3/27/15 Havana, Cuba

Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad wrote about a semi-distinguished group of American travelers who embarked upon a journey to the Old World of the Mediterranean on the ship, the Quaker City. Pragmatic and accomplished but generally ignorant of history, the travelers make naïve but truthful observations about the foreign cultures they met. Lost on them were the nuances of these foreign lands, upon which they pronounced judgments confidently.

In contrast to the innocents abroad, Marc Frank is a journalist who has lived in Cuba for twenty years, and he writes about the complexities of Cuba in his new book, Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana. Our group from a Citadel study abroad program met with him in a Havana restaurant the other day. Frank’s grandfather wrote a book about the country, so in some sense he inherited his relationship with Cuba and his appreciation of the intricacies of this foreign culture.

Reading Frank’s book, one learns that Cuba is a totalitarian dictatorship run by a single political party that persecutes dissidents such as Osvaldo Paya. In 2015 the vast majority of 11 million Cubans lack access to internet, and the country affords a special position to one newspaper: Granma, the communist party paper.

Yet there are debates within this seemingly monolithic system. For instance, Juventud Rebelde, the communist youth paper, in 2006 wrote a scathing three-part series on graft and the dismal offerings in shops, bars, and other retail sector services, titled “The Big Old Swindle.” Some Cubans can get underground access to internet, and spread its information by word of mouth. There are regional newspapers. Cuba is an enigma.

However, on this issue I have an affinity with the passengers of the Quaker City. Cuba effectively has one newspaper: Granma. This is the only newspaper I see distributed outside my hotel. Reading its pages, I learned about “US efforts to make the Ukrainian right wing government a thorn in Russia’s side.” I learned that Caracas declared peace against US aggression, and the “The United States threatens Venezuela’s national Security” (Venezuela has a per capita murder rate 2.5 times that of Mexico). I performed a mental experiment, substituting the names of countries in the headlines of Granma. Imagine the The Wall Street Journal heralding, “It Is Impossible to Seduce or Buy America, or to Intimidate Britain.” The sole newspaper of Cuba offers indoctrination, not debate.      

I must confess, I get confused sometimes trying to categorize editorialists in major US newspapers. I know the Wall Street Journal is conservative and the New York Times is liberal. I know that Peggy Noonan is conservative and Paul Krugman is liberal. But I get confused because I know that David Brooks writes for the New York Times, but he is conservative. And the Wall Street Journal runs Op-Eds from that guy from the Brookings Institute (liberal), but I can’t remember his name though I recognize his pixilated portrait. This knowledge is just enough to shake my confidence in my ability to accurately categorize other writers. Have I missed something? Is that person from Arkansas whom The Post and Courier publishes conservative or liberal, or both? The simplicity of Granma is enticing. 

But, no. It is hard to swallow the pedantry of Granma. No doubt this is how the travelers on the Quaker City would see it. Give me the messiness of two newspapers or two hundred newspapers with a welter of categorizable and uncategorizable writers.