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Lessons from Cold War Cuba

-By The Reluctant Republican

I have been fortunate in my life to have had the opportunity to meet a number of interesting people.  As a matter of fact, I happen to believe that most people are interesting; some just more so than others.  I recently had the pleasure of getting to know a  man for the purposes of this story that we’ll call Tom. Tom is in his early fifties and had been somewhat of a college baseball star in his day. That bit of history along with some business contact he’d made along the way found him working for the Pan American Games in the early 1980’s.  Now for those of you too young to remember, there was a bit of tension in the international sporting community in those days. To protest the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympic games being held in Moscow.  The Russians (and their puppets, the Cubans), in turn boycotted the 1984 Olympic games that were held in Los Angeles. This meant that the first opportunity for  worldwide sporting competition in seven years was to be the 1987 Pan Am games. Adding to the tensions was the fact that both original host,Santiago Chile, and later the replacement host, Quito Ecuador withdrew and informed the commission that they would not be able to meet their hosting obligations. The two remaining alternates to host were  Havana, Cuba and  Indianapolis. Indianapolis won the vote further straining relations with Cuba. Tom quickly found himself on a delegation headed for Havana to try to convince the Cuban government to participate. He was partly selected because of his status as a former athlete and particularly as a former baseball player (the Cubans, are absolutely crazy about baseball). 

To paint a more concise picture for you; in 1984 as he prepared to make this trip to communist dictator ruled, Russian communist funded Cuba,  the Cuban missile crisis was little more than 20 years in in the past, the trade embargo was in full force, the delegation would have no formal diplomatic status, the Cubans had just boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles and they had just been snubbed to host the very games he was going to try to convince them to participate in.  By any stretch of the imagination, this was both a tall order and a bit scary.

After arriving in Havana, the delegation was given the full “guided” tour. They were shown the factories where the baseballs were made and taken on what generally amounted to a propaganda tour where they were told and “shown” how superior the Cuban communist system (as an interesting side note, their “tour guides” referred to it as “socialism” rather than “communism” for some reason) was superior to the American capitalist system.  They were also told that Cuba had the finest medical facilities in the world that were free to all citizens (just as much of a lie then as it was when Michael Moore told it again in 2007) and that they had 100% employment which was and is laughable.  After four days of negotiations with Cuban officials, the delegates were summoned to the Presidential Palace at about 2:00 in the morning from the state owned Hotel Flamingo and told that President Castro wanted to ask them some questions.  (That, in and of itself, had to be a jarring moment.)  And so Tom and the rest of the delegation were led to Castro’s office to be introduced to him and then to a conference room to answer his questions.

This had to be an absolutely surreal moment in time for these men.  What in the world would Castro want to ask them directly that he couldn’t just find out from his subordinates? As it turned out, he was mainly interested in logistics; how would the teams be treated, could they fly directly into Indianapolis instead of through Miami (Miami has a large population of Cuban expatriates who don’t look fondly upon the Castro regime), etc.  Interestingly, one of the questions that Castro seemed interested in was what assurances the Pan Am  officials could offer him that he wouldn’t “lose” any athletes.

For those of us who grew up in the 80’s and after, the cold war and many of its realities are less than distant memories. They aren’t even memories at all. They are fragments of information that we read about in a book or saw in a movie; the latter we accept with only partial value as we know that they mix fact with fiction and so in many ways we discount the vividness of some of the truths of that time.  Here sat a man who had ordered the death of thousands, killed with his own hands, ruled with an iron fist, literally lead a bloody revolution in his own country  to bring about what he purported to be a socialist/communist utopia and what he wanted to know was that none if his country’s citizens would be permitted to escape into freedom.  Not just “ordinary” citizens either, but rather athletes who had access to the finest things his country had to offer and who were preparing to represent their homeland in international competition. He was concerned that these citizens would try to escape.

Sometimes I wonder why it is that my peers don’t view socialism or even communism with the same level of disdain as some of the generations that preceded us.  I think perhaps it is because the harsher realities of where those roads lead are not, in fact, actual memories of any kind for us. They are those faded fragments of information of whose validity  we aren’t even certain.  And I think…that is unfortunate.

Tags: Castro, Cuba, Socialism