By Claudia Fanelli 1/20/2007
I am not Cuban. I don’t attempt
or pretend to be. I am
Italian-American, the granddaughter of economic, not political, immigrants.
As a result of my background, the concept of political
immigration was
foreign to me until I met my Cuban-born Spanish professors in college twenty
years ago.
Even so, knowing them as well as I did but never discussing their
ordeals, I had only marginal knowledge of Cuban history.
With regard to the Cuban exile experience, well, let’s just say that if
I didn’t hear it from Tony Montana, then I didn’t know about it.
My ignorance was never questioned much since I live in Pennsylvania where
the Cuban population is sparse. However,
now that Cuban history and literature are part of the high school Spanish
curriculum where I teach, I felt compelled to know more than what the student
textbook told me. Books, Blogs,
movies, documentaries and talking to Cubans have helped me to understand what is
so seemingly foreign a concept to the average American: the current situation in
Cuba.
Other teachers ask me questions about Cuba and while I am in no way an
authority, I do my best and get an answer if I don’t have one. You see, my colleagues 
have
no clue about what is going on in Cuba, and until I began talking to them, they
really didn’t care to know. Perhaps
they are relieved that I keep abreast of what is taking place so that they
don’t have to. After all, Cuba is
barely a blip on the radar of most Americans.
I am always sure to inform the curious about the suffering and the human
rights violations that are taking place in Cuba as a result of a 48-year death
grip on the country and her people. I
cite my sources when I need to and I state statistics when challenged by a fan
of Fidel. Once presented with the
propaganda espoused by Hollywood and parroted by those who swallow it, I unload
the litany of contradictions as well as the endless list of human and civil
rights violations that people who don’t live in Miami either don’t know or
choose not to acknowledge.
More and more frequently, someone will ask me “Why do you care so much about
Cuba? We don’t even have Cubans
around here.” I have no agenda.
I don’t have Cubans in my family and
my closest exile friend died this
summer, taking with her the stories of what happened to her in Cuba that she
couldn’t bring herself to share. I’m
just an American who wants to see freedom established in a country that
Americans clamor to visit clandestinely without regard to what is actually
taking place there. Now it’s true, where I live Cuban-sightings are few and far between,
but yet only an hour away is Union City, NJ, where a huge population of Cubans
live, and New York City is just a stone’s throw from there.
It’s hard to stay provincial once you are aware of the
fact that people
who left behind everything they owned, risked being jailed or killed or who made
the ultimate sacrifice of sending their children by themselves (14,000 of them
to be exact) to another country to escape the hell of their own, live sixty
measly miles from here. One would
think that I shouldn’t have to justify why I “care” about Cuba. Why should
I care about a country in such close proximity to us that their people try to
swim to get here after their makeshift rafts fall apart in the sea?
Why should I care about a country where the citizens are denied the
simple freedom of using the same hotels and restaurants as the tourists?
At a mere 90 miles away from here, how can I say that I don’t care?
Engaging in a “Why do you care?” discussion means keeping a calm head, for I
must make my points rationally, removing emotion from the argument so that I
don’t lose my cool. The problem is that now I am emotionally invested in this
issue: I am disgusted, infuriated and heartsick about what I know takes
place on the island. This makes remaining calm in the face of people who think
communism is a good system or that fidel Castro is “misunderstood.” But
perhaps the most frustrating conversations take place with those who are
apathetic. “They’re not our people,” I have been told. “Not “our”
people?” I ask. “Were
the Ethiopians “our” people? Americans
recorded music and sponsored Live Aid to help the poor and oppressed there. Were
the Bosnians “our” people? Americans
went to fight ethnic cleansing for them and there was nary a protest that they
weren’t “our” people. Were
the
victims of the tsunami
in Thailand “our” people? Americans donated money from their own pockets to help them.
Since when do others have to be “our” people for us to care about
humanity? And by “care,” I
don’t mean take to the streets and burn Castro in effigy or protest the
regime; I don’t expect that. I just mean not being apathetic.
Why should caring about the people suffering in a brutal, oppressive
dictatorship that is so close to the USA be any different from being concerned
about Darfur, Thailand, Indonesia, or anywhere else?
And if anything, we should care MORE because we have an enormous
population of Cubans living right here on OUR SOIL- which is now
THEIR SOIL.
Perhaps that is the problem.
People see how Cubans have prospered here (over 125,000 Cuban-American
owned business in the US), how much they have contributed to society and the
economy (over 26 billion dollars are generated by their businesses annually) and
how they have made their own way, even though they arrived with the clothes on
their backs. Maybe they just assume
that Cubans were good to go from the moment they arrived so life in Cuba can’t
be that bad after all; ergo, Cubans don’t really suffer.
“Castro isn’t that bad… he won a Human Rights Award- that must mean
something,” some uninformed people have told me.
“Do you know who awarded him that award?”
I ask, a little giddy to reveal the
award sponsor. “Moammar Gadhafi, you know, from LIBYA?”
“Oh,” is usually the response to that.
Conversation over. Nobody is going to defend Gadhafi. No wonder people don’t care about Cuba- if Castro has a
human rights award in his possession, everything must be right with the world! Far
from deserving human rights awards, Cuba’s totalitarian dictator has a long
list of violations against both 
human
and civil rights. I don’t know
about anyone else, but when I
heard that the Cuban government has Decree 988 which says that "executions
can be carried out in less than 48 hours, without trial,” I
scratch my head and wonder where the international out crying is.
Death without
trial? In Philadelphia, convicted
cop-killer Mumia Abdul Jamal got his trial and was sentenced to death and the liberal left in
Hollywood went ballistic trying to get him off death row, where he has been for
twenty-four years. But to be put to
death within 2 days and not get a trial and nobody makes a scene? Hollywood has
the biggest bully pulpit in the world and yet nobody says a word about Cuba, and
the Hollywood elite continue to visit Cuba and revere it as if it were paradise
on earth. How am I expected to wrap
my mind around that?
The Cuban American National Foundation stated that in 1992, there were 266,000
men, women and children in 241 prisons and concentration camps and 
there
were 54,000 Cubans dead for political reasons, including 12,486 killed by firing
squads. Keep in mind that these
statistics are fifteen years old- I shudder to
think how high the total is today. Should
this not bother me? Why do I care
that “only” 52,000 rafters tried to escape Cuba and out of those, 17,000
were successful? (That begs the
question, what happened to the other 35,000 rafters?) 
Where are Susan Sarandon and Ed Asner?
Has anyone told Oliver Stone
about these figures? Is Hollywood so enamored with Castro that they can just
ignore these heinous crimes against humanity? Castro puts to death thousands
upon thousands of people who dare not to tow the Communist party line, yet
Hollywood
embraces this
man? Am I the only non-Cuban who cares about this?
Do I have to be Cuban to care? Or
is the majority of the country so provincial that what happens outside of their
own town is not important unless a loudmouth Hollywood type says it is?
I think that Hollywood’s romantic notion of the revolution and its
leader have contributed to the American apathy toward our neighbor in the
Caribbean. After all, it was Hollywood, not Cuba, that produced such films as Havana,
Motorcycle Diaries, Comandante
and the upcoming Che.
are successful or are jealous of them and therefore cannot muster up
enough concern for humanity to give Cuba a second thought, they might want to
consider the stats. U.S Census data shows that in the first fifteen years after
Castro took power, over 640,000 people fled the island.
The total for over forty years of Castro’s regime has passed 1.5
million people. 
Not all of these were affluent like those who left the island
soon after Castro took over. Rather, these were the people for whom Castro had
supposedly created the “Revolution,” the working man, the poor, the
oppressed. If he had done right by
them, why would they be leaving en masse? In
1994 when he announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, 35,000
people tried to raft their way to the US. Try to understand that- people crafted
makeshift rafts and hopped on them, pushed off into the ocean, not knowing if
they would live or die, just for freedom. These
people were the regular people, desperate to escape death squads, ration cards,
denial of freedom of speech and a ban on religion.
These were the people who, when faced with the idea of “Socialismo
o Muerte,” chose death. Death
by drowning, death by sharks, death by dehydration… Yep, Cuba must be a real
paradise if these choices trumped life on the island. And why should I care? I
think the question should be “Why shouldn’t I?”
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