With no television or radio, and no real eagerness to see or hear arrogant Western males discussing their military prowess, their delight in their own “cleanhanded” destructiveness, I relied on a friend’s phone calls to his son in San Francisco to keep me informed. His son told us about the huge resistance to the war in San Francisco, which made me love the city even more than I did already, and informed us too that he had been one of those demonstrators so outraged that they’d closed down the Bay Bridge.
What to do? Go home and join the demonstrations, or continue to write about the fact that little girls’ bodies are daily “bombed” by dull knives, rusty tin can tops and scissors, shards of unwashed glass—and that this is done to them not by a foreign power but by their own parents? I decided to stay put. To continue this story about genital mutilation, aka “female circumcision,” which I believe is vital for the world to hear. But of course I could not forget the war being waged against the earth and the people of Iraq.
Because I was thinking so hard about the suffering of little girls, while grieving over the frightened people trying to flee our government’s bombs, my unconscious, in trying to help me balance my thoughts, did a quite wonderful thing. It gave me a substitute for Saddam Hussein, the “demon” on whom the United States military’s bombs were falling. Her name was Sadie Hussein, and she was three years old. So, as the bombs were falling, I thought about Sadie Hussein, with her bright dark eyes and chubby cheeks, her shiny black curls and her dainty pink dress, and I put my arms around her. I could not, however, save her.
As it turned out, this was the truth. Saddam Hussein still reigns, at least as secure in his power over the Iraqis, according to some media sources, as George Bush is over North Americans. It is Sadie Hussein who is being destroyed, and who, along with nine hundred thousand other Iraqi children under the age of five, is dying of cholera, malnutrition, infection, and diarrhea. Since the war, fifty thousand such children have died. It is Sadie Hussein who starves daily on less than half her body’s nutritional needs, while Saddam Hussein actually appears to have gained weight.
This is the story of why I am here today. I am here because I pay taxes. More money in taxes in one year than my sharecropping parents, descendants of enslaved Africans and Indians, earned in a lifetime. My taxes helped pay for Sadie Hussein’s suffering and death. The grief I feel about this will accompany me to my grave. I believe war is a weapon of persons without personal power, that is to say, the power to reason, the power to persuade, from a position of morality and integrity; and that to go to war with any enemy who is weaker than you is to admit you possess no resources within yourself to bring to bear on your own fate. I will think of George Bush vomiting once into the lap of the Japanese prime minister and will immediately see hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, cold, hungry, dying of fever, dysentery, typhoid, and every other sickness, vomiting endlessly into the laps of their mothers—who are also emaciated, starving, terrorized, and so illiterate they are unable to read Saddam Hussein’s name, no matter how large he writes it.
The slaughter of Iraqis and the destruction of so much of the earth deeply disturbed the world. Many of us could not ignore the pain in our hearts when we heard various United States government rumblings of: Cuba is next.
It is difficult to think of Cuba without also thinking of Fidel Castro. In fact, I cannot entirely do it, for I do not think of him at all as the demon he has been set up to be over the past thirty-odd years. Whereas I recognize Saddam Hussein as a victim of gross child abuse who grew up to abuse and victimize his people in the same way he was terrorized and tortured as a child, I recognize in Fidel Castro the Jesuit scholar and social-activist lawyer; a lover of children and a defender of the weak and the oppressed; a secular “priest” who finally picked up the gun. Though an atheist, he is nevertheless a person of immense spiritual power, and it is true to say, I believe, that the Cuban Revolution, all these years, has been fueled by his revolutionary spirit. In his love of the most humble of the Cuban people, and of the Cuban spirit per se, he is not unlike the Dalai Lama, whose devotion to Tibet and Tibetan culture is absolute.
Saddam Hussein, a convenient villain for the West because he is obviously out of balance psychologically, tortures and bombs his own population. Though an attempt is frequently made in the media to equate Hussein and Fidel, and this is easy, visually, because they are both “dark” and wear uniforms, I feel we must be vigilant about noting differences, and affirming them. Just for our own clarity and human integrity.
However, what is more important is that we remember that wars—whether waged through military strikes, as against Iraq, or through trade embargoes and blockades, as in the case of Cuba—are fought not against leaders only but against the people, who may or may not even like the leader. And that children are the most devastated victims.
Thirteen years ago I went to Cuba, and the radiant health, intelligence, generosity, and joyousness of the people made it a sacred place for me. Ironically, in a place where there was very little Church, I felt the most God.
Since I was born into the poorest, least powerful, most despised population of the United States and was spoken to as if I were a dog when I asked to use a library or eat in a restaurant, the revelation that people of color, who make up between 40 and 60 percent of Cuba’s population, and women, who make up half, can share in all the fruits of their labors was a major gift Cuba gave to me—a major encouragement to struggle for equality and justice, and one I shall never forget.
I refuse to be responsible for the suffering and death of hundreds or thousands of Fidelitos and Fidelitas. My ego is not stroked by the thought of sick and hungry Cuban children throwing up in their tired, scared, ill mothers’ arms. What gives me pleasure is the thought that all children everywhere can be safe from deliberate brutality and cruelty, deliberate enslavement, ignorance, and genocide.
Rather than envying—as I think the United States government does—and therefore despising Cuba for its dedication to the health of its citizens and its elevation of people of color, women, and the poor, I believe it has important lessons to teach our gadget-rich but spiritually bankrupt country: that the earth on which we live is the body of God. All people and living things are the body and soul of God. And that we serve God not by making the earth and its people suffer but by making the earth and its people whole. This is why I have always believed Fidel Castro is really a priest. We can look at the sound teeth, shining eyes, straight limbs, and strong minds of the Cuban people today and know that thirty-odd years ago these same people would have been null and void. After thirty-odd years of racism, sexism, poverty, assassinations, and despair in the United States, great numbers of my own generation—because of homelessness, joblessness, drugs—are certainly null and void.
I am far from blind to Cuba’s imperfections. There are days when I think: How noble, how graceful, it would be if Fidel Castro would simply retire. I think: Doesn’t he have grandchildren to snuggle and jiggle on his knee before he dies? I also think this about George Bush and all the rest of the rich white male dictatorship we in North America suffer under. And have suffered under since the arrival of these men five hundred years ago. I am also highly skeptical of a revolution that has not produced younger men and women to lead it. But one thing is clear: Whatever its imperfections, in Cuba the poor have not been held in contempt; they have been empowered. Which is different from being made wealthy in a capitalist sense, and more lasting. A healthy body, a well-trained mind, a sense of solidarity with one’s people, these are harder to lose than a million dollars, and offer more security. This empowerment of the poor—literacy, good health, adequate housing, freedom from ignorance—is the work of everyone of conscience in the coming century. Cuba has led the way and is an object lesson to us. For, if the poor are not empowered—by any means at their disposal—they will continue to be devoured by the rich. Just as women, if not empowered, will continue to be the slaves of men.
I have heard that rich Cubans
in Miami (whose old money was no doubt made off the backs of slaves and the vulvas of women), and others who see Cuba as real estate, intend to buy Cuba, as if it were still the North American–owned plantation it was before the revolution. This is obscene. What has been paid for in blood, tears, and backbreaking work by the people of Cuba cannot be bought, especially not by rich white Cubans in Miami, or by those North American profiteers who raped Cuba shamelessly over hundreds of years and who, if they returned to that land today, would hardly recognize it. Certainly it would surprise them not to encounter any of their former slaves, serfs, drug addicts, and prostitutes—though prostitution has, tragically, returned, as Cuba’s economic situation has worsened and disproportionate emphasis has been placed on tourism.
What can I tell you? Cubans always speak of defending the revolution. I speak of defending ourselves from the grief and heartbreak of being accomplices to evil acts done in our name and with our hard-earned cash. I speak of defending our right not to be murderers. If I would rather die myself than run over a child in the street, how can I possibly accept squashing a million children from forty-five thousand feet, as in Iraq? And to celebrate such a feat, I assure you, is quite impossible. To see the anti-abortion forces, including Bush, rage against poor and scared women, some of them homeless, who refuse to give life to children they cannot support, while not even planting symbolic crosses for the actual children bombed to death in Iraq, is to witness cynicism in its most unconscionable form. I speak of defending our right to praise and uphold what is good about any other people’s way of life, even as we recognize and criticize what is bad. To Cuba I would say, Your poets are the heartbeat of the revolution, because that is what, by definition, poets are. If you force them to eat their words, it is the revolution that will suffer indigestion and massive heart attack.* Bread is not everything, after all, as women have always stressed; there must be roses too. And the roses of any revolution are the uncertainties one dares to share.
I speak of defending the Earth, our Mother God. I speak of defending and loving the Earth’s children: All of Us.
Suffice it to say that at one point we had three times more doctors working for free in the Third World than did the World Health Organization; and we didn’t have a lot of resources either, only minimum resources. We only had the honor of our health workers, with their internationalist calling. How many lives have they saved? And I wonder, is it fair to blockade a country that has done this?
More than 26,000 Cuban teachers have served abroad. How many hundreds of thousands of children have we educated with our teachers in foreign countries? And we haven’t only sent primary and secondary school teachers, but university professors. We have founded medical schools in diverse countries of the world. Is it fair to blockade a country that has done all this, and still does it to a certain degree?
Half a million Cubans have completed internationalist missions of different types, half a million Cubans! I ask if any other small country, and even medium or big countries, has had this record.
The Africans have been very generous, very noble, and have wanted to recall here Cuba’s solidarity and aid in the war against colonialism, the war against foreign aggression, the war against apartheid and racism.
As I said here, our soldiers were fighting in southern Angola — 40,000 men! They were fighting alongside the Angolan troops, who acted and fought heroically. There were Cubans in southern Angola facing up to the South Africans after the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, and when our counteroffensive was launched in southwest Angola these men and women were exposed to the possibility of nuclear warfare. We knew it, and the distribution of forces in that offensive took into account the possibility that the enemy could use nuclear weapons.
—FIDEL CASTRO
World Solidarity Conference Havana, Cuba November 25, 1994
* This refers to an article I read about a Cuban poet who wrote poems against the Cuban government. Neighbors allegedly forced the poet to eat the poems.
Hugging Fidel
WHAT IF THERE’S A TORTURE CHAMBER
UNDERNEATH THE PALACIO DE LA REVOLUCIÓN?
There are moments that we will remember always. We know this as they are happening. There is a subtle light around them. A feeling of a circle being closed. They have a sound that is distinct but indescribable, as they feed something old and weary, something hungry in the soul. There is an urge to laugh, though the joy is heavy with sorrow. They are moments, often, with a long history of longing behind them, of shared suffering and losses. Moments that have, as well, memories of happiness, of triumph over evil, of solidarity with irrepressible warriors and a temporary distance from defeat.
One such moment for me was hugging Fidel Castro Ruz the second time I was in Cuba, in 1992. It was not a planned hug. In fact, on the way to the Palacio de la Revolución in Havana, in a clean but old North American bus, I had no idea what might happen. I had spent the previous evening with a stunningly beautiful black woman who had escaped from prison in the United States and been a guest of the Cuban people for nearly two decades. She had been charged with killing a highway patrolman, a charge she denied, claiming that her real crime had been to be part of a black revolutionary group in the late Sixties, targeted for destruction by the F.B.I.; her comrades, in the confrontation with the patrol, deserted her. I was so intensely glad to find her alive—speaking Spanish and driving a tiny, battered car (“But how do you get gasoline?” I asked. “By any means necessary,” she replied, grinning)—that by the time I left her small, colorfully decorated house, I felt emotionally worn out.
In the morning I had been helping to deliver medicines to a children’s hospital and talking to doctors, nurses, gravely ill children, and their mothers. I didn’t know if I could bear any more emotion. I had been glad that a visit with Fidel seemed out of the question, until it was unexpectedly announced after dinner, and suddenly everyone was ready to go. In the United States, Fidel Castro has been demonized by the press, castigated by presidents and others in government for over thirty years. Suppose, after years of admiring him from afar, I discovered that, up close, I didn’t like him either.
I wouldn’t be able to hide it.
As the bus carried us through the quiet streets of Havana, where, because of the gas shortage, few cars were in evidence, I meditated on my long relationship to the Cuban people, on the Cuban Revolution, on the lives of men and women who are as precious to me as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman or Jesse Jackson, and on my long-term feelings of closeness to the least dashing of the revolutionaries who stormed the Moncada barracks in 1953, thereby beginning the Cuban Revolution—the bearded and loquacious lawyer Fidel Castro Ruz. I thought of Camilio Cienfuego, of Che Guevara, of Celia Sanchez, of Haydée Santamaria and her brother Abel Santamaria, all dead, having given their lives in the fight to give the Cuban people a change, and a chance at life. I had been deeply moved and inspired by all of them. The Cuban Revolution was my generation’s Chiapas.
In 1959, when Fidel came to power, I was sixteen and living in the brutally racist, completely segregated state of Georgia. Fascism was a way of life, so entrenched there seemed no other possibility. I could neither eat at a public restaurant nor use a public library or rest room without the certainty of being arrested by a white male agent of the state who would undoubtedly physically or verbally abuse me. For a long time I could not even identify with the tiny bits of news coming from the Cuban people’s struggle, because the faces we saw—Fidel and his comrades living as guerrillas in the jungles of the Sierra Maestra or rolling triumphantly through the streets of Havana—were white.
What if you discover a Cuban gulag? a friend had joked as I packed for the trip. What if there’s a torture chamber underneath the Palacio de la Revolución? What about the skeletons that are probably in Fidel’s closet? What about the concentration camps where they keep gay people with AIDS? Having read the newspapers for several years, she thought about Cuba this way. Having v
isited once and kept in touch through friends and books and organizations that monitored the island regularly, I had different expectations. When I thought of Cuba I thought of a health care system that was one of the best in the world. Of how well educated Cubans are. Of their zest for life and their love of music, reading, dance, and talk. I thought of a place that welcomed me. A place, unlike the Georgia, U.S.A., of my birth, where I did not feel afraid. Now, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ever-tightening United States embargo, I worried that every gain in health care, literacy, and housing would be wiped out. That Cuba might be returned to its former poverty under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a former overseer of Cuba, as a plantation for U.S. interests.
I identified with Fidel because he was fighting the same greedy men we were also fighting, and as a student I thought often of him and of Che Guevara, and of their guerrilla fighting down from the Sierra Maestra and into revolutionary power in Havana. As we were beaten, battered by firehoses, thrown into jail for demanding the right to eat and sleep in public establishments, and also the more important right to vote, the Cuban Revolution gave me hope. These were men and women who had not backed down, though faced with the cruelest repression. They had a dream of equality and justice, of bread and roses, of exemplary high schools and world–class hospitals; they stated as early goals that they intended to teach every Cuban to read and to produce enough doctors to export them to every poor third-world country on earth. How could anyone resist this revolution? Especially as the Cubans, with small resources but plenty of courage and help from wherever they could get it, set out to make their dream come true.