Revolution
is a Moment
By Olga
R. Rodríguez
Reseracher: Osvaldo Gomez
I knew I had arrived at my destination
when I saw the hammer and sickle emblem outside the door. My walk there had
not been through the Florence you see on postcards. Few corner stores, ice cream
or flower shops operated on this side of the river. I was there to meet Alessandro
Leoni, a founding member of the Communist Refoundation Party, a faction of the
Italian Communist Party that survived the partys break up in 1991. Tall
and slim with a bushy mustache discolored by years of smoking, Leoni opened
the door to an office filled with posters of Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, Antonio
Gramsci and smoke. He lit cigarette after cigarette as he spoke of solidarity,
of equality, of the rights of the poor. For more than four hours, he talked
Communism, Cuba, Mexicos social problems. The smoke swirled around us.
Five years later, I remembered that
episode as I walked down the Malecón in the sweltering sun of Havana.
Flanked by the calm and clear Caribbean ocean and the old, deafening cars, I
wondered whether foreigners who had moved to the island during the 1960s remained
as supportive of the Cuban revolution as Leoni was when we spoke in 1996.
I first visited Rosa Maria Almendros,
a Spanish contemporary of Leoni who moved to Cuba after the triumph of the 1959
revolution.
"It was dream come true," Almendros, sitting in her Havana apartment,
says. "We knew with Castro in power it wouldnt take long before a
just society would be created."
Almendros and her husband, Edmundo
Desnoes, a Cuban journalist and author, watched the film clips of Fidel Castro,
dressed in his now legendary olive-green combat fatigue and with his rifle tossed
over his shoulder, as he marched triumphantly through the streets of Havana
on January 8, 1959. Cubans filled the streets to welcome the man who promised
to fulfill the dreams of Jose Martí, the father of Cubas independence.
More than 1,300 miles away in New York City, Maria Rosa Almendros joined the
celebration.
Already, they had followed and raised
funds for the 26th of July Movement, Castros rebels. It didnt take
long -twelve months to be exact- before Almendros and her husband moved to Havana.
The years that followed, Almendros says, fulfilled expectations. The barbudos,
the young, rugged revolutionaries heroes of the Cuban struggle, walked the streets
of Havana and lived and worked among the Cuban people. Cubans packed the Plaza
de la Revolución to listen to a young, passionate and defiant Castro
challenge the United States. Legends like Che Guevara and others were being
made and revolution was the muse of Latin American intellectuals, poets and
painters. Sympathetic foreigners watched the island transforming and many became
part of it.
"In Spain we lost a battle
but in Cuba we won the war," says Almendros, whose father fought in the
Spanish Civil War against Franco. "There was a lot of hope for what Cuba
could accomplish. It was a revolution based on faith."
Cuba and Castro enticed foreigners,
including Almendros, to leave comfortable lives and come to the island to cut
cane, teach reading and writing, to replace doctors and university professors
and for some to work in the new government. The young, enthusiastic idealists
came from the United States and all over Latin America to experience revolution.
Hope for the future became the essence of Cuban life and their lives.
Forty years later few foreigners
remain. Some defend the revolution with conviction that has lasted more than
four decades. The island, they say, will remain true to its revolutionary values,
even in the face of tourism and the dollarization of the economy. Others have
no where else to go and find themselves stuck on an island frozen in time. For
them, the revolution has been reduced to a memory.
But not for Almendros. At 71, her
support for Castros revolution is unconditional. When I step into her
apartment, shes sitting in a rocking chair two sizes too big, shes
barely five feet tall, pale and wears bright red lipstick. Her brown shoulder-length
hair, without a trace of gray, matches her long, flowing black, white and brown
tye-dye dress. "The 1960s were a time when anything was possible and when
other Latin American countries were looking toward Cuba for inspiration,"
Almendros remembers as she peeks through a pair of glasses with the right lens
cracked right through the middle. "I am happy here. I have everything I
need," she says. "I dont worry about anything. I have never
been materialistic."
Staying has not been easy. Her apartment
is in a decaying building with an elevator that rarely works and a set of stairs
so dark you have to feel with your feet before you take a step. Inside, the
walls are filled with artwork and crafts from the different countries she has
visited. She has old books piled high in the corner of a terrace where she likes
to eat breakfast and watch the waves of the Caribbean ocean crash against the
Malecón. In bookshelves scattered around the house she keeps books about
museums, painters, art history and the books by the Latin American authors she
has met. She shares her phone line with a neighbor who cant afford to
pay for her own and the artwork comes in handy. "I had to sell a painting
to be able to fix the leakage on the roof," she says. Then
quickly explains, "The government does not have the resources to take care
of things like that."
Some of the paintings and books
are from renowned Cuban and Latin American artists she met during the 1960s
when she worked as director of information at Casa de Las Américas, Cubas
main cultural center and publishing house. It was founded in 1959 by Haydee
Santamaria, one of two women arrested with Castro during the Moncada attack,
the 1953 failed attempt by Castros rebel movement to start an armed uprising
against Fulgencio Batista.
Casa de las Américas became
the headquarters of leftists, intellectuals and artists who, during the 1960s,
visited the island often hoping to duplicate the Cuban revolution in their countries.
Many of them, Almendros points out, failed to accomplish what Castro achieved.
But shes met them all. Roque Dalton, the Salvadorian poet and founder
of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or FMLN,
the leftist guerilla movement, became a legend after his own comrades killed
him in 1975. Victor Jara, a Chilean poet and singer was killed by Augusto Pinochet
after the1973 coup that ousted Salvador Allende, the socialist president.
"Victor taught me how to sign
with my hands," Almendros says. "We would be in different corners
of a room and we would talk by signaling. Did you know they smashed his hand
before they killed him?" she asks without expecting an answer.
Even though Almendros and her husband
aided Castros rebel movement she did not feel worthy of the revolution.
"We felt we did not deserve to come back," she says. "We had
done very little to help." But when they heard rumors that Cuba was going
to be invaded by the United States she willingly left her marketing job on Fifth
Avenue to defend the revolution.
By the time the United States backed
anti-Castro Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, Almendros and her husband
were there mobilized and ready. "We were in our posts," she says.
Almendros worked for Casa de Las Américas, her husband at the Ministry
of Education. Although they never saw any combat, they stayed. "I felt
I had done something to contribute," she says. More then she could in New
York, where she found people caught up in "fashion trends, materialism
and shallowness."
Even now, Almendross faith
in the revolution remains. "This has been a profound revolution, but not
a bloody or cruel one." Moreover, it changed more than her life. In El
Rosario, a village in Oriente Province, she witnessed a whole town go from a
place where people were infested with parasites to a place that Fidel Castro
would call "an example for others to follow."
It was while at El Rosario that
Almendros met Fidel Castro, a man she describes as "a mortal protected
by the gods."
"I remember seeing his jeep
approach and feeling like I was going to faint," she says putting her hands
on her face. "He had come to get a report about the progress in our town
and I was so nervous that I would not remember all the details. I panicked."
She had met important men before.
She had eaten with Che Guevara with Salvador Allende and countless personalities
of the Latin American literary world, but meeting Fidel was different.
"I was shaking like a leaf,"
she says. "He asked about the three tractors that he had sent on such and
such a date in 1970. Thats when I realized that the myth about his memory
was a reality."
"He turned to me and said and
you little girl?" she laughs. "I was 41 at the time. But
I guess my height has always made me look a bit younger."
Castro asked what she was doing
there. "I said I was doing social work. But I said it with a Spanish accent
and he noticed. He talked with Spanish accent also and we laughed." He
left without asking any questions but told Almendros she had done great work
and should be proud of it. "I was so relieved he had not even asked any
questions that I did not even think about just having met the Comandante en
Jefe. When he left it was as if I had cut burnt cane all day, as if someone
had just beat me up."
Almendros says the only time her
faith faultered was in the 1960s when some of her homosexual friends were persecuted.
"This was hard on people," she says but prefers not to talk about
specific cases. "You have to understand, the government recognized its
mistake before it was too late."
But the 60s are long gone and struggling
to survive has endured. The challenge now is to maintain a balance between socialism
and the capitalist ventures that fund the revolutionary ideals.
So far the biggest change has been
the legalization of dollars and tourism. For Almendros dollars and tourists
are necessary evils. "When the government first announced they were bringing
in more tourists the first thing I thought was how this was going to rot Cuban
society," she says. "It makes me remember Pancho Villa (the Mexican
revolutionary) when he said be afraid of the dollars and not the bullets."
She thinks for a second, "I know Fidel will not let that happen."
She pulls out her album and proudly
shows me her collection of photos of the Comandante en Jefe she keeps. These
memories, she says, make her grateful to have had experienced a revolution that
will continue, "Even when Fidel is no longer among us."
If only that optimism translated
into reality, I thought after I left Almendros. Its hard to imagine a
bright future for the Cuban revolution when you see a Havana trapped in a time
warp. Everything seems a contradiction. Cubans come up to me and start a friendly
conversation that ends in a business transaction of some kind; colonial building
in decay but that still look royal, and the deafening Studebakers, Chevys, Fords
and Cadillacs from the 40s and 50s move among the modern cars that carry a tourist
license plate. I think of Almendros reference to Pancho Villa and I wonder if
he wasnt right. Dollars, and not bullets, will bring change to an island
struggling to hold on to a 40-year ideal.
For Jane McManus, an American who
moved to Cuba in 1969, the islands contradictions are proof that the revolution
is coming to an end. McManus, 80, moved to Cuba early on. Disenchanted with
the U.S. left, she wanted to live in a socialist system. The 32-year experience,
however, has been bittersweet.
"When I first arrived I worked
very hard as you always do when you are enthusiastic about something,"
says McManus, a lanky woman with short white hair and piercing blue eyes. "But
that kind of enthusiasm no longer exists. In the late 60s, people would do anything
for their government, not anymore. You cant sustain it. Revolution is
a moment."
The daughter of an IBM executive,
McManus grew up in an upper middle class household in New England. Her father
voted Republican and her mother became politically active late in life when
she joined the Womens League for Peace and Democracy, a liberal organization
that promoted political and social equality.
"But she also kept her rich
friends," McManus says. "She just did not talk about politics with
them."
It was while McManus was studying
at UCLA that she started to become political. It was 1941 and the United States
had declared war on Japan and entered World War II. She witnessed the roundups
and internment of Japanese American students at UCLA.
"That was my first radicalizing
experience," she says.
While World War II raged, she decided
to go to Spain. Her father had "all these right-wing" connections
that made it possible for her to enter Spain. Once there she met with people
who had been victimized under Franco. After a year in Spain, McManus returned
to the United States and went to work as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. It
was there that she experienced what she calls a "deeper radicalization"
when she saw how blacks were mistreated and discriminated against. It was the
mid-1940s and segregation was stringent.
"I was becoming more and more
radical," she says. "I was working at the Baltimore Sun when the atomic
bomb was dropped."
Winston Churchills 1946 speech
warning that an "iron curtain" would cut through the middle of Europe
changed her life. The Cold War had started and with it the persecution of left-wingers
in the U.S., she says.
At the time McManus was covering
the United Nations for The New Republic, a liberal weekly magazine. But she
soon ended up on a black list and work dried up. "I never had such a good
job again," she says.
From there she went to The National
Guardian, a progressive weekly in New York City. The weekly, co-founded by John
T. McManus, her second husband and a well-known figure in progressive politics
who ran for governor of New York as the American Labor Party candidate in 1950
and 1954, was one of the few publications to openly denounce Senator Joseph
McCarthys hunt for Communists.
Although McManus says she was never
a member of the American Communist Party, she might as well have been. "Our
telephones were tapped," she says. "We would get strange calls at
night. Every time I traveled I was always harassed when I would come back to
the U.S. But I did not mind being harassed. Its part of the game."
By the 1960s McManus had become
a full-fledge leftist, involved in both the black power and the anti-war movements.
Her husband had died a few years earlier and she was looking for a new start.
When Cubas TriContinental magazine offered her a job as a translator in
1969 she took it.
At the time, Castros government
was in desperate need of professionals to replace the middle class that left
for Miami. He invited university professors, doctors, psychologists, journalists
and anyone else willing to take part in the creation of the new Cuba. For McManus,
the decision was an easy one. The best years of the U.S. left were over. "I
loved Cuba already because I had been here several times," she says. "I
knew people were very enthusiastic and if anybody was going to make it would
be Cuba."
McManus says she began to loose
faith in Castro in the 1970s and no longer believes in the revolution. She openly
criticizes Castros policies and describes his government as a "military
dictatorship."
"I was never so blindly partial,"
she says. "Most Americans are quite uncritical. They are a lot more starry-eyed
than I am. I could easily see there was nothing being done to develop the country.
As long as the paternalistic relationship continued with the socialist block
there was no need to produce. And now we are living the consequences of that."
Nowadays McManus supports herself
as a freelance travel writer and translator. And, like other Cubans, her family
in the United States sends dollars. But before she became disenchanted she eagerly
to contributed to the Revolution. She worked as a translator for TriContinental
magazine until the late 70s. She also became a member and eventually president
of the Union of North American Residents, a group that the U.S. government describes
as "a propaganda apparatus of the Cuban government." The group of
about 30 American expatriates, "100 when there was a party," would
show their support for the Cuban revolution by marching waving American flags
in Havana parades every May 1, International Workers Day.
It was at one of the meeting of
the American Union, as it was known among the members, that McManus met William
Lee Brent, her current husband and a former member of the Black Panthers Party.
In 1968, Lee Brent shot and seriously wounded three San Francisco police officers
in a robbery-related shootout. A few months after the shooting and while free
on bail, Lee Brent hijacked a TWA airplane bound for New York City from San
Francisco to Cuba where he has been in exile ever since. He is still wanted
by the United States government for robbery, the shooting of the officers and
the hijacking.
Lee Brent spent 22 months in a Cuban
jail suspected of being a spy. After his release he worked on a sugar cane plantation,
graduated with an arts degree from the University of Havana, taught English
to high school students and worked as a journalist at Radio Free Havana, a place
where many Americans work.
"The one thing we all had in
common was our respect and unbridled admiration for Fidel Castro," wrote
Lee Brent in his autobiography, "Long Time Gone," about the American
Union. That respect started fading after Castro no longer liked the idea of
their organization.
"Cuba began its policy of trying
to reestablish diplomatic relations with other countries so it became very inconvenient
to have all these outspoken crazy exiles, who did not believe in their own governments,
organized and visible," McManus says. "We became sort of troublemakers
so by the late 1970s the Cuban government disbanded all unions."
Lee Brent, one of 77 American fugitives
living here, sits in the living room and nods in agreement as his wife speaks.
He refused to share his opinions on Castro and the current situation in Cuba.
In a previous interview he said he doesnt doubt Castro would turn him
in if that would serve him.
"Politics is politics,"
he said in the 1998 interview. "If the big man thinks he can get some advantage
out of peddling me to the Americans, hell do it."
Like McManus, Americans who live
in Cuba are a select group of journalists, translators, teachers, artists, people
who have married government officials and those running from the American government.
There are 545 Americans registered with the U.S. Interest Section. But this
number only represents those on the island for business purposes. How many people
are on the island for purely ideological reason is hard to know.
"The are no more than 100,"
a Western diplomat said. "They no longer have the ideological fantasy that
this is paradise."
Those on the island for ideological
reasons include people who are running away after they committed crimes in the
United States and found a safe haven in Cuba during the 60s and 70s.
Americans living in Cuba fall in
a legal gray area since under U.S. federal law no American citizen is allowed
to work for a foreign government. In Cuba, anyone who works is working for the
government.
Most of the Americans I encountered
were unwilling to talk to me. The main reason they gave was that they want to
maintain ties with the United States and be able to travel back and forth. Sure
the government knows they are there, they said, but they felt uncomfortable
drawing attention to themselves. A few of them freelance for major news networks
and felt their jobs could be jeopardized.
"You really put them in danger
by writing about them," the diplomat agreed.
McManus was the exception. The Cuban
government does not really care what foreigners think, she says. Many Cubans
share her opinions but they dont express them because "its
too close to the truth and too close to the top," she says.
It almost seems as if this is the
first time McManus has shared these ideas. Shes anxious to talk about
the lack of democracy, "You have to have a society that is run by rules
and regulations," she says. "But I think there is a difference between
a country that is run by law and order and a country that is run by hierarchy."
She talks about Fidel Castros inconsistencies. "He just inaugurated
a statue of John Lennon," she says incredulous. "He was the one who
banned The Beatles back in the 1960s but now they are OK."
Nonetheless, shes content
to stay on the island, "I have no desire to go back," she says as
she pets her longhaired dachshund. I have no house there. I have good medical
care here and a very nice house."
McManus lives in a quiet and airy
apartment in Miramar, a tranquil and swanky residential area outside of Havana,
where children play in parks and where Cubans and foreign businessmen jog, walk
their dogs and take strolls down La Quinta Avenida, an avenue filled with colonial-era
mansions that now serve as embassies or as headquarters for major corporations
doing business in Cuba.
McManus recognizes that she lives
a privileged life because she has access to dollars. "If you can live better
it is easier to tolerate other things," she says. "Foreigners dont
have to scramble around to find where their next meal is coming from, or stand
in line eternally or go to hospitals that are filthy and dont have medicine."
Its not that foreigners have
more rights than Cubans, she says. "We get to do things that Cubans do.
Its just that we have more money to do them with. If there is not enough
in my ration or if I dont like an item I can always trade it or give it
away but I can always buy things at the dollar store."
Not only does McManus have access
to dollars, she is also able to travel, a luxury very few Cubans enjoy. Even
if they have the money, Cubans must be invited by someone abroad to get the
governments approval to leave. McManus goes to the United States every
year, to visit her husbands relatives in Californian or to see her family
in New York. "This year I am going back to my grandsons wedding in
Maine," she says.
If McManus dislikes Cuba now she
still remembers being a believer, "Before it was much more egalitarian,"
she says. "Everyone lived comfortably without dollars. But after the Special
Period it was obvious Cuba had to open up to capitalism. Before everything was
a barter relationship, oil for sugar, troops in Angola for everything else we
got from the Soviet Union."
McManus says she is just saying
what she and many of her Cuban friends see.
"There's a lot at stake, not
just personal power but the goodies," McManus says as she opened the door
to her terrace to let the warm wind in. " The people at the top live a
better life."
McManus came to Cuba lured by the
revolutionary dream once tangible. Her idealism is long gone and what keeps
her here is her husband. After all, Lee Brent is still wanted by the United
States. Since Cuba has no extradition treaty with the United States they feel
safe living on the island. It also helps that she lives in relative comfort.
I wondered if she would be as critical had she experienced the stifling violence
and poverty of most Latin American countries. To a certain extent, McManus is
like many American expatriates who go to other countries looking for whatever
is missing in their lives. Like Jimmy Buffet sings, "Some of them go for
the sailing
Brought by the lure of the sea
Tryin' to find what is
ailing
Living in the land of the free."
For most foreigners life on the
island is harder than it would be in their home countries but they live a lot
better than most Cubans. They have access to dollars, can travel and many are
part of the government bureaucracy.
Soledad and Felipe, a Salvadorian
couple that moved to Cuba at the start of the Special Period, are the exception.
Home is a massive 1,400-unit apartment building. Three more Soviet-style buildings
just like theirs complete their "neighborhood." The fact that you
have to walk a couple of blocks out to catch a taxi does not bother them. Nor
does the small apartment. Their tiny living room serves as a dining room too
and they keep a desk and book shelves in a corner for when their 17-year-old
daughter comes to visit from a Havana University campus outside of the city.
The deep blue refrigerator has to be kept in the living room as well since the
kitchen is too small. The wall is taken by huge paintings of Fidel Castro and
El Che.
"The small painting of Charlie
Chaplin is kept because Soledad is a fan," says Felipe referring to a painting
set above a couple of old armchairs that were made functional after their holes
were covered with duck tape.
Soledad and Felipe, both 42, have
lived in the same building since they arrived in Cuba 11 years ago. Theyve
lived through the harshest of times yet they describe Cuba as, "a paradise,
a dream come true, and an example for El Salvador to follow." For them,
life here couldnt be better.
While McManus began to tire of Cubas
revolution, in the 1970s Soledad was working on duplicate it in El Salvador.
Soledad, her guerilla name, and the name she likes to be called by, is articulate
and affable. A woman with brown skin and eyes and dark short hair, she is sharp
and full of energy. She smiles as she speaks of the time when she first got
involved with the FMLN, one of the leftist guerrilla groups involved in El Salvadors
violent civil war during the late 1970s and the1980s. She was just 17 years
old and still in high school.
For Soledad joining the guerilla
movement when it first started in the 1970s was more than an ideological pursuit.
The deplorable situation they were living and the daily sense of insecurity
prompted the two of them to take action. "We wanted to change our reality,"
Soledad says, and then she adds laughing. "What
we wanted was to build heaven on earth. We did not understand why we had to
wait until after death."
Countless corpses would be left
on the side of the roads to teach people a lesson, Soledad says. The Salvadorian
government waged a psychological of repression. But Soledad and Felipe continued
to participate in the FMLN. Their awareness and activism developed from the
discussions at her church. "We never spoke about Cuba," Soledad says.
"We had heard of Fidel and of El Che but we were living our own reality.
We never thought we would end up here."
"It was through our priest
that we started to develop a social conscience," Felipe interrupts.
Felipe "El Gato" Rodríguez
wears a bright red t-shirt with FMLN written in white letters, but he does not
fit the profile of a guerilla fighter. He is barely 52 and
fragile-he lost a kidney in the late 1980s and the other had to be removed in
1993, the result of not having access to health care. His skin has the yellowish
tint of dialysis patients and he has to stop every few minutes to take in air.
But hes alive and its thanks to the Cuban revolution. "If Cuba
had not offered to help us he probably would not be here." Soledad says.
The two came to Cuba thanks to a
program to help those who have participated in social movements throughout the
world. They arrived at the beginning of the Special Period and watched as more
than 30,000 people left Cuba the summer of 1994 when Cubas economic situation
became intolerable. But the scarcity and the harsh times reinforced Soledad
and Felipes faith in the revolution. "Scarcity was nothing new,"
Soledad says. "We were used to it in El Salvador. Sure you had things there
but if people dont have money to buy them its as if they were not
there."
During the Special Period, the Cuban
economy was basically in freefall. Nevertheless, Felipe received the medical
attention he needed during the eight months he was hospitalized after his surgery.
"What would we have done in El Salvador?" Soledad asks, knowing first-hand
the difference between Castros Communism and El Salvadors democracy.
"We wouldnt have been able to pay for his surgery, all the medical
attention he needs and the expensive medicine."
Soledad, who works as a teachers
aid, talked of how during the special period the unemployed were guaranteed
at least 60 percent of their salary. "In El Salvador if you loose your
job that is your problem," she says.
Sure there were lots of things missing
in Cuba during the Special Period but in El Salvador there was always a sense
of anxiety. "We had some comforts but we also had debts," Soledad
says. "There was always insecurity. People there cant go to university.
They have to work to help support their families."
The only criticism toward the Cuban
government the couple has is the paternalism that they say the Cuban people
became accustomed to. "They used to live in a crystal ball and they want
things to be like when the Soviet Union was around," Soledad says. Cubans
nowadays dont appreciate the revolutionary values of hard work and solidarity
like they used to, Soledad says. And they dont appreciate its benefits.
"In Cuba," Soledad likes
to point out, "everyone who wants a university degree can get one."
The best example is their only daughter
who is on a full government scholarship studying to become a teacher. This too
could never have happened in El Salvador, she says.
Soledad and Felipe first left El
Salvador in 1982. The civil war there was in full force. Soledads brother
had been shot by paramilitaries and one of their comrades, after being arrested
and tortured, gave their names to the government. Soon after men dressed in
civilian clothes came looking for them.
"I always told my mother not
to open the door if those knocking were not in uniform," Soledad says.
"The ones in civil clothes were the death squads," Felipe adds to make sure I understand the situation they lived in.
The men knocked on their neighbors
door. The next day Soledad and Felipe left and went to live on the border of
Nicaragua and Honduras where there was still a Contra resistance. "We had
to help somehow," Soledad says. "Thats when we realized our
struggle was not limited to El Salvador. We were fighting an international cause."
Both of them enlisted with the Sandinistas,
who, in 1979, had toppled the government of Anastasio Somoza and by 1982 were
waging a war against the American-backed Contras. The Sandinistas supported
the FMLN, and defended that revolution. Felipe was part of the reserved battalions
and he fought in the front a few times. Soledad was part of the committees for
the Sandinista defense, something like the Committees for the Defense or the
Revolution in Cuba. "We wanted things to settle down so we could go back
to El Salvador," Soledad says. "When we were about to return Felipe
got sick thats when we decided to come to Cuba."
The failure of the FMLN to take
power resulted from the divisions within the movement, Soledad says. The FMLN
signed a peace agreement with the Salvadorian government in 1991 and the following
year became a political party.
"We didnt accomplish
what we fought for," Felipe says. "There is still a lot of work that
needs to be done."
Its not that the left in El
Salvador is finished, Soledad says. "Now we have to use politics and not
weapons."
They havent lost hope and
wish to one day return and help El Salvador become more like Cuba.
"Do you think this is possible?"
I ask.
"In the next few years, I doubt
it," Soledad says while laughing. "But we hope to go back and at least
help in ending government corruption."
I realized that it is their idealism
that keeps them going. They keep in touch with Roque Daltons widow and
other Salvadorian exiles who have made of Cuba their home. It is here that they
can still find people who share their ideals and where they can plan how to
influence change in El Salvador. Imagining a better future for El Salvador will
have to do for now. They wont go back to their native country any time
soon. Doing so would mean Felipe not getting the life-sustaining medical attention
he needs.
While Soledad and Felipe imagine,
Almendros and McManus remember that moment when revolution was palpable. "Revolution
is a moment," McManus told me. But it was that moment of revolution that
gave Almendros the opportunity to see a whole village go from a place where
illiteracy was as rampant as parasites to a place where children grew up to
be engineers, doctors, teachers. It was also that moment that allowed McManus
husband to find a safe haven where a prison cell was replaced by a classroom.
It was that revolutionary moment that gave Felipe a second chance in life.
That was the moment that I was trying to understand and to a certain extent relive when I first went to meet Leoni back in Italy. Compared to now, it seems the 1960s was a time when it was easier to be an idealist, a time when people cared about more than just their own material well being. It was a time when social justice and equality were thought of as possible realities and not just the fantasies of radicals; a time when heroes where more than athletes and pop stars. But that moment is long gone. And now Cuba is a paradox of idealism and authoritarianism. Now, these foreigners are torn between the idealism of the past and the harsh reality of the present. And all we, my generation and I, have left are the heroes of an earlier generation.
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