Before I went to Mosquito Island, I received a phone call from Irma Deas, Ilia’s sister, and she invited me to lunch at her house. The day we settled on was my second-to-last in Cuba.
Almost as soon as I came back Douglas called me and invited me to ice cream on the same day, and I accepted. So on Saturday, April 19th, I met Douglas at Coppelia.
Coppelia is one of the strangest, and most awesome, institutions to come out of Communism. In the early days of the Revolution, Fidel was searching for ways to boost the morale of the Cuban people. So he ordered the construction of an enormous public ice-cream parlor and called it Coppelia.
Coppelia is truly huge. It occupies an entire city block, and has multiple sections. One area is for sitting; another is standing-room only; and a third is for those paying in convertible pesos (read: tourists). In a cruel twist of irony, this most communist of ice cream stands now provides shorter lines and better ice cream to those who can pay with convertible pesos, but it remains an intensely beloved place for the Cuban people and is widely considered to serve the best ice cream on the island.
I met Douglas there in the early-afternoon, and he greeted me warmly. We got in line for the standing area — not the tourist line, but with normal Cubans. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
“I can’t decide,” he said. “Do I want two ensaladas, or three?” Ensaladas are ice cream salads, three scoops of different ice cream flavors in one bowl.
I told him about my lunch at Irma’s, and invited him to come. He accepted, but his face fell. “I guess I will only have one ensalada,” he said, before brightening again. “Luckily, I am in Havana for three more days.”
We ate our ice cream — and it was, I must admit, quite good — and then continued on to Irma’s house, which wasn’t far from the cementerio.
Irma was very different from her sister. Ilia had been short and, if I may say so, rather round. Irma, on the other hand, was considerably older, and she was frail in a way that her sister was not: thin, with white hair and wrinkles around her eyes. She hugged me and Douglas (who, as it happened, she had never met) and invited us inside.
I was surprised to find her cooking beef. In Cuba, cows are highly prized for their milk, and it is illegal to kill any cattle for meat. All of Cuba’s beef, then, is imported, and extremely expensive — I had almost never seen a local eat it. Little did I know how guilty this little bit of beef would make me feel.
Months earlier, when I was in Santiago, I had been talking with Ilia about Cuban food, and she asked me if my family cooked Cuban food often in California. Of course, I responded, and went on to name my favorite Cuban dishes — fried bananas, black beans and rice, and, of course, ropa vieja, a kind of stew made with strips of beef.
Well, Ilia had felt rather guilty about not having any beef to offer me, so as soon as I had gone she called up her sister on the phone and told her that, when I came to lunch, she had to make me ropa vieja. So the day before we had lunch Irma had traversed the city by bus (in and of itself no easy feat), searching high and low for beef until finally she had found it, an hour from her house. The thought of this tiny old lady, who would almost certainly not weigh over a hundred pounds, combing the city on my account made me feel terrible, and I apologized profusely. But she waved it off and, when the food was finished cooking she brought it to the table and we all sat.
I took a few bites, and it was good. I told her so and she was happy. Douglas was also excited to be eating beef, and he tucked in eagerly. A short time into the meal Irma leaned over the table and me and said, “Kyle, tell me: why does everyone in America hate Cuba?”
I laughed a little bit, uncomfortable, and glanced at Douglas. But he offered no help: he seemed to be as interested as she. I breathed in deeply and considered how best to answer.
It was a difficult question for me because I was convinced, and remain convinced, that the embargo is a terrible policy. My reasons for thinking so are threefold:
It doesn’t hurt the right people. Conditions in Cuba are bad across the board, but the people most hurt by the embargo — the people without food, clean water, or, in some cases, shelter — are not the leaders of the revolution. They are our family and friends, long-lost but not forgotten, and we are condemning them to a life of pain for a cause they may or may not have supported fifty years ago. And in all those years I guarantee you that Fidel has never gone hungry or unsheltered.
It gives Fidel the perfect scapegoat. For the last fifty years, the Communist government in Cuba has not had to take responsibility for a single one of its failures. Don’t have any food? Those greedy Americans are the ones who won’t sell it to us! Did a hurricane blow away your house? Blame the imperialists to the north! So the government receives a disproportionate amount of credit for its successes – some of which, like the literacy program and the medical system, are legitimate – while never once taking the blame for its failures.
It simply does not work. There is perhaps no single U.S. foreign policy that has failed as spectacularly as our policy toward Cuba. Not only have we utterly failed to bring about any kind of regime change, we haven’t been successful even in fomenting the seeds of any kind of opposition or resistance. As bad as the Communist government has been to them, the Cuban people look north and see — what? Not a shining beacon of democracy, but instead a punitive, vengeful country, still punishing the island for offenses no longer relevant or, perhaps, even remembered.
A reasonable argument could have been made for the embargo during the Cold War, when the possibility of weapons (nuclear or otherwise) in Cuba was a real one. But for the last twenty years it has existed simply because it has always existed. The embargo is petty. It is small. And it is beneath us.
I was, then, put in the awkward position of defending a policy I myself did not agree with. I couldn’t decide which answer she would be happier with. Would it comfort Irma to know that most Americans don’t unilaterally hate Cuba — that indeed, most people in, say, Kansas have no opinion on Cuba whatsoever? Or would their apathy only make her angry?
So I deflected the question, and the conversation moved to other topics. But the core issue was one that would stay with me after I left Cuba. It is inevitable that, someday, the Cuban government will fall, and the United States will adopt a normal policy toward Cuba. But I think there’s going to be a rift between Cuba and the United States for a long time over our conduct over the last half-century, and we’re going to have a lot of things to answer for, and only feeble answers to give.