Letter from a young man who left

From Pomorie, Bulgaria, a young Cuban emigrant responds to the letter written in Havana that we published in our June issue. In his words we hear the disappointment, frustration and pain of a generation of young Cubans who decided to leave Cuba.

Iván López Monreal

Dear Rafael Hernández: it was with great interest that I read your “letter to a young man leaving Cuba.” I felt it was talking about me because I left Cuba two years ago. I’m 28 years old and live in Pomorie, a beach resort in eastern Bulgaria.

“I wanted to take that risk”

The reason I’m writing to you is to try to explain my position as a young Cuban emigrant. I’m doing so without formalities or absolute truths, because if leaving my country has taught me anything, it’s that these truths don’t exist.

Some of the thousands of us who’ve left in recent years may clearly remember the moment they decided to do so. I don’t. My decision was progressive, almost without noticing it. It would have started with that oh so Cuban thing: a complaint. Over trifles, perhaps. For what’s lacking, for what doesn’t come, for what happens, for what doesn’t happen, for not knowing. Or not being able to. The complaint isn’t serious, what’s serious is that it becomes chronic, like a disease, when nothing seems to get resolved. You can just accept that this is how it is and it’s your country for better and for worse, or you move on to the next category, which is frustration. In other words, discovering that the solution to most problems isn’t in your hands. Or that they won’t let you solve it. Or even sadder: that it doesn’t seem to matter. To leave or stay in your country is a very personal decision that should never be judged in moral terms. I chose this path because I wanted a different future than the one I saw in Cuba and I went out to look for it. I was aware that it could turn out badly, but I wanted to take that risk. I won’t lie by saying it was painful. I didn’t cry at the airport. Quite the opposite; I was happy. I’ll go further: I felt freed.

“I’ve seen my country degraded”

You’re right when you say that my generation lacks those emotional bonds created by experience such as the Bay of Pigs, the October Crisis or the war in Angola. But don’t be fooled, I too have had my epiphanies. Probably not so epic, but just as devastating. In the twenty years you mention, I’ve seen the degrading of the country for which both my parents fought so much. I’ve seen my primary and secondary teachers leave. I’ve seen families argue over the right to eat a piece of bread. I’ve seen the promenade full of nervous people protesting the government, and even more nervous people screaming in its favor. I’ve seen young people building rafts to flee to who knows where and a mob throwing cat shit at the house of a “traitor.” I’ve even seen a dog eating another dog on the corner of 27th and F in Havana.

And I’ve also seen my father, who did fight in Angola, speechless, his face pale, the day a hotel doorman told him he couldn’t continue walking on the beach at Jibacoa in front of the international camp site because he was Cuban. I was with him. I saw it. I was ten years old and a child of ten doesn’t forget his father’s dignity going to hell. Even though he returned from war with three medals.

“I’m going to tell you
about my education”

You tell me about the social gains of the revolution, about education and medicine. But I’m going to tell you about my education. I had good teachers and when they left they were replaced by others less qualified who, in turn, were replaced by social workers who wrote experience with an s and couldn’t even find five Latin American capital cities on a map. This isn’t something I was told, I lived it. My parents had to hire private teachers so I could really learn. They didn’t pay for them; an aunt of mine living in Toronto did. So if we’re being honest, I owe a good part of my education to the customers of the Greek restaurant where my aunt used to work.

But there’s more. In my older sister’s day it was extremely rare for a student to get a grade of 100. In my time, 100s became somewhat common, not because the students were more brilliant, but because teachers lowered their standards to cover up for the educational failure. And guess what? I was the lucky one, because those who came after me had a TV instead of teachers.

“Cubans with foreign
currency are healthier”

There’s not much I need to tell you about medicine because you live in Cuba. Apart from the fact that it’s still free, which I admit continues to be commendable, the state of the hospitals, the precariousness of some poorly paid doctors and the increasing corruption are pushing the health system ever closer to that third world it did so much to escape. And it’s true that these days a Cuban who has access to foreign currency, even if illegally, has a better shot at getting good treatment than one who doesn’t because he or she can give gifts or even pay, even though the Constitution says otherwise. As sad as it is to admit, the education and health care available to Cubans these days is worse than what my parents enjoyed.

“They haven’t allowed
generational rotation”

You say the country is making a big effort, that there’s an embargo. And my reply is that there’s also a government with fifty years of making decisions on behalf of all Cubans. If we’re at the point we are, it’s healthier to admit that the government hasn’t known how to or hasn’t been able to or hasn’t wanted to do things differently. Whatever the reason may be. Because failure carries reasons too. And rather than take refuge in the Council of State with its old figures, it should make way for those who are coming up behind them.

Rafael, it’s very frustrating for a young person my age to see that we have 50 years without generational rotation in Cuba because the government hasn’t allowed it. And I’m not talking about them giving power to me, a 28-year-old. I’m talking about Cubans who are 40, 50 or even 60 years old and have never had the chance to decide anything. The people who are these ages and in positions of responsibility in Cuba today haven’t been trained to make decisions, but only to approve them. They’re not leaders, they’re functionaries. And here I’m including everyone from ministers down to National Assembly delegates. They’re part of a vertical system that gives them no scope to exercise the autonomy that befits them. Everything is consulted. And contrary to how the saying goes: instead of asking forgiveness, they all prefer to ask permission.

“What good is my vote?”

You say that in my country you can vote and be elected to positions from the age of 16, and that the presence of youth delegates has fallen since the eighties. You even warned me that if we keep leaving, there will be fewer young people voting and therefore fewer who are eligible. But I ask you: what good is my vote? What can I change? What have the National Assembly delegates done to get me to take an interest in them?

Let’s be honest, Rafael, and I think you are in your letter, so I want to be in mine too: both of us know that the National Assembly of People’s Power, as conceived, only serves to pass laws unanimously. It’s paradoxical to call an institution that meets once a year for a week an assembly. Three or four days in summer and three or four days in December. And during those days it limits itself to approving the mandates of the Council of State and its president, who’s the one who decides what’s done or not done in the country. Unfortunately, I can’t vote for this president. And you don’t know how much I’d like to.

A few days ago I heard [National Assembly President] Ricardo Alarcón confess to a Spanish journalist that he doesn’t believe in Western democracy “because citizens are only free on the day they vote; the rest of the time parties do what they like.” Even if it this were so, which it’s not, at least not always and not in all democracies, it would mean accepting that since my birth in 1984 voters in the United States, for example, have had seven days of freedom—one every four years—to change their President. Sometimes they’ve done it well and other times badly, but that’s another story. A young man of my age from New Jersey has already had two days of freedom, for example, to throw out Bush’s Republicans and choose Obama. We Cubans haven’t been able to make a decision like that since 1948; I don’t include Batista’s elections, of course. And if you tell me that the capacity to name a President isn’t relevant to a country, I’ll tell you that it is. And even more so for a young man who needs to feel he’s being taken into account. Even if it’s only for a day.

“Those who govern fear the future”

You probably think that those of use who left chose the easiest path, that what’s hard is staying behind to solve the problems. But I have to say that my grandparents and my parents stayed in Cuba to fight these problems. They sacrificed many things for the revolution and even risked their lives for it, in order to give me a modern, fair and progressive country. The one they’ve given me is one in which people are ecstatic to be able to buy a car and sell their house, as if it were some sort of triumph. But this isn’t a triumph, it’s just getting back a right we already had before the revolution.

Have we come to this? To celebrating something this basic as a success? How many other basic things have we lost during these years? For my parents it’s painful to bear that failure, and they don’t want it for me. They don’t want me to be 55 years old and have a salary that doesn’t cover my cost of living, neither the salary nor the ration book. Because it’s not enough. And they don’t want me to survive by turning to the black market, to corruption, to the double standard and pretense. They’d rather I be far away.

At 28 I’ve become my parents’ social security. How else do you think two people survive on 650 pesos? Yes, Rafael, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have had to leave so that our country won’t go bankrupt. What Cuba gains from our remittances is more in net worth than almost all its exports. It’s true that the country has lost youth and talent, but instead of opening up a realistic discussion about how to stop this hemorrhage, it remains bound to an ideological rigidity that’s nothing more or less than fear of the future. And what can I do in a country whose rulers fear the future? Wait till they die? Wait till they change the laws out of generosity, not out of conviction?

“Do you want me to
tell you what I think?”

What can I do in a country that still rewards political loyalty over talent? What can I aspire to if who I am and what I do isn’t enough? Become a cynic? Or do I take my lead from you and show my face and tell you what I think? Some young people of my generation have already done so, and where are they? Let’s remember Eliécer Ávila, a student at the University of the East, who had the courage to ask Ricardo Alarcón why we young Cubans couldn’t travel like others, and who was then repressed by the system. It wasn’t his fault there was a BBC camera present, or that Alarcón gave a ridiculous reply: that absurdity about how the sky would fill so up with airplanes that they’d crash into each other.

Now Eliécer leads a marginalized life for political reasons. And he’s not a terrorist or a mercenary or an unpatriotic person; he’s a humble, young mulato university student who made the mistake of being honest. How sad to make a revolution and end up condemning someone for being honest. Is that why you want me to stay?

“Cuba’s not leftist “

Leaving your country and your family isn’t easy. It’s not the solution to anything, it’s only a beginning. You’re going to another culture where you have to learn another language and you go through very bad times. You feel alone. But at least you have the relief of knowing that with effort you can get things done.

My first winter in Bulgaria was really rough. I got a job with a transport company and spent four months loading and unloading washing machines to save money so I could go visit Turkey, a dream I’d had since childhood. And go I did. I didn’t have to ask for an exit visa and my plane didn’t crash into another. I could fulfill Eliécer’s dream. And I’m glad I did.

I’ve known other realities, I’ve been able to compare. I’ve discovered that the world is infinitely imperfect, and that we Cubans aren’t the center of anything. We’re admired for some things and abhorred for others. I’ve also discovered that leaving hasn’t changed my belief in the Left. Because Cuba’s not leftist, Rafael. Call it whatever you want, but it’s not leftist. I’m one of those who seek social progress with equal opportunity and without exclusion. You can think any way you want, but I want it without sectarianism or defensiveness, because they only serve to pit society against itself and replace truths with dogmas.

“In this country they
think in the present”

Fate would have it that I ended up in a country that was also governed by a single party and a single ideology. Here there was no velvet revolution like in Czechoslovakia; they didn’t bring down a wall like in Berlin; and they didn’t shoot a President like in Romania. Here, as in Cuba, the people didn’t know their dissidents. There were no cracks here yet they went from being a socialist State to being a parliamentary Republic in a week. And no one protested. Nobody complained.

I can’t help but wonder: did they spend 40 years pretending? It hasn’t been a bed of roses since then; they’ve faced several crises and the population has had to live with even worse quality than it did in the eighties. But interestingly, the vast majority of Bulgarians don’t want to go back. And this with the fact that the socialism they left behind was considerably more prosperous than what we Cubans have today. But in this country they don’t think about the past, they think about the present. About improving the economy, resolving inequalities, which do exist as they do in Cuba, fighting double standards, personality cults and the corruption generated by the State for decades.

The day the present matters in Cuba, have no doubt, I’ll see you in Havana.

Iván López Monreal is a young emigrant worker.

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