It took me longer to get to Havana than it did to get to
Chennai, India. Part of the reason was a four-hour delay at the Miami Airport. Rumor
had it that the delay was because Hugo Chavez was dying. Dignitaries were
flying in. Chavez was supposed to have been sworn in on Thursday. That didn’t
happen. So who’s running Venezuela? Cuba needs to know. Venezuela has virtually
replaced the Soviet Union as Cuba’s life support system, selling Cuba oil at
controlled prices since 2000. Cuba, in turn, has been supplying Venezuela with
doctors. Since 2004 Venezuela sends Cuba 100,000 barrels of cheap petroleum a
day. Cuba sends 30,000 health professionals to Venezuela and trains thousands
of its citizens in Cuban medical schools. Were this arrangement not to continue,
the Cuban economy would suffer.
When I exited the airport, I glimpsed a billboard with a
message for Che Guevara, presumably from the people of Cuba. The message was
next to the image that appears on T-shirts worn by young people in almost every country I have
visited. I’ve been to 51. It is an image made in 1960 by the famous fashion
photographer, Alberto Korda.
 |
| In our eyes you are always pure, as a child and as a man, Commandant Che, friend |
Che is looking into the middle distance. I will buy a refrigerator magnet with that image on it before I leave. I’ll bet there are Che dolls in the store. I saw one of Korda’s Che images with a legend. It said, “Let’s Go, Mets.”
The impact of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on the 20th
century is extraordinary, far out of proportion to the size of their domain, slightly
smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. Fidel was born in August 1926. His
father, Angel, was a white settler from Galicia and his mother, Angel’s second
wife, Lina Ruiz, was a Cuban from Pinar del Rio. Angel came to Cuba at the turn
of the 20th century, just about the same time that my own father
came to America from Eastern Europe.
Angel arrived at the beginning of the Cuban Republic, a period
that lasted from 1902 to 1952 and marked the beginning of a new kind of
American influence. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French had for
hundreds of years practiced colonial expansion by forced occupation. America
stayed at home. All that changed at the end of the 19th century.
America declared war on Spain and immediately attacked and destroyed its fleet
in the Philippines in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898.
Next was Cuba. The government needed a pretext for the
invasion. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, provided one. On February 15, 1898, the American
battleship Maine was lying at anchor
in the harbor just off the shore of what is today the Malecón. The battleship
blew up. Hearst marketed the explosion as an act of treachery. Teddy Roosevelt echoed the accusation. A tsunami of patriotic outrage flooded
the country. Volunteers poured into the armed services. On April 25, 1898, the US
declared war on Cuba.
It hardly mattered that there had been no Spanish mine in the
harbor. Indeed, almost 70 years later Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted a study
that strongly pointed toward spontaneous combustion in the coal bins as the
culprit. It was enough for Hearst’s newspaper to declare a mine to make it
true. America invaded Cuba. One hundred years later it is still here. It is
instructive to think of these things today, when mutatis mutandis the slogan would be Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
