cuba he pointed to a man in one picture and told me that he was the man that smuggled their pictures out of Cuba, when he left through Mexico. He mailed them to my grandparents from Mexico. The pictures made it to their destination but he never did. He, very mysteriously, was murdered just before he made it to the US. He pointed to several other people in one of the wedding pictures, taken just five short years before the revolution, and told me that they were killed by the Castro government, shortly after the revolution.

I was talking to my dad about the similarities between what is going on now and what happened in Cuba and we got to talking about when they left and I said something about the scene in “The Lost City” when Andy Garcia’s character leaves Cuba and he has to leave everything behind. My dad said that was exactly what it was like; you couldn’t take anything with you at all. Not even family mementos like pictures, things that have no real value other than sentimental value. I had never realized that there were hardly any pictures of either side of my family from their days in Cuba and now I know why that is. I brought home all of my grandfather’s pictures for my mom to arrange for him and as I looked through them the other day I noticed that there were a few black and white pictures in one old album, that I know are old enough to be from Cuba, but other than that, there is nothing. Almost all the pictures pre-1967 are gone. I can’t explain why but it makes me sad to think about that. There are just a few pictures of my mom as a baby and a girl, up until she was 10, there are only a few pictures of my grandmother growing up, there are no pictures of my grandfather until the wedding pictures, he was 27.

So with all the reminiscing last week, I came home and put the lost city on my instant play list on Netflix and some suggestions popped up. One of the suggestions was Fidel. It is a documentary about Fidel and according to it he is a wonderful man and possibly the best thing that has ever happened to Cuba. I beg to differ. There was one old man, a journalist, talking about how great Fidel is from the comfort of Miami. I kept thinking: if he’s so great then why are you in Miami instead of in Cuba?

Of course there were also the American celebrities that think he’s wonderful too. Belafonte and Alice Walker think he has great qualities. But of course they live here in the United States and not in Cuba. I wonder if they would still think so highly of him if they had to live in Cuba, as everyday Cubans, in poverty.
I wonder if they would feel the same way if they had to live like these people:

All these videos are from O-jec.com. They have a lot of great videos, some are subtitled and some you don't even need to know what they are saying to realize how bad the situation is. Check them out.

Getting water in Cuba:



How about food?

There is no translation on this one but this guy interrupts an interview and he's pretty much saying that there is no food and that the people of Cuba are going hungry:



How hungry are they? Well how hungry would you have to be to eat garbage off the street?



And how about living conditions:

This lady pretty much says that tourists have this image of Cuba being so pretty and that the people don't have any need but that in fact they dont have clothes or shoes, that it's hard to get food, that kids are dying because they can't get the medicines they need:







This lady is showing how she works her old stove and then her family buys her a new stove:



Can you imagine if these celebrities that thing Castro is so great had to live like this?

And after seeing that look at these pre-revolution pictures of Havana and tell me which one you would rather live in: