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ON THE CUBAN QUESTION

by JEAN CAREY BOND

The following is a slightly revised version of an article that was first published in the May 31, 1980, edition of the New York Amsterdam News. Jean Carey Bond is an Associate Editor of FREEDOMWAYS.

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS NOW, the so-called "Freedom Flotillas" bearing thousands of mostly male Cubans have been wending their hazardous way to these shores. The U.S. press hasn't hesitated to seize this latest opportunity to inveigh against the regime of Fidel Castro, but more questions have been raised by its reports than answered.

As luck would have it, a trip to Cuba in May by this writer with a group of 15 black, white and Hispanic women coincided with the emigration wave, affording us the opportunity to check out for ourselves what the emigrants are leaving behind and why. Not surprisingly, what we learned indicated that the full dimensions of this phenomenon cannot be contained in the U.S. media's sensationalist characterizations of the mass exodus, nor are the range and nature of the new arrivals' motives for abandoning their homeland wholly revealed in their studied expressions of love for freedom.

Before going to Cuba, we were aware that in November of 1978 the Cuban government negotiated an arrangement with representatives of the Cuban American community whereby members of that community would be permitted to visit their relatives in Cuba. Among many other factors, this "reunification of families" program set the stage for current events.

Approximately 100,000 Cuban Americans travelled to Cuba during 1979, bringing with them a huge quantity of material testaments to the glory of life in this consumers' paradise. Predictably, a lot of the homefolks were impressed - specifically, those among them who had failed to assimilate the values of the Cuban revolution. Cuba is, after all, a developing nation whose priorities have been directed at achieving, for example, the lowest infant mortality rate in all of Latin America (even lower than the city of Newark), not at indoctrinating its citizens in the art of conspicuous consumption.

But when the relatives came calling with their gold chains and stickpins and radios and Gloria Vanderbilts and fedoras and marmalade and chocolate-flavored toothpaste, it was not simply the things themselves that dazzled the homefolks but also what they symbolize-namely, an American dream whose main feature is a life of almost total selfishness, of virtual irresponsibility. "Here," one

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