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"You tell them back home that we are their friends," Cubans say. "Tell them we are good people."
In Cuba they have only what is cheap or free -- rum, music, sex, pride. And hope. They don't pin their hopes on Fidel Castro; they expect him to die still clutching his slingshot and staring north. What they hope, even seem to firmly believe, is that the United States under some half-imagined future leader will see the light and embrace them. They will travel, they will drive Chevy trucks, they will eat and eat.
Cubans are a brave, funny and generous people, well aware of their ability to make us laugh and damn near make us cry. They're an innocent people, as long as we strip the word "innocent" of its sexual implications. And back in Miami, after a week of discounting the news from the north as reported in the Party paper Granma, a bitter taste of unfiltered news gave me the uneasy feeling that the Cubans overrate us. The Miami Herald reported that in 2004 97 percent of the world's executions took place in China, Iran, Vietnam and the United States -- where the Bush brothers' special axis of death, Texas and Florida, accounts for more executions per capita than any other place on earth. A footnote was California's decision to execute Clarence Ray Allen, a 75-year-old convict who was deaf and blind; a plea to the US Supreme Court did not save him. A popular Web site named "deadmaneating.com" specializes in the last meals of the condemned and sells T-shirts and coffee mugs with its logo.
Along with the death penalty, the gun cult (one gun for every man, woman and infant in the US) and the bewildering war in Iraq, the eternal chastisement of Cuba is a proof of the violent, irrational immaturity that still separates the United States of America from all other nations we regard as civilized. I've never heard an explanation that satisfies me. Compared with hungry Cuba, where purse-snatching is common but more violent crime almost unknown, ferocious America with its epidemic obesity makes you wonder: Is it possible to be overnourished? Are we somehow eating ourselves back into barbarity?
Cuba is a failed society because Castro has been unable to feed and house his people. Communism is a failed ideology because there seem to be no successful societies without economic incentives and democratic controls on the ruling elite. But when, to echo Clarence Ray Allen's unsuccessful plea for mercy, does an affluent society become a "cruel and unusual" society? The lowest note in my re-entry blues was a Fort Lauderdale story about teenagers who bludgeoned a homeless man to death with golf clubs and baseball bats. Police and advocates for the homeless (in the midst of the megayacht explosion, there are 90,000 homeless people in LA alone) added that these attacks have "practically become a sport among young people around the country," claiming 156 lives since 2001. Feral gangs, most of them white, assault the homeless "for kicks," according to the story, "or out of contempt for the down-and-out."
Welcome to the land of opportunity, where some kids drop out of high school and others drop out of the human race. For these hyenas there's no redemption. They're genetic garbage, biological debris best smothered mercifully in their sleep. It's possible that underfed Cubans envy overfed Americans too much. A great humiliation for many Cuban parents is that their well-bred and educated daughters have joined the ranks of the jineteras to save the household from ruin. Clients even visit the homes of these semiprofessional prostitutes with gifts for their families. A Hobson's Choice over which few of us would hesitate: Would you rather have your children riding tourists for a living or smashing the homeless with baseball bats for recreation? Yet every moonlit night the channel between Havana and Key West hosts the refugee regatta -- small boats loaded with high hopes, showing no lights, headed north.
