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You are here: Home / Travel / Cuba… What Can I Say? (2)

Cuba… What Can I Say? (2)

February 3rd, 2019 by Sallie Bingham in Travel 1 Comment

From the series: Cuba - 2019

Vinales, Cuba. Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash

Vinales, Cuba. Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash

I have more questions, most of them unanswered, which adds a piquancy to the beautiful aquamarine seas through which we are traveling off the south coast of Cuba.

Wednesday morning we visited an island off that coast called Maria La Gorda, which I translate as Maria the Plump, a term of admiration at the time. She was kidnapped by pirates who frequented these waters and then abandoned on the island that wears her name where she set up a profitable business, probably the expected brothel-and-bar that is always a money maker. We were shown through small island parks, only dozens of acres large, by local guides whose pride in them was touching, particularly in the context of the huge U.S. national parks that are often treated carelessly. One guide has spent fifteen years learning to imitate the calls of the local birds, and managed to summon one of them, although I wasn’t able to see it.

There are a lot of people on this trip, and one of them, a man named Hermes, has spent a lot of time in Cuba and told us that it’s not so much the embargo, in his opinion, that has caused all the economic problems, but the failure of a central idea of the revolution, boarding schools for all teenagers where they were educated in both the traditional western ways and in the ideology of communism. The plan was, according to this man, to produce a labor force to work in the orange groves, a major export for Cuba before the embargo; we saw no orange groves and indeed no fruit or vegetables cultivation. But, again according to this one man, the boarding school plan fell apart because parents refused to send their daughters, having heard that “everyone” got pregnant.

How often, it seems to me, a progressive idea is felled by our fear of sexuality—especially the sexuality of teenagers—when providing means of birth control would have scotched this rumor—which may have only been a rumor anyway. But instead the boarding schools closed for lack of girl pupils.

I have more questions, most of them unanswered, which adds a piquancy to the beautiful aquamarine seas through which we are traveling off the south coast of Cuba.

We westerners would of course argue that no educated young person wants to work in an orange grove, but as the world is going, that’s the kind of work—possibly the only kind—that will be available, if global warming allows orange groves to exist. The legions of lawyers, doctors and accountants turned out in the U.S. might find it less objectionable than they expected to drive taxi cabs instead of practicing their professions. At least the taxi drivers we’ve met, all trained for white collar jobs, seem resigned, if nothing better, as the people living in these pastel colonial villages may not miss our TV sets, cars, appliances and fast food choices, but are not tormented by the ravages of alcoholism and drug abuse. The culture seems to mandate against addiction, as well as a lack of money to bring these noxious products in, and the government has apparently been successful in keeping them out. This leads in turns to a much smaller jail population and a scarcity of treatment centers, both for-profit industries that thrive on our wastefulness.

Maybe working in an orange grove in a tropical climate is not such a dreadful fate, if your education and health care costs are taken care of by the government. And if you know poetry, as the taxi drivers here do, you have a way of keeping your imagination alive, no matter what you do.

[For more on my trip to Cuba, please see Part One.]

Havana, Cuba. Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash

Havana, Cuba. Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash

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In Travel

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Scott David Kenan says

    February 3rd, 2019 at 9:31 am

    Ms. Bingham: Your comments on the lack of Drug Trafficking and Addictions are most interesting to me — and I will include a link to this piece in my Political Blog today. Thanks for all you do!!!

    Scott

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Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

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Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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