Cuba

Writ­ing a response to an ear­li­er thread got me think­ing about some things, specif­i­cal­ly about Cuba and women and see­ing Cuba before Cas­tro dies, because things will change quite a bit when he’s gone.

My father went to Cuba a cou­ple years ago. He was a part of a “ful­ly host­ed” yacht race so it was entire­ly legal and every­thing. And he took a lot of pic­tures. One of my favorite ones is this post’s fea­tured image above.

A cou­ple things about this. First, it looks like an aban­doned Hol­i­day Inn. And it looks like Che is spray­paint­ed on. Well, it’s very pos­si­ble that the build­ing was once a hotel, but cur­rent­ly it is the Min­istry of the Inte­ri­or in Havana. And that Che is not paint­ed on to the side of the build­ing; if you look close­ly, you’ll see that in fact it is a huge iron struc­ture. Which makes it even more impres­sive to me.

Well, there’s more his­to­ry to that pho­to, which is why I’m get­ting all wist­ful. About a year ago at Burn­ing Man on the day of the burn, I took off on my bike to go do some sketch­ing in my sketch­book and take some pho­tographs. I zipped and zoomed and sat out in the sun draw­ing. Here:

and I end­ed up way on the oth­er side of Black Rock City from my camp, hav­ing run out of water. I stopped at Alien Love Nest and took advan­tage of some of their shade and even­tu­al­ly cooled down to the point where I was coher­ent enough to ask for water, which I need­ed very bad­ly. I fell to talk­ing with a love­ly young lady named Rachel, who want­ed to see my sketch­book and after talk­ing about the most inter­est­ing parts of the body to draw asked if I would draw her hands. We sat under the tent at Alien Love Nest and I went to work.

After that I helped her get her tent set up and then we walked around the perime­ter of Black Rock City just as every­thing was start­ing to get ready for the main event. In total I spent about 3 hours with this young lady. After the burn and sub­se­quent run­ning around dazed, I final­ly went back to camp to find my camp­mates telling me that a cer­tain 23-year-old blonde had been ask­ing for me. And she left a note with an email address. We trad­ed a few emails, most­ly she asked me a lot of ques­tions about myself.

One of these ques­tions was, “would you rather live under com­mu­nist rule or fas­cist rule?” and my answer to that was too com­pli­cat­ed to go into here in this already lengthy jour­nal entry, but I sent her a copy of the pho­to my father took of the Min­istry of the Inte­ri­or in Havana. Rachel wrote back: “I was wor­rried that you might be some kind of psy­cho, but any­one that sends me a pic­ture of Che by email has got to be OK.”

I nev­er got to vis­it her up in Wash­ing­ton; the details did­n’t work them­selves out. And after a while I had­n’t got­ten an email from her in a long time and I start­ed to won­der whether she’d changed her mind and had decid­ed I was some kind of psycho.

One Sun­day morn­ing in March I gt up and sat down to the com­put­er to check the news. The top sto­ry on the BBC Online web­site was: “Amer­i­can Activist Killed in Gaza.” I groaned and clicked to see what mad­ness might be com­ing out of Israel. Nat­u­ral­ly, I was­n’t expect­ing to see Rachel’s name there.

I’m not writ­ing this to rehash the events of almost six months ago, but feel free to check it out yourself:

March 16^th 2003
March 19^th 2003
March 22^nd 2003: two posts
March 23^nd 2003: The Way Home

San Fran­cis­co is a very lib­er­al city. I think most peo­ple know this. So when I walk around the city I see Rachel’s face on fly­ers on tele­phone poles and in the win­dows of the offices of social­ist news­pa­pers and so on. One of these places is on 23^rd street between Mis­sion and Capp. There is a mur­al with numer­ous rev­o­lu­tion­ary heroes all over it. I’m in the neigh­bor­hood every Mon­day and I found, six weeks ago or so, that they had added Rachel’s face to the mur­al. What was nicer was that her face was right next to Ché’s. I’m sure the artist had no way of know­ing how sweet that was, but it was a won­der­ful piece of syn­chronic­i­ty. I vowed to bring my cam­era the fol­low­ing week to take a pho­to­graph that I could send to Rachel’s family.

The fol­low­ing week, I did indeed bring my cam­era, but to my shock some­one had van­dal­ized the mur­al, and had kicked or chipped a hole in Rachel’s face. I don’t know what kind of a shitheel would do a thing like that, but I’ve been try­ing to con­vince myself that it was just some­one drunk and ran­dom­ly destruc­tive rather than some­one who rec­og­nized her and want­ed to make a state­ment. I got mad enough with Thom Stark’s (and oth­ers’) “your ter­ror­ist friend got what she deserved” crap. I want it to be the act of a ran­dom drunk who did­n’t sin­gle her out, because think­ing that it could have been inten­tion­al makes me frus­trat­ed that I don’t know who did it becuase I want to kill them. And that makes me sad because I don’t want to believe that I’m capa­ble of such blind rage that I could actu­al­ly kill some­one else, but there it is, right there in my own heart, the mur­der­ous hate that can­not forgive.

If I have this much trou­ble for­giv­ing over an act of van­dal­ism, I can only imag­ine the very shad­ow, the minut­est sliv­er of that which fuels the cycle of vio­lence in Israel/Palestine and else­where. I lost some­one I bare­ly knew. Peo­ple on both sides have lost their hus­bands and wives, their sib­lings and par­ents, their chil­dren and their friends, and that makes my pain and anger seem insignif­i­cant. More impor­tant­ly, though, it might be the first step in for­giv­ing them for being trapped in the cycle because I know how hard it is to get out of it even in a much much small­er scale. That’s the root of com­pas­sion, isn’t it? To have the same vital emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence, to expe­ri­ence it togeth­er. To have the same passion.

It does­n’t make any­thing go away, but I can see the door­way and maybe that is the way out. Maybe.

In any case, I’ve decid­ed while writ­ing this: I must see that build­ing with my own eyes. When Cas­tro dies, that iron­work on the side of the Min­istry of the Inte­ri­or will prob­a­bly be torn down. And I think I have to go there while it’s still there, and thank Ché.