(Perceptive Travel, July 2006)

While reluctantly becoming a group tour participant in Havana, Lea Aschkenas finds a way to mount her own mini revolution on a bicycle.

When I returned to my hotel late one night at the end of my first week in Havana, I found Amaury, a bellboy I’d befriended the day before, waiting for me in the lobby.

“Lea,” he called out. “I have some important news for you.”

But then as I approached, Amaury put his hand up as if to stop me, rolling his eyes in the direction of one of the overhead lights.

Keep reading Black Market biking at Perceptive Travel.

Early one afternoon in November of 1999, 32-year-old Denise Vancil was walking through the lively Havana neighborhood of el centro, where impromptu baseball games take over the streets, salsa music emanates from the surrounding balconies and the Caribbean Sea, never more than a few blocks away, smacks itself against the malecón sea wall, drenching passersby with its salty spray.
The heels of Denise’s dance shoes clicked out a fast-paced rhythm as her cane tripped along the uneven sidewalk. She walked with two American women from her salsa class, one of whom offered her elbow for support.

After two months of planning for this trip and nearly 10 years of fantasizing about it, after numerous attempts to convince her friends and family that she would be safe traveling as a blind woman in Cuba, Denise had finally made it here. And in this moment, she was high on the adrenaline rush of her first Cuban salsa class. She would be here for two weeks as part of an Afro-Cuban dance and percussion program organized by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

But somewhere along the walk back to the hotel in Havana, Denise’s friends were deep in conversation and forgot where they were and forgot that they were with Denise, who slipped on a large pothole and fell with all her weight on the side of her right foot. She went to the hospital, got a cast and crutches, and stayed on until it became obvious that she couldn’t maneuver Havana’s potholed streets in her condition. And then, a week after she’d arrived, she flew home to recover. In the U.S., her physical therapist told her that her injury, a break in the fifth metatarsal bone, was, ironically, referred to as a “dancer’s break.”

“As soon as I got home, the first thing I did was to make a reservation to return in January,” Denise says. “I didn’t have a lot of time because I had quit my job and was starting a new one in mid-February.”

Her doctor said it would take at least three months for her foot to heal 50 percent and up to a year for it to heal fully.

“I never exactly told him I was going back,” says Denise. “But I went prepared. I brought sturdy tennis shoes to dance in and an ice pack, pain medication and foot wraps. I remember being in physical therapy with a cast and a wood shoe and telling the therapist, ‘Okay, I know my foot’s broken, but I’ve got this salsa class in Cuba to get back to.’ Everyone thought I was crazy, which I am.”
* * * *

Denise lost her sight at age 13 when her retinas detached following complications from a birth defect knowon as Persistent Hyperplastic Primary Vitreous. Ever since, Denise has spent much of her life doing things that others considered crazy or risky, especially for a blind person. She has white-water rafted along the Yampa River in Utah and hiked the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. She has swam naked off the Caribbean coast of Belize, danced merengue on a bar top in Ecuador, held an anaconda in her hand in the Bolivian rainforest, and tandem biked through lavender fields in France. Closer to home, she has cross-country skied in Tahoe, sea kayaked in Tomales Bay and tandem biked down Mt. Tamalpais, which butts up against the old hunter’s cabin where she lives in Mill Valley, California.

Although Denise and I live less than two miles away from each other in the U.S., I first met her in the lobby of Hotel El Bosque in Havana this past February. I had just flown in from Mexico to study Spanish with a Global Exchange program, and Denise had just returned from two-and-a-half weeks of traveling throughout Cuba. She was standing at the reception desk when I first saw her, asking for her room assignment, her long blond hair ruffled from a breeze that blew in from the open entrance. Her cane was resting against the counter.

In the coming two weeks, I watched as Denise immersed herself in Cuban life, as she walked down the colorful Callejón de Hamel alley with its Afro-Cuban murals and installation art pieces, running her hands along the different shapes. I watched one evening as she danced salsa beneath the stars at a rooftop café in Old Havana, spinning in such swift, fluid steps that a Cuban friend of mine shook his head in disbelief and asked, “Are you sure she can’t see?” And one afternoon when I walked with Denise through a building that housed a scale model of Havana, I learned how to communicate what I saw to someone who knew colors and shapes only from memory. I touched the miniature houses and museums with Denise. I felt the Brillo pad tree tops and, during those two weeks, I traveled through Cuba more aware of my surroundings.

Traveling in a foreign country, even as a sighted person, can be difficult. There are speech and cultural barriers that no amount of language classes can translate. For Americans in Cuba, there’s also the taboo of travel and the 40-year information gap between the two countries.

“I was really nervous about going,” says Denise. “It’s this place you don’t really hear too much about because we don’t really have relations with them. I was a little intimidated as a woman, and a blind woman at that. People kept telling me how dangerous it was. People asked, ‘Cuba? Aren’t they communists? Why would you want to go there?’ So I didn’t exactly get the type of support that I’d wanted, that I’d gotten for other places I’d traveled to.”

For the past seven years, between studying for her master’s degree in special education and teaching at independent living centers, Denise has traveled in Mexico and Central and South America with her boyfriend Tripp Carpenter. They met on a ski trip for the blind that Tripp led ten years ago, and became traveling partners five years later. But Denise had been dreaming of Cuba long before she and Tripp began roaming through Latin America.

“I picked up this flier for Cuba in a Global Exchange store about ten years ago,” she says. “I’ve always loved salsa dancing and Latin music, and I was just fascinated by Cuba because it seemed so mysterious. And I wasn’t disappointed at all. It was worth the wait to get there, and the dancing was phenomenal.”

Before she lost her sight, Denise had taken a combination tap/ballet/gymnastics class. And after she lost her sight, she kept right on with it, eventually adding jazz, modern, ballroom, swing, salsa, merengue, and flamenco to her repertoire.

“A lot of people ask me how I can dance if I’m blind because they think of dance as being so visual or,” she says, laughing, “they’ll ask if I feel the vibrations in the floor and I have to tell them, ‘I’m blind, not deaf.’”

“People see my cane, and they automatically think, ‘Get that girl a wheelchair.’ At times like that, I realize that, no matter what my profession is, I’m going to be a lifelong teacher. I’ll always be educating people about the blind.”

Denise tells people who ask about dance that it’s not as much about visuals as it is about body language.

“I’ve learned to read body language from walking with someone’s arm all the time,” she says. “When I’m walking behind someone on the stairs, I can feel their body going up or down a step. Or if they’re going around a tight corner, I’ll know because they’ll pull their arm back behind them. It’s the same with dance. With salsa, the guys lead and if they’ve just gone forward so many steps and are preparing to go back, they accent the last step before they change directions. So you learn to pick up on that.”

In Cuba, Denise’s dance instructors verbally described the steps to her. They also put her hands on their waists or their shoulders or their legs so she could understand how they moved.

“It’s a little different and more difficult when I’m not doing partner dancing,” Denise says. “I like to try to stay in contact with someone all the time. I’ve danced with blind friends and we’ll have a signal, like I’ll clap and they’ll clap back so we know where we are.”

As a rehabilitation teacher at the Earle Baum Center of the Blind in Santa Rosa, Denise has also taught dance to the blind.

“I teach tap a lot because it’s so rhythm-oriented,” she says. “And I’ll go around individually. I’ll touch my students or have them touch my feet. Maybe we don’t dance exactly like everyone else. Maybe it takes a little extra explanation or a teacher dancing with someone so they can learn a new step, but there’s no special technique or knowledge a teacher has to possess.”

Beyond dance, Denise felt such a connection with the Cuban culture and people that she returned for a third visit in late spring.

“Cuba is so unique from anywhere I’ve been because the people are so genuine,” she says. “I’d meet someone who’d invite me into their house for juice after having known me for just a couple of minutes. This family I’d met only one or two times wanted to throw me a goodbye party when I left.”

When Denise went to the hospital in Cuba with her broken foot, the doctor told her he’d teach her to dance when she got better.

“I was so upset, and that type of kindness was exactly what I needed then,” she says. “But what sticks out most in my mind is how doctors here [in the U.S.] treat you like a science experiment. They poke and prod you and send you off on your way but the doctor I saw in Cuba really listened.”

Denise was also struck by the sparsity of the hospital where she witnessed firsthand the effects of the U.S. embargo on Cuba’s health care system.

“It was just one big room instead of individual consultation quareters, and all there was to sit on was this old metal bench,” she says. “Since the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba didn’t have that financial support coming in, they’ve been going through a really difficult time. Food isn’t plentiful and a lot of home are rundown and without running water or hot water, but this isn’t any different than other underdeveloped countries I’ve been to that weren’t socialist.”

In 1993, in an attempt to jumpstart the economy, Fidel Castro legalized the U.S. dollar and ever since Cuba has been edging slowly toward capitalism. More than a handful of foreign companies have moved in and tourism has replaced the Soviet Union’s aid as Cuba’s main source of revenue. If religion was once considered the opiate of the masses, the U.S. dollar is today considered the god of the Cuban government (which still pays its workers only in Cuban pesos), and tourism, which brings in more U.S. dollars, is protected at the cost of the Cuban people.

“What really struck me was the inequality of Cuban in comparison with the tourists,” says Denise. “I could use any bathroom in any hotel, but they couldn’t even enter the tourist hotels. As an American, I had more rights than they did. Cuba is like a volcano waiting to erupt and unfortunately I’m sure the U.S. will have their hands in it when that happens. It’s a misconception that so many people think that Cuba is in such a horrible situation because really there are so many positives. There’s no violence. People are entitled to free education and medical care. It’s a hard life, but it’s not a bad life.”
* * * *

Form her travels, Denise has witnessed many hard lives, especially for the blind. In Guatemala, where she studied Spanish for three weeks in 1993, Denise met a blind man walking down the street.

“He had a rebar cane,” she says. “And I remember thinking it was so wild that he was actually using it to walk. It’s really heavy and it doesn’t have a tip so it can’t glide over anything. It just jabs into everything. I gave him a cane because I’d brought some extra ones and his eyes teared up and he kept saying, ‘Que increible, que moderno’ How incredible, how modern.”

Although there are more provisions for people with disabilities in the U.S., Denise has found that there’s just as much ignorance and perhaps more fear of people who are different.

“We’re such a busy society that we don’t have time to understand disabilities,” she says. “This is why I thrive on traveling. Not only do I get to see differences and how wonderful they are, but I also feel like there’s more of an equal exchange for me. In the U.S., people want to know about how I lost my sight and then they go on with their lives. In Guatemala, I was in this small town called Santa Cruz. It was the first time I’d been in a place without cars, and it was wonderful. Everyone there was super friendly and interested in me because I was blind. And I was curious about them too. I’d show my cane and then ask if I could feel their looms or their babies wrapped up in their serapes.”

It’s this exchange of information that keeps Denise traveling and also planning for the next adventure.

“I still want to go back to Cuba, but what I’m thinking about now is something a little bigger,” she says, smiling at the thought. “I’d like to find some grant to travel the world and study dance. Do tango in Argentina and flamenco in Spain. I’m happiest when I’m dancing, and I’d like to learn more and then bring it back home as a teacher.”

Oakland native Pablo Menendez came to Cuba from Oakland in 1966 when he was only 14 to study guitar at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA). He planned to stay for just a year but fell in love with the culture and the music and never made it back home. Today, at 47, he’s created a name for himself in the Cuban music scene with his band Mezcla, which he founded in 1985. The word Mezcla (“mix”) describes both the divergent African and Spanish roots of the Cuban culture and the band’s music itself—a blend of rock, reggae, jazz, salsa, son, and merengue. Mezcla has toured Europe and the U.S., stopping off in 1998 for a homecoming performance at Ashkenaz in Berekely. In May, I met up with Menendez in his second-story flat in the seaside Havana neighborhood of Miramar to talk about Cuban music, politics, and solidarity.

UV: How did you end up coming to Cuba to study music?
PM: In 1966, my mother Barbara Dane, the singer [and] longtime resident of Oakland, was the first performer from the United States to visit Cuba after the blockade. She visited this arts school, Escuela Nacional del Arte (ENA), and she was very impressed with the way young people were involved in the transformation of their country. She thought it would be a very good idea for me to study music here. I came thinking that I would be here for a year. The end of that year coincided with the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia. It was an intense period for Cuban youth, and I asked if I could stay another year and then another and this went on until 1969 when I went back to the Bay Area to visit for the first time.

UV: Who were you studying with in Cuba?
PM: I studied classical guitar with Isaac Nicola, but at the time that type of discipline didn’t fit in with my rock-and-roll mentality. In junior high in the Bay Area, I was in a couple of rock bands and then I started at ENA. I also ended up starting an electric guitar department here in 1991.

UV: How can Cuba use its unique musical tradition to boost its economy without commodifying its music?
PM: Cuba has many export items that the world loves, but for me the main thing about the world knowing about our music is that it gives them a chance to learn about our souls and spirits above and beyond certain clichés that have been taught to them about Cubans. The older generation (members of the Buena Vista Social Club) achieving such unbelievable success at this stage of their careers is an inspiration to artists of any country, not only in Cuba where they have been loved and admired always—not forgotten and discarded as the film implies. I think unfortunately that there are always some negative aspects of massive fame. For example, certain styles of music are now exported more than others. It would be sad if everyone in Cuba started to play only old-timey music from before the 1950s.

UV: One of the songs on your latest CD, Rocason, is called, “Lo Que Me Amarra Aquí” (“What Makes Me Love it Here”). At your last performance, you said you sing this to explain to people who ask when you’re on tour why you’re going to go back to Cuba. What is it that keeps you here?

PM: I came down to see what the revolution was about, what was happening in terms of music and culture, and then I got caught up in the whole musical movement.

UV: Are you working on setting up something in the Bay Area?
PM: Yeah, hopefully this fall. Havana has always been one of the world’s greatest mixtures of all times, but Oakland is also a world center of this same culture and mixture. Also, my mother was just down here…with some representatives from Mayor Jerry Brown’s office because Oakland is becoming the sister city to Santiago (in eastern Cuba).

Before I left the Bay Area, I didn’t speak Spanish. Now I go back and discover a whole world of Spanish-speaking families that have been there for hundreds of years. Recently I saw a documentary on the birth of West Oakland and the transcontinental railway and the whole development of black Oakland culture, the blues being the part of music I was brought up with. And these are all things I am very proud of. I never fail to mention that I’m from Oakland when I give interviews.

UV: What was it like coming to Cuba from Oakland?
PM: When you move from one culture to the next, one language to the next, you have to have an open mind, an open heart, have some knowledge and love for your own culture and security in that. You have to know your own language well and I think that for musicians, because you’re used to reproducing sounds, it’s easy to learn a new language. I think if someone was to ask me after all these years what I would say a revolution is all about, I’d say it’s about transforming society. Whereas the U.S. policy towards Cuba has been very solidified and stale, to put it mildly, Cuba has been changing constantly. The 1970s were not like the 1960s, the 1980s were not like the 1970s and were nothing like the tremendously hard times of the 1990s when 80 percent of Cuba’s trading partners disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

UV: How informed about Cuba is your U.S. audience?
PM: A lot of times there are people who know nothing about Cuba and I think when they see Mezcla, it helps them to learn about Cuba. Maybe it’ll make them stand up against all these war-like measures against Cuba, like denying the sale of medicine or food. I’ve always thought that the best, most diverse music can provide a kind of microcosm, a microscopic view of how many possibilities of living together and supporting each other there are.

Operation Peter Pan, as it was named by the U.S. government, is the story of 14,000 Cuban children who, between 1960 and 1962, were brought to the United States by Catholic organizations funded by the U.S. State Department. They were helped by oil companies and other U.S. corporations that were kicked out of Cuba following the 1959 revolution, which brought Fidel Castro to power. To encourage Cubans to move to the United States, the Catholics offered to save their children from communism by setting them up with scholarships at U.S. schools and caring for them until their parents could join them.

But in 1961, the United States closed its embassy in Cuba and then, in the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, attempted to overthrow the Cuban government. In response, Cuba asked the Soviet Union for missiles to protect itself with, setting off the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which in turn led to the cancellation of direct flights between the United States and Cuba. When it became obvious that the Cuban children’s parents would not be coming to the United States any time soon, the Catholic groups collected the children from Miami refugee camps and disbursed them among orphanages and foster families throughout the country.

Five or six years later, when political tensions with Cuba had decreased, most parents made their way to the states. But by this time, many of their children had forgotten Spanish and could no longer communicate with them. Others couldn’t recognize their parents and even challenged their identities. Throughout the entire operation, the U.S. press released few, if any, stories on this massive exodus that linked church and state and spent an unknown amount of taxpayer money on a plan not even known about by the public. Today the Miami Cuban website www.NoCastro.com chastises the Cleveland Plain Dealer for having published an article about Operation Peter Pan in 1962, claiming that the newspaper broke the spirit of cooperation, suggesting collusion between the U.S. government and the press.

I first learned of this story while living in Cuba during a period that, in future history books, will probably be referred to as “The Time of Elian.” The Elian Gonzalez custody battle was one of the few Cuban news stories to receive major coverage in the U.S. press in recent years. And in Cuba it also dominated the newspapers and the two government-owned television stations. People were sick of hearing about Elian by the time I arrived in Cuba last February. Everywhere I went in the country–from Havana’s famous malecon seawall to dusty street corners in the tiny town of Baracoa–Cubans rushed up to me hungry for news of what else was going on in the United States.
Because the U.S. embargo is not only a blockade of food and medicine but also a stranglehold on the transmission of information, I was suffering from a similar sort of ignorance when it came to the lives of these Cubans. Together we created impromptu information exchanges. And through these friendships I learned of a Cuba rarely covered in the U.S. media. I met people who had volunteered in the 1961 Literacy Campaign when one hundred thousand Havana residents moved to the countryside to teach the peasants to read. Several volunteers were murdered by counterrevolutionary peasants who, most Cubans believe, were paid by the CIA. I heard a trova or political folk singer criticize Fidel Castro at the National Symphony. I met a doctor who had been living in Africa along with thousands of other Cuban physicians who offered free medical care to the poor. And I learned about Operation Peter Pan. This story has parallels to the Elian crisis and perhaps at one time could have elicited similarly strong emotions, but it is a story that even today, nearly 40 years later, remains locked away in the confidential files of the CIA.

During my first month back in the United States, I asked everyone I knew if they’d heard about Operation Peter Pan, but not one person had. People asked me only about salsa clubs and santeria, poverty and the pending death of Fidel. And, of course, Elian and the Buena Vista Social Club. It was all they knew of Cuba.

Then in August I went to Berkeley for the screening of Fidel, a documentary about Castro. I learned that its producer, Estela Bravo, a 67-year-old U.S.-born filmmaker who has been living in Cuba for the past 36 years, was also working on a documentary entitled Operation Peter Pan. The following month, in a telephone interview to Havana, I spoke with Estela about Operation Peter Pan, her filmmaking, and her thoughts on both the Cuban and U.S. media.

MediaFile: How did you end up moving to Cuba?
Bravo: My husband is Argentine, so we were living there when he came home one day in 1963 and said, “How would you like to go to Cuba?” He’s a biochemist and had been asked to teach at the medical school there. I went, thinking it would only be for a year, but they asked him to stay longer.

MF: Have you always worked as a filmmaker in Cuba?
Bravo: No, I worked as protest song director at Casa de las Americas, a cultural institution in Havana. We did programs about love songs, work songs, hootenanny type of things. And then we started doing it for TV. That’s when I became active in TV and film.

MF: When was that, and what made you decide to do documentaries?
Bravo: In 1979 I started working on documentaries about Cuba because in that year there was a big group of Cubans moving to Miami but there was so little information [in the U.S.] on Cuba.

MF: What was U.S. coverage of Cuba like then?
Bravo: If you didn’t live in Miami, the media ignored Cuba. And in Miami all the news was negative. But that’s changing now, especially after the Elian story. I’m in the U.S. frequently, and I thought most stations except for Fox did pretty objective coverage.

MF: How would you compare Cuban coverage of events in the U.S. with U.S. coverage of events in Cuba?
Bravo: I believe that there’s no freedom of press anywhere. In the U.S. whoever owns the New York Times decides what goes in and how it goes in. In Cuba, it’s the government who decides. It is opening up a little now. With Elian, we had all the roundtable discussions. But you have to remember that Cuba is like a country in war, and the government is very [vigilant] about anything that they think will hurt the revolution. When there are better relations with the U.S., things will open up more.

MF: Tell me about Operation Peter Pan. Most people in the U.S. don’t seem to know anything about it.
Bravo: In the early 1960s, 14,000 Cuban children were sent out of Cuba by their parents to save them from the revolution. They were supported by the Catholic Church, which thought the parents would come over quickly. But then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a lot of flights were shut down, so many kids were brought up in foster homes and orphanages throughout the U.S. They are the children of the Cold War. It’s largely an untold story. The CIA has refused to open these files. There’s this woman, Maria de los Angeles Torres, at De Paul University who’s a Peter Pan child, and she’s suing the CIA to get access to her files.

MF: Does she know her parents?
Bravo: Oh, yes. Most of the parents came four or five years later. But all these kids have a wound in them about the time of being alone.

MF: Why did you decide to work on this as your next project?
Bravo: I met the artist Ana Mendietta in 1978 at a talk she was giving in Soho. She was a Peter Pan person and she started telling me her story. I found her aunt here in Cuba and helped reunite them. All of that spurred me on to do this story. I’ve been working on it on and off for years since.

MF: Has there been anything in the U.S. press about Operation Peter Pan?
Bravo: Yvonne Conde wrote a book about it called Operation Pedro Pan, but it was also a book against Cuba. There have been a few TV programs in Miami about it. The more this story gets out there the better.

MF: How did you go about tracking down Peter Pan kids for your documentary? Who else did you interview?
Bravo: One person led to another. Just today I heard from these twins in Miami who want to talk about their experiences. I interviewed some of the parents, and Father Walsh is also in my film. He’s the main person in Miami who organized the operation. He says he got a call from the State Department saying they wanted to get children out of Cuba, but they couldn’t do it themselves. They needed an organization. They said they’d get him the money to do it. There’s been a lot of talk about the money and where it came from, but no one knows for sure.

MF: Where do you get funding for your films?
Bravo: I’m independent, so it depends on the film. Canada and Channel 4 in London have helped a lot. Eventually I give my films to Cuba, and they put them on the air. Well, not all of them.

MF: Why not?
Bravo: It all goes back to that freedom of the press issue. The person who has the money to buy the press has all the freedom. If you think about it clearly, even the term human rights is [just as arbitrary]. How do Cubans define human rights? They say, well, a person has a right to free health care and free education.

MF: Have any of your films been shown in the U.S.?
Bravo: I’ve done 28 films now, and many are subtitled and distributed by Cinema Guild in New York. Many have been in film festivals in the U.S., in San Francisco and Chicago. One called Miami Havana was shown on P.O.V. and another, Cuban Excludables, about Cubans in prison in the U.S. without due process, was on PBS.

MF: When do you think you’ll be done with Operation Peter Pan, and will it have a showing in the U.S.?
Bravo: I’ll probably be done in January, and hopefully it’ll show there [in the Bay Area].