The Culture of Symbols and the Realities of Culture

On Feb. 16, I traveled to Santiago de Cuba with a colleague, Arnold August, to pay homage  to Jose Marti and Fidel Castro at their respective tombs. August is a good friend of Cuba who has written books and articles about its revolutionary experience, basing them on his direct knowledge of on-the-ground realities. He had come as part of the Quebec delegation, a component of the Canadian delegation, to the Havana International Book Fair, this year dedicated to his own country. Among his personal contributions to the event was a speech — “Fidel Castro, Political Power, and the New Culture of Communication,” later published on Cubadebate in Spanish and English — that he gave at a symposium on the leader of the Revolution.

The plane took off for Holguin and the standard announcements came over the loudspeakers — in English only, even though the passengers were of various nationalities and quite a few were Spanish speakers, including some Cubans living in Cuba. Later on in the flight, I asked the friendly attendant how this could be, given that we were traveling on a domestic flight operated by Cuba and had bought our tickets directly from Cubana de Aviacion. She went into a long, involved explanation about how the plane is not Cuban, it is leased from Italy but operated by I forget which Cuban agency, the chief steward is Italian ... She neglected to mention the fact that Boeing is an American multinational, or to speculate as to whether that might have something to do with Cubana’s English-only announcements.

We ultimately did get a flight out, but our Canadian friend and others who had booked the charter were not offered compensation for being shunted into a significantly lower-priced class of service. “Cubana does not pay compensation,” is basically what we were told. Such a message attests to a deficiency in the way we operate as a nation, one that will have to be corrected — organically, as in the case of people who suffer accidents due to the poor condition of the streets and sidewalks — if we are to create the country we desire, need, and must have: a country of sustainable and ethical prosperity.