Jan. 16, 2000

TRAVEL TO CUBA SHOULD END REVOLUTIONARY ILLUSIONS

Giving students first-hand experience of life in Fidel Castro's Cuba will enhance their education.

Filling their head with romantic nonsense before they go will not.

Brian Fitzpatrick, a teacher at Jefferson County Open School in Lakewood, Colo., will be leading a group of 10 students along with his two college-age daughters and another teacher on a two-week tour starting Wednesday.

On a recent Friday, "Cuba Day," students prepared for the trip.

"You don't get to see many revolutions," Fitzpatrick told them. "They happen very rarely. What hit me last night is, revolution is pure. It comes out of the ground, like grass. It comes out of human hearts that are sick of exploitation."

No. Revolution is brutal. Often it devours its own, as in France and Russia; even when that doesn't happen, it is likely to deliver the country into decades of misery, as in China or Cuba. And it grows in rank abundance in human hearts made sick by their own greed or ambition.

The Cuba-bound students might derive some inkling of the nature of the place they are about to visit from the fact that their trip is in part a "community service" project. They will deliver to their host school in Cuba things unavailable there, such as leotards for the dancers and reeds for the woodwind players.

The U.S. embargo, whatever you may think of it, cannot be blamed for such scarcity. Cubans are free to trade with any other country in the world, they don't need us, but Castro's tyranny devastated the economy. Now that he is doddering and there are no Soviet billions to prop up the ruins, there is nothing to trade and no money to spend.

The students should reflect on why so many Cuban-Americans safe in Miami believe sending Elian Gonzalez back to his father is like sending Anne Frank to Nazi Germany.

They can also learn from the experience of the National Conference of Editorial Writers that visitors are not welcome unless they are prepared to see only what the regime wants them to see.

The NCEW believes that journalism will be better informed if journalists have seen the places they are writing about, so it regularly organizes international tours. I went to Russia in June on one of them.

The group had scheduled a Cuba trip for late January, but in December, they were notified that Susana Barciela, an editorial writer for the Miami Herald, would be denied a visa.

That wasn't entirely a surprise to the Herald. Herald journalists weren't allowed to cover the Pope's visit in 1998 or the Ibero-American summit in Havana last year. But it dismayed NCEW members, who furiously debated in their online discussion group whether this selective discrimination was grounds to cancel the trip.

In a Dec. 28 editorial, the Herald asked "What is Castro afraid of?" Is it that "our editorial writer will point out the inconsistencies between the propaganda and the facts" to colleagues on the trip?

The editorial concluded that the trip should go on, and encouraged NCEW members who would see firsthand the results of 40 years of repression to "ask unflinching questions of Cuban government guides and of ordinary citizens if opportunities for conversation arise beyond the prying eyes of the state police."

Barciela wrote a column detailing the way Cuba restricts unfavorable press coverage. It's illegal for a Cuban to own a fax machine, she said, and a new law aimed at the independent press makes collaboration with "Yanqui imperialists" punishable by jail terms up to 20 years. A doctor who told foreign journalists about an outbreak of dengue fever was sentenced to eight years for "disseminating enemy propaganda."

But the journalists were spared the agony of decision. Cuba canceled everybody's visas.

A government representative cited a tour organizer's negative comments about the denial of Barciela's visa and concern that trip members were making reporting arrangements separate from the official briefings planned by the government.

In her column, Barciela suggested some questions visiting journalists would get in trouble for asking.

If reuniting families is such a high priority, why won't Cuba grant exit visas for family members who want to join relatives in the United States?

"Out of bounds, too, are questions about uncontrolled AIDS or other venereal diseases that might scare sex tourists," she wrote. "Chatting up Cuban workers of foreign joint ventures might make Cuban handlers nervous. The workers could disclose that they earn: slave wages in pesos, even though the regime charges big bucks for their labor."

After the visa cancellation, Herald publisher Alberto Ibarguen said, "People who believe in democracy, yet romanticize the revolutionary Castro, should remember this incident."

So should Fitzpatrick's students.

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