BY JON HILLSON
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota - Sixty people here, including
college and high school students, unionists, farmers,
and political activists heard brief, powerful speeches
on August 30 from 14 of the 17 members of the Minnesota
delegation to the August 1-7 Cuba Lives! festival.
The reportback, sponsored by the Twin Cities Cuba Network, featured the impressions of the diverse group and included an extensive question-and-answer period.
Diverse in age, occupations, and experience, the Cuba travelers were united in a common purpose to defend Cuba after coming back from their trip.
Lisa Rottach, a 27-year-old activist who participated in trips to Cuba sponsored by Pastors for Peace, Freedom to Travel Campaign, and the International Youth Brigade in the past two years, compared the changes over that period, as Cuban working people mounted "resistance to the effects of the embargo, and the collapse of trade with the USSR and Eastern Europe."
"Cuba has turned a corner," she said, with "more food available, fewer [power] black-outs, and a small increase in the economy."
"I'm a novice at all this," Todd Patton, a family practice doctor noted, "but anyone can see that the revolution is alive. People don't say, `what can I do for me,' but `what can we do for society.'"
Seeing Cuba with their own eyes
Shane Bastien, a 15-year-old high school student,
said he was prepared to debate fellow students,
"because I saw with my own eyes a true democracy."
Dan Keyser, a community farmer, said he had countered the argument that Cuba is a dictatorship by explaining what "Cubans vote for in their elections. Not parties or personalities, but rights: the right of farmers to land, of students to free education, of women for their rights, of a people to have their own government."
Kim Kochelmeyer, a prison reform advocate, saw a "culture that gives hope, proof that the planet will survive. But you have to go there to see this."
Megan Arney, a 25-year-old airline worker who quit her job for the trip, had already returned to brief former co-workers on what she saw. She reported on the half-million strong demonstration in support of the Cuban revolution, under a driving rain, that capped the festival.
"Everywhere you turned, there were people from other countries. I started talking to someone," the Young Socialists member said, "and he was from Angola. And Cubans were everywhere. It was the energy of internationalism, marching, and hearing all these languages."
Steve Quintanilla, a printshop worker, quoted from a newspaper article which claimed that "Cuba is virtually closed to outsiders."
"But I saw the opposite. Cuba is open, and the United States is closed to `outsiders,' " he said.
Amy Roberts, a 19-year-old activist, spent time with members of Cuban women's organizations. She detailed achievements from free and legal abortion to inexpensive child care, maternity, and job rights, which are being defended under difficult economic conditions. "If women in the United States want an example to learn from," Roberts said, "they should look to Cuba."
"Thousands of Cuban families took us into their homes," explained Michelle Wiegand, director of a community housing organization. This enabled the activists to deepen the experience of solidarity, which should "inspire us to work in behalf of Cuba."
Wiegand urged the crowd to become active in fighting "the internationalization of the [U.S. economic] blockade" by opposing congressional measures sponsored by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms and U.S. Representative Phillip Burton to tighten the 34 year embargo against the revolutionary government.
That embargo, Tony Lane said, will not be lifted any time soon. Citing recent articles in the New York Times, Lane, a Northwest Airlines ramp worker and member of the International Association of Machinists, quoted a top U.S. government official who termed Cuba "a special case" for ongoing hostility from Washington.
"Why is Cuba a `special case?'" Lane asked. The answer came from the response at the closing session of the Cuba Lives! festival, when Cuban President Fidel Castro asked, "Is the power in the hands of the bourgeoisie? Is the power in the hands of the capitalists?" The audience shouted, "NO!"
"Castro explained," Lane said, "that in Cuba, `power is in the hands of the people, the workers.'"
An example for fighters
This fact is why "Cuba is the example to everyone in
every country who fights for justice," said Adriana
Sanchez, a recent graduate of the University of
Minnesota. Sanchez represented the U.S. delegation at
the closing ceremony of the event.
"People ask me, `since you're Mexican, why do you support Cuba, why don't you support the Zapatistas?'" she said. "I tell them, Cuba represents the Zapatistas. Cuba represents the immigrants, Cuba represents the homeless, Cuba represents women fighting for abortion rights. Cuba is the message of solidarity to all those who live in a system that is not working for them."
"That is why we should work for Cuba," Sanchez said. "That is why we should go to Cuba to learn about it for ourselves, and why we should bring Cubans here to see the capitalist reality for themselves."
Such outreach has already begun. Mary Swenson, a leader of the Resource Center of the Americas, which cohosted the reportback meeting, opened the event with an offer to utilize the organization's vast secondary education network "to get this information out to the high schools. Now is a very important time to talk about Cuba," she said.