Cuba has intrigued David Ebinger since he was a boy. Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., he went to school with the children of Cuban immigrants who'd fled Fidel Castro's revolutionary victory in 1959. “Many of the doctors at our hospital were part of that first wave,” he remembers. “I was always curious about their story.”
Last month, Moorhead's chief of police got his chance to learn more. David and his wife Lynne Flanders participated in a people-to-people mission to the tropical island just 90 miles off the Florida coast – a 1950s world preserved in time, now coping with rapid passage into the modern world.
“You still can't just buy a ticket and fly to Cuba as a tourist,” David explains. “Travel restrictions have loosened since diplomatic relations were revived in December 2014, but commercial flight agreements haven't been worked out yet. The only way you can get there is on a charter flight like the one we took from Miami.”
David and Lynne traveled on an educational program organized by Road Scholar. The eight-day itinerary emphasized the chance to meet and get to know the people of the island nation, with historic and museum tours, seminars, performances and lectures scheduled from 8:30 in the morning until nightfall. “The education part was taken very seriously,” David notes. “If anyone had thought they'd take this trip to eat gourmet foods, be entertained and lie around on the beach, they'd have been bitterly disappointed.
“But that isn't our style – at least, not more than a day or two. We were busy all the time. It was actually rather grueling at times. A fantastic experience!”
The Road Scholar tour took them to Havana, where they stayed at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, and the the Caribbean seacoast city of Cienfuegos, established in 1819, where they were booked at the Hotel Jagua. “Our hotels were beautiful in the public areas – the grounds, lobbies and restaurants,” he says. “When you get to your room, it's not what Americans are used to. The linens are clean and the staff is very respectful, but things are a little rough. The plumbing doesn't always work. The furniture is broken.”
The group dined in the hotels and paladares, or privately owned restaurants. Once forbidden by law, these small businesses – sometimes in people's homes – have flourished since 2010, when the government loosened regulations on how they can operate and what they can serve. David says, “The food was wonderful.” Beef was virtually nonexistent. The scarce amount of fish on the menu comes from Canada; Cuba's own fishing fleet was scuttled after the revolution to keep disaffected citizens from escaping the island by boat. Most meals, then, center around pork and lamb, along with chicken, along with rice and beans, fresh vegetables and fruit.
“We were eating Cuban food, but not eating like Cubans,” he says. “Cuban families eat much, much less meat. Feeding a family on the average salary is a daily challenge.” Basic ingredients in their diet, like beans and rice, are rationed. Vegetables and fruit are available to citizens at “peso markets,” where only the domestic peso is accepted.
Visitors, though, use a second Cuban currency, the CUC (pronounced “kook”), or Cuban convertible peso. That's what international visitors spend on their visits, shopping in “dollar stores” that cater exclusively to those with the hard currency – including Cuban nationals who cater to visitors and earn tips in precious CUCs. Visitors turn other international currencies, like U.S. dollars, into CUCs in exchanges operated by third parties. One CUC is valued at one American dollar, but visitors must also pay a 13 percent tax and service charge. One CUC, in turn, equals 25 Cuban pesos.
“People who work in the tourist industry have access to CUCs, making their jobs incredibly attractive,” David says. “You'll meet school teachers and professionals who are working as cab drivers or street musicians, since they can make so much more money from tourists.”
He describes the people he and Lynne met as “incredibly educated and cultured.” “The schools are excellent, up to and including medical schools, even though they haven't had access to the latest equipment and pharmaceuticals,” he says. “They produce top-notch doctors, and nurses are everywhere. Right now Cuba is producing doctors for much of South American and Africa. One of the big fears as relations warm up with the U.S. is the outflow of their best and brightest will continue to accelerate.”
Americans are familiar with the saga of Cubans' escape to Florida and other southern locations, beginning with Project Peter Pan – flights carrying upper-class children to safety in the U.S. – after the revolution, and reignited by the less privileged Marielitos in the 1980s. The migration has not disappeared, however. In recent times, Cubans who want to leave the island have flown to El Salvador, where they can travel without a visa – then engaged the services of coyotes to guide them through Guatemala, Belize and Mexico to the U.S. border. Unlike other undocumented immigrants, the Cubans are given asylum as political refugees, receiving legal visas and, after one year, eligibility for permanent status.
David and Lynne toured historical attractions – Ernest Hemingway's home in Havana and the Bay of Pigs Museum near Cienfuegos, which the victory of Cuban forces over the ill-fated CIA-backed invasion in 1961. In Old Havana, they visited the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception, which dates back to 1748. They viewed vibrant Cuban art, thrilled to the music of street musicians … and even rode in one of the nation's lovingly maintained fleet of 1950s American motorcars.
Except, says David, that's not exactly what you find upon closer examination. He observes, “It takes a lot of intelligence to keep those old cars and tractors running. When you look them over up close, you see a lot of Bondo, marginal paint jobs and 'chrome' that's shined-up cheap pot metal. Pop the hoods, and you'll see Russian or Chinese or Japanese diesel engines.”
The Cubans Lynne and David met, both at official events and on the street, were uniformly welcoming and eager to get to know norte Americanos from los Estados Unidos. The visitors were shepherded across the island by two guides – an official “minder,” who was clearly speaking for the Cuban government, and an American tour guide who grew up in the Cuban expat community in Miami. Both, David says, were very candid about Cuba in 2015 – what has worked for its people, as well as what has not, like the defeated campaign to replicate Soviet Communism.
After his sojourn among the people of Cuba, Chief Ebinger is convinced of the need for normal relations between our country and theirs. “The Cuban people are looking forward to change … but after so long in a world apart, they're anxious about what more open travel, international investment and the coming flood of U.S. tourists will mean for their culture of the nation they love.
“Isolating Cuba is a failed foreign policy, and we're just to stubborn and entrenched to change it,” he says frankly. “These are intelligent, educated, creative, industrious people who are just waiting for normalized relations to begin.
“Dropping the embargo and opening our nations to trade and travel is going to be great for them, for the rest of the Third World in the Western Hemisphere … and, I think, even for us.”
