Hey friends – go to the Photo Page and see Jim Dick’s great U.S.A water falls! Then come back and see my new page, below, on my Cuban visit.
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People, Color, Equality
I wanted to show you some photos of the colors and the people of Cuba. As I tried to select photos, I pondered the people I met. People are a product of their culture and the influence of their government to create that culture.
What culture elements did the Cuban government create? For example, in Cuba it is equal and free for everyone, they say?
We from the U.S. have not grown up with free college education for all, and free medical attention for all. But on the other hand, we are not accustomed to having every college graduate being unable to get a job to earn enough to live on – or having the Doctor tell us about our health problem and telling us what drugs we need to cure the problem – but knowing that the drug is not financially available to us.
I saw so many people focused on getting enough to live on. The folks on the street that were begging were focused on survival for themselves and their families. One tour guide – a twice college graduate – held three jobs – Not driven to have more but to have enough to live on – is what he said.
Last spring he said he taught school all day, worked a second job, and went to school two nights a week – on those nights, no sleep between the end of a school day teaching and the beginning of teaching the next day. He was focused on making enough money to live on he said.
So, I went to the dictionary and to the BBC to get a political description of Cuba:
“The Communist Party of Cuba is the political party that rules Cuba, although others exist without legal recognition or incorporation.
Cuba’s Communist government has survived more than 50 years of US sanctions intended to topple Fidel Castro.
It also survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Exploiting the Cold War, Cuba, was able to rely on strong Soviet backing. It received annual subsidies worth $4-5 billion, and succeed in building health and education systems. But it fell short in building a free successful economy.”
In my brief visit to Cuba, I saw that this history created a culture different from us in the good old U.S.A. – a challenging culture for the people of Cuba. A culture of getting enough to live on, of secret ways to beat the rules, and of speaking very quietly (carefully) about the government and why things are as there are. Entrepreneurship seems tightly controlled to prevent the building individual wealth and the associated power that comes with that wealth. I found the culture hard to define – but I can say, as I ask questions, the people I met were wonderful to me.
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