Journey to Cuba
College students often head for Caribbean beaches in the spring. But it's not often they go to Cuba, and it's not often that they go as part of a class instead of on spring break.
But that's the trip 2010 Freeport High School graduate Christian Heilman took in March along with 14 other members of his international reporting class and five professors from Penn State University.
Heilman, who's since graduated and started a job as a general assignment reporter for WTAJ-TV in Altoona, said, “The international reporting class, they've had it about five years. Every year they try to go to a different location, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City. They'd been trying to go to Cuba for years.”
The 54-year-old U.S. embargo on commercial, economic and financial transactions made planning more difficult, he said.
“We had to file with the State Department. I'm not sure of all the red tape involved,” Heilman said, adding the Penn State group was cleared because of the educational nature of the trip.
“We partnered with the Jose Marti Institute down there,” he said. “The institute handled lodging and making sure we would be able to come, working things out on the Cuba side, making sure we would be able to get visas and that sort of thing.”
Heilman said the group left March 7 and returned nine days later.
“We had to take a bus from State College to Philadelphia. We flew from Philadelphia to Tampa,” Heilman said.
“Since you really can't do business with Cuba, we flew on a quote — charter flight — unquote. We had to go to a separate charter flight area.”
Because of a recently relaxed immigration policy allowing Cubans living in the United States to visit relatives on the island, the 737 was filled with expatriates and consumer goods.
“They are bringing back TVs, they are bringing back air conditioners, they are bringing back laptops because you can't buy these things in Cuba,” Heilman said.
All the merchandise was heavily wrapped in plastic, he added, to discourage theft by Cuban baggage handlers.“We spent the week in Havana and then we spent 24 hours in Varadero which was more of a resort area,” he said.However, the class wasn't there to sightsee.“We had to come up with a story idea, and we would go out and talk to people and make it work,” Heilman said. “I had a four-and-a-half minute story about the Internet in Cuba.”Trying to put together a news story in a foreign country was a difficult experience.“We were always supposed to have one other person with us, but we didn't have a professor with us all the time,” Heilman said.“Cell phones don't work in Cuba. They would just drop us off. You get lost in Havana and that's when you find out how much Spanish you know,” he said. “I was barely able to ask for a map and ask for directions. ... If you can't communicate with them you are stuck,” he said.Heilman said of Havana, “You walk down the street and you can see it was America's playground in the 1950s.” He also learned that while there are still 1950s vintage American cars on the streets of Havana, modern Chinese and Asian cars are also present.But there is also a lot of poverty. “A lot of the buildings are rundown. We would not fathom living in them. They would have been condemned years ago, decades ago, but there are still families living in them.“There is a section of the city called Old Havana. It's very touristy. They keep it nice. Tourism is the only way the country gets money,” Heilman said. “That's currency that means something. The dollar means something. The euro means something.”“They have no economy, the country just doesn't work,” he said.“It's impossible to figure out Cuba. You can't figure out how it operates. You can't figure out what makes it go. It's something different at each turn and something surprising.
“The weather was 75 and sunny, and this was in March coming from Pennsylvania and 22 degrees. It was the perfect time to go,” he said.“The weather was great, the food not so much,” he said, “We stayed at a hotel where you could feel every spring in the bed.”“For breakfast, we had these crumby scrambled eggs and something that was called orange juice and tasted nothing like it,” he said.“One of the persons that I interviewed, high up in the Cuban government — he and his wife said they don't make enough money to buy milk. He's an accomplished radio show host, and they don't have enough money to buy milk.“In Cuba, if you are successful, you are marginally better off than everybody else, if even that,” Heilman said.“But the people are the strongest people I have ever met. They are living in conditions that we would not dream of, and they just do what they have to do,” he said. And, he added, most Cubans do not want to leave their country.While trying to tape his story about the Cuban Internet, Heilman gained a new appreciation for the First Amendment.“You cannot criticize the government in any meaningful way,” he said. “We were frustrated by this. They made it difficult to talk to anyone. It hindered my reporting and a lot of other people's reporting.”He said the Web service showed Cuba's lack of infrastructure.“It's really slow,” Heilman said. “It takes an hour to use in a cyber cafe. It's dial-up Internet. One of the questions I was trying to figure out was: Do they not want free information flowing or do they just not have the money? I really think they don't have the money.”In contrast to Havana, Heilman said, was resort of Varadero.“They keep up the buildings, and they have a great beach,” he said. “The tourists are Canadians, Europeans. Canada is the number one country that sends tourists there.“It's seven hundred Canadian dollars to stay at Varadero and that included the flight down,” he said. “If you stayed at the resort, you'd have no idea that Cuba is as screwed up as it is.”Heilman said one small, privately owned restaurant in Old Havana, Mama Ines, owned by Fidel Castro's former chef, Tomas Erasmo Hernandez, was a culinary highlight of the trip.“We went there four times; a group was there every single night,” Heilman said. “They loved us. We were a large group. This was the best food I had in Cuba. It was amazing.”Heilman said the trip led him to discard many of his preconceptions of Cuba and its people.“Before, you just assumed Cuba would be more dangerous than it is. When I went out at night, it was fine. You don't go down a dark alley; you use common sense. The Cuban police care about tourists because if they don't have tourists, they don't have anything” Heilman said.Even with the long period of tension between the U.S. and Cuba, returning to Tampa proved to be no big deal.“It was surprisingly relaxed,” Heilman said. “I don't know if they looked in any of our bags. They asked if we were bringing anything back that we shouldn't and we said 'No.'”
Cuba is a Caribbean island between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic, 93 miles south of Key West, Fla.The island encompasses an area slightly smaller than Pennsylvania with terrain that is mostly flat to rolling plains with rugged hills and mountains in the southeast.A communist state, Cuba's head of government is the president of the Council of State and president of the Council of Ministers, Gen. Raul Castro Ruz.The president and vice president are elected by the National Assembly for a five-year term. The last election was Feb. 24, 2013.Cuba exports petroleum, nickel, medical products, sugar, tobacco, fish, citrus and coffee. Its main trading partners are Canada, China, Venezuela, the Netherlands and Spain.The government continues to balance the need for loosening its socialist economic system against a desire for firm political control.In 2011, the government held the first Cuban Communist Party Congress in almost 13 years, during which leaders approved a plan for wide-ranging economic changes. Since then, the government has slowly implemented limited economic reforms, including allowing Cubans to buy electronic appliances and cell phones, stay in hotels and buy and sell used cars.The government also opened up some retail services to “self-employment,” leading to the rise of so-called “cuentapropistas” or entrepreneurs. Recent moves include permitting the private ownership and sale of real estate and new vehicles, allowing farmers to sell agricultural goods directly to hotels and expanding categories of self-employment.Despite these reforms, the average Cuban's standard of living remains at a level lower than before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting downturn of the 1990s. Since late 2000, Venezuela has been providing oil on preferential terms. Cuba has been paying for the oil, in part, with the services of Cuban personnel in Venezuela, including some 30,000 medical professionals.SOURCE: CIA World Fact Book
