Socialism in Cuba drawing spring breakers, too
By LAURIE GOERING, The Chicago Tribune (via Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel) Web-posted: 2:54 p.m. Mar. 23, 2000
HAVANA-- Caroline Finch's program of study at Columbia University Business School normally doesn't touch on socialist revolution.
Last week, though, she was right in the middle of a mob of flag-waving students at one of Havana's near-daily revolutionary rallies, a lone capitalist getting an up-close look at the other side.
"I don't think I've ever seen anything like it," she said in wonderment, souvenir Cuban flag in hand, as speakers exhorted the crowd with calls of "Homeland or Death!" over the booming public address system.
Spring break is not what it used to be, even for future MBAs. As relations slowly thaw between the United States and Cuba, cultural and educational exchanges are growing rapidly, and more and more students are abandoning Cancun for a taste of long-forbidden Cuba.
Last week, with dozens of major U.S. universities on spring break, the narrow cobblestone streets of Old Havana were jammed with Yale University law students and glee club, University of South Florida geologists, medical students from the University of Wisconsin, a herd of Princeton undergraduates and the Columbia University MBA class, to name just a few.
At the U.S. Interests Section on Havana's waterfront, student groups lined up waiting for up to four briefings a day by tired U.S. diplomats. Cuban officials were getting a similar workout.
"There's never been a time with more cultural and academic groups going down," said Kirby Jones, the head of Alamar Associates, a consulting group on trade with Cuba. "Even more congressmen and senators are going. We're seeing a big increase in contact."
Many of the visitors are coming under an increasingly relaxed U.S. licensing system that allows students, professors, researchers and just average Americans to visit Cuba for educational or research purposes.
Under the rules, almost anyone can legally visit the island by studying photography with the Maine Photographic Workshop, for example, or exploring U.S. policy toward the island with Witness for Peace or learning about Afro-Caribbean music and religion through Global Exchange.
Last year, besides Cuban-Americans visiting their families, more than 60,000 Americans made their way to the island, Cuban government figures show, and the number is expected to rise sharply this year.
That includes a significant number of illegal visitors, who, drawn by rum, cigars, white beaches and the allure of one of the world's last socialist societies, flaunt the U.S. embargo that effectively bans solo travel to Cuba.
"This is Prohibition all over again. The moment you prohibit something people are all the more interested," said Louis Perez Jr., a University of North Carolina historian who has written five books on Cuba. Americans, he said, "are going in droves."
The mob includes visitors like Deke, an Alabama businessman who recently stayed at a posh Old Havana hotel on his second trip to Cuba. He called the island "a must-see for any traveler" and said his own trips have persuaded him that U.S. sanctions against Cuba are ineffective and should be lifted. "Seeing this has changed my mind," he said. "I didn't know much at first. I came to drink rum, smoke cigars and sightsee. But I came back thinking these are great people and we shouldn't be so hard on them."
The rush to Cuba is inspired in part by the island's recent high profile in the United States with the ongoing Elian Gonzalez custody battle, visits by top officials such as Illinois' Gov. George Ryan and the success of the "Buena Vista Social Club" movie.
"There's tremendous interest in Cuba right now," said Kristen Moller, co-director of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based exchange operator that sponsors two to three "reality tours" a month to the island, focused on health care, renewable energy, revolutionary culture and music.
"Culturally it's a country that's very accessible for North Americans, very warm and outgoing, with a well-educated population. Almost anyone can engage you in a dialogue about current issues of the day," she said.
And "as more and more people go, the word of mouth gets around that it's a fun place," she said. "It's the last socialist bastion in the world, which is interesting for people to see."
That is clearly a major draw for Americans thronging the island, most of whom say they wanted to see Cuba's culture and socialist way of life before relations between the two countries normalize and the first McDonald's and Hard Rock Cafe inevitably one day arrive.
"When I was growing up, Cuba was a hands-off communist country. I've always been curious to see how that plays out on a day-to-day way in peoples' lives," said Traci Noone, a Cape Cod photographer and former Chicago Art Institute student enrolled in a two-week photographic workshop in Cuba.
The flood of Americans strolling amid Havana's magnificently crumbling architecture, however, she said, "seems to beg the question why we have the sanctions (against Cuba). Obviously it's not a real restriction, because people are coming here all the time."
Legal U.S. visitors normally spend at least part of their time in Cuba on official tours organized by the government, often to schools, hospitals, factories and other sites designed to show off Cuba's achievements in education and health while emphasizing the economic damage done by U.S. sanctions.
The visits provide some interesting opportunities for two-way exchange. At a Cuban high school, Columbia University Business School students were quizzed on the rash of school shootings in the United States and asked why the U.S. had failed to return 6-year-old shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez, portrayed in Cuba as a kidnap victim and always shown grim-faced behind a chainlink fence.
The U.S. students, in turn, were fascinated to hear how top Cuban students take government jobs, while the best U.S. students often head to private industry -- not a choice for most Cubans in a society where private jobs are tightly regulated and taxed if not altogether discouraged.
Most of the visitors came away persuaded U.S. policy is not working -- and worried that U.S. business is being left behind as other nations invest in Cuba.
"The embargo is having the opposite effect of what we want by giving Cuba a huge rallying point," said Sebastian Stubbe, a Columbia business student. "We should lift it sooner rather than later. It's clear it isn't going to make Fidel Castro fall to his knees."
"Where Cuba is going should be a decision made by Cubans and, our policy gets in the way of that," said Michael Joseph, a Witness for Peace exchange organizer who hauled visiting U.S. pastors, university and high school students and professors to a Havana baseball game recently.
A few of the conversions in thinking after visits to Cuba have come at high levels. U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford, a conservative South Carolina Republican, now is trying in Congress to lift travel restrictions to Cuba as a result of visits on his own and with a church group.
Not all travelers to the island, of course, come away persuaded that U.S. policy should change. Dennis, an illegal visitor from Alabama, said his look at Cuban society had strengthened his feeling that the United States should stick to its policy guns.
"This is a prime example of the failure of socialism," he said, gazing outside his luxury Old Havana hotel at the crowds strolling and bicycling by in the hot afternoon sun. "This guy opening the door," he said, gesturing to a bellboy, "is a doctor who makes more in tips than he would in his profession."
"If lifting sanctions would extend what's going on here, I don't want to see it," he said. "The government in this country is a failure."
Some repeat exchange visitors to Cuba -- including a group of law-enforcement students and professionals organized through the University of Illinois at Chicago -- say they can see at least subtle signs of opening in Cuba's authoritarian government.
In talks last week, Cuban officials for the first time admitted to the group that the island has problems with organized crime and drug trafficking, said R.C. Raycraft, a Normal, Ill.-based communications specialist with the Office of International Criminal Justice.
And while the visitors were not allowed into police stations and prisons, generally on the excuse that the group had run out of time, "people were genuinely answering our questions," said Vesna Markovic, a recent master's student in international criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "I think Cuba is headed the way of China, with more opening."