General Discussion

The higher up they were, the more likely they were to have traveled abroad, and met with a variety of foreigners, including even some Cuban exiles. The government official that invited me was a guy I had met at a conference in London. I had lived in Spain and majored in Spanish in college. I never even found out how this guy’s English was. We spoke only Spanish from the minute we met. Some of the limousine riders spoke passable Russian from having received “political training” in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, but it was mostly just Spanish.

If you travel and get to speak with people you are not likely to meet at home, you will be exposed to other ideas, other media. Ordinary Cubans couldn’t do that. High government officials could. They cherished their privileges dearly, but they did not lock themselves in their hotel rooms at night to read from Marx and Engels. They read newspapers out of Spain, and talked with people from around the world. They knew what was going on.

To have gotten as far as they did, they had to have been true believers in the beginning. Otherwise, they never would have risen as high as they did in the party’s hierarchy. But with contact with the world outside the Soviet empire came awareness and contact with people who were not limited to saying only what they were told to say and hearing only what they were told to hear. Their man that I met in London wore a suit that was more expensive than any I have ever worn in my life, although I was never one for “proper attire.” He had made it to the point where he was considered useful enough to the country to travel, and he made good use of his opportunity. He said that he absolutely considered himself a “socialista,” but in 1982 Cuba, no one who wanted to be more than a janitor couldn’t well say anything different.