Letters From Latin America photos courtesy of Stephen Breton by Stephen Breton I finished Spanish 202 last semester with a good grade and a desire to hone my new language skills with real experience. The summer abroad program that I found through U.Va. seemed like it would be educational, but bar-hopping in Spain with a hundred other Wahoos didn't strike any chords. Besides, I was looking for something far removed from the influence of American crap-culture to give me a better perspective on the world. So I went out and found my own program. It was through the Baha'i Faith, a religion focused on service and unity, that I found a project in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. I talked to the friend of a friend of a friend to find it, showing that even when you want to volunteer, it's who you know. They recommended I join their short-term service project called the Proyecto Permanente Movíl. It was set up as a project through which the local youth could do service for as long as a year or as short as a week -- perfect for an americano on his summer vacation. Due to the prominence of the University of Nur in the city, students and Baha'is from all over Latin America (and the occasional gringo) had shown up. Having watched PBS documentaries throughout my youth, I was expecting (actually, hoping) to get to see some bizarre rituals and customs (e.g. loincloths and cannibalism). But when I was picked up at the airport, I was instead welcomed to the strangely semi-modern city of Santa Cruz. It was modern in many ways with a few skyscrapers, cars, and department stores, but the contrasts between rich and poor and rural and modern were everywhere evident: the traditional Cathedral plaza that I learned about in Spanish class was ringed all around by movie theaters, pizza places, and electronics stores; some streets were paved, others were just dirt -- no telling which was around the next corner; dusty, bare-footed ten-year-olds held up gum to the windows of shiny, new SUV's at stoplights. Being from Reston (A Planned Community) on the border of Fairfax County, I guess I just wasn't used to the kind of city that sort of melts into farmland. I wasn't set to join the project for a few days so I went around town with some recent graduates of the local American-style high school. All the rich kids attend these schools, which are found throughout Latin America. They speak English all day and are taught typical American courses by imported American and Canadian professors with the goal of attending a North American university after graduation and, they hope, never going back to Bolivia. For those who had the dollars to afford it, the city could be depressingly American. One night, these kids took me to a club where I was treated to the sounds of "Barbie Girl" and the Backstreet Boys. On the car ride over, we blasted electronic jungle and trance music out the windows of the Nissan Pathfinder while they talked about what drugs they'd tried. Where was I? Hanging out with these Americanized Bolivians made me uncomfortably comfortable. We could talk about the same American TV shows and we even used the same expressions, but their obvious contempt for everything and everyone around them was unsettling. Besides, I'd come to Bolivia to get away from 7 Mary 3. My fellow Baha'is were a refreshing change from the economic elites I had hung out with. The international mix of city-dwellers and rural folk from just about every country in South America at the Baha'i parties reminded me of the uniqueness of Northern Virginia, where I come into contact with asians, whites, blacks, hispanics, and middle-easterners every day. Can you imagine distrusting someone because they're from Maryland or Oregon? Nationalism and covert racism is mixed in with economic inequalities in Bolivia. Chileans are given a mistrutful eye due to some war 80 years ago. Brazilians are despised for their supposed arrogance. My hopes for unspoiled innocence in a primitive land were so much Western paternalism, it seemed. I was given a brief training session by a local family (probably to make sure I actually spoke Spanish), and then I was introduced to my traveling companions for the next 2 months. Edgar was from El Salvador, Saeed was an Ecuadorian of Iranian descent, and Evelio was from the small town of Saavedra outside of Santa Cruz. We didn't have time to socialize before we were shipped out to Colonia Aroma, about 30 miles and a hundred years from Santa Cruz. We tried to tell all the jokes we could think of as a way to get introduced, they were patient with me and good-naturedly laughed at my mangled, untranslateable English jokes (at one point I was explaining that lawyers are despised in this country and that blonds aren't always admired for their genius). But then the taxi-shuttle thunked off the pavement and onto the dirt highway. What was this? As blue-jeaned youths gave way to herds of cattle, I thought I might find that innocence after all. The accommodations were spartan, but the scenery was beautiful. My lungs were scrubbed clean just breathing the air. Our plan was to ask around and see if any parents wanted to send their children to classes. We split into two groups and over the two week period we stayed in Aroma our two classes averaged about 20 kids each (that was about all of them). Due to a lack of teachers and materials in the rural communities, the Baha'is in the rural areas still rely on Santa Cruz for help educating their children. Without television, colored pencils and duck-duck-goose becomes the ultimate in afternoon entertainment. But making the community self-sufficient was our other goal. We worked with the adult Baha'is to explain to them the importance of having a local administrative body so that the community could address its own problems and have a structure through which home-grown development projects could be realized. Studies have shown that attempts by outsiders to directly develop a community have either led to short-term economic gain in return for long-term deterioration of families and society, or the creation of a small, wealthy elite (whose children I think met in the city). Baha'is believe that only a united community with solid, stable families can begin to develop itself. The most obvious example of economic development without a stable framework is the sugarcane-based economy. No one ever got rich through farming and the locals know it. That's why they send their children to the cities for schooling in English and computers. The problem is that those boys lucky enough to get out of the campo (as the rural areas are called) never return, taking all their valuable human capital with them. What good are computer skills in a cane field, anyway? Boys not fortunate enough to go to school go to work in the chaco (the sugarcane fields) with their fathers from before dawn until dusk (the girls all become mothers at a young age). This would be the end of the story if it wasn't for (Comm-schoolers, straighten your ties) globalization. For the past ten years an agri-business conglomerate has been buying up farmland and hiring the farmers back as laborers. Wages go up for the same amount of work -- sounds great. But these men are only going to have job security for about ten more years. The new owners are bringing in trucks and machines that are replacing the thousands of uneducated men who have cut cane all their lives. Economics tells me that efficiency in an economy is an objective good, and modern Western thought takes for granted that progress will free a thankful mankind from its menial labors, but I watch Bolivia with consternation, feeling that unrestrained growth is about to displace thousands and rip apart communities and families. My talks with others on this subject have shown me that this is the state of most of the third world: relentless modernization with no one at the reins; governments racing to better their people economically, while the quality of life seems actually to degrade. Left-wingers would place blame on the west for its consumerism and our shallow, sex-and-violence culture exported all over the world, and I'd agree to a large extent. But it takes two to tango, and the fact that other cultures want to be like the U.S. is the second half of the problem. Our family structure is a disaster, and besides that, we're obviously not all that happy with our riches, seeing as Prozac can proudly claim in its ads that its happy pills have been prescribed to a hundred million people. But that's not what other countries see. Our seductivly glamourous media make other nations race to keep up with the international Jones' in much the same way that Leave It to Beaver allowed advertisers to show America what they should look like and what they should buy, rather than reflecting actual American life in the 50s. The Baha'i Faith's emphasis on other factors besides money in determining exactly what "development" is and on community-based decision-making could go a long way to helping other countries avoid the secret problems that come with growth. What profiteth a country if it gain the world and lose its soul. by Fidel Sassoon One of the great mysteries of American "freedom" is that I cannot sign my name to this article or I could face up to $250,000 in fines and/or ten years in jail. I'm not just being melodramatic; this is the punishment doled out to Americans who visit Cuba without official permission (as I did this summer), according to the Helms-Burton Bill signed by President Clinton on March 12, 1996. I was amazed by how easy it was for me to elude the 37-year American blockade. I simply purchased a plane ticket in Costa Rica, filled out a tourist card on the airplane, and suddenly I was in La Habana, descending a flight of rickety stairs from the airplane to the steamy tarmac. No soldiers were in sight. When I arrived at passport control, I asked the official not to stamp my passport. She smiled and waved me through. The ten days I spent in Cuba made me rethink many of my political views. I still don't like communism but now I understand, and respect, its vision. I am also convinced that the 37-year American embargo against Cuba is a very, very bad idea. I thought I had a pretty clear image of what Cuba would be like. I had lived in communist China and travelled through the Eastern Bloc before the Wall fell. I was born in the same decade as the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Cuba was a frequent topic of conversation at my family's dinner table. I imagined Fidel Castro living in luxury but steering his own country to the brink of starvation, sitting atop an elaborate Orwellian machine that controls the thoughts and actions of the island's inhabitants. After 40 years of revolution, I thought, Cubans must be brainwashed. But, as it turned out, I was the one who had been brainwashed. What amazed me most was that no one was starving in Cuba. In fact, the people I saw in my 400-mile jeep tour around the island seemed well-fed and, for the most part, well-clothed. This is an important accomplishment when you consider that extreme poverty exists, in varying degrees, in almost all of Cuba's Caribbean and Central American neighbors. It is a miracle that the Cuban economy did not implode a few years ago. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost its main trading partner -- with which it did 85% of its trade -- overnight. For 30 years Cuba had focused almost solely on producing sugar for the Soviet Union in exchange for everything from washing machines to medicine. Suddenly, Cuba had to diversify its economy and, at the same time, search for new economic alliances. The low point, when Cubans did suffer real poverty, was 1992. Little by little, the Cuban economy has climbed back with the help of economic reforms, such as allowing for foreign joint ventures in the tourism and energy sectors. There are dozens of new foreign investment projects in Cuba and many more to come from Spain, Germany, Canada, and other world powers. The Cuban government, for the first time, has allowed Cubans to buy dollars and open up small businesses. Meanwhile the peso has increased in strength, moving in the last few years from 120 to 20 pesos per dollar. After the two-year austerity period announced by Castro in 1990, Cuba appears to be coming out of the other side of the tunnel. But life continues to be very hard for Cuba's 11 million inhabitants. Thanks to the American embargo, gasoline and most everything else is in short supply. Buses are infrequent in the city and the most common forms of transportation in the countryside are horse-drawn carts and flat-bed trucks. Although the quality of doctors in Cuba is quite good, there is a serious, and life-threatening, shortage of most important medicines. Soap and shampoo and most other basic products are scarce. The government gives each Cuban a certain amount of food each month (a dozen eggs, five pounds of rice, thirty rolls, etc.) which is not nearly enough to survive. Cubans must use their tiny salaries to buy extra food from farmers or on the black market. Fortunately, Cubans are endlessly imaginative and resourceful in the face of such hardship. During a nation-wide shortage of brake fluid, for instance, one mechanic I met had concocted a home made substitute for brake fluid which seemed to work reasonably well. As a way of obtaining immediate foreign currency, the Cuban government is trying to attract as many tourists as possible, which has created inevitable contradictions with the socialist economy. Tourists in Cuba spend most of their dollars in state-run restaurants, hotels and dollar shops which are not cheap by international standards: a hotel room runs from $45 to $150 in Habana, for instance. A medical doctor in Cuba, on the other hand, earns an average of 180 pesos a month, about nine dollars. This spectacular difference in wealth between tourists and Cubans has resulted in a frantic search for dollars and an explosion of jineteras, or prostitutes, in Habana. The Cubans I met were surprisingly frank in expressing their opinions on the current situation in Cuba. Almost everyone we met complained bitterly of the food shortages, the power outages, the daily search for soap and the nation-wide obsession with obtaining dollars. But at the same time, no one ever expressed nostalgia with the way Cuba was before Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959. No one denies that by 1959, Batista was a puppet of the U.S. government and Habana was ruled by the mafia. The situation had to change. Although Lenin and Marx have been thrown out the window, Cubans have not lost faith in their own revolutionary heroes. Cubans love to display their living-room paintings of Jose Martí and especially Che Guevara. "Che was an authentic man," said Juan, a thirty-year-old I met one day snorkeling on the beach. "He really cared about the people." What these revolutionary heroes represent for Cubans is their belief not in socialism but rather in self-determination. Over the last five hundred years, Cuba has been dominated and exploited by the Spanish, the British, the Americans and, most recently, the Soviet Union. For the first time in modern history, Cuba is plotting its own history without being under the shadow of a world power. In the time I spent in Cuba, I came to see very clearly that the U.S. embargo is a relic of the Cold War which is only causing human suffering and a serious medicine shortage. If the U.S. trades openly with China, which is also communist and has a worse human rights record than Cuba, then why does it not trade with Cuba? Furthermore, by blockading Cuba, the United States is only hurting its own goals: Castro becomes the admired bad boy of Latin America and U.S. companies get a late start investing in Cuba.

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