Thinking in Cuban.

• Author: Campo, Rafael

Like more and more of us in this privileged country, I have begun to question the delightfulness of certain luxuries, most especially that of e-mail. Occasionally, however, amidst the barrage of spam hoping to sell us a lower mortgage rate, more hair, a guaranteed weight loss plan, or a larger penis--apparently anything really can be bought in the United States of America, with the most personal and fantastical of needs best met as impersonally as possible--something drifts in of genuine human meaning and value.

Today, for example, a poet-friend in Paris e-mailed me a column from Britain's The Guardian, written by a former Labour MP, that addressed Cuba. While it may be true that this writer, too, was trying to sell something of his own--namely, that fond liberal dream of a more normal trading and diplomatic relationship between Western democracies and the small, defiantly Communist island nation that is my family's homeland--I found the piece strangely moving. After a compelling critique of the hypocrisy of Cuba's conservative detractors, buttressed by a summary of the many injustices Cuba has suffered at the hands of the U.S. (the puny victim of a trade boycott by the world's greatest heavyweight champion of free trade), it ends with a rousing endorsement of a country that has conquered poverty, disease, and illiteracy in spite of its ostracism. Cuba, he writes, is "a symbol of human potential."

I immediately forgave the article's polemical elements, having long ago learned that any discussion of Cuba by necessity attempts to oversimplify. What so powerfully engaged me was the notion of a Cuba wronged, isolated, and thus impoverished by its bullying neighbor to the north, a not-unfamiliar image that resonated in a new way for me now, with opposition to the spiteful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq so much in mind these days. I found myself repeating my family's arduous journey once again, reexamining my citizenship in the Land of the Free, and reconsidering my paradoxical identity as at once a "revolutionary" with strongly leftist inclinations of my own and a refugee from a nation that proclaims itself (apparently persuasively, at least to one genteel Briton) as the purest, and thus most successful, emblem of Marxist social change.

Might Cuba, I wondered, with its lofty socialist ideals and rejection of the callous Enron- and WorldComstyle materialism that has lately also so disgusted me--might Cuba, with its frequent and resounding condemnations of American imperialist actions across the globe--really be a freer society than America?

Yet my own family had fled Fidel Castro's murderous, rampaging soldiers. My parents and grandparents were grateful to escape the nascent oppression of his regime with only the clothes on their backs to reach this mythical place, to dream their particular American Dream, and to venerate always those who fell in the hail of bullets along the way.

It was happening again: Such "thinking in Cuban," which I have experienced before, can produce an altered state of consciousness that can often lead to my writing bizarre, feverish, magically realist poems (perhaps as absinthe did for the likes of Verlaine and Rimbaud), followed by a bad headache. How was I to reconcile my ardent belief in the inherent goodness of American democracy, inculcated by parents and grandparents who included our Presidents (except John F. Kennedy, of course) in our thanks-giving prayers before dinner, with an equally passionate idealism that pulls toward precisely the kind of socialist revolution that seemed to have been achieved, at least in the eyes of plenty of people who did not eat roast pork every Friday, in Cuba?

"Communists and homosexual pigs!" I remember my grandfather's branding of these apologists for Castro's regime, who were ton comfortable in their fancy professorships...