12/10/12 The Columbus Syndrome Redux: Robin Hemley in Cuba » Numéro Cinq

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A WARM PLACE ON A CRUEL WEB

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The Columbus Syndrome Redux: Robin Hemley inCuba

It comes as a shock to think that I have known Robin Hemley for over thirty

years. I didn’t think, honestly, that I was that old. We met at the Iowa Writers

Workshop in 1980, across a workshop table, I recall, with the then program

director Jack Leggett chairing the proceedings. Robin looked too young to be in

graduate school, and he still carries himself, even writes, with a kind of wide-eyed,

cheery openness to EVERYTHING that is both charming and compulsively

readable. Nowadays he’s achieved that remarkable state of being able to turn

almost anything that happens in life into something worth writing about. He is an

indefatigable world-traveler, prolific author, inspired teacher, and an amiable

friend. Here he is taking a group of American undergraduates to Cuba for a

winter course. Academia, life, politics and art merge.

Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and fiction, and the

recipients of many awards for both, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two

Pushcart Prizes. His most recent books are A FIELD GUIDE FOR IMMERSION

WRITING: MEMOIR, JOURNALISM, AND TRAVEL (University of Georgia

Press, 2012) and REPLY ALL: STORIES (Break Away Books, Indiana University

Press, 2012). Indiana University Press is also reissuing his novel THE LAST

STUDEBAKER in 2012. He is also the author of the popular books, TURNING

A dd com m en ts

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12/10/12 The Columbus Syndrome Redux: Robin Hemley in Cuba » Numéro Cinq

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LIFE INTO FICTION (Graywolf Press) and DO-OVER (Little, Brown), and the

BBC is currently at work on a feature adaptation of his book INVENTED EDEN:

THE ELUSIVE DISPUTED HISTORY OF THE TASADAY (Bison Books,

University of Nebraska Press). He is the director of the Nonfiction Writing

Program at the University of Iowa, founder of the NonfictioNOW Conference, a

senior editor of The Iowa Review, editor of the online magazine DEFUNCT, and a

colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts .

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§

The eighty-three-year old Cuban poet grasped my arm, whispered, “I love

your people. I feel a spiritual connection to them.” I didn’t know what to

say. I had just met him. He had spent a dozen years in New York, much

like the Cuban National Hero, Jose Marti, who, before dying in battle

against the Spanish in 1895, spent fifteen years in New York. I had spent

a total of two weeks in Cuba, and what was I to say? To lie? “Right back

atcha, Cuba! I feel a spiritual connection to you, too.” I didn’t. But

neither did I feel a spiritual connection to my own country. I thought that

he and nearly every other Cuban we met idealized the U.S. the way

Americans idealize Cuba. The Columbus Syndrome works both ways.

Columbus spent a few days in Cuba and then sailed back and said it was

the loveliest place on earth, and certainly my students had an enormous

case of Columbus Syndrome.

I and a colleague had brought thirteen undergraduates with us to Havana

for a Winter term course, as had, it seemed, nearly every other U.S.

university. A bellman at the Presidente Hotel, Gringo Central, told me

there were more Americans now than ever, but “they will all go when

Obama loses the election.” True, the restrictions have lessened over the

last year, allowing more short-term visits by educators, researchers, and

students.

Every day, it seemed a new group from George Mason or Randolph

College or American University showed up at the Presidente and we

compared notes on our respective itineraries: who was going to visit Che’s

grave or the hot springs at Las Terrazas or the beaches of Varadero.

Canadians, Brits, Russians, Germans, Chinese, Argentines, Colombians,

and Japanese have been coming here for years, but for the throngs of

young Americans now legally entering Cuba, the approach is not unlike

the hordes of shoppers awaiting a midnight sale at Target on

Thanksgiving. And what are they waiting so impatiently to purchase?

Authenticity, of course. It’s what the country trades in when all is

blockaded. Cuba es autentica, the commercial warbles. Tom Miller, a

travel writer and Cuban expert along with us, warned my students never

to use the words, “quaint,” “nestle,” or “local” in a travel piece, but his

warning was of no use. Any traveler infatuated with a new country sees

nothing but quaint nestling locals.

And that’s not the half of it with Cuba, where a powerful strain of

Columbus Syndrome, resistant to any known ideological antigen, infects

most American tourists who find their way here legally or not. It’s not

just the antiquated American cars from the fifties and sixties, belching

smoke and plying the uncongested streets of Havana. Or the two and

three hundred year old buildings, some being restored, some too ruined to

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save. It’s also the view from the rooftop of the Presidente Hotel at night –

the modest skyline with only one or two signs lit by neon. My colleague

and I had wondered if our students would miss the Internet and

Facebook and Skype and their cell phones. Instead, they worshipped the

lack of it. It’s not the U.S. blockade against Cuba that blocks the Internet,

but the Castro government, though nearly everything else seems the

result of the blockade, including the cars and the crumbling buildings.

What the elevator operator in the Presidente Hotel said about the U.S.

elections is true most likely. If Obama loses the election, the Blockade

will undoubtedly continue at least four years more. No one, American or

Cuban alike, could give me a good reason why the Blockade, in place

since 1960, continues, except for the most obvious political reason, that

the Blockade serves the interests of a minority of Cuban Americans in

Florida. And there’s too much money being made in the maintenance of

the Blockade, (including spending 500 million taxpayer dollars annually

on Radio and TV Marti, the latter which is blocked by the Cuban

government in any event). The word I heard most frequently was

“inertia.” The Blockade has been in place so long, no one has the energy

or will to end it.

Romney must be a little embarrassed by a 2007 speech on Cuba, which

he mistakenly ended with the phrase, “Patria o Muetre! Venceremos!” It

means “Fatherland or Death, We shall overcome,” a phrase that Castro

used for decades to end his speeches, and which my students and I

glimpsed occasionally on banners strung across Havana’s streets

(Gingrich has had a lot of fun with that Romney gaff). Our tour guide

admitted unabashedly as we passed under one such banner, “It works,

growing up with those slogans, seeing them everyday.” Of course, it

works, but blockades and embargoes don’t work, unless we hope to push

the blockaded country into war. When was the last embargo that

worked? In the forties, we wanted Japan to leave China and stop

massacring its population. A noble desire on our part, but not an easy

solution. After we imposed an oil embargo against Japan (at the time,

America supplied 80% of Japan’s oil), Japan asked FDR for a summit to

discuss the matter, but the U.S. said Japan had to withdraw first from

China and instead Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Go figure. Why didn’t

they just do the right thing and obey us?

Throughout World War Two, comics routinely portrayed Japanese as

monkeys, inhuman, not worth a moment’s thought, but now of course,

we’re the best of idealizing buddies again. It could be so again with

Cuba. In his youth, Fidel Castro wrote to FDR addressing him as his

good friend and asking him for a ten- dollar bill. I’m sure he doesn’t give

this youthful faux pas a moment’s thought now, and it means nothing

because he was a child. But grown men like Romney and Gingrich

should at least be a little realistic when they ask the Castros for

something. They don’t want ten dollars from Raul or Fidel Castro. They

want, in Gingrich’s words to “promote democracy” in Cuba. They want

“free elections.” Sure, we all do. We want them in China. Let’s blockade

it. We want them in Iran. Let’s embargo it . . . oh, we are?

This just in: Cubans don’t want to drive junker cars. They’d rather drive

new cars, which they now get from China, along with scores of new

Chinese busses. They long to eat Pringles. But I don’t want them to eat

Pringles! Or Big Macs. I certainly never want to hear any quaint Cuban

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3 Responses to “The Columbus Syndrome Redux: Robin Hemley in Cuba”

1. ns says:

February 15, 2012 at 7:22 am

locals ordering skinny lattes. Then all hope for humanity will be lost. For

this reason, I find myself curiously conflicted about the Blockade, on the

one hand wondering what good it serves (beyond reasons to do with a

small minority of Cuban Americans in Florida). On the other hand, I

was delighted to see so many old American cars so well preserved. The

country seems so real!

During our visit, a rumor spread in the Miami Cuban community that

Fidel had died, relayed to me by Tom Miller, who added that such rumors

crop up every eighteen months or so. “Assassination by Twitter.” I

mentioned the rumor later to our Cuban tour guide who assured me it

couldn’t be true because if it were, her mother, a well-known journalist,

would have been in tears that morning. Cubans mourning Castro?

Actually mourning him and not in the official North Korean way, in

which a family of bears reportedly sobbed by the side of the road upon

learning of Kim Jong-Il’s passing? Undoubtedly, few woodland creatures

will mourn Castro’s passing, and not many more Americans, but now I

wonder if even his passing will signal a change in our policy toward

Cuba?

Honestly, ask yourself, don’t you want to visit Cuba before Fidel dies

and/or the Blockade ends? Of course you do. You want to see Cuba as it

exists now, poor and blockaded, but resilient and proud, one of the lone

anti-U.S. bastions that’s any fun. If North Koreans had conga lines and

made Pyongyang Club Rum, maybe they’d have more visitors, too. But

North Koreans don’t salsa. At least, the Cubans know how to resist the

U.S. with panache. When the American Interests section, a tall building

along Havana’s famous seafront, the Malecon, streamed electronic anti-

Castro messages around the building’s rooftop during the Bush

administration, Fidel retaliated by erecting over a hundred flagpoles flying

enormous flags to block the messages. The messages are gone now, but

the Cuban flags remain, as well as an adjacent plaza, “Jose Marti Anti-

Imperialist Plaza.” It was here, on January 1 , the anniversary of the

“Triumph of the Revolution,” that my students and I listened to a Cuban

singer belting out tunes with a string of young women straight out of a

USO Show, as one of the savvier of my students remarked, line dancing

on a stage before which thousands were gathered, most of them dancing

too. And between sets the enormous anti-imperialist video screens played

the latest American music videos.

—Robin Hemley

————————————————-

See also Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life,

a book length essay on living in Cuba published earlier on NC.

st

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A fascinating glimpse, Robin. I want to visit while Cuba’s still authentic, while it’s still blockaded, before

cans of Pringles crowd the supermarket shelves!

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2. beebee says:

February 15, 2012 at 1:09 pm

It makes me wonder what other embargo-like items we keep in place, just because the proverbial

political capital isn’t worth risking. Special interest rule our little world, which leads me to believe that

the Cuban car market must not be big enough or else Detroit would be lobbying to open the shipping

channel. But, I can’t believe that the potato farmers haven’t jumped on the “Open Cuba for Pringles”

bandwagon.

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3. Vanessa Blakeslee says:

February 15, 2012 at 1:14 pm

I enjoyed the humor and honesty in this, Robin, especially regarding the “inner conflict” of the embargo,

how we don’t want Cubans to descend into the rest of “globalization’, sipping lattes with the rest of us.

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