This makeshift raft carried eight residents of Fidel’s paradise to Belize. The picture appeared in Latitude 38, a sailing publication based in the San Francisco Bay area and exhibiting no right wing sympathies I have ever been able to decipher. Last week, I spent an afternoon teaching medical students the abdominal examination. One of them was wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt. Castro and Guevara have captured the imaginations of thousands of students and I sometimes wonder at the naivete’ of these children. My middle daughter, who is fluent in Spanish and tends left politically, took a trip to Cuba a few years ago. She expected to find that Cuba was much better than it was portrayed in her home country. Instead, she found it was worse. I think her fluency in the language helped. This would be an argument for opening travel to the island but the chief benefit would be to Castro and his jailers. Hopefully, he will be gone soon and then, maybe, it will be possible for the young to get a true picture of the regime and its consequences. In the meantime, think of why those eight people (six of whom are still hospitalized) would risk their lives to escape.
I occasionally watch Link TV, which often has Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn holding forth. Last night they had a documentary on Cuba, complete with ”56 chevys in the background. The people were saying, “there is more money elsewhere, but Cuba has good community.” I’m sure they were in the better parts of town, and it still looked really poor and rundown.
What’s the use? If anything’s wrong with Cuba, it’s our fault, right?
This counts as a sailing-related post???
Latitude 38 was the source.