January 20, 2008

A View from Cuba
College study abroad lets Isaac Holeman look beyond the rhetoric

By ED COX
of The Dalles Chronicle

Isaac Holeman has been to a lot of fascinating places in his 21 years — Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Mexico — but none quite so unusual as Cuba.

“It was so interesting,” says the 2004 The Dalles High School graduate of his fall semester study-abroad experience in Havana through Lewis & Clark College.

Lewis & Clark, where Holeman is a junior, is one of just a handful of undergraduate institutions in the nation that have sent students to Cuba since the Bush administration restricted that option to colleges or universities that design their own programs.

Together with 26 fellow students, Holeman spent 10 weeks studying art, culture and politics at Havana’s Art Institue and Cuba’s health care system as part of an independent study.

Calling that system “incredibly unique,” he notes that with a tiny fraction of the money spent on health care in the U.S., Cuba has achieved the same low infant mortality rates as — and a slightly better life expectancy rate than — its giant neighbor to the north.

Part of that savings, he says, is due to problematically low doctors’ salaries — like most other Cubans, they make between $12 and $15 per month.

Still, he says, Cuba has achieved its notable health care success by making “smart investments” in preventive care and through its “fanatical” commitment to a universal right to good medical attention.

“Every case at least gets seen,” he says, noting that all Cubans have a doctor within walking distance. That, he says, contrasts with U.S. health care, where 10 percent of patients consume approximately 80 percent of resources, often to treat chronic disease in highly sophisticated ways.

While Holeman — a biochemist and pre-med student — was drawn to the program by his interest in health care and Spanish, he found his education in culture and politics equally interesting.

“I feel like Cuba’s kind of a hard place to understand,” he says, adding that it was “more different than any other place I’ve ever been or read or heard about.”

His understanding was modestly aided by short trips from the country’s capital to its eastern and westernmost provinces, and also by his class on “The Socialist Experiment in Cuba,” where he says the reliability of information varied greatly from speaker to speaker.

“I very rarely felt like I was being outright told something that wasn’t true. I frequently felt like I was listening to a senator,” he recalls, expressing his admiration for the way some speakers managed to evade questions.

“It’s a really funny situation. No one gets tortured or disappeared in Cuba,” he says, but there’s a sense of impended career penalties for anyone who gets too controversial.

It was in Holeman’s conversations with local people, once he built up sufficient trust, that he got a better handle on the country’s state of affairs — and how people feel about it.

According to Holeman, those talks belied a conception popular in the U.S. — and especially with the current administration — that communism in Cuba will either drag on in failure or suffer a dramatic fall.

Neither scenario is what most Cubans seem to want, Holeman says, adding that they see more possibilities for change within the system.

“There’s a feeling that things are changing in Cuba,” he says, one he credits in part to the symbolic significance of Fidel Castro’s delegation of his powers as head of state to his younger brother Raúl in 2006.

Despite the elder Castro’s ill health and fading strength, Holeman says he remains a brilliant orator and a dominant figure in Cuba. That influence will likely be felt long after his death, Holeman believes.

“People tend to have ... a really profound respect for him, even when they think it’s really good we’re transitioning away,” he says.

More than on drastic change, the emphasis among Cubans, according to Holeman, is on maintaining but improving the “revolution” — the euphemism by which the government and the socialist system are referred to.

“There’s a lot of people that feel that changes need to be made,” he emphasizes.
He’s not sure what, exactly, those changes might be, though he notes that poverty is a universal concern.

While Cubans have their most basic needs looked after, he says it remains hard for them to get by — or even buy a pair of shoes for their kids. State measures promoting equality tend simply to mean that “everybody is really poor.”

One thing, he says, is clear: to improve its economic situation, Cuba needs to have a healthier relationship with the dominant hemispheric power, the U.S., which continues to impose a crippling trade embargo that goes so far as to deny its own business to any company trading with Cuba.

He doesn’t foresee a “serious dialogue between Washington and Havana” happening under Bush, although he does see some openness to that on the part of some of the Democratic presidential candidates.

For the moment, though, Cuba will remain a unique and undefinable place, uneasily poised on the paradox of social success amid impoverished uniformity.

In Havana’s old town, Holeman says, the “gorgeous but decrepit” buildings give the sense of a fall from grace. Still, the streets are filled with happy, healthy-looking children rather than the homeless who haunt American metropolises.

“It’s an incredible place,” he says.

The most incredible place he’s been.