m review — creative non–fiction — sí por cuba: dr. cabrera's choice
Sí por Cuba: Dr. Cabrera's Choice
by Helen Crowley Cheek
The travel agents checked and re-checked our baggage and eleven sixty-pound boxes of medical supplies for Marfan Children's Intensive Care Hospital in Havana. Our papers were in order. Richard Cheek, my son, had a license from the U.S. Department of Treasury to ferry medical supplies in compliance with the "Business with the Enemy" regulations. This was his sixth trip to Cuba to deliver humanitarian aid. My husband, Dick, and I applied to the Treasury Department for permission to assist him. We had one week to accomplish our mission. It was March of 2000.
At the Miami Airport we waited in the party atmosphere of departing Cubans for eight hours. Laughter and chatter echoed through the large hall like a school playground. As the noise escalated, so did the emotion. Passengers dressed in party finery carried armloads of presents packed in clear plastic duffel bags. The flight took thirty-seven minutes.
The Miami terminal was a palace compared to Jose Marti airport in Havana with its unpainted buildings and potholed runways. We were ushered through rusty gates and into a large anteroom where a customs officer awaited us. The agent wasted no time in getting to the business at hand. She opened the first box of medical supplies. Richard is a middle school teacher. His students had donated small stuffed toys to be used as packing material. The customs agent burst into smiles and motioned to a co-worker to come over and look inside the box. They giggled and made cooing sounds as if talking to a baby. A Beanie Baby frog grinned stupidly.
Through the windows we could see the crowd of locals waiting outside to greet passengers. From the corner of my eye I could see the custom station next to ours where an elderly woman wept softly. She dabbed at her face with a white hankie as a young male inspector went through her personal belongings item by item. With a passive expression, he held up a nightgown, then a bra and examined each closely before placing them in a pile on the end of the counter. He unzipped a transparent plastic cosmetic bag and poked around in the contents until he came upon a bottle of prescription medicine, which he held up to read the label. The woman's sobs increased. Her shoulders shook. Suddenly she let out an anguished cry as if she had been stabbed and crumbled to the floor. An employee summoned a relative from the crowd waiting outside and they led the woman away. We heard her whimpers until the doors closed behind her.
Through the glass doors Richard spotted our host, Dr. John Cabrera, a physician and researcher who was director of the Instituto de Nutricion e Hygiene de los Alimentos for the Republic of Cuba. Dr. John Cabrera had received his medical education at Louisiana State University in New Orleans in the fifties. His gray wavy hair was combed straight back over a high forehead. Deep set brown eyes, hollow cheeks and a sallow complexion gave him the appearance of an ascetic. The sun had faded his short sleeve flowered shirt. Although John's grandfather was English, his heart and soul were passionately Cuban.
John, his wife Alexandrina and son David, also a doctor, greeted us with the warmth of long lost friends. John extended his arms to embrace us. "Welcome to lovely sad Havana," he said. "We Cubans open our arms to our friends from the United States.
I apologize that we cannot give you a ride to your casa particular. We Cubans are forbidden by law to give a ride to a foreigner."
We waited on the curb next to the potholed street for a cab. "Are you sure this is a cab?" I asked Richard, when a decrepit forties Hudson pulled up.
"Anything that stops is a cab. Get in," he responded. I climbed into the back of the two-door and Richard and his father squeezed into the front. Richard spoke to the driver in Spanish and we crept away from the curb. The back of the front seat was broken and jutted into the leg space in the back forcing the driver to grip the steering wheel tightly to stay erect. I sat sideways with my legs across the back seat.
The cab lurched along at twenty miles an hour, making it easy for us to gawk at the decrepit mansions and exotic ceiba and balsa trees whose roots pulled up the sidewalks as if an earthquake had occurred. We made our way through the sparse traffic to the Vedado district where lavish homes had been converted to apartments after the revolution and now were in an advanced state of decay. People stood in doorways and lounged against pillars holding up porches and balconies, whose iron railings had been carried off by thieves in need of construction material. Clothes flapped in the tropical breeze on lines strung between buildings marked with the graffiti, Sí por Cuba, the cry of the revolution. Ornamental Spanish tiles had been stripped from the walls as high as a man could reach, leaving bare patches like clear cuts in a forest. The eeriness reminded me of old movies of a beautiful city the morning after a disaster. We whispered.
"Another statue of Jose Marti, that's the third."
"Jose Marti was a poet and a great hero of the Cuban People," Dick said. "You remember 'Guantanamera, da da da Guantanameeeera.'" He hummed the sixties folk tune softly. Imitating Pete Seeger's sonorous baritone, he continued: "I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees. Before dying I want to share these poems of my soul."
We passed a park where the canopy of trees filtered dapples of light on the uniformed school children playing below. In their white shirts, red or blue bandanas and red shorts, they darted among the benches where old men relaxed.
It was a relief to get out of the cab, although I felt quite safe. No one was speeding because the forties vintage cars couldn't go faster than a crawl. Few of the traffic lights worked. The neighborhood streets were quiet except for ancient bicycles that demonstrated the ingenuity of the Cuban people. Mismatched parts were held together with wire, coat hangers, broomsticks, and duct tape. Junked cars with men hunched over the engine were a common street sight. A few pedestrians strolled the sidewalks and armed uniformed police or perhaps soldiers, I was never sure which they were, handsome as teenage Latin rock stars, were posted on every block.
After settling in at our casa particular, we walked the two blocks to the Cabrera apartment where John and Alexandrina had lived since their marriage forty years before. John and David were waiting for us at the door.
"I always walk up," said John. "Exercise is good for the heart."
The apartment was on the seventh floor. I wished I had chosen to walk up with John. The elevator door wouldn't close all the way. The car creaked and jerked its way from floor to floor. On the third floor a woman entered. David stood behind her. He pointed at her, stabbed his finger sharply in her direction and frowned. Conversation stopped until she got off at five. "She is the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution monitor for the building," David said. "She reports any sign of residents not being good socialists or having too many foreign visitors or buying on the black market."
We got off at the sixth floor. The elevator didn't stop at the seventh.
"Dad says he needs the exercise, but I think he's really afraid he will get stuck between floors." As David spoke, we saw John coming up through the darkness. An empty socket overhead was rusted from disuse.
John was breathing heavily as he joined us and we went in total darkness to the seventh floor. Light from a large dirty window at the end of the dark hallway made up for the empty sockets. John unlocked a heavy wrought iron gate across the hall and locked it behind us, then unlocked another gate at the entrance to the apartment. Alexandrina was waiting for us.
A wall of grime coated windows was straight ahead. Later I learned that household cleaning supplies hadn't been on the shelves within the memory of most adults. The furnishings were shabby, but neat. I needed to use the bathroom and was shown the way. The toilet wouldn't flush. The cover to the tank was missing and I peeked in. No water. An embarrassed Alexandrina showed me to a barrel of water at the other end of the apartment in a little anteroom off the kitchen. Water, when it was available, was caught in a barrel and dispensed in buckets when needed for flushing. Some days no water came at all. The brown-outs, unplanned electrical stoppages, prevented the pumps from working.
Richard, Dick and I joined John and Alexandrina and David in the living room. The sun filtered through the dirt on the windows casting exotic shadows on the floor. Six shot glasses sat in circle on a tray on a side table. John opened a bottle of light rum and poured a tot into each one. He passed a tray around and we raised our glasses as John proclaimed a toast.
"To friendship. To the United States of America." He raised his glass higher. "To Cuba!"
"To Cuba!" We tilted our heads back and drank the rum neatly.
The occasional roar from a faulty muffler on the street below interrupted our conversation.
"Looking back, the worst mistake I ever made was not staying in the United States when I graduated from Medical School," John said. "Living in Cuba has been very hard on my family. I let my love of Cuba cloud my decision making. Little did we know that the revolution we supported would end up like this." He shook his head. "'Sí por Cuba' indeed. We had such high hopes."
When David saw the agitation in his father's body, he changed the subject.
"Tell them about the tests," David said.
"Ah, yes," John said. "After many weeks of waiting I have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. My colleagues and I have searched all over Cuba for the proper medicine. From Santiago de Cuba to Trinidad to Havana, none is to be found."
"What will you do?" I asked.
"I will do nothing. The disease will take its course, if it is God's will."
"We can get you medicine. Tell us what you need, and we will get it to you," Dick said. My husband and I looked at each other, and without speaking, made the commitment to keep Dr. John Cabrera alive.
We spent the afternoon talking about the conditions in Cuba, the rationing, the need for medicines, the shortage of pencils and paper and books, the lack of news.
"We Cubans are poor. Most do not have computers," John said. "The telephone system is the same as it was when the government nationalized it. It is unreliable. Electricity is unreliable. Water is unreliable. The lovely city of Havana is dying."
"How does your medical system work?" Dick asked, "with everyone working for the government."
"Havana is divided into small neighborhoods, each one served by a doctor assigned to take care of the health needs of the people in that neighborhood. David is responsible for a section of the Vedado district, which he covers on a motor scooter. A car is out of the question because parts and gas are difficult to find or afford on the salary of thirty dollars a month."
"What do you do for people if you do not have medicine?" I asked.
"We have some medicine," said David. "If I have the right one I give it to the patient. If I do not, I try to teach them how to take care of themselves and visit people in their homes."
"We Cubans are proud of our infant mortality rate, one of the best in the world," said John. "All mothers nurse their babies. No one uses formula or cows milk. Milk cannot be transported from the country because Cuba has no refrigerated trucks and gas is very expensive when it is available. What sounds like a bad thing turns out to be a good thing. It is God's way."
Alexandrina turned down my offer to help in the kitchen so I stood out of the way in the tiny room and we chatted as aunts and sisters and friends do in kitchens all over the world. The only difference was, we didn't speak the same verbal language, but the language of the kitchen, the language of mothers and of food and of sisterhood. We gestured, shrugged, laughed, frowned and smiled.
The kitchen was the same as it was when the Cabreras moved in. The enamel on the refrigerator was worn down to the metal around the door handle. Only one burner of the gas stove worked. A makeshift wire rack replaced the metal grate which once covered the flame. The badly chipped sink had separate faucets for hot and cold, but the hot water heater had failed years before and cold water had to be carried in from the barrel. Alexandrina showed me her ration book and told me how she stood in line everyday to buy bread, if there was any.
We sat down to a meal of black market crab, shredded carrots, the ubiquitous beans and rice and a dessert of grapefruit rind boiled several times in sugar and water and served with white cheese.
"We Cubans are very proud of our cheese," John said. "Notice the fine texture and purity of color."
On the following day we visited the Marfan Children's Intensive Care Hospital to deliver the six boxes of medical supplies.
"Did you bring us antibiotics?" The director, who was sitting under large portraits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara rose to greet us. "We so desperately need antibiotics. We haven't had any for months."
The director took us on a tour of the one story dimly lit hospital with its 1940 style x-ray machine and sterilizers filled with boiling water. Murals of cartoon characters were cracked and peeling. Sockets with electrical cords bound with black tape stuck out from the walls. The all women staff wore discarded scrubs donated by a hospital in Spain. We looked in on sad eyed children tended by their mothers or other relatives and friends. The rooms were bare; no monitors or call lights. A relative was expected to be at a child's side at all times to alert the staff to problems.
During the next two years, with the help of tourists and local church groups, we sent household goods, drugstore items like aspirin, cough syrup, laxatives and shampoo. We sent a toilet seat, a carburetor, surgical gloves, and baby sized hypodermics, the desperately needed antibiotics and the medicine for Parkinson's disease. Knowing how difficult it was to obtain ordinary everyday items, I shouldn't have been surprised when Alexandrina requested a "breast supporter." The word spread. Strangers came to our door and called us on the phone to offer to take supplies to Cuba. About every three or four months a package went.
In February of 2002 we were surprised to hear from John that the Cuban government was giving him permission to come to Los Angeles to participate on a panel of judges who were awarding a prize for research in the field of nutrition. His visa allowed him an extra two weeks in the States. We immediately arranged for him to come to Portland and be our guest. He arrived on a balmy Saturday morning. We met him at the airport and he was shivering from the cold. I was shocked by his gaunt and pallid appearance. We had many questions about conditions in Cuba. His e-mails contained no information about the state of the country, only formal expressions of good wishes and family news. David had married and was expecting a baby, the first grandchild for the Cabreras.
I sent out invitations to all the friends of Cuba who had carried goods to Havana to come to our house for a welcoming party. Fifteen people came, among them a photographer, a lawyer, a member of a church choir, a nurse practitioner who specialized in pediatrics, a mid-wife, a physical therapist, an advertising executive and a couple of teachers.
I broke out the rum I had carried from Havana. We drank mojitos and danced to the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. The next day two young mothers, friends of our family, showed up with three duffel bags of slightly used and new baby clothes. We dumped them out on the living room floor and asked John to sort out what he would like to take home for the new grandchild. He picked up a couple of garments and turned to me with a puzzled look.
"I cannot choose. I cannot begin."
I devised a set of criteria to help John. First we eliminated any item that would be too warm for Cuba. Then we set aside clothes with ruffles or sports logos. When the pile became manageable, John picked out enough clothes to fill a large suitcase.
"I cannot thank you enough." He choked on the words. "God has been good to me to give me such generous friends."
When we bade goodbye at the airport, John leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and I could feel the bones of his back as we embraced. The medicines now flow to Cuba irregularly as regulations get tighter. The e-mails are fewer as John gets weaker. We finished off the last of the rum with the salute, Sí por Cuba.
Helen Crowley Cheek of Portland, Oregon.
First Place, "Sí por Cuba: Dr. Cabrera's Choice", winner in the Creative Non–Fiction category for the M Review 2006 Writing Competition.
Helen Crowley Cheek is a Marylhurst Alumni (1977). Before attending Marylhurst she studied at Holy Names College and Gonzaga University. She is the former Director of the Metropolitan Human Rights Commission in Portland, Oregon. Her essays have been published in The Sun and On Point: The Journal of Army History.
