Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

I never expected to meet anyone from Cuba, but there he was beside me on a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis/Saint Paul--a wiry, curly-haired young man named Sergio. We weren't even near Cuba or Miami. What was he doing outside the ring I'd unwittingly drawn around Cuban participation in the world?

I hadn't given much thought to Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first time I was old enough to realize that a world event might actually affect me. More recently when my husband and I have visited Key West, Florida, we've imagined that we can see Cuba just over the horizon. Once in the mid-1990s, we met a Minnesotan library aide, who was taking his girlfriend to Cuba, via Mexico. He seemed thrilled to attempt what was then, and still may be, a rather risky trip.

In my book, Up to the Plate, I remembered writing about Las Cubanas, a Cuban "girls" team, who hosted the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the World War II era. The All-American girls stayed at the Seville Biltmore Hotel in Havana and drew bigger crowds than the Brooklyn Dodgers who were there for spring training. One Cuban player, Isabel Alvares, also landed a place with the All-American Girls, coming to the U.S. once she turned fifteen.

But May Day, as I'd mentioned in the book, was a dangerous time for the All-American visitors. The Havana hotel manager confined the female ball players to their rooms, fearful of political street fights on this "red letter" day for socialists and communists. In my rather hazy calendar of Cuban change, Castro's  Communist revolution overthrew the right-wing Battista, and after that, came the missile crisis. Now, thinking about my impressions of Cuba, I saw that the country had seethed with turmoil before the overthrow of Battista.

Now, here was Sergio, telling me how hard he and his Canadian wife worked to support their two children in the very expensive city of Vancouver, Canada. Since he's a carpenter, he's been able to fit out their one-bedroom apartment to provide everyone a bed, but it's clear that he and his wife worry about how they'll afford college. "Everyone in my family went to college free in Cuba," Sergio tells me. "My mother, my aunt, both have advanced engineering degrees, and their education was financed by the government." I'm impressed by this far-sighted program of Castro's communist government, well aware that even in U.S., going to"state" universities like the University of Minnesota can cost close to $80,000 for a four-year college education, not to mention the additional cost of a masters or Ph.D.

Not only was it very pleasant talking with this kind and articulate young Cuban, but we even traded differing versions of what started the Spanish-American War--his certainty that the explosion of the U.S.S.Maine in Havana harbor was an intentional act of aggression, and my suspicion that the explosion was simply an accident which the U.S. took as a pretext for invasion. In either case, we agreed about U.S. aggression, and I remembered a memorial in the Key West cemetery listing the Cuban dead from the war, assuming that Key West had had a substantial Cuban population.

We also both applauded President Obama's recent visit to Cuba. When he arrived in Havana, Obama sailed smoothly through Fidel Castro's refusal to meet him (though Raoul Castro did greet him). Obama gave a speech encouraging better relations between the two countries. Both of us applauded the President's composure and far-sighted desire for more neighborly relations. In the end we both feared what the current Republican front-runners for the presidency might make of Cuba. Sergio told me that Fidel Castro himself seemed to have lost the ability to grapple with current affairs. He seems stuck on the past, on the missile crisis and what he had hoped but not been able to create for his country.