I sit in a small painter's workshop on a rickety old chair, sipping sweet coffee that burns my fingers through the thin plastic cup and struggling to understand the answers to my questions. Don Eliades swallows half his consonants as most Cubans do, and the early-century recordings blaring from an old dial radio on his cluttered desk don't help. He has one small fan, and I'm grateful to escape the overbearing heat even briefly--anyone who calls Caribbean cultures slow or lazy has obviously never tried to live in this kind of heat and humidity. Little gets accomplished; his paints go soft and runny, the candles I bought this morning bend to the touch, and all I ever want to do is sleep. Maybe it's the heat, but it feels like I've gone back in time.
Baracoa is considered the most remote spot in Cuba, only accessible by boat or plane before the Revolution created La Farola, a narrow road that winds through the mountains, today bringing around 30 tourists a day to this sleepy town everyone keeps comparing to García Márquez's Macondo in "100 Years of Solitude" (I don't argue it, but there are no banana plantations here and Baracoa is on the sea... the comparison seems odd). Baracoans say the mesa Columbus described on his very first sighting of Cuba was theirs, El Yunque, although farther north the same claim is made of similar formations along the coast. But you don't argue with Baracoans about this, nor about the wooden cross kept in a glass case in a church barely standing in its disrepair. A Belgian university carbon dated the cross and found it was 500 years old, and Baracoans have always claimed it was one of the crosses brought from the old world by Columbus himself, the only one still left and now protected from the whittlings of pilgrims by sterling silver adornments and a dusty glass case. According to my guide book, a Spanish university later discovered that though it was 500 years old, the cross was made of a local hardwood endemic to Cuba, and that it couldn't have come across with Columbus. But it doesn't say that on the faded sign inside the church, and it's not smart to argue it with the locals, who are very defensive about their cultural patrimony.
I ask Eliades about his artistic education in such a remote town, about the specialized art institute he was sent to in Santiago after the Revolution removed all the fine arts from regular educational programs. Like my friend Caridad in Havana, Eliades sees both sides. Removing the arts from regular education did a LOT to advance the arts in Cuba because specialized art schools took techniques further much faster than they'd have developed as a small part of a larger academic curriculum, and this is obvious in everything from Cuban music and film to painting and "artes plásticas." But like Cari, Eliades also feels the times have changed--at the start of the Revolution, priorities needed to shift, and problems like intellectual brain drain meant regular education had to put fields like history and philosophy before art so a new society of thinkers could be developed. Today, however, young people still have almost no artistic education within the regular schools and only study fine arts if they're identified as talented and sent off to special institutes. The growth of artistic appreciation happens only informally in Cuba, outside the classroom walls, ironic considering how artistically advanced the arts themselves are.
It's only when I put down my notebook and thank Eliades that he asks what he's probably wanted to know the whole time, the question that likely made him willing to be interviewed at all. He wants to know about the shootings at Virginia Tech, how we could have such a problem with youth violence in the U.S. I got the same question almost constantly when I was here in 2000, just after the Colombine shootings. I don't really have a satisfying answer to give; I try to explain U.S. gun laws and why they exist, but Eliades can tell it doesn't even make sense to me--as he said, it's one thing to have guns and another thing entirely to USE them on other human beings. "Something's broken in our society," I finally say. "I think it started around 9/11." I look down at Eliades' gnarled, paint-covered hands, searching for an explanation. "Ten years ago, I had a few depressed students; today, it's more like a third of the class."Eliades sips at his coffee, thinking. "We offered help after 9/11," he tells me. "Every U.S. tragedy has been met with Cuban solidarity, from Hurricane Katrina to Virginia Tech. But our help is always refused." He goes on--he tells me of Cuban doctors, teachers and laborers who had their bags packed and their paperwork stamped and ready, to come help after 9/11 and then again after Katrina, to help us rebuild our schools, homes and lives, and who instead were sent to Malasia so they could at least be of service somewhere. "It was a chance at a new start, a new friendship, the chance for solidarity between our countries," he says. He looks sad, and I don't have the heart to tell him that the American press paints these Cuban solidarity trips as attempts to sell socialism to the world and create unrest, spread the Revolution. I remember a billboard I saw in Havana last week: "The Bush Plan: No Friendship, No Humanity." We can't even take care of our own people in the U.S., yet we criticize Cuba for trying to take care of the world.
Sometimes I have trouble understanding how Cubans can be so taken with "El Pueblo Norteamericano," given such ample evidence of our hypocrisies. But everywhere I go, Cubans tell me that the U.S. people are just and honest, noble and good, that our personality as a culture is marred only by the actions of our most powerful classes, but that our society was built on all the right humanistic principles. They mourn the death of our children in Iraq, are proud of our mothers for rising up against the war. Cubans consistently distinguish between the U.S. government and the U.S. people, and they GET the difference between a just pueblo and the monster that governs them. And each time a Cuban tells me this, I'm left wondering why we can't do the same, why our government and press won't let us see Cubans as they are, as people who are just, kind and generous for the right reasons: because they believe in helping others and in confronting injustice when they see it. There is nothing more powerful than to feel the respect they have for us, in spite of our jailing their most honest men and letting their worst counter-terrorist go free, in spite of our creating inhumane laws that sqeeze them half to death and then reward suicidal attempts to cross to our shores when we won't give them citizenship without risking their lives. We just keep building walls, while Cuba just keeps trying to break them down.
At least individuals can escape the idiocy, and we try. Eliades wraps up a small painting for me, insisting that I take it without payment. "To remember me," he says. I raise my plastic coffee cup and smile weakly at him. "To friendship and solidarity," I say. And we click our cups together with a quiet plastic thud.
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