“A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of the US”. This shocking revelation by the New York Times was unknown to the majority of its readership, accustomed to a hostile rhetoric about defecting baseball players, stagnated economy and a lack of basic goods.
After arriving by plane to the Holguin airport on December 24th, we noticed the first sign that something was wrong during our trip to the city of Bayamo. There was a deathly silence in the city. Bayamo’s Cespedes park and its surrounding areas seemed peopled by the dead.
What has sadly become a ritual in Cuba are the yearly mea culpa of the heads of the nation’s most important institutions for failing to fulfill the meager projections they had set for themselves.
In a speech in Miami on Friday November 8, 2013, President Barack Obama said “We have to be creative and we have to be thoughtful and we have to continue to update our Cuba policies”. Many have questioned, some were alarmed, while most know very little about the 400 year old history of Afro Cubans with Florida.
Despite the great efforts made by the Cuban government to achieve racial equality, social justice, and reduce stereotypes and racism, these problems have clashed with powerful forces masked in key positions inside our society, who are determined to halt and prevent the most important moral project in the country.
It took only a few days for the new immigration regulations to come into effect for all-star baseball player and national hero Jose Ariel Contreras to show up at Havana’s international airport tearful, thrilled and grateful for having been able to return to his homeland.
For those who experienced the massive destruction left by hurricane Sandy in Santiago de Cuba, it is hard to believe how a few months later, all streets are free of debris; water, electricity, and telephone service have been fully restored, thousands of roofs have been replaced and hundreds of homes have been repaired or built.
As I learned about Haitian President Michel Martelly’s recent visit to Cuba, I was forced to reflect on my childhood memories in La Guira, Banes, a United Fruit Company Soweto-type, sugar cane plantation community in Holguin.
The massive destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere in the United States prevented the media from reporting about another massive destruction that has crippled Santiago de Cuba and placed nearly one million people on the brink of economic collapse and created even greater uncertainty about the future of this 500-year-old city.
As I traveled around the eastern Cuban areas of Guantanamo, la Maya, Songo and Santiago de Cuba, I searched in vain for words to describe the horrifying, devastating and unbelievable trail of destruction, human suffering and death left by Hurricane Sandy, another killer storm that passed through our country.