We all needed Esau, because in 2005 there were damned few ways an American citizen could legally visit Cuba.
The forty-four-year-old trade U.S. embargo doesn’t actually prohibit travel to the island. We Americans don’t like to think we can’t go where we please. We do, however, respect the tabu mojo of money. So our government allows us to journey to Cuba at will—but forbids us to spend a single dollar while we’re there. We may not legally buy a meal, a souvenir, or a bed for the night without a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
There used to be a lot of OFAC licenses out there.
Though the embargo has been in effect since before the Bay of Pigs invasion, and various U.S. and Cuban actions—from the 1962 missile crisis to proxy wars and interventions in the Congo and Angola—kept tensions uncomfortably high well into the ’80s, the undeniable logic of talking to your neighbor kept OFAC permits multiplying through the years. Tens of thousands of Cuban expatriates and Cuban Americans were allowed to visit island family. Businessmen, journalists, and other individuals could get one-off permissions, and OFAC granted hundreds of institutions the right to send travelers wholesale. Colleges sent students and faculty; arts organizations sent dance troupes and string quartets; sports associations, basketball teams and fencers. Charities sent aid workers; churches, missionaries. By the end of the Clinton administration, tens of thousands of active OFAC licenses made Cuban travel something less than common but more than rare.
The 2000 Bush campaign had implied that a George W. Bush administration would normalize relations with Cuba, but that was before far-right Miami Cubans helped GOP operatives disrupt recounts of disputed Florida ballots, sometimes breaking into election commission offices to scatter chads to the winds. Such favors helped get Bush appointed president, and his administration got tougher with Cuba than any since Nixon’s.
Decades’ worth of OFAC licenses were revoked or not renewed. First to go, understandably, were the permits of de facto travel agencies—many based in Canada—that had long worn the fig leaf of “cultural exchange facilitation” to sell package tours. Soon, however, even businesses and universities with long-standing—and diplomatically useful—connections to Cuba lost their licenses. The process accelerated after 9/11, and by November 19, 2005—the day the chorus got stuck in Kingston—licenses were almost impossible to obtain.
Only one loophole had been slow to close: “faith-based travel.” And not just any faith. Mainstream Christian organizations, which had provided the lion’s share of practical aid to Cuba for decades, were shut out at the recommendation of the administration’s new Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. (The appointment of a study group for Cuba policy seemed ominous; the recommendations of a “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq” became policy with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.) But fundamentalist organizations such as the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions, were still in the Cuba business, shepherding yanquis down for a week or two of ennobling early-morning labor, painting churches or laying cinder block, followed by long afternoons and evenings trying not to take too much pleasure in Paradise.
All of this didn’t quite explain why the twenty-four members of a women’s choir recruited from blue-state Vermont and red New Hampshire’s bleeding-heart enclave in the hills around Dartmouth College—most of them agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, lapsed Christians, Green Mountain Buddhists, or avid self-taught pagans—would put their dream of attending Santiago’s International Choral Festival in the hands of a Birmingham-based fundamentalist minister whose church proclaims the literal truth of every word in the Bible, from the six-day Creation to Revelation’s encrypted disasters.
Nor did it explain why the Reverend Esau, whose church’s view of women stresses the subordinacy of Adam’s lost rib and the wiles of the Whore of Babylon, would put his license on the line for a choir devoted to one-world feminist anthems and traveling with its assorted hyphenated spouses, children of first marriages, and lesbian life partners.
How had these antitheses made even a moment’s common cause, gotten even as far as this breakdown moment in Kingston?
The answer was Maricel.
Maricel Lucero Keniston was born in Santiago de Cuba, a few weeks after her father disappeared. Oscar Lucero Moya was, according to survivors of the Revolution’s bleakest days, one of Cuba’s boldest revolutionaries, a leader in the fight against dictator Fulgencio Batista’s U.S.-supported kleptocracy. Comrade-in-arms and biographer Renán Ricardo Rodríguez describes Oscar, just thirty years old in 1958, as a hero, “unforgettable, valiant” and already “battle-wise.”
Oscar didn’t live to celebrate Batista’s flight to Miami, just ahead of the rebels’ entrance into Havana, or join the street parties on January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro declared the triumph of the Revolution from a balcony overlooking Santiago’s central plaza. By then, Oscar had already been missing for months, arrested by secret policemen on April 28. His body was never found. Searchers learned, however, that Oscar never told his torturers a thing, never gave up a name, never endangered his comrades, the Revolution, or his hope of a just and free Cuba. The Revolutionary government declared Oscar Lucero Moya one of its martyred Heroes of Silence. Schools are named after him; children write poems in his memory.
Born into the Revolution’s dawn, Maricel grew up a hero’s daughter. A picture in Ricardo’s biography of her father shows the infant frowning during a 1959 ceremony unveiling a memorial bust of Oscar. Tragedy’s limelight shone on “the martyr’s daughter,” a petite, dramatically wide-eyed little girl, projecting expectations and promising a favored place in revolutionary society. But it didn’t protect her as the Revolution turned avowedly Communist and militantly atheistic. Even the family of a Hero of Silence couldn’t get away with open adherence to its Baptist faith, which seemed to go hand-in-hand with criticizing Castro for breaking his promise of democracy. Perhaps it was the last flicker of the martyr’s halo that allowed Oscar’s widow, Blanca, her new husband, and their family to leave Cuba safely, when Maricel was eight.
Blanca was done with Cuba, but she had no sympathy for the rightists in exile in Miami, either. She raised Maricel in New Jersey, speaking English even at home, deliberately avoiding Cuban foods, culture, and concerns. Maricel turned out to have a lovely soprano singing voice, a real gift, but never heard a Cuban rhythm growing up, never even a Spanish melody.
When Maricel, forty-one and living in Vermont, was completing her master’s in voice at Dartmouth College, she took a class with Hafiz Shabazz, a Philadelphia-born musician of Jamaican heritage who had steeped himself in music of the African diaspora. Only then, in the course’s routine study of Afro-Cuban rhythm and the island’s melodic son, did she hear music that brought back the sounds and sensations of her childhood—and all the feelings that went with them.
Maricel finished her master’s work focusing on Cuban classical music. She founded a women’s community chorus with a repertoire rich in Latin American songs. And she found the courage to tell Blanca that she was traveling to Cuba, going back one way or another, to see her father’s family and recover something of all that had been lost.
And she’d done it, first on her own and then again and again with the Feminine Tone in tow, despite her mother’s fear and the Cuban government’s official hostility to returned “traitors.” The Feminine Tone had traveled under a cultural exchange license in 2001, when I’d accompanied it as a newspaper reporter. On that trip, I met Kathleen, a birthing nurse and FemTone alto. Kathy and I were married in 2002; this trip, she was staying at home with the teenage daughters of our blended family.
Maricel had returned to Cuba as often as she could through the Clinton years, and when the Bush administration started denying family contact and cultural exchange licenses, she’d redefined the chorus’s travel to fit other OFAC categories, such as faith-based humanitarian aid. This 2005 trip was her sixth. Maricel’s determined planning and unyielding energy had brought he
r—and the chorus and its friends, all of us—to within a puddle jump of Santiago.
Now everything depended on Esau, but he seemed to want to depend on me.
“I don’t know what to do, William,” he said.
“Can’t Overwater Missions wire you the money?”
“I don’t think so. No, we don’t have that kind of money,” he decided. “It’s project by project, you see? And this mission, I’m already overextended trying to help you people. William, I am overwhelmed.”
I patted his shoulder, but I was thinking less-than-comforting thoughts. The reverend felt overextended, overwhelmed? Already? Wait, I reckoned, ’til the chorus catches on.
The Feminine Tone and friends were scattered around Norman Manley’s glass-fronted, swoop-roofed international departure terminal, camped in far corners and clumped along the walls, trying both to stay together and to stay out of the way. Stunned by successive transitions—a freezing midnight rendezvous with a charter bus in White River Junction, Vermont, the dawn-patrol bustle of boarding at JFK, the overly air-conditioned flight and the sucker punch of Jamaican heat as we’d stumbled across the dazzling runway—they’d been chatting or snoozing through the terminal’s afternoon hurly-burly, having somehow accepted on faith the notion that nothing was wrong, that tropical charters never leave on time.
I looked from group to group, trying to poll their faces. They were trusting souls, as willing and kindly a selection of citizens as I could ever hope to travel with. No one seemed acutely worried. No one was looking our way, wondering why the reverend looked so glum. But then, there was so much else to see.
The terminal was beyond busy, because for Jamaicans international travel is still much more than submission to the dreary indignities of being packed and shipped from point A to point B. Everywhere I looked, vignettes were unfolding, gaudy characters demanding our attention. Families cheered departing sons and daughters. Solo travelers opened their cell phones with urgent flourishes, shouted into the digital ether to help every involuntary eavesdropper appreciate the burden of being ceaselessly essential. Many wore travel costumes. There were men in wide-lapeled, bell-bottomed Shaft in Africa safari suits not seen elsewhere since Ali fought Foreman in Zaire. Lots of younger men affected U.S. B-boy styles at least a decade old, shuffling in pants baggy as unpegged tents, on laceless sneakers insecure as geisha sandals.
The women were self-confident and stunning in a variety of shapes, their earth-goddess and vixen roles equally convincing whether the actress swelled like a gourd or swayed like bamboo. One stout woman with processed hair swept back in an Elvis pompadour wore a motorcycle suit of zip-tight red leatherette. A short, powerful woman with an unusual, freckled-chocolate complexion emphasized her Nordic touch with bright gold-painted braids, hair twisted out into bullion swoops apparently solid as water buffalo horns. People got out of her way.
People were staying out of Maricel’s way, too. Esau had yet to tell her about the unpaid charter tax, but just an hour earlier he had reluctantly warned her of another difficulty: According to Ileana, Cubana was sending a plane that could carry only half as much luggage as we’d brought. A few giant steps from where I stood with my hand on Esau’s shoulder, the sparrow-boned soprano was clambering over our enormous pile of luggage, yanking heavy bags around with strength born of indignation, trying to decide which loads of donated clothing and medicine we’d leave behind in Kingston, to be lost or pilfered. Just then she was a force no one wanted to reckon with.
Esau knew how powerful Maricel’s moods could be. It was Maricel’s repeated, not-taking-no-for-an-answer calls to Overwater Missions, her relentless sales pitch (stressing the chorus’s spiritual interests, downplaying their diversity), and, finally, her impassioned recounting of her family story that had persuaded him to take the FemTone on.
You think you feel overwhelmed and overextended now? Just wait, I wanted to scold him, until Maricel realizes she’s not going home this time. Esau didn’t know from overwhelming. Not yet.
As for overextended, well, the reverend wasn’t the only one forced out on a limb by the crazy logic of U.S.-Cuban travel. Like Maricel, I’d been looking for routes that skirted our government’s increasing ill will. I’d recently published an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe accusing the administration of racial profiling and scaremongering at a Border Patrol installation on Interstate 91 in central Vermont. Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t, but when I requested a journalist’s license for this trip, OFAC turned me down. My application had been backed by Vermont’s top weekly; once again, I’d had support from the offices of Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Bernie Sanders. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney had recently told Leahy to go fuck himself—on the Senate floor, no less—and independent socialist Sanders was openly sneered at in Speaker Dennis Hastert’s House. Perhaps I’d had the wrong help.
For whatever reason, the same OFAC that had given me a journalist’s license in 2000 turned me down in 2005. This time only the Cuban government offered me journalist’s credentials. So I found myself taking a required phone interview with the tour-guide preacher Maricel had found, hoping to travel as a missionary.
I may have soft-pedaled my politics to the Reverend Onyegoro, but I had no trouble rationalizing my use of his faith-based license. I was traveling on faith alone, freelancing on spec, with no assignment to cover my expenses, but I had to get back to Cuba.
My need was irrational, undeniable. I wasn’t even sure when it had started.
Like billions of people around the world, I’d been horrified by the atrocities of 9/11, and accepted war in Afghanistan as a bleak necessity. But I couldn’t support an axiomatically endless “war on terror,” and I was sickened by revelations of kidnapping and torture at Guantánamo and a murky galaxy of secret prisons scattered across the continents. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of our best friends overseas, I’d marched and waved protest signs in the run-up to the Iraq War, only to realize that the president and his advisers had no intention of letting protesters, the law, or mere truth get in their way.
In all this, though I may have been among the minority of my fellow Americans, I was hardly alone. Regardless of what we believed, our 9/11 fears and angers—deliberately stoked by administration officials, tirelessly fed by the news and entertainment industry—were still blazing away. The body politic was staring into the bonfire, enthralled by the constant flaring and dying of threats and rescues, the flame-colored alerts, sparkling shoe-bomber fuses, and mushroom-cloud puffs from smoking guns. Most of us were kept far too worried to risk turning our backs on the flickering show, to wonder what was happening in the shadows beyond the glare.
When the Global War on Terror began, I was working for a daily newspaper serving central Vermont and New Hampshire. If I questioned the war in editorials, op-eds, and book reviews, I was either preaching to the choir or angering people who just turned the page or canceled their subscriptions. The paper was kind to me as I reassembled myself after a difficult divorce, and more than patient with my antiwar vehemence, but I finally resigned.
I’d lost faith. Not in my smart and steady colleagues, but in “objective” journalism. Many fine journalists have been taught to abstain from voting, lest they contaminate their professional ethics by “taking sides.” Many more are careful to “balance” facts with opposing views, even at the risk of obscuring the facts’ import. But objectivity is meaningless if we have no perspective on our own fears and prejudices, if we can’t recognize the pervasive bias of our history and culture. After more than a century’s striving for “objectivity,” the news industry enthusiastically amplified the Bush administration’s most preposterous fabrications, from Iraq-Al Qaeda links to WMDs. If that’s objective journalism, then objectivity is irresponsible and immoral. I didn’t know whether I’d be able to put together a living’s worth of steady freelance work, but I wanted to be both a writer and a citizen, to get the facts straight and be free to do something about them
.
If I could figure out what to do.
I had no illusions about the effectiveness of waving signs on street corners. To my mind, protest is a civic obligation, like paying taxes and voting. You do it whether your side is winning or losing, because democracy doesn’t work if the losers shut up and stay home. But the invasion of Iraq made civil debate almost impossible. It didn’t matter that the bungled occupation revealed the administration’s bad faith and incompetence; watching Iraq collapse into chaos and civil war only made most Americans all the more desperately insistent that we all “support the troops.”
Some were, understandably, more desperate than others.
For the Iraq War’s anniversary, I organized a roadside, lunch-hour protest on our region’s busiest box-store shopping strip. Not long after we’d set up, a driver jerked his pickup to the curb, rolled down a window, and screamed bloody murder at me and my sign and all the people standing there in the snow.
A gaunt black Irishman, he looked to be in his late forties, just like me. His face blanched by rage, he shouted his certainty that U.S. soldiers were dying in Iraq to save our worthless, cowardly asses, to stop Saddam from orchestrating another devastating attack on United States, “like he did on 9/11, you stupid fucks.” As he yanked the truck back into traffic we saw the yellow-ribbon magnets and the bumper sticker: “Proud Parent of a Marine,” silver letters and the golden anchor and globe.
He couldn’t know it, but he and I had something in common. By then, Kathy and I knew that her son Brendan—who’d signed up with the Marines in 2000 and started his five-year hitch in the summer of 2001—was on his way to Iraq. We already knew a little of what that father seemed to know, what so many of our neighbors and co-workers knew. It was a new way of fearing the news and its horrors, of resenting power’s careless lethality, of hating every kind of uncertainty and doubt.
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