Why we are going to Cuba

Last summer we chaperoned a group of students from NOVA Alternative High School on a trip to Guatemala.

We went there to study Spanish and show solidarity with repatriated refugees who'd fled to Mexico during the civil war and were just now returning home after decades in exile.

Guatemala is stunningly beautiful and the people are wonderful, but there's no way to sugarcoat it: the country is in absolute misery.

We stayed at the Mountain School, the plantation house surrounded by coffee bushes under a smoldering volcano. The village folks managed a miracle: organizing and buying the land. Everyone else in the region, if not most of the country, continued to live a modern version of serfdom, making pennies a day.

The school was run by progressive activists as a way to teach Spanish, but mor eimportantly the struggles of the Guatemalan people. As I already speak Spanish, my lessn was less instruction, and more of a daily two-hour crash course on current events.

The people live in absolute misery. The water is undrinkable. Three times a day, the 20 students walked to the village next door to share a meal with a host families. My family was a mother and four kids, ages 9, 5, 3 and 2. Dad had been working Houston, for over two years. They lived in a tin roof and walled shack that leaned against here father-in-laws. Mom spends a morning a week climbing the mountain scavaging for fire wood. To cook, she made a fire straddling wood over two cement blocks in the “kitchen”. Smoke escaped the shack through an adjustable slit between two pieces of tin. As this was the rainy season, the slint was shut, filling the shack with smoke.

The oldest child was a bright, happy girl, eager to teach me the guatemalan version of “Ring Around the Rosey”. She was upset, though, because she couldn't go to school that week, cause they didn't have money. The school in the village next door hadn't been opened in six months, as there was no money to pay for a teacher. To further the heartbreak, the mother was 23 years old.

The closest doctor was in the town of Colomba ten kilometers down a windy road, a small town of ten thousand people and five doctors.

In the village and all the others in this part of the country, 80% of the people are functionally illiterate, and 80% are unemployed. At four, five, and six o'clock in the morning, pickup trucks slowly passed through town, horns honking calling out all available men. They would take the trucks to towns and cities one, two hours away, hopefully to find work for the day. It usually cost the equivalent of 50 cents there and 50 cents back, but this was the summer of skyrocketing fuel prices, the cost of gas more than in the states, topping $5 a gallon. Fares had thus doubled, raising the price a day labor pays to look for work from one dollar to two, which is a lot when you make a maximum $5 a day, if you find work.

The fuel crisis compounded an already panicked economic crisis and the misery of a third-world country wrought by corruption, poverty, and drug violence.

We didn't go at night. The gang violence saturated the entire nation. Daily papers in towns big and small recounted the nightly deathtoll. An average of 17-19 people a day were killed violently. 15 of them occurred in the capital, a sprawling, crowded mess of 2 or 3 million, but the rest were spread equally through the mountains and lowland coast. In the month before our arrival, a beheaded body was found dumped on the side of the road of this tiny village. Drug gangs had launched a pitched battle inside of a prison using firearms. Vigilante squads were rising up in the smallest of towns, angry citizens tired of living in fear and the inept corruption of the police. One squad, my teacher told me, caught a young delinquent and brought him to the police station. “Why did you bring him here?” asked the captain. “Our jail is full. We'll hold him for a day, then he'll just go back out to the streets. You should've killed him yourself”.

The country is also a case-study in political corruption. The president of Guatemala, the 2nd or 3rd poorest country in the Americas, is the 2nd highest paid head of state in the Americas, after the US. A week earlier it was discovered that a member of congress had constructed an elaborate fuel robbery scheme, where henchmen would hijack fuel trucks, divert it to a secret location to unload the gas, and then distribute and sell the bounty as his own.

All this with the season rains deluging the mountains daily, causing massive mudslides and washing away houses and tin-roof shanties alike.

The daily lesson in current events ended with my teacher in tears. Two months after we left, his wife and son were involved in a motorcycle accident, taking the life of his child.

In the middle of our stay, taking in all the misery, oppression, and violence, I told Briana, Miles and Jade: y'know, we should organize a trip to Cuba. There's no violence in Cuba. There are no drugs in Cuba. Children don't die of preventable diseases in Cuba. The water is drinkable in Cuba. Not only is the school free in Cuba, but children play freely in the street, blissfully unaware of any evils or dangers.

That's how this trip came to be.