Luisa Yanez, of the MiamiHerald.com, wrote an article titled "Plan for post-Castro Cuba outlined." I read it and wonder how much of the plan could ever be implemented. I think it's a sad chapter in history that millions of Cubans were displaced by Fidel's totalitarian government taking over and destroying what was known as an island paradise. But what voice could the exiled community really have in Cuba's present and future? That part I don't know.Recently I went on a virtual scavanger hunt and actually found the church I went to as a child, la Primera Iglesia Bautista de Santiago de Cuba. I also have used Google Earth to find my home.
But these are wishful thinking type of activities. Would I like to physically go back to my home town of Santiago de Cuba and walk the streets I walked on as a child? Yes. Would I like to see the home I grew up in? Yes. Would I like to live in that home again? No. I am pretty sure it's nothing like what it used to be. When we left Cuba my grandparents wrote us to tell us the government had put four families in our home, turned it into a cuarteria, a slum type place where four families lived and the home was being destroyed.
I'm glad the Unidad Cubana plan Luisa Yanez refers to in her article actually mentions that the Cuban exiled community would not go back and try to reclaim their old homes. It'd be horrible if we did to those now living in Cuba what Israel has done to the Palestinians... sad... sad all around.
I agree with the last lines in the bulletin, "They know that Marxism and Lenism have failed and that Cuba is a disaster and something needs to be done.'' My hope is that, somehow, those of us in the exiled community would work together with the Cubans in the island and help them take their 50-year old bandages off, sort of like the Biblical story where the onlookers are told to take Lazarus' bandages off when he comes back from the dead. I look forward to the day when Cuba comes back from the deadness and oppression it's lived under all these years and those freshly liberated Cubans, together with the help of the exiled community, can work together and build a healthier and brighter future for the Island of Our Hearts*.
*Island of My Heart is the working title of the middle grade novel on Cuba I'm writing.
