Parties make the world go round!: November 2012

So this year I went to Cuba. An unusual place to go, because not many people from the US go there. In fact, the most common comment I got when I said I was going to Cuba was “I didn’t think you could go to Cuba”. But you can and I did.

I wondered what my parents would have said about my going to Cuba. Remember that both of them were in Germany less than 10 years after WWII ended. A divided Germany ravaged by war. My dad was in the Army and was stationed there, so maybe his parents wouldn’t have been so concerned about him being over in Europe, and specifically in West Germany, then. They may have just been happy he had a stable job. My mother, on the other hand, chose to go there.

I asked my aunts what Mocha and Granddaddy had said about her going over there like that. They said they don’t know what might have been said behind closed doors, but that in public they were supportive. This, of course, was back before the days of women’s lib and women being major players in the workforce, so for my mother to have made the decision to go teach school for a year in Germany had to have been a BIG deal. Both my parents grew up with Germany being this major world power, ruled by Hitler. I know that, at least for my mother, the concept of a reunited Germany in the late 80’s/early 90’s was cause for apprehension. The Germany they knew was a “bad” country, filled with hate and evil. After the war, I think for them it was a matter of the “good” Germans being in West Germany and the ones who couldn’t move past the past being in East Germany.

I didn’t remember a Cuba that wasn’t ruled by Fidel Castro. That wasn’t Communist, although Cubans today will describe what they live in as closer to socialism than communism. I vaguely remember the anxiety around the Cuban Missile Crisis, although I was too young to know what it meant or what it was about. I wrote a paper about it in college and learned more about how close we may have come to disaster back then. I remember the Mariel boat lift, mostly from watching the movie Scarface, and the problems around that. I knew that Cuba was a communist country, but that was about it. Of course, I knew about the embargo, but it didn’t really touch me, so I didn’t dwell on it. I certainly didn’t know much about what life was like in Cuba when I decided to go.

I think my parents, and especially my mother, would have been worried about my going over there. They would have worried about my safety and they would have assumed that the living conditions would have been meager and difficult. I think they would have supported me because, after all, I’m a grown woman and can make my own choices, but I think they would have been worried. Especially since I would have been on total communication lockdown while I was away.

As I think back on my decision to go, it was a totally spur of the moment decision. My church sent out a pamphlet on all the missions that we do and at the end had a list of upcoming mission trips. The Cuba trip was on the calendar but just listed as “fall 2012”. As I looked over the list, it was as if a voice said to me “Go to Cuba”. I knew right then that I needed to do this. For many reasons. I was sure that it would be a popular trip, so I emailed the Missions Director right away. Turns out I was the first person to ask about it! I met the Associate Missions Director, who would be leading the trip, and was reassured that this was not a “building” trip or a “planting crops” trip, just a support trip. I knew I could do that! When the application came, I filled it out and sent it in immediately. And then started to wonder if I was making a good choice.

Several years ago a friend and I had gone to hear Bruce Wilkinson speak at a local church. He’s the guy who wrote, among other things, “The Prayer of Jabez”. He talked about a mission trip he was sponsoring to a remote, undeveloped area of South Africa and was asking for 100 people to come forward and go with him. My friend really wanted to go and I could hear her making all kinds of noises as she was struggling with the decision. She knew her husband would not want her going alone and he wouldn’t go with her, so she was hoping I was “hearing the call”. At one point she asked me “do you feel led to go?” But I didn’t. Not even a little bit. But this time I certainly heard that call. And made the decision to answer before I could talk myself out of it.

This was when I heard the “I didn’t think you could go to Cuba” stuff and people wondered what it was like there, would we be roughing it or having to go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground. My best friend was apprehensive because not only was it a Communist country, but she didn’t think she could do it because she’s not a “camping girl”. We did learn that, while Cuba is not as modernized as the US, they do have electricity and air conditioning and TV and phones and indoor plumbing. Not so bad. And no camping! LOL

I did worry, in the weeks leading up to the trip, whether I could do this or not. Because, after all, this was a mission trip. Not a guided tour trip focused on sightseeing, although we would have a translator who was like a guide and we did do sightseeing. I consider myself to be religious and spiritual, I believe in God and Jesus, I pray. But I wasn’t sure I was “good enough” to go on a religious mission. I couldn’t quote Scripture and I was uncomfortable praying out loud. I wasn’t good about talking about my faith, even with others of faith. I was sure I would fail. It didn’t help that, when I went to the pre-trip meetings, the other folks who were going seemed to be so much more Godly than me. I worried that I would be unmasked as not enough – not spiritual enough, not knowledgeable enough, not able to carry my weight enough. But I also believed that God had led me to make this decision and that it would help me find a closer walk with Him. So, in spite of the fact that I felt like I was completely out of my depth, I pushed forward.

The trip itself was amazing. It was a little like peeking behind the curtain and seeing the Wizard of Oz unmasked. The people were wonderful, happy to have us there and warm and welcoming. I never felt unsafe. There were no overt political overtones, in spite of the many graffiti messages of “Viva la revolucion!” and pictures of Fidel and Che. The few times it ever came up, the message was really one of hopefulness – hope that the embargo would soon go away, hope that soon it would be time for the Americans to come. It gave me hope, even while I felt immense sadness that it was this way. I had never given much thought to the embargo and what it meant, both to these people in Cuba as well as those who had left after the revolution. But I was left with the feeling that we were beyond it, that it had gone on too long and that whatever was important about this at one time was long in the past. I couldn’t, and can’t, figure out who or what it benefits anymore. This is a beautiful country with beautiful people and I’d love for more Americans to see this amazing place. Even though I fear that if that does happen, Cuba will lose a lot of what makes it so special, because the Americans they want will change this place to be more acceptable to Americans.

The only part of the trip that wasn’t so amazing had to do with clothes. And as much as I tried to tell myself to get over it, I couldn’t. One of the team members had been on several mission trips to Cuba and gave us her thoughts on what we would see and experience. One of the things she told us was to “dress like a bag lady”. No fancy jewelry or designer clothes or shoes. No high dollar purses or other things that would show us to be Americans. We wanted to blend in. She even said that we could probably get away with wearing the same clothes the entire trip and that midway through we’d have the opportunity to have some laundry done. While that last part about the laundry was true, the rest of it was mostly not. And, as it happened, I was the only one who actually took it to heart and didn’t bring a lot of clothes. Certainly not enough to wear something different every day. Even the team member who gave us this advice didn’t take it herself. She had a different outfit for every day and sometimes even more than one! It was hot and humid while we were there and it didn’t take long to feel hot and sticky in your clothes. So wearing a top two days in a row or a pair of pants four days in a row got old. And every time I had to do that, every time I didn’t have what I thought were more appropriate clothes for the occasion, every time I saw her and the others wearing something nice, I couldn’t get past my anger and irritation. I couldn’t not mention it either, even though I didn’t want to. The other women even took makeup, which I did not, so when we went out to dinner or went to something a little more special occasion, they could look nicely made up (and wearing clean fancier clothes!) and I felt like an idiot.

We did get to do things that tourists would do. The seminary, which was our host, had someone who planned the trip for us and she made sure that we had cultural experiences as well as the more religious ones. We went to the ballet, we heard a chamber choir sing. We visited a pharmacy museum and a slavery museum (which focused more on Santeria than slavery!), we visited the Hemingway Museum. We got to go to the beach and had a mojito at the former DuPont mansion (now a hotel). We had dinner at two nice restaurants in Havana and stayed at a nicely appointed hotel in Havana. We went to craft markets in both Varadero and Havana and got to buy souvenirs and mementos. And we had a walking tour of Old Havana.

But what impressed me the most was the faith of the people in Cuba. The enduring faith that made it through a difficult time when Cuba was an atheist state and discriminated against people of faith and caused them to have to go underground for fear of reprisal. Because of this, it’s not uncommon to see mostly old people and children in church. Few young and middle-aged adults are in church because they weren’t allowed to go as they grew up and they don’t have that history. Many of those who go to the seminary and spend many years learning about the Scripture and about Scriptural teachings will leave Cuba once they have completed their studies. So while Cuba is now a secular state and does not prohibit its people from going to church, it’s still hard to grow the church because of the many years of neglect. So it was encouraging to see young adults starting to come back and teenagers standing up for their faith when many of their friends are not.

I didn’t get the major spiritual moment that I thought God led me to Cuba for. But as I saw how God worked through the people of Cuba and that He hadn’t given up on them, it started to awaken in me the knowledge that He hadn’t given up on me either. I often wonder how God could love me, an imperfect and flawed person. I’ve worked so hard in my life to be the Anti-Mother that I think I lost a lot of the wonderful qualities that really made her who she was and would have made me more pleasing to God. And so I felt that God surely couldn’t love that hard-hearted and selfish person that I have become. I needed to understand that God would stand by me and I started to learn that through seeing how He has stood with the Cubans all these years. When everything was against them and it didn’t seem as though there were any hope, He was still there. Waiting. And so I think He’s been waiting for me and that was what He wanted me to see in Cuba.

Here are some pictures that say “Cuba” to me and that are representative of my trip and what I want to remember. And I think that, in the end, if my parents had heard what I learned about myself and about the country of Cuba while I was there, they would have been glad I had gotten that opportunity.