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tv   Anthony De Palma The Cubans  CSPAN  January 18, 2021 6:45am-8:00am EST

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we can't prove that your but
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if you want to go to cuba we will give you a special visa >> and pay again. >> and pay again. so it was bizarre butthat's no surprise to you or any other cuban . when we were there and one of the visits we werethere ,
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miriam and i walked around. of course i was visitingonly people . the me and we went to revisit some of the places of her child is in area where carmen and francisco at the church and all that is right there. she was so upset by the conditions that we found that she had not driving here to the building to file a complaint with the office because she was upset to show herhusband what had happened to her . >> the characters in the book who have now become friends were horrified that i would just walk into themunicipal building to file a complaint . but it's horrifying to see the conditions that people
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lived in. piles of garbage, the amount of insects and rodents all around. the municipal building, the people there were a little bit shocked that i had even gone in to try to talk to someone to make a change and the answer that i got was well, it's all because of the environment . we couldn't get parts for the trucks so they the garbage so i argued with them said you have carts so we were all ushered out . >> that's an important point that one of the things i found is that cuba looks much better from adistance .
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i think that's part of the problem that we have in our relations between thetwo countries . most people of course of various restrictions havenot been there . people who may policy in washington have some idea based on who knows what but it is always based on aview from the distance . what i found is the closer you get, it's like walking up to one of those 1957 chevy bel air everybody dreams about and from two blocks away, it's gorgeous. it's stopping me gorgeous. until you know a little bit about cars and pain and everything else and you get up close and you see that there's rust underneath that shiny paint and that the seats are kind of bumpy and multi- that if you, well the
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general motors iron is long gone and is replaced by a lot of toyota or something. or you don't, yes. the first time we went early was driving around chevy or desoto and he had commands that in place of the fan. so i think during a booklike this , one of the real things it can accomplish is to overcome those misconceptions that are based on distance. here i'm saying, i got right up close to it. these people allow me to their house. people opened up their refrigerators for me and here's what i found . whatdid you have in mind ? >> that's totally true and i want to ask you a question about the book itself as a work of writing because it's very engaging to read and lots of reviewers have said that kind of mix of journalism narrative storytelling.
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there's some graphic vignette , biographical portraits. i would call it a blurred genre text so it would be perfect for a course. you fear you are inventing a genre and what are your literary influences and i really love the kind circular chronological structure of the book where you begin with hurricane irma in 2017 and then bring us back a little bit beyond that at the end of the book so you clearly thought about structure so just to talk about that for a little and then we will come back tosome of the other questions .>> i like that mixed genre idea.it's not my first book. and writing a book as a new york times correspondent a former new york times correspondent, pierce a certain model that i could have followed which is what i did with my first book which was on north america, the
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three countries of north america, canada, the united states and mexico in that regard you do it in amuch more journalistic way . you chapter that deals with a particular theme and it's a long article about education or politics for the economy or religion or of course, music in the case of nouveau or the cars and culture. i could have done that, but in recent years, especially because it's latin america, one of the famous new york times editors, scottie rustin years ago said about latin america that americans will do anything for latin america except readabout it . >> that's horrible. >> it's horrible butthere's a lot of truth to it .
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and so i wanted to go beyond that model which i had used before . it could have been cuba today or cuba open and that would have beenformat . but i thought one, cuba is not that or nepal. it's close enough that just doing that that way wouldn't be sufficient to get the kind of readershipthat i want because people think they know . we need to go to a book about you but to find out because if you already think you know . and the 60 years since the revolution happened, so intense that in fact people unless they were growing up in a cave feel they know a lot about cuba already. what they know is female, che
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and hemingway and that sufficient in recent years there have been a number of books that have enough forged a new form. one of the models that i had in mind and read several times before i started on the cubans was behind the beautiful forever's. a very well-regarded book about a single slum town in, not even a town but a slum dwelling in india. beautiful forever's were a series of billboards coming from the airport in mumbai. another one that is done in sort of this same mixed genre as you described it is nothing to envy. which was a book by barbara dennett, well-regarded again
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about north korea. a country that is very much forbidden that most people didn't know about and she did it based on interviews with a few people and through their stories tell the larger stories. what she wasn't able to do was actually spent much time in north korea so she wrote the book based on i think two or three brief trips that she was allowed to take when she was correspondent for the "l.a. times" in china and the rest was based on interviews with people who had left and so by that very nature there were people who were against the regime. there were dissidents and she felt a very powerful and moving story about. i didn't want to do that. we had gone to miami and talked to as many cubans as i needed to to get the story but i didn't want to do that.
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i wanted to see what it was like and the first time i used this method was while i was correspondent of the new york times in new york. we had a trendy time when it wasn't an economic crisis but there were taxes, water rates, subway fares and a couple of other things were all rising at the same time. normally, would be let's go to the straphangers and ask them how do you react to the current increase in fares and course they would say it's the worst that's everhappened . people aren'tgoing to be able to go to work . instead, i turned around and did a series of stories by selecting a single city in new york city that was representative of the ethnic religious sociological and economic mixture of the city.
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just simply go there and ask those people how were they affected by these changes? what sort of turning things around and that essentially is the model for the cubans. i could have gone to business people and ask them about the opening as limited as it is for dissidents or anyone else . instead we pick a particular place. establish that place in history and it's quite an interesting place in itself and just find out what those people arelike . and by picking a small enough place, their lives intersect to some degree and it gives you a fabric from which you can create the entire tapestry of thebook . >> that's great and it's so close to what we do in anthropology, and cultural
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anthropology . you were doing fieldwork which is great. i found that so exciting actually because i think journalism and anthropology how a lot of things in common and i think as more people do fieldwork as you did ethnographic work, the two ways of approaching reality and writing about the reality converging in ways. >> one of the great models for that is children of sanchez. it was listed in the late 1950s, early 1960s about mexico and in fact, i had read that years ago and i had in mind the idea that he was using a particular community that i didn't know, but when i went back to reread it after having lived in mexico, it became clear to me he was using a neighborhood in mexico city. but the neighborhood itself
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sort of faded into the background and it was simply the people inthis one family . interesting oscar lewis was invited to cuba in 19, the first decade from revolution. bell said i'm in. do for cuba what you did for mexico and oscar lewis said to fidel at the beginning well, i insist that i have complete freedom to talk to anyone i want and record anything they say they're going to be quick critical. and fidel course posted there's nothing they can say i haven't already heard. they can talk to me freely, we are an open society and everyone is in favor and there are little issues and resolve them. so oscar lewis began his work by 1968 when the first, he had to make his first reports and fidel found out what he was going to write. he stopped the project.
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he actually accused oscar lewis of being a cia spy and shutdown. and oscar lewis never completed it. those reports that he did are in a university at i think university of illinois. >> herb and a champagne but he did manage to publish three volumes based on that. >> the original manuscript as well. >> with his wife and research assistant. and it has amazing information about the literacy campaign and like the first-person testimonials about a lot of key experiences from that time so it's still very useful from that perspective. so i guess knowing off of that, your book as a really interesting narrative arc and it moves between as i see it
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between hope and despair. on the one hand we have kydi and her commitment to the principles of social justice. she wants true equality to exist in cuba and she gives up her party card to show the truth of her commitment and on the other hand we have jorge garcia who has 14 members of his family and the sinking of this tugboat in 1964 and he blameshimself for what happens . he has grief, anger and cuba and the comes committed to spending his life telling the story of the loss and leaves for miami in 99 with his wife and daughter and there are many other important characters in the book but kydi and jorge represent the island and the diaspora and their intersection in very powerful ways so i wonder if you and miriam and tell us more about this art of hope
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and despair and what it tells us about you but. >> i want you to jump in. kydi does that and her life story as it turns out, i didn't know her before i began the book. but just to let people who are watching no, she was born in 1956. within three weeks of fidel and the anyone arriving on the southern coast of cuba to begin the belligerent stage of the revolution. that ended up in january 1959 with him taking over the whole island. so her own personal story covers the whole art. what could be better? she's also a black cuban woman who was brought up a single mother in a sugar mill
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town in the past and very quickly as she, as it affected her life the changes that were brought in and the idealism with which the revolution was literally ushered in the early years when there wasn't enough money to do this. because of the soviet union was underwriting everything. she benefited greatly from it . she went from being in her sugar mill town where there was a school for the black jamaican cubans and a school for the white cubans, where there was a cultural center for the black humans and for the white cubans and they were not allowed to cross the point where in the 1970s she was able to get on a boat and be sent to your to study for
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her graduate degree at the university of tf, part of the soviet bloc and she told this incredible story about getting on board this ship with over 1000 other students and for her, the most remarkable thing is that all of those students were carrying the same suitcase and they were wearing the same underwear and same clothes . for her, and we were equal. and as a black woman that was really the most significant thing for her. so i was quite surprised when after hearing her trajectory of going from this little black girl into sugar mill town to becoming vice minister like and industry for the entire country, she reaches a moment of reckoning where her mother has to go in for treatment in the hospital. but you just started by telling somebody that story you take course and the mother didn't get the care she needed so she was
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disappointed with the revolution therefore turned no, it's exactly the opposite . it's very counterintuitive and what she finds is her mother because they live in glaucoma is supposed to go to and retest, this sort of mediocre little neighborhood hospital . called martin, they do itwith a sense of irony . it's so good to be there. she's supposed to go there and that's where she's aside once they find out that it's a vice minister's mother, the government intervenes, takes her over to the hospital. the big fancy renowned hospital on the waterfront in havana and she gets the best treatment that cuba can afford. she's grateful for that but there's something inside her that says this isn't right. this isn't because i'm human or because my mother is cuban
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, this is because my mother is my mother and i am the vice minister of industry. and there's something there that opens her eyes to an extent. it doesn't, it leaves in a way eventually, the story leads to a moment of despair. and how could it not? she was not only vice minister high-ranking number of the communist party so she has dedicated her life, she bought this line and sinker. she was revolutionary. the leading into revolution had at its core a false promise. so yes, eventually with that realization there is a moment of despair. but what comes through i hope in the book and it certainly came through for us is that moment of despair did not lead to surrender. she showed that human ability and i'm reluctant to say unique but it's certainly
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formidable. in cuba that in the face of that despair, imagine your whole life for they being devoted to a live. she reinvents herself. reinvents herself as an independent woman. a capitalist and an entrepreneur using the skills that she had developed over the years and understanding that any of those instances, she is that businesses most important resource. it's not material. it's not the place. it's the person real switch from a socialist mindset. she does all that, it gives up her card but she never gives up her life, her love for her homeland. that i thought was just such a moving narrative that she could have been bowl book,
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her life could have been the whole book. i was reluctant to put that much focus on her because she still lives there. although she's protected to some extent because of her status and her position, she still has to live there so it was better to move some of it away very much that story from despair, from hope to despair back to hope and how wonderful that the fan that she uses to keep herself cool while she's watching the election of miguel cannell being president and the new constitution and all that stuff she doesn't believe in, the fan has on it in english word that she didn't really understand but it's hopeful. it's a chinese fan, the guy in china didn't know what it meant either but here it is quite i can't tell you how
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much i love that touch. you're so good at using these significant details and not one which is like in the third sentence of the beginning of the book is so perfect, it's such a perfect detail to include. >> it should be every cubans middle name . there hopeful for everything, hopeful for things that they will either face with change, they would have a better meal the next day or able to get a meal the next day. full that they could come to the united states and see what it's all about, hopeful for freedom, hopeful for so many things. >> that flimsy rat doesn't help while they're trying to cross the straits of florida. >> hope is their middle name, i don't know about despair . i don't think that the people who are there have field
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despair always. they're always thinking i had and thinking of how to make things better every day and if they let despair take the best of them, they wouldn't have any hope and they wouldn't be able to function. it's unbelievable what how in some families make ends meet every day and how from the beginning from the moment that they wake up, their thinking about what comes next and that's takes a lot of hope. more than despair. >> at the same time, what they're doing i their adaptability. by grace, every day is this was a surprise to me. to understand the extent to which they understood about themselves and that is a understand this adaptability, this ability to i thought i
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saw in so many instances of it, when you see a motorcycle that people are reliant on trying to keep going but there are no parts and in place of the gas tank is a plastic soda bottle. how do you do that? you are adapting to the very worst conditions. yes, that's their greatest strength but at the same moment it condemns them to the system that doesn't change. and they realize that. if you were to be supercritical, you can call it complacency. if you were to more inclined to be a fact you say after so many years and so many shortages so much restrictions censorship and hardship, and this geopolitical situation, it's simply survival mode.
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>> but they were born into survival mode . any of them don't know what it was like for they don't know what it is to have . so this is all they know. >> her husband and some of the others who are that age still think of the first two decades of the revolution as the golden period. it wasn't really golden fight global standards but for them , compared to what came afterwards which was the time when it was really bad, what they now fear is becoming another special period, maybe worse than before. as being time when yes. things weren't that bad. you could be hopeful. >> with regard to claudia i was struck and you talk about antilock races and throughout the book and then we get to
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2018 there's someone who says you all are so professional and courteous i feel like i'm in business run by whites and you hear stuff like that into. that's kind of the other sort of upsetting thing after all these years of revolution and efforts to create gender equality and racial equality that there's still such antiquated attitudes about things like being black or white but that was very interesting. as we got towards the end of the book. how do you confront that yet again. >> with their shortages all the time, people tend to sort of become much more tribal. so there isn't a whole lot. let me keep what i have and keep it from the others. and i think that's one of the real negative side effects of the life that they lived.
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despite that, they can be very generous. but when it comes right down to it, there's so little that you really have to be most concerned about yourself and your family so that allows that kind of attitude and many others to not to flourish but to survive in a time which they might otherwise have disappeared. >> one thing is they were very generous with us, with their time and with whatever they would seek out for dinner, they would invite us over and they made us feel like at home. they never treated us with anything but a countrymen who looked back and welcomed. i think that's true. >> we see that the end of the book when kydi is spelling of cuba and what each letter signifies and i think that human work is very much something that you see.
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in cuba they have a lot less than we do in the united states but they would give a lot more of what they have to be kind and the welcoming. and i guess following, another question which follows is about departure and return. those are such intense themes in human life. we're all familiar with the cuban goodbye where yousay goodbye 10 times before you actually leave . you kiss everybody goodbye. so we know how painful goodbyes can be. we know how beautiful a return can be so i appreciated having the artist be one of the characters in this story. the artist who could have stayed in the diaspora but chose to return to the island and be part of the island because of the inspiration, the way life is unpredictable in cuba and the neck and had charm so i wonder if you can talk about that relationship between departure and return and many of the protagonists we meet eventually decide to
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leave cuba. that includes kydi's twin sister and her two nephews and her own only child oscar and then there's someone else who decides to return so i'm curious about those goodbyes and returns and i think you did a nice job in showing that happening in both directions and as opposed to just everybody wants to leave cuba itches the common assumption somehow. things are so difficult there but you have an artists radar who decides to return and be part of this artistic community in cuba. so let's hear more about that and the whole theme of the return among humans and coupon us. >> i don't waste the goodbyes. you are cuban so we are really saying goodbye? i don't think. you always say pronto which
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means i'll see you soon. it's never a goodbye. it's never a lament that you're gone and you're expected to come back. and when we have said our goodbyes, especially towards the end of the last time i was there , they expect us to come back at some point. we had planned to go back and spend some time with them, bring them a copy of the book and unfortunately due to we just can't travel but yes. >> but what about when you left in 1962? >> in 1962 there was, it was we were expected to come back . my father didn't leave. my father said he was remarried and he said if we don't all leave, the whole family doesn't leave, i leave . this isn't going to last long .
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>> i'll see you again. so we were expected to come back. it wasn't a total departure so time has shown that we stayed and i became more and more americanized and to be honest with you i have thoroughly enjoyed returning and seeing my country and meeting people and their worth and everybody in the street wants to talk to you, wants to know whereyou're from and what are you doing here . and i can't find myself being able to say for a fact that i could live there again. i'm no longer the cuban that i would have been if i had left back in the 80s. i left too early at my life
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is here and i don't know that i can do the things that the people there can do to make a life for themselves. >> but you could use a battery for hair coloring. or like planned pain skins. but there's a story years ago when in the very early years when she was just a little girl there were so many of your friends who were leaving that they just one day you would find out that felipe is not there and they would say where did theygo ? they went to new york and you would look up in the sky and there would be planes leaving from the airport . >> and you thought. >> new york was up there.
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what else could it be? the planes go through the clouds so new york had to be up there. >> and everybody was saying in the north, where is north? they're up there. >> so many people when they leave cuba is often the first timethey're getting on a plane . i've met so many people have interviewed in the jewish community who left by israel and for many of them, the plane for the first time with her leaving the country, they've never traveled before that. they're not accustomed to travel the way we are. >> in that same light, how could it be that there are so many cubans don't know how to swim? >> that's so interesting, it comes up in your book . >> it's a long narrow island so you're never that far from the sea. but there are, most people i think don't know how. >> i would say most, we all find love the beach. we can stop marveling at it
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and how beautiful the beaches are and the vistas are but i think because we are surrounded by it and it's so familiar and it's part of our life, we really go to the beach, we enjoy it, we splash in the water and we are there and we really are not avid swimmers or learn how to swim. or herein the united states, there are very few beaches . you have that small area in new jersey or the middle school area or in florida where there's plenty of water or in california you learn how to swim. you join the y so he could never get over that my grandmother who died at 98 had never gone beyond her ankles in the ocean. >> i think there's a kind of respect for the ocean.
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we understand its power and it may have to do with things like hurricanes and moods of the ocean change and the ocean is so beautiful but it could also just keep you away and take you away. and i don't know if on a deeper level this may be going too far but there is the association with the history of slavery and all africans who died at sea and were buried at sea. this goes into my question, i want to ask about religion before we close and i think about suntory a and the whole force of the ocean and that these rdas that you have to respect to a certain extent so i always wondered if that has something to do with it as well . let's not play too much with the ocean, the ocean is a serious thing. >> i would say that to me, i
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can't swim. splash here and there and i can hold my hand the water i would always say that i respect the ocean, i don't. . i respected and i enjoy it and i love to be in the water . but don't get me past my neck . >> i hear you. >> montalvo one time told me that he hated living on an island. he would much rather have lived in europe or the united states. simply because he could then get in a car and drive without ever reaching the end . there was something about being on an island where the end was right there . that that closed him in. he came back not because of the island but because of the sun and the light so he was
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willing to do that i never even considered that because we think about living on an island as something luxurious and wonderful but for him it was not. but the religion of course was a very big part of what a lara. but i don't think, we lived in mexico and i've covered other latin countries and the cubans never really were religious in the same way that say mexicans are religious, were and still are . and in what a lara itself, of course you have a whole mix. thereare the jewish cemeteries although there is no standing on . your old catholic churches, most of them are falling down . the big yearly ceremony was the august 15.
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this holy day of the assumption of the virgin mary. for decades, the procession that was the big social and religious event of the year was absolutely prohibited. now they are allowed to bring the statue of the virgin out of the central church and marching through the streets and i was able, i was fortunate enough to be there for one of them but people like area del carmen who remembered from their youth and darien remember that as well, but in norma's and vibrant and memorable ceremony was a 20 minute rush around two blocks very close to month although studio beforethey brought her back in . i think in the case of the people who were the center of the book, ray went through
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her moment of reckoning with the revolution. she not only left behind her party membership and her position and her cell phone at her car, she also gave up her santeria and she's now ready much an evangelical pentecostal. she had a penchant for religion and the messages we get from her tended to become more religious. so it has become an important part of her life. i think she brings people,her husband along and he goes along . >> lily hernandez who is the president of the local cdr was one of her real friends, he was her maid of honor when she got married and they lived down the street from eachother but had completely different worldviews . has a santeria altar in her
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bedroom. but her son who lives in the same building and who has nothing to do with the party or the revolution and is desperate to get out is raising two daughters who are now jehovah witnesses. because of the mother. gardenia began in the church and was at low frisco which is sort of the center of a lot of this. month although studio is across the street but he never indicated to me that religion was any big part of his life . or his art. but carmen who grow up across the street from los escalapios, religion has been the firmament thatallowed her to survive , this is interesting many cubans never bought into the revolution
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but never left. so there's a whole part of the society that is living within the system that they don't really have any alliance to or allegiance. how do you do that for 65 years? she did it by remaining faithful whatever that meant so when she after she was not able to get the career she wanted because she was brought in by the young communists we asked do you believe, she knew that if she said no, he would get the job , the position in the university she wanted which would lead her to the job which would lead her to life she wanted. she couldn't say no . she suffered the consequences of that instead of becoming a research scientist that she wanted to be, she became a food safety inspector.
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based in ann arbor even when she worked in the fleet, she would at the end of her shift at 5:00 walked up the street and she found this little chapel that have managed to survive alongside the fruit market and making sure that nobody saw her go in, would go in for mass and while she was in there one day, she would also talked to one of the monks who read it. she wanted to talk to the monks and she came down the hallway to talk to him and then stopped short because she saw that he was speaking to someone else . and nervous that other person with see her or something like that would happen, she turned around but before she did she notice that the person was speaking to was wearing uniform that looked familiar and it turned out that person was a captain in the fleet and eventually after several years, they married.
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and even today, she continues. she can't dance anymore and most of the spanish community , the societies that she belonged to they have really cut back. there's no way to support it anymore. but she remains a participant in the school for spanish dance that a friend started 25 years ago and every summer when they have their graduation ceremony she'sbeen the narrator . tells a little history about the pieces they're playing the girls are doing and how it all came together so it has become a religion and the culture has allowed her and i can't imagine how many other untold number of cubans have
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been able to survive in a system they don't agree with that's very harsh and very demanding by relying on those things. >> it's kind of that the culture is so strong and that includes religion is so strong that it becomes something that people have been able to hold on to allow for these everyday acts of resistance. maybe it's not major resistance against the system but people try to live the life they want to live in that kind of everyday active resistance just to continue to go to church during the years when they were trying to suppress religion and people can also observe some jewish tradition as well i know about where in jewish tradition you need 10 people to perform a ritual or ceremony, what's called the minyan and in cuba again during that time that religion was being suppressed often couldn't get 10 people maybe they would get four or five people then they would make a for the missing people
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by pulling out the toe runs, they often had five or six in the synagogue so maybe you have five people, for total runs and attend was god and that became known as the human minyan but people found ways to survive through these everyday acts of resistance, not huge going out and protesting type things but these everyday acts of resistance and i think we see that in so many ways among humans and i guess to end , since we are close to timenow or at time , i'm so glad that you wrote about going, and this is thanks to miriam and i think it's so important because we have so much writing about cuba where people think they're writing about cuba but they're usually writing about how that. this is! i bring up an aikido class on cuba and they say it's cuba but really they just gotten to know how that. nothing wrong with that, then is a great city. i love going back but often
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what that means is we don't know about the rest of cuba. we don't know how complex cuba is there are many different cuba is and by working in while i thought you were able to show us there's many ways to be human and there's like jan. and injures interesting things going on in different parts of the country so i wonder how you think we could encourage more people to look beyond havana plus to look at other places might want a co-op and other cities and towns in cuba, what do you think we could do toencourage more understanding of the island ? >> right now if we're talking about americans, it's very difficult. to physically be there. all airports are closed except for havana and there are so many restrictions but i think that part of what my book is and the books that
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you've written do that as well, they give a sense that there are cuban people with a rich and long history and culture that's not the fantasyland cinderella type thing that you see in havana which all kudos to them, they've done a great job. it makes money and the money is put back into training people but it's unfortunate that there's so many americans who will say i was in cuba and i saw the car and we stayed the hotel and i went down and we had a great meal and it's all, it's not even havana. it's this tiny section of havana and then you leave and i suppose it's better than nothing, but the people's experience that was allowed in the last administration
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was a great idea but it really fell short because it left people with a skewed idea of what cuba was like so they came back saying it's not so bad and really quite lovely and it is quite lovely but when i would take people, i would say even if we're going in havana, come with me and we will go two blocks over from obispo into the next block and will find somebody outside trying to fix a car and i'll talk to and see you mind if we come inside and we walked inside their house and talk a little bit and i would even ask were just once i felt comfortable enough, open up the refrigerator and say my goodness, you have 2 is hot something and nothing else in their. they start to understand what
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it's really like to live there. so i don't think it's possible right now to come up with a whole lot of alternatives to visiting havana. but i would encourage people that they are in havana even on the people to people, that you may need to go far. two blocks over or when you take that ride in the 57 chevy, ask your driver to open up the and asking where you got that were what bricks are on the car. because going something i said that cuba looks much better from afar and once you get close to see things. it works even when you are there. even in the party part of it, you come away with one impression but just looking for little closer. so it requires requires a little bit of work on the part of individuals.
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cuba is the kind of place that opens itself up to you but you've got to work at it a little bit . the more you work at it the more it will open up but it's not the kind of place where you can go there and you come back and understand it although there's something about it that tempts people to do that. i'm sure you know better than even i do how many cuban experts there are out there . who will in a moment of anger say i was there 10 years ago for a week. but let me tell you what it's really like. >> i've already drank the kool-aid. they know everything. >> we saw it even in the campaign. you'd have a candidate talk about how great theeducation system is . not taking one side of the other you say simply know
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