How Cuba Shaped and Shapes Me

Revolutionary Cuba and it's many roles in my life.

It's been awhile since I was writing on a regular basis, and outside of telling the stories of life caregiving for my mother, there have been scant few articles or even “introductory rants” on someone else's article for several years. At this point, my first substack post, those of you who are subbed to it are people who know me and my life on some level, so I think I will tie the various aspects of my life together, from the mid-nineties on. What has consistently been a bulwark of strength in my consciousness? Revolutionary Cuba, of course. How Cuba has related to and impacted my life has had multiple stages, none greater than any other. As a young adult, I was becoming aware of things like the environmental crisis of our time.

Questions like “How can we survive on a planet that has a limit to growth built in, while living under an economy that needs infinite growth?” were among the queries I wrestled with that ultimately made me look to anti-capitalist ideas (though it would be a few more months until I said those words as such). Chomsky, Parenti and others pushed me over and I became a radical in ideals. Very quickly, despite the USSR having been defeated only a half decade before, I was introduced to and enamoured with Cuba.

I got a politically satisfactory job of knocking on doors for the Wilderness Committee when they were still WC2. Met some great friends, saved up money and was able to go to revolutionary Cuba for January 1, 1999-- the 40^th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. The date actually matters in some other ways, too; I had been trying to be an active participant in various other political causes and groups-- one of those was a Hands Off Iraq group.

By late 1998 I had traveled only to countries involved in Nafta in my life-- I had never crossed the Pond, nor had I gone south of Chiapas or Miami. The 3 week trip to Mexico my mother took me on in 1985 was my only travel to a country very different than Canada or the US (and Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and DF were neat, but not exactly culturally representative of much outside of the tourism).

When I went to leave for Cuba, I told myself to be ready for things I had not seen that might shock me: Police telling you where you could or couldn't go, for example. I also expected other things of a similar bent, essentially I assumed that a good chunk of the anti-communist/anti-Cuba stuff that I had been surrounded by most of my life would show itself. I told myself “It's okay, they are surrounded and have dealt with literally over 100 attempts on Fidel's life, poisoning attacks on crops, airliners blown up and more; It's not the end of the world or the revolution if the government takes extreme measures to prevent this from happening.”

At this time, I wore my father's PCMR (Pacific Coast Militia Rangers) beret everywhere. I looked, well, like either a young radical or a hipster hippie-- maybe both. But in 1998, looking like a possible drug dealer as I entered Cuba-- my first time dealing with ANY immigration on my own-- certainly came with a cost. I landed at the Varadero airport (really, Matanzas) and had a pre-arranged ride (from the travel agent) to Havana waiting for me. I just had to go through customs first. This older fellow-- probably at least 28 or so-- who was with the Cuban state started to stare at me. I didn't have a clue why this was happening, and I must have been obvious about getting nervous. This is a classic almost all people who don't have major power go through: “Do I look guilty? Oh, man... I'd better not...” and this thought process makes you look very guilty of something. Guy kept looking at me, and eventually just pulled me out of line. He took me into a little room, and this wasn't exactly making my day. I knew I did nothing, so I was nervous but not freaking out.

The first thing he said to me after he asked if I had any drugs in my bag was such total, typical cop talk: “I tell you what, if you just give me the drugs now, there won't be a problem,” sure. Now I am nervous. Having been active in social justice struggles for a couple of years, I knew when cops were being cops and I knew to just say as little as possible. After I replied again that there were no drugs, he started to go through my backpack. He unfolded my sock pairs, and seemed to be watching me, to see when I got nervous so that he would know where things were by my visual 'tell.'

I had no drugs, so I was basically just waiting for him to get bored of looking and hoping I'd still be allowed through once they figured out there were no narcotics in any fold, pocket or section of my backpack.

Then he came across the books in my bag. “Cuba at the Crossroads: Conversations with Fidel Castro,” “The history of the Cuban Revolution,” “Mao Tse-tung: An anthology of his writings” (yes, the old spelling-- I still have the book). And finally, Regis Debray: “Revolution in the Revolution.”

The cop stopped dead. He looked at the books for a minute, and then he held up the one with Fidel on the cover. He looked me dead in the eye, and asked his most important question: “Do you like this man??”

“Yes,” I replied. “I am a friend of the revolution and think a lot of him,” and the tone shifted about as much as is possible.

“This is the greatest man on this earth,” the Cuban cop replied, and then he did something that 25 years later has not happened to me in any searching of my stuff by a cop ever again, anywhere. He apologized, and started to repack my bag for me. He then asked me, now just as a curious Cuban chatting with a young comrade, “Why are you here?”

“I believe in much of the revolution, and I want to see how I can help,” was my perhaps a little ridiculous but totally honest answer. His next reply still makes me get very emotional to this day. He looked at me sternly, and said:

“If you want to travel to help someone right now, you should be in Iraq,” and my body just got covered in goosebumps thinking about that. A fucking cop called me out for not doing enough solidarity with the people of Iraq. As a young barely 23 year old radical, I was highly susceptible to radical guilt trips. I had been involved with trying to stop the bombing that history now knows as “Operation Desert Fox,” led by Bill Clinton. Sanctions had already murdered hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 5 at this point; The bombing was torturing a dying horse. I already felt lousy about leaving the anti-war, anti-sanctions group to travel when that bombing was about to happen.

A flippin’ cop no less, was now calling me out for going to Cuba when there was anti-imperialist work that needed more immediate attention elsewhere. The bombing campaign began within hours of his admonishment. A cop, with true internationalism, and a fire in his eyes when we got to talking about it. I remember feeling so very very very at home. This was Cuba? This is the country I'm supposed to be afraid of? Where the cops have better politics than even the left of the NDP back home? I love this place! It's settled. And now I can actually go outside here, for the first time ever. I hadn't even seen the Cuban sun yet.

Similar to my most recent 2023 visit, I contracted dysentery while on the island. I had already travelled across the country via the train. On that train, a Cuban with good english sat next to me and saw that I was reading Regis Debray. He began a polite but firm lecture on how that book got hundreds if not thousands of good, would be revolutionaries killed needlessly. I recall this chat going on for awhile; I have no idea what my reply to him was. I do know now that he was absolutely right, and while an important historical tract, this text as a guide to action is collective suicide. So the random 40 something guy who sat next to me on a passenger train helped me synthesize my young theoretical brain. Romantic thoughts + revolutionary actions can = regretful results.

This trip was designed for me to get to Santiago de Cuba for the speech of Fidel at the very same balcony he proclaimed the defeat of Batista and the arrival of the Bearded Ones on January 1, 1959. After I got to Santiago, I wandered the first day and saw something that shocked me: A person who I would learn over the coming decades to call them, but at the time I still mentally said “him” very effeminately walking down a main road in Santiago, with a dress and a visible adam's apple, loudly saying something to others who turned their heads, but without an aghast look on any faces. I knew of the horrid repression of queers in Cuba decades prior, and this was a very welcome and relieving sight for me-- one that has expanded to be the best place in Latin America for non-gender conforming people to live normal, publicly seen lives. I couldn't see the future then and I knew the past, so to see this in that present was important for me.

I didn't have strength to see much more soon after that. As mentioned, I contracted nasty bowel infections that held me glued to my hotel toilet for over a day. After a day and constant liquids running in and coming out-- and I'll stop there because the details don't get better-- I stumbled down to the front desk and the people behind it were shocked at the sight of me, likely a weird shade of green.

They grabbed me and put me in a cab to rush me to a medical clinic. The cab didn't take money from a sick kid. I went inside and the medical team went about hooking me up to IV's and got me eating charcoal; I was ordered to drink Coke as a possible stool thickener. I stayed in this little facility until my colour returned and I could stand up. I had no insurance, and if that had happened in Canada, never mind the US, I might still be paying it off. My IV, other meds and several hours in the facility would cost me $100 I was told. I was 23 and dumb, so I asked what happened to free health care? I was told that 's for Cubans and that I wasn't one, so... then I showed them my wallet and how I only had $120 left for the trip.

“Oh my goodness! Okay, no worries, you can't give that up. Just give me a minute and I'll take care of it,” said the doctor. Then a few minutes later he came over and told me to pay.

“What happened? I thought you said I didn't have to pay...”

He pointed to the woman in the fancy uniform who just came in. She was from the Party and he couldn't give me a break with her around, there would be problems. Okay, I paid the money and was a lot nervous (this is pre-easy money transfers) now. Then I realized how cool it was that the people themselves, the doctor in this case, were more to the left than the government itself. The individuals sense of solidarity with my financial situation was more important to him than getting my Yankee cash (the CUC system would come years later, this was all at the end of the “Special Period”).

So at this time of my life, Cuba was embracing me and I back, and our shared values made me feel very much a part of something far greater than myself, and for a radical? That's a very addictive feeling. I left early in January 1999 for Canada, and somewhere else at the exact same time, another great revolutionary movement was just taking power for the first time mere days later: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias and the Bolivarian Movement for a Fifth Republic would take power in the Miraflores palace of Caracas.

Within a few more months, and thanks to the young internet connecting me with other revolutionaries from the south, I was a supporter of Chávez and his ideals. At the time I called him an “Allende with support from the military,” and a friend from Argentina made me feel brilliant for that formulation. I watched some things from Venezuela, and saw how even with bourgeois methods it seemed like radical changes might be taking place in that country. When I was one of thousands who were tear gassed at the “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001 that changed my life even more dramatically than any of these Cuba (and Venezuela) stories did, but for the purposes of this story, let me say that when wafting tear gas through windows called the days presidential summit to a close, our hearts were pried open with pride. Later on, I learned that the declaration of “representative” democracies inclusion was forced to be changed by HRCF to “participatory” and threatened to give the summit no consensus documents without that change.

Of course though, as the summit was a capitalist fest planning to carve up slices of Latin America to feed to corporations from North America and Europe, Cuba was not invited and was excluded. The day after I was tear gassed off the streets by a canister in the back-- leading to a former Black Panther calling himself “Doc” giving my swollen spine acupuncture in a “people's tent”-- thank goodness, because SQ cops were arresting people in hospitals. Then I found this statement from Fidel, while I was recovering my ultimately minor injuries:

We have just watched, on television, images of the brutal manner in which Canadian authorities are repressing the peaceful protest over the crime being attempted in Quebec against the political and economic rights of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a shame!

I wish to express on behalf of the people of Cuba our sympathy and admiration for the brave and heroic behaviour of those who struggle there for such a just cause. Governments that deceive the world by calling themselves defenders of human rights treat their own people in such a way! In this manner, they hope to discharge their guilt for the millions of children, women, adults and elderly in the world that, although they could be saved, die every year of disease and hunger. These governments will not be able to sustain the unfair order they have imposed upon humankind. We convey our fullest solidarity. Cuba supports you, embraces you and greets you with fraternity,

Fidel Castro Ruz

I was a weeks hitchhike or bus ride from home, I was wearing clothes that were making my eyes water from tear gas residue and I was sleeping on a gymnasium floor next to hundreds of other strangers, all who had just experienced this insane level of state violence to protect corporate criminals while they plotted a crime-- and then I read that Fidel “...embraces you and greets you with fraternity.” I got emotional writing down the story of the Cuban cop who understood internationalism and solidarity better than many activists, but I feel a strong sense of emotional peace and love with digging up this quote from Fidel. Is it stupid that I felt he was talking to me? Maybe, but getting a very clear revolutionary approval from the greatest living revolutionary of that time was enough. Revolutionary for life! Period, no excuses.

Some years later, I was at my apartment with a friend when the news reported that there was a coup in Caracas, and that Chávez had been overthrown. We nearly had a fight because I wasn't going to “get over it” and be okay with this, Chávez was clearly the only leader since the defeat of the USSR to seriously provide hope, a real future and an absolute end to that Fukuyama nonsense of the “End of History.” I took it personally, and I was instantly sad and immobilized. For another 24 to 36 hours, that is.

After 36 hours? Venezuela did what no one had done before, and they took the US coup and shoved it right where it belonged-- the dustbin of history. The people themselves rose, and the animated, participatory nature of the Bolivarian Revolution was on display for the whole world to see. The Americans tried as they always do, to drown the vision of liberation in blood-- but the people of Venezuelas barrios, the workers and the peasants and the rank and file members of the military sent them back (Venezuela had a very working class and non-white military). It was the greatest victory of the people I have seen in my lifetime (I was born a few months after Yanks tried to grab at rising helicopters and flee a liberated Ho Chi Minh City).

The wholesale participatory nature of the Bolivarian revolution and it's ability to advance with the people portended a new framework for revolution-- one that seemed to line up with Fidel's statement that “now the great struggle is the battle of ideas,” rather than trying to simply seize a state. When Chávez added in that “we are peaceful but not disarmed,” and that any Allende-like coup would fail because the people were organized to defend the revolution, I was hooked. A thousand referendums, where ballot paper flies around like snow flurries in Ontario in February? This, with an armed people, who rewrote their own constitution? Yes!

After this, perhaps the most cordial of passionate arguments would happen in my home over family reunions and dinners. Which is more important to advancing liberation: Cuba or Venezuela? Bolivarian Venezuela had the oil, the democratic and participatory structures that outstripped even the most advanced bourgeois representation. Taking the originally Maoist proposition of “from the people, to the people” Venezuela advanced new laws, but only after the people had understood the call for them and voted them into existence. The scope of this was so vast, there simply was no way the US could allow this, what Chomsky called “The threat of the good example.”

What was Cuba doing during all of this? Supplying doctors and teachers to the poorest Venezuelans (and others around the world), in exchange for the oil and gas needed to fuel their green but not perfect economy. During this time, the so-called “Special Period” had forced new agriculture onto Cuba, and they took compost and grew diamonds again-- creating the green revolution that the very right-wing WWF called the only sustainable environmental economy on the planet. Uh, if you have been outdoors in the last month you'll see the significance of this.

But Cuba has always been there-- right up until a few years after the death of Fidel himself, and the start of the global pandemic. The shortest version possible is that on Halloween 2014 I brought my mother to live with me when it became clear that the decision was either with me, or with strangers in a Long Term Care facility. Cuba was where I went when I desperately needed dental work and had no insurance; It was cheaper for me to get two fillings and two root canals there and pay for lodging, food and fun for two weeks than just paying for two root canals would be here in Vancouver, Canada.

After returning from that trip, mere months later the world was in the throes of a pandemic that threatened to kill my mother and pretty much anyone who had any lung or other compounding vulnerability. Almost immediately, Cuba began to send brigades of doctors to face down this struggle all around the world: Italy, under a far right government, applauded and thanked Cuba for saving countless lives. They worked all over Latin America, of course, and South Africa and many other places. One of the places that filled out all the Cuban forms, applied and went through everything needed to get this assistance? Indigenous nations who were isolated and vulnerable because Canada had no doctors near their communities. They specifically explained that Cuban doctors were willing to go where the work was dangerous and were undaunted by the scale of the crisis. Canada's then foreign minister Chrystia Freeland put her far right stamp on things and blocked Canadian immigration from allowing these doctors-- who had made a deal with sovereign indigenous nations-- from being allowed to help. Thus was both a reminder of what Cuba stands for, and what Canada is really all about, when you strip away the rhetoric.

Cuba, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for these global efforts, got through the pandemic, but not without making erroneously stupid economic moves. They have eliminated the two tiered economic structures and then floated the Cuban peso without help, costing about 80% of the savings of Cubans in the process. These moves are dangerous at the best of times-- but this was during the pandemic. Cuba is seeing perhaps the hardest times since January 1, 1959 right now-- combined with these issues are many of the problems with the Chávista sin Chavez Venezuela, whose oil deliveries have also become problematic. In the streets of Havana-- the “big money capital” that all countries have-- the desperation now is palpable, and truly hurts my heart.

That pain was felt in January of 2023 for me. My time caregiving 24/7 for my mother ended in 2022 when I had a breakdown and personal crisis as a result of the isolation of the pandemic-- but when my mother suffered a major injury here at home during a Christmas visit months later, my own mental health and stress became dangerously acute. The internal wreck I instantly became was very frightening. I had two realistic choices: Stay here and end up dead from a likely night of binge drinking or institutionalized somehow, or flee and try to at the least begin to begin relaxing.

During the years prior to becoming a full time caregiver my work was resisting climate change and extreme extraction like the tar sands, & I had travelled to Venezuela a number of times, along with other countries such as Madagascar, Trindad and Tobago, South Africa and so on. I have become used to how things go for a white looking man from an imperialist country in all of these places. But now? I was broken. It was all over my face, and in my posture and more.

As too many victims can tell you, predators have a “sixth sense” about the vulnerability of their marks. I had always travelled with a “Nothing will happen to me!” confident/arrogance that would be also evident to a would-be predator. I think on the dumb things I used to do-- being drunk and going to a barrio in Caracas at 1am because some guy I had chatted with said it was fine? Well, it was fine, but that was incredibly stupid. I can think on feeling “cased” and seeing the eyes of strangers look to the bulge in my pocket so many times in all of the listed countries, and others unmentioned. Completely broken, able to cry and whimper on a dime but unable to feel true laughter, I was in no shape to go to any of these places. Except Cuba. I knew and already felt safe in Cuba. Just that thought, sitting where I'm writing it now, that I could flee there and be safe? That was the light at the end of not a tunnel, but a dark hallway of despair that led nowhere else.

My collapse had me exhausted to the point I couldn't tell I was exhausted any more. I decided to rent a bike in Havana and ride to Matanzas (just under 100km, not very far). I went out the first day, got lost by accident, and then actually hitchhiked with a 1500 Euro valued electric bike back to Havana. I also knew even in my completely broken state, that this was safe. My tired, beaten up look didn't make me a mark in Cuba-- it made me a target for individual solidarity. I stuck out my thumb and got a ride from Catorro back to La Habana in mere minutes, paid the driver some cash and went about looking for a new place to sleep.

I was very messed up, and trying to just take a break at this restaurant in Vedado when a woman heard my issues and was able to communicate to me that I could come by her place. In Canada I might do that, in no other country would I do such a thing. In Cuba, the idea this was a scam or a set up just didn't even cross my mind, or more importantly, it never entered my over anxious, “something always goes wrong” anxiety disordered soul and body. I stayed with them for a few days, and as soon as I realized I was safe my body gave out. I slept 14 hours a day in their home for more than 3 days. Walking the three blocks to where I could use the internet was my big action for those days.

Cubans treat everyone as a human first, on all matters. Education and raising your kids with the right values across an entire society has immediate merit. Cuba proves to me --and the world that is honest-- that we don't have a selfish gene, that humans are capable of being so much better if we just try to collaborate as an entire society in that goal. I had been (and am still, though improving) hard wired and distorted in my very brain chemistry by the stress of caregiving for an elder with dementia-- and doing it in a society that really hates it when people do that, preferring that we toss our elders in a bin and get on with making money for some ass-hole. It breaks you down and steals your sense of human self-worth. In a given day, I'd try to be proud of what I was able to do for my aging mother, and even other so-called “activists” would talk to me as if they felt sorry not for the situation, but for my “inability” to walk away like “you are supposed to do.” Yuck.

After a day and a half of staying with these strangers just off the main drag in Vedado, I managed to tell them all about my situation and why I was sleeping even though I was on vacation. For telling them this (in order to thank them for their hospitality), I went for a walk and when I got back my rented bike with the flat tire had been fixed. One of my hosts had taken it 20-25 blocks, got the tire fixed and brought it back ready to go and even fully charged the thing. They didn't say it, but I could tell they just wanted to give me a break.

When you are over stimulated, and your body cannot relax anymore because of the trauma you have gone through, you move around like there are ants in your pants all the time. You can't sit down, you try to go for a slow walk and your body just keeps taking off on you. Even trying to type it out is making my back tighten up and ache a little.

Cubans don't do life like that. You might find a little bit of the worst type of service in the tourist sectors, since us imperialist tourists are used to people who bring coffee or food “jumping to it, working hard and moving fast!” but for the most part, if there is no reason to hurry, they don't. They are workers first, and their dignity is not being compromised to get you the thing 20 seconds faster. Just chill and remember that life isn't all 30 second clips.

Being around people who seemed to steadfastly refuse to get stressed out by work was a revelation. I began to almost see the energy and stress that would come off of individuals. I could see the other white tourists, talking into their phones, marching along not looking at other people and somehow being on vacation and acting like they were on a rigid, stressful schedule. They actually couldn't slow down, and I avoided them because I couldn't stand being in that energy. Cuba reminded me so very, very clearly that we don't have to act like this. These revelations may not have saved my life outright, but they sure did save my soul.

Why do I feel safe, even down the least travelled alleys of La Habana? It's not that there are no Cubans who want to rip you off or hustle you; You'll be surrounded by jineteros trying to get you in their cab before you leave the first few steps from the airport. But let's return to what I spoke about earlier: The collective manner in which the society raises its kids to be adults.

Whether it's part of building solidarity with others in the society, to always being alert for American attempts at sabotage, Cubans are all part of the national project of building socialism, but also of changing how people think. Thinking collectively means acting when something happens that violates the sanctity of the local peace. This means if you see something wrong, you do something about it. All Cubans are trained and most act on the assumption that it's the responsibility of the person who spots a problem to do something about it. If I were to be attacked by someone, if five Cubans saw it happening, at least four of them would intervene. “mind your own business and don't get involved” is a bourgeois, individualist value, and it is absolute garbage—never mind anathema to the Cuban people.

Once I placed why I felt so safe, I felt even safer. I had somewhere that valued my human experience and took the expression on my face not as an invite to mess with me, but a clear statement as to my needing a break. By the time I was about to leave, I began to feel confident in that special nature of the Cuban people again. I had to fly out after 7, leaving Matanzas proper at 4 or thereabouts. I was supposed to check out of my casa by 11 or 12, but I saw that there was no one in the next door places and they weren't turning people away. So I simply asked if I could stay with my things a few extra hours, since it meant nothing to them either way. This simple interaction is one that I would need to know the people who I was staying with in order to ask for this elsewhere, including Canada. But it's just basic human kindness.

So now as I look to my future, and look at both my long term and short term pasts, Cuba has a central role in keeping me sane before, inspired always, and healthy now. Cuba has been the beating heart of revolution since the attack on the Moncada Barracks, but it is in being a truly transformed society that I feel most affinity for. It is their shining example every damn day that shows why the Blockade is so important to the Americans-- this dignified, educated, loving people who practice solidarity the way we practice cheering for sports teams?

They are the most potent thing in the history of humanity. They are the great example.

They are a people who live in humanity, but not over others. Those who have found the joy in taking price tags off of people's souls. They are the ones who helped me as a kid realize there was a better way, and they are the place that saved my soul and perhaps even my life a quarter century later.

We have only one way to pay them back: More revolutions, and the ultimate defeat of North American imperialism. End the blockade on their economy, and you'll end the blockage in your own heart and spirit as well. Meanwhile, as I look to the future of my own life and recovery, I am not certain yet how Cuba will play into it. I do know, for a complete fact, that if Cuba calls for help I will always answer. I also know that when the plane doors open again next time, I will feel like I can breathe and have value as a human being regardless of anything else, once again.

There is nothing more key to my recovery than feeling like I have inherent value, and no greater society to convey that to anyone than Cuba.