Cuba is a Slave state
Read below
Published Sunday, January 9, 2000, in the Miami Herald
The secret servitude
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two decades ago, Fidel Castro quietly sold 80,000 Cubans into indentured labor in Communist countries. One recently journeyed back to confront the past, but found former friends reluctant to reawaken ghosts they have buried beneath a new life.
DAMARYS OCA¥A
docana@herald.com
SEE ALSO
THE RECORD: Morel writes, 'From the beginning, I knew that the crux of all this lies not only in the examples, but in what they represent, in the essence of every human being who suffered; in the awareness we all had about what was happening to us and the ideas that our superiors had about what we signified; the things that they fed us in meetings and conferences, things they themselves never believed.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THEN: Carlos Morel and other Cuban workers attend an official function at the town of Tynec-nad-Sazavou in 1987.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Morel poses on a borrowed motorcycle made at the factory where he worked.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOW: Morel kisses the ground on his return to Czechslovakia.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEJECTED: Carl Morel in his room soon after his arrival in Czechoslovakia in 1986. He wrote detailed letters describing his experiences and those of other Cubans.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exiles delivered a letter to Czech leader Vaclav Havel
Defector: 'I won't forget you'
Read one of the letters by Carlos Morel (883K graphic)
Previous Special Reports
PRAGUE -- This is where the end of Carlos Morel's odyssey begins.
He falls to his knees as he leaves the airport, kisses the granite sidewalk with his eyes closed, and then rises like someone surfacing after years underwater. His face is awash in conflicting emotions: release and suffocation.
Looking around, Morel blinks rapidly, so that his mind can catch up to the images and correlate them with the memories coming in flashes:
It's 1986 again, and Fidel's latest shipment of cheap labor to a Central European ally, Czechoslovakia, arrives in this same airport.
The group of young men and women walk out of a plane under an ominous winter sky. They shiver from a cold foreign to their bodies, not yet knowing they've been duped.
Among them is Morel. He is about to become a victim and an unofficial historian of one of Fidel Castro's most egregious, yet least-known tools for money and control -- a program that from 1978 to 1991, sent 80,000 young men and women to Eastern bloc countries to work for meager pay. The host countries got cheap, unskilled labor for jobs the natives didn't want, and Castro got cash.
Everything now, in 1999, is different, Morel notices as he rides away in a friend's car. There's a new building across the tiny airport, with a Coca-Cola sign on it. There are more cars and billboards. The roads are better.
Even the country's name is different. It's now the Czech Republic, which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its liberation from Communism.
Closing his eyes now, Morel breathes deeply and smells a memory.
'That peculiar smell -- carbon from the cheap heaters,' he says, as if sated. 'You always smell it here when winter starts. Delicious.'
Time has a way of turning the bitter into the sweet. Years ago, desperate in this very land, Morel wrote a letter to his godmother in Miami, about a magnificent snowfall, and about the same smell:
'The snowflakes began gathering on the windowsill, first in a fine coat and then as a white, clean carpet, brilliant. It was as if only the snow and I existed. Then, the smell. I opened the window, it filled my nostrils, and I thought I was going to throw up everything I had eaten since birth. It was carbon from the cheap heaters.'
It's strange to Morel now, how you always come back to the place where you've felt the most pain and seen the most beauty. Like Homer's battle-worn and homesick Odysseus finally reaching Ithaca after years of forced wandering, Morel is home.
And like Odysseus, he has stories to tell.
'Before 1986, I had already thought about the possibility of traveling outside the island, to discover what for many was -- and still is -- forbidden. I never took the idea very seriously. Instead, everything would disintegrate into street corner plans between midnight friends who always ended up talking about what German women were like and whether Czech women were prettier, or whether Hungarian meat was the cheapest. When our patience or the bottle ended, each would head home to sleep, and the next day would bring a new monotony, without Czech or German girls, much less cheap meat.'
-- From Morel's letters
Since 1994, Morel, 44, has lived in Miami, where he is a graphic designer and an active member of an anti-Castro Cuban exile group. But think of Miami as a way-station in a journey that started in his native Havana in 1986.
That journey took him first to Czechoslovakia. There, on poster-size pieces of thin paper that resemble scrolls, Morel began writing about his and other workers' experiences: their back-breaking work and scarce food; their light moments -- sharing beers in an old pub, visiting beautiful places. Each word was painstakingly pounded on an old typewriter as letters to his godmother in Miami.
His journey next took him to Canada, where in 1990 he defected during a layover on a flight back to Cuba. There, he and other Cuban exiles helped a childhood friend in Prague seek asylum in 1990. Israel Cabrera was then secretary of the Cuban communist party in Prague.
EARLY TRAINING: Carlos Morel as draftsman in Havana in the 1970s.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three years later, Morel made his way to Miami.
'When I think of everything that happened to me, it still seems unreal,' Morel says.
Morel was born in a neighborhood of Havana called Lawton, the eldest son of a painter and a housewife.
He was always meticulous, observant and a quick learner -- at 17, he became an architectural draftsman and later, a graphic designer. Like many his age, he longed for a life outside the repressed island. At 31, he got his chance, when a colleague asked him to accompany her to apply for a work-abroad program.
Officials sold the program to young Cubans as a way to earn money while learning technical skills, such as auto mechanics and operation of textile and other machinery. In reality, the program was designed to ease civil unrest due to unemployment, and pump money into Communist activities in Cuba and worldwide.
Chosen workers would be sent to Eastern bloc Communist countries to work under four-year contracts. At the end, they earned a certificate and a chance to buy a Czech motorcycle.
They were promised language courses, clothes, comfortable living quarters. Embassy officials and supervisors from Cubatecnica, the government-run agency that coordinated the program, would offer support and guidance.
Under their contracts, 60 percent of workers' pay would be deposited in bank accounts until their return to Cuba.
Morel -- and thousands like him -- couldn't wait to apply. But, secretly, Morel had a risky plan in mind.
'I was never going to get to Czechoslovakia,' he says. 'My plan was that when we got to Montreal on a scheduled fuel stop, I was going to get off the plane and defect.'
He figured getting from there to Miami, where his godmother lived, would be a snap.
On March 12, 1986, he and fellow workers boarded a Czechoslovak Airlines plane. It flew 14 hours nonstop -- and landed in the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. There had been no layover.
Morel's first words as the plane door opened: 'What the hell am I doing here?'
'The fields were all in shades of dark green, ochre and sienna, the houses were all the same shade of burnt ochre, with roofs that looked as if they had been saddened by time. That world felt completely alien to me.'
Sitting down to lunch at a riverside restaurant soon after friend Lazaro Casta¤er picked him up at the airport, Morel tells Casta¤er that he has come back to face his past and talk to others with similar experiences. Most of the 1,000 Cubans living in the Czech Republic are former workers granted asylum after the fall of Communism in 1989.
Morel's ultimate goal: Write a book. Then, he feels, he can move on.
Struck with an idea, Casta¤er, himself a former worker, pops open his mobile phone and calls a Cuban woman Morel has never met, a former worker who lives in Prague.
'I just want to meet people who went through the same abuse,' Morel tells her.
The woman's response is icy: 'No, comrade. I don't know what you're talking about. No one ever abused me.' Click.
Over the days, Morel will encounter the same attitude from people who were once friends or lovers. He'll find them reluctant to dig up a past they've buried beneath a new life, afraid they'll not be allowed to visit Cuba if they talk, or that relatives will suffer for it.
But this first rejection fills him with rage. 'Can you believe she said that? 'Comrade,' ' he repeats in disgust. ' 'No one ever abused me.' '
In fact, according to Morel, other workers and documents, Cubans were abused and exploited from the beginning.
'Soon after we got here, I felt a tremendous curiosity to get to the bottom of the suspicion that kept turning itself over and over in my head: that it was all a farce.'
Cat meat, if you cook it long enough and try not to concentrate on its shape on your plate, tastes just like rabbit. So learned Cuban workers desperate to eat something more substantial than a scoop of rice flavored with an old onion. Out of a thin plastic tube and rope, they fashioned a simple device to catch wandering cats.
Others sneaked into fields to steal fruit or corn. They dug through garbage cans and learned to shop at flea markets where rotting meat was sold for a few Czech crowns.
The Cubans learned these survival methods just weeks after arriving, Morel says.
'My first reaction was to try to leave, but you would hear the rumors, 'so-and-so got caught at the border',' Morel says. 'So after that, it was a waiting game, waiting for my contract to expire so I could defect during a layover.'
At the airport, Morel's group of 30 workers was bused to a tiny town outside Prague. In Votice, they were given new clothes, meal tickets and a stipend for their first three months.
In a small boarding house, Morel's group was crowded as many as four roommates to a unit composed of a tiny living room and one bedroom. They shared a bathroom with the other guests. In other collectives across the country, as many as seven roommates were squeezed into two-bedroom units.
Initially, most of the Cubans did not work, instead learning Czech in daily eight-hour classes. Some worked voluntary shifts at factories during that time, and started to get a clue about conditions. Everyone started working after the three months.
'Hope vanished in the first few days,' Cabrera said.
Morel's group was moved to Tynec-nad-Sazavou, where they were assigned to a Jawa motorcycle factory. Their duties -- like those of other Cubans working in truck and shoe factories, breweries, paper and textile mills, and construction sites -- were a far cry from the technical training they were supposed to get. Morel's group moved boxes of motorcycle parts by hand.
When workers were paid for the first time, reality hit hard, Morel recalls.
Aside from the expected 60 percent deduction, there was an unexpected deduction for the clothes, food and shelter of the first three months.
Later came more deductions -- 'strongly recommended donations' to Communist causes. Examples of where the money went, Cabrera says: Cuban troops, a Chilean revolutionary group in 1988, the reconstruction of the Lazaro Pe¤a Theater in Havana in 1989.
Out of the average 3,750 crowns workers earned per month during Morel's era, they were left with about 1,200 -- about $40. With that, they had to feed and clothe themselves, pay rent and try to send money home. Shifts of 12 to 16 hours were the norm.
Workers didn't know Czechoslovakia had paid Cuba about 250 crowns for each worker sent.
'These people were basically indentured servants,' says Michael Luhan, of the Czech human rights group People in Need, which last year published an article about the Cuban workers' experience.
Many workers, like Eneida Hernandez, refused to stay, despite the consequences.
Hernandez, who lives in Miami and has never met Morel, started working in Czechoslovakia in 1979. A year later, sick of the hunger and intimidation, she and 16 others who worked at a shoe manufacturer staged a strike. It was a sure way to get 'revoked' -- meaning a nullified contract and a flight home.
'When I saw all this -- sometimes you had to choose between buying food or feminine products -- I said to myself, 'If I'm going to be miserable, I might as well be in my own country,' ' she said. But shortly after repatriation, a mob stood outside her home, carrying out an 'an act of repudiation' -- government-sponsored harassment.
'They yelled at me and called me all kinds of names: traitor, whore, gusana [worm],' said Hernandez. 'They threw eggs and rocks at my house.'
She and the others learned that the bank accounts that was supposed to have 60 percent of the money they'd earned were empty. In 1990, when she asked to emigrate to the United States, she was told she'd have to reimburse the government 781 pesos, the cost of her Czech round-trip ticket.
Still, why did others choose to stick out the four years?
Because in Czechoslovakia, workers say, once you managed to get out of the sight of Cuban officials, you could forget for a while that you were under Castro's power; because your relatives were counting on your help.
Above all, you stayed for a chance at freedom.
'Why did we stay?' Morel says. 'Why do people risk their lives trying to cross the ocean on an inner tube to get to Miami when they know the water is full of sharks? There is always the hope, the possibility, of crossing a border to freedom.'
'All these theatrics had a premeditated end: Divide the workers, confuse them, create uncertainty and mistrust within the group of slaves.'
Sitting around a bottle of vodka in Casta¤er's apartment, Morel, Casta¤er and Fidel Zulueta remember that the indignities didn't end with money. A lot of the abuse was psychological.
Zulueta, 39, a worker who stayed in Prague after working from 1981 to 1987, is the only person other than Casta¤er who was willing to speak.
'I remember I used to wear a cap with an American logo on it,' Zulueta says. 'After they saw that, they kept a close eye on me and made a big deal out of every little thing. We were all constantly being intimidated, and you didn't feel like you could say a word.'
At monthly group meetings, the three recall, workers were browbeaten over perceived offenses, such as Zulueta's, or for keeping in contact with relatives or friends in the 'imperialist' United States.
'They were always mentioning el avioncito, the plane back to Cuba,' Morel remembers. 'And they were always bringing out the political stuff: 'Remember everything that the revolution has done for you.' '
The threats were accompanied by secret room checks that became routine. Workers' personal letters were opened and drawers rifled.
Zulueta, like Morel and others, found a way of coping by moving in with Czech women who had homes and steady jobs. Both Zulueta and Casta¤er married Czechs and stayed in the country.
The situation spun out of control. Some workers started drinking heavily. Others stole parts from factories to sell on the black market, or secretly moonlighted shoveling snow in the streets or the dead at crematoriums. Yet others started sleeping with older Czech women and men in exchange for money or gifts.
'You had to do whatever it took to survive,' Zulueta says. The room falls into silence.
'Not to write about this would be to betray myself, and that, I will never do.'
As kids in Lawton, Morel and Israel Cabrera had been buddies until mandatory military service separated them as teens. They met again by chance, at a conference in Prague, in 1988. Seeing Cabrera again, a familiar face so far from home, turned out to be more than a comfort to Morel.
Cabrera was a secretary for the Cuban communist party in Prague and a supervisor for a collective in Steti -- a man who portrayed himself as ruthless in front of Cuban officials, but was loved by workers for his fairness. He needed a translator and a worker liaison, someone he could trust.
Morel, who'd become fluent in Czech, accepted the job.
It meant better pay and better conditions in a new town, but it also meant that he would see things most workers didn't.
He rushed workers into emergency rooms when faulty equipment and other dangerous conditions at job sites had chopped off their fingers or broken their bones. He stood by the injured as officials talked them into not filing complaints against the factory.
Life for women, who were paid less than male workers, could be particularly bad.
At the gynecologist's office, Morel translated for the women. If they were pregnant, their options were an abortion or a plane ride.
Taking advantage of a bizarre sexual fetish, women shaved their pubic hair and sold it.
Others were coerced into sexual relations with Cuban officials. If the girl refused the advances, Cuban officials looked for any excuse to send her home.
'They were always on the prowl,' Morel says.
When Cabrera was away, Morel was acting supervisor. No longer a lowly worker nor part of the Cuban officials' circle, powerless to truly help workers, and doubtful he could trust Cabrera despite their friendship, Morel felt alienated. He turned to alcohol.
'For months, I lived like an animal,' Morel says. 'I didn't know who I was.'
Finally, he traded the vodka bottle for a typewriter. One of the anecdotes in his writings is about Lucia, a girl from Las Villas who lost two fingers to a faulty machine, and begged not to be sent her home.
'By sheer will, she continued to do the same level of work with only eight fingers,' until the same machine took a third finger. 'This time, no one wanted to be responsible for her. She was sent back to Cuba with her heart in pieces and with three fewer fingers. She was 22.'
Votice is exactly as he left it, except that the Hotel Modra Hvezda, the Blue Star, is under scaffolding. Near the hotel, Morel's first home, are a fountain and a bench. Sitting down, Morel relives a scene from his past: He and friends discover that planes fly over Votice, and the bench becomes a place of daydreams.
'We would sit here, looking up and watching the planes fly over, wondering when it would be our turn to get on one and leave,' he says.
For Morel, that day came January 13, 1990, after November 1989's Velvet Revolution had overthrown the Czech Communist government. Cuba had begun flying workers home by the thousands.
Morel boarded a plane again. This time, it stopped in Montreal, and Morel did what he'd intended to do four years earlier: He got off, walked to the nearest Canadian official and asked for asylum. Three years later, he was in Miami.
'Time passes with blinding speed, without us even realizing it. Scenes that abide in our minds form part of an immense archive in which only the beautiful things are remembered. That's why many people are able to forgive betrayal -- as time passes, beauty is the only thing that prevails, and then your mind is ready to forgive. The heart is different. It always keeps pain until it stops beating, and it is my heart that I'm counting on to tell this story. Still, I think I'll find beauty there too.'
Morel started writing again after his November trip to Prague. He is still angry about the people who turned him away, including Cabrera, whom he met again only by chance. He had seemed like the only one who hadn't moved on, who still wanted to remember.
But when he has written every word, Morel knows what he will remember most are the precious moments of beauty, made so much more significant because they were surrounded by misery:
The faces of Czech farmers and neighbors who opened their homes and their pantries, allowed him to use their addresses to receive forbidden mail, hid friends seeking asylum; the way the Bohemian countryside was dotted with hops fields and green forests, and Prague, with a thousand spires.
The scene in Wenceslas Square on Nov. 17, 1989, when Communism fell. Czech civilians, carrying candles and flowers, faced police officers covered by shields, helmets and guns, and in a moment, the armor came down and brothers hugged again. Morel was there, anonymous in a sea of radost, joy, hoping that a similar celebration would one day be Cuba's.
He was in that square again this November, 10 years later to the day. Small groups of friends, carrying flags and candles, walked around quietly, indulging in private remembrances. Morel joined them.
He crouched down at the base of a statue, where flowers and tiny candles had been placed in remembrance of all the victims of communism. Without saying a word, he began lighting the candles whose fire had gone out, one by one.
|
