Another Viewpoint: Baltimore to Cuba
A reflection on the Witness Against Torture walk through Cuba to visit the prisoners in Guantanamo
Susan Crane
In December 2005, 25 people from the U.S. , most of us Catholic Workers, walked from Santiago to Guantánamo, past the city of Guantánamo to the Cuban checkpoint before the U.S. Naval Base. During this time we focused our thoughts on the prisoners, the torture they were enduring, and the naval base; on how the Geneva conventions and international law are being broken, and how it is our responsibility to visit the prisoners. During this time people supported us by prayer, working with the media, taking on our community responsibilities, fasting, and protesting here in the States. There was a lot of support, and there were many who wished they could have gone with us.
Before we left, we talked about the need to focus our message: The 25 of us walking were not the story; Cuba , the country in which we were walking, was not the story. We focused each interview, each blog entry we wrote, on the prisoners.
Yet there we were—walking though Cuba , talking to Cubans—and the realities of what I saw linger with me.
My experience in Cuba was a lesson in nonviolence, compassion, and solidarity. After 45 years of trade and credit embargo, after Cuban planes have been seized by the U.S., after a series of terrorist attacks carried out against Cuba from the U.S., after goods destined for Cuba have been sabotaged, machinery damaged, chemicals added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid wear on diesel engines, ball-bearings sold which were off-center, sugar for export contaminated, swine-fever virus sent to cause death and epidemic among pigs, and many more CIA-sponsored incidents, how can it be that the U.S. government continues such actions and doesn't even apologize? And how is it that the Cuban people and the Cuban government officials welcomed us and helped us? When someone you have hurt treats you with love, when you are on the receiving end of such compassion, it is very moving. It is an encouragement to deeper nonviolence. At these moments, we realize that nonviolence is a force more powerful than coercion and violence.
While we were there, keeping vigil at the checkpoint, we heard that a prisoner who had been held at Guantánamo Naval Base asked for the release of the Christian Peacemaker Team hostages. How is it that someone who has been tortured by Americans will ask for mercy for one American? What a lesson in nonviolence.
And then, the gift of solidarity. “Working together we can build a better world.” “Save your money for your next struggle.” “Thank you for walking for the prisoners.” The Cuban people understand that common people of the world are in a struggle together against the dominant powers and principalities.
The contrast between West Baltimore , where I live, and the Cuban towns and countryside, is still with me today. Of course, I didn't see all of Cuba . But I did see people who had hope, who cared about each other and who cared for their animals, their gardens, and homes. I saw happy children safely walking to school; I saw children, even in the poorer rural areas, in school. I saw medical doctors in poor towns. I saw people getting bread with ration cards which insured that all people were able to get food each day.
I didn't see litter in the city or in the countryside. I didn't see people begging. I didn't see people homeless. I didn't see advertisements and I didn't see a commercialism that invades the whole of life, until all you can see are things and their prices. I didn't see hopelessness. We hold placards that say “Food for people, not for profit!” In Cuba , neither food nor medical care is run for profit. And there probably are some homeless, and some wishing they were in another place.
In the New York Times (1/12/06) I read about Asian children who come to the U.S. and eat the food they see advertised on TV—items high in sugar and fat. For the first time, Asian children are experiencing trouble with obesity, and the incidence of diabetes II is on the rise in the Asian population. Why do we let corporations advertise foods that harm us? We know this isn't new. Remember the Nestle boycott in the late '70s and '80s, when Nestle was selling infant formula—banned in this country—in Third World countries, encouraging women not to breastfeed their babies. How is it that choosing between this kind of bean and that kind of bean, this brand of OJ and that brand of OJ, becomes our definition of freedom? In the small rural stores that I saw in Cuba there were bins of beans, bins of rice. There were no brand names; no one was making a profit off the food.
I did see some class differences: some people living in a way that seemed like a middle-class home in the states, and some people living in very humble shacks in the countryside. But wherever they live, it appeared that everyone has the chance to go to school and college. The children in the country are valued, cared for, loved.
There is a certain powerlessness that I feel so deeply when I read and reflect on what is happening in the world: grandmothers on walkers arrested outside a recruiting center; air strikes in Iraq intensifying (how can it get worse—but it does); the NSA spying on Catholic Workers and on the American Friends Service Committee in Baltimore; the Arctic ice shrinking, which means trouble for the rest of the world… and so on. There are new horrors, new examples every day. The boot of the U.S. stomps now on El Salvador , now on Iraq , now on women, now here, now there. The CIA secretly poisons and murders; it funds and bolsters one right-wing dictatorship after another.
So I walk though West Baltimore . Litter is everywhere. Advertisements crowd every vista—for things we don't need, things for which we'll never be able to pay. Schools are falling down, the water has lead in it. Children are not valued, properly taught, or cared for. People don't have adequate food. Parents are forced to choose between paying for food or medicine, or paying for food or the electric bill. Our country spends $32,000 a second on warmaking and can't figure out how to educate its own children.
Since good medical care is often out of reach for those of us without insurance, and without means to pay, there is now a TV show that shows some people being amazingly cured by doctors. I believe these TV shows are given to us so we can vicariously feel joy that medical care is available, and we can dream that we might somehow also be cured. Sort of like the lottery: The poor keep faith, thinking that it might be possible to win, and don't look at the way the domination system has made them poor.
The suffering of the prisoners held in Guantanamo remains with me; as do contrasts between the US and Cuba. And throughout all I imagine that the God of love looks on those made poor and those in chains with sadness and grief and is not pleased with the policies, warmaking, and domination of the country I live in..
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