Funemployment- Cuba

As we made our way back to Havana on the last day of the tour, we viewed a documentary film about Che Guevara's life and another on Operation Pedro Pan (also known as Operation Peter Pan), a strange program run by the Catholic Church and the US State Department in 1961-62 under which Cuban families were allowed to send their minor children, unaccompanied, to the US. The children were given visa waivers and placed with relatives, foster families, or church-run group homes. Some reunited with their families quickly, some after years of separation, and some never. Some had good experiences, some were exploited and/or abused. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about how this operation came to be. Some parents who were against the idea of the new government in Cuba after the revolution wanted to send their children out of Cuba, and other parents feared that their children would be forcibly removed from their homes (apparently, someone convincingly forged a legal document draft of a supposed law stating this would happen) and so they pre-empted that by sending their children away. And then there was the US government, in particular the CIA, covertly trying to foment dissent in post-revolutionary Cuba through a campaign of disinformation and fearmongering.

The relationship between the US and Cuba is so tangled and fraught with so much misunderstanding and miscommunication. What I am sure of is what I see in every country I have visited: getting to share experiences and trade our perspectives on an individual level through interpersonal contact shows how we are all so much more similar than different, and that cultural differences have little bearing on how we can (and should) treat one another. Oversimplifications based on ideology, assumptions, and/or misinformation make it a whole lot harder to interact in a civil manner. Ultimately, it is the little people - especially those with no safety net - who suffer the most when these oversimplifications get in the way. Whether or not the US was right in imposing economic sanctions on Cuba, in the end, it is the average person who is most severely impacted.

In every country I have lived in, we overcome shortages by simply importing. Cuba doesn't always have this luxury. But, one sees human ingenuity at work everywhere in Cuba. Cars are somehow kept running for decades by jerry rigging engines and adapting parts. Chair seats and backs are made from cowhide. So many workers on their own account supplement their incomes by buying, selling, and providing services, or by simply gaming the system. The highly educated population, which has little access to information other than those from official media (anyone else think this is a ticking time bomb?) finds creative ways to pass information and news around. Human ingenuity knows no bounds and Cuba is a fine example of that.

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