Teach-in reveals truth about Cuban culture, government

02/18/04 - A projector flashed a slide of two smiling faces across a wide screen in Atrium II of the Memorial Unions yesterday afternoon. It was a photograph of Naomi and Abel, a Cuban couple who artist John Kotula of Wakefield met while in Havana during the summer of 2002. "Who would have thought, a Cuban man who can't dance," Kotula said Abel joked about Naomi's aversion to dancing. Abel loved to dance, but Naomi, a sound technician, preferred listening to music instead and hoped to study music in the United States in hopes of becoming a disc jockey.

Kotula talked about his meeting with the pair to a small group of professors, students and humanitarians gathered together to discuss the social, economic, political and artistic aspects of Cuban culture in a daylong teach-in sponsored by the URI Multicultural Center.

As Kotula went through his slides of a policeman, an out of work fisherman, a lawyer and a landlady, as well as a dozen or so photographs of famous Cuban artists and their work, one could gain a sense of Cuban culture people in the United States are not usually exposed to.

Cuba and the United States haven't had a good relationship over the past 40 years. The U.S. placed an embargo on the country in 1962, ending all U.S. trade, in an effort to stop the spread of communism. The U.S. government also passed a series of acts, which prevent foreign countries from trading with Cuba and limit travel to the country.

Jennifer M. Ungemach, a program officer from Oxfam America, an organization that works to prevent poverty in the international community, said that the relationship hasn't improved in the wake of Sept. 11, when Cuba was declared part of the "Axis of Evil."

Martin Lepkowski, a member of Witness for Peace of Rhode Island, said the embargo prevents a flow of information between the two countries, which leads to a lot of disinformation in the United States about Cuba.

Witness for Peace, a grassroots organization, which promotes peace in other countries by trying to reform U.S. policy, allowed Lepkowski to see other cultures and ask questions to better understand them.

Lepkowski said he judges a country by how it treats its children and so he was pleasantly surprised to see how well Cuban children were living. While he has seen children in other countries have to beg for food, the Cuban children he saw were well fed and happy.

"I was shocked at seeing happy children in uniforms going off to school," Lepkowski said.

While the embargo hurts the Cuban economy, Lepkowski said it is also designed to keep the citizens of the Unites States from seeing what life is really like inside the country.

"It's really aimed at us here and how it prevents us from seeing what I saw," Lepkowski said.

He said if people were allowed to travel to the country, they could see what is really happening and make their own informed decisions.

Lepkowski's theory is that America's problem with Cuba has been its independence and unwillingness to listen to the U.S. and follow its rules and way of life.

"The point is that Cuba's not beholden to the U.S. and we can't deal with that," he said. "We're taken aback by a country that says you have to treat us as equals."

He also pointed out that Americans believe that Cuba is in a static state where nothing has changed since 1959, when in reality a lot has changed and they have become more democratic over the years.

Lepkowski said that Cuban artwork is a perfect example of how free the people of this culture are to express their beliefs.

"All you have to do is look at art to see how free a country is," Lepkowski said.

Ungemach spent two years living in Cuba while working with Oxfam, and agreed with Lepkowski's opinion that Cuba has changed greatly over 40 years.

Ungemach said in 1959 Cuba had relations only with the United States and throughout the 1960s their relations were with the Soviet Union. Now Cuba is learning to work on a global scale with a variety of countries.

Oxfam America, along with six other international branches of the organization, including Great Britain, Belgium and Canada, has been working mostly with non-government run programs that have been sprouting up in Cuba since the end of the Cold War.

Ungemach said that when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, people in Cuba began to realize that they couldn't depend on just one organization for all their resources.

These non-government organizations, which still run in accordance with the government's regulations, include the Martin Luther King Center, the Cuban Association of Agriculture and Technology and the Cuban Council for Churches.

She also pointed out that President Fidel Castro, who has ruled for the past 40 years, is not immortal, which leaves the people of Cuba anxious about the uncertainty of their future.

"Cuba does change," Ungemach said. "It's important to take it out of this black and white situation."