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Cuban Coloradans hold hope for change

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 19, 2008 at 9:50 a.m.
Updated February 19, 2008 at 9:50 a.m.

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Coloradans with Cuba connections hope relations with the island country will thaw and hard-line stances will totter now that Fidel Castro has announced his resignation.

He was charismatic, strong-armed and brutal, with an iron hold on his people, their freedoms and their tottering economy, they say.

Denver Deputy Mayor Bill Vidal, who was born in Cuba and came to America with his siblings when he was 10, said Castro's resignation "was long overdue."

He sees the transition in power as an opportunity for the United States to reach out to Cuba and help its suffering people.

When he heard of Castro's resignation, he thought of a sign hung up at work that says, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

To Vidal, that phrase reflects not just Castro's Cuba but U.S. policy toward Cuba.

"This continuous oppression of Cuba, the squeezing the life out of them until they see things our way makes no sense to me.

"With him stepping down, maybe we can start normalizing relations with Cuba and help the Cuban people," Vidal said.

"It's time to do something different, at least open up trade and travel — send a signal, do something positive.

"I visited Cuba in 2001, and saw how much the people were suffering there," said Vidal, whose 2007 book "Boxing for Cuba" describes his family's immigration experience.

"The Cuban people aren't exposed to anything, the government controls the media, 80 percent of them were born since Castro took power.

"If we opened up trade and allowed Americans to go there, to influence them with new ideas, we'd get them moving in a different direction.

"That makes more sense than forcing it out of them."

When Vidal came to the United States in 1961, his parents weren't able to leave with him, so he and his siblings spent four years in a Pueblo orphanage.

"We suffered greatly, the Cubans who came to the United States," said Vidal, who also is director of Denver Public Works. "But ultimately we made a good life for ourselves.

"It's time to let go of the hatred, to do something to improve things in Cuba, both economically and ideologically, It won't be an overnight transition, but we have to start."

Spense Havlick, former deputy mayor of Boulder, who has visited Cuba four times, this morning predicted the decades-old blockade of trade with Cuba will disappear within two years.

"Oil has just been discovered off the northern edge of Cuba," he noted. "If our governments can become friendly again, it would be a nice thing for the United States to beging some trade and commerce, instead of going to Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela" for oil.

Havlick, who saw Castro once when the dictator spoke to a University of Colorado Semester at Sea class, said, "He certainly instilled a great deal of pride in the Cuban people.

"Almost all the (Cuban) people I spoke with over the past six years talked about the way he mobilized the spirit of the country against formidable odds."

Castro fought for independence following 300 years of Spanish rule and decades of influence from American fruit and sugar companies, Havlick said. For that, he may be remembered as a Che Guevera-type liberator.

"When we saw him on the stage eight years ago, he appeared to be less the monster I remember when I was building a bomb shelter in Milwaukee. He was more of a hard-line socialist.

"He said he had mellowed over the years."

Still, he suppressed the freedom to speak and other basic liberties, Havlick said.

"Whenever there were some overtures from American business interests, Castro would do something quite dreadful, like imprisoning peole who spoke out against the government.

"His regime ruled with a very heavy hand."

Havlick said that despite Castro having "this overwhelming power over public policy," he noticed "little events of religious expression and freedom — creches at Christmas time or little events of capitalism, vendors on the streets."

Just a month ago members of the Boulder Sister City program packed used medical supplies donated by Colorado Hospitals and shipped them to Yateras, Cuba.

Havlick said "there was a peculiar purity in the Cuban people, a love of the simple life," despite the fact that "they are very, very poor."

Havlick fears that if there is a thaw in relations, American interests will build tourist hotels and "overwhelm the simplicity of what is truly an agricultural economy."

Comments

  • February 19, 2008

    10:27 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    huffmanglhr writes:

    I am hoping for the best. My great grandmother was from Havana, and lived there till she was 18. There is an amazing home stead, and cigar factory down there that she and her family worked for, that our whole family has never seen. Maybe this will be the start to that connection my family has never had. It would be so amazing to finally see my father's family history and to experience Cuba for what it really is.