I’ll never forget the doctor who treated my son Alex for a back problem in Havana in 2011 while he was studying with the Cuban National Ballet. The hospital was miles out of the city and we walked down corridor after corridor, signing in at door after door on weathered logbooks, until we arrived at the right one.
The doctor was slightly built, about my age. He wore glasses. Hardly had I introduced myself than he said: “I can see you have a thyroid problem.” I was astounded. I had had my thyroid removed but how would he know? “Your eyebrows,” he said, “they’re short.”
We spoke about Alex. He couldn’t show us the scans he’d made because the screen wasn’t working but he had them on a CD, which I still keep. When he learnt where we were from he said he’d fought against South Africans in Angola. “It was a hard war,” he said, paying tribute to his enemy. “But we won.”
It’s not a point I argue. But this was a serious person and I remember liking him enormously. And I can’t help wondering about him now as a deranged US president, Donald Trump, busy losing a war he started with Iran, prepares to cripple Cuba. “I do believe I’ll have the honour of taking it,” Trump said last month. What a pig.
My first two weeks in Havana, I stayed with a poor family in the old barrio in the middle of the city. They were lovely. For breakfast I was given a slice of bread with a small piece of butter, a fried egg and half a potato. Fruit was rare.
The family lived on rations. The ration shop was around the corner and opened briefly during the week, dispensing sugar, candles, eggs and the like, ticking off items in your ration book. In the hot evenings we sat out on the pavement, feet in the road, smoking and talking. Black-and-white TVs would flicker in some rooms opposite. Baseball was wildly popular.
The government in Tehran may be despicable and Iranians may hate it, but there’s something unifying about being bombed night and day. If Trump ever puts American soldiers on the ground in Iran, as he threatens by massing them in the area, he is going to be horrified by the result.
The Cubans I met knew life could be better elsewhere. Many younger people would leave, as young people everywhere do. But I never found anyone who wasn’t proud to be Cuban. They were patriots. Almost everyone I met in the evening street or in the bars wanted to talk about the war against South Africa.
Self-obsessed fool that he is, Trump doesn’t appreciate the power of nationalism and will make the same mistake in Cuba he is making in Iran. The government in Tehran may be despicable and Iranians may hate it, but there’s something unifying about being bombed night and day. If Trump ever puts American soldiers on the ground in Iran, as he threatens by massing them in the area, he is going to be horrified by the result.
And that’s not even allowing for the fact that the religious fanatics who control Iran regard their martyrdom as the highest of life’s honours. Heaven help fighting people who actively want to die for their cause. An Easter thought.
Cuba, a paradise for sex tourism is, like Iran, a cruel dictatorship. There is no freedom of speech and it holds thousands of political prisoners. And like Iran and many other police states, Cuba can count on the unbending loyalty of the ANC.
Ninety miles away in Miami, though, Cuban exiles are eager for Trump to move on the old country and the worse he does in Iran the more likely it becomes that he will seek to redeem his heroic view of himself in his “own” hemisphere. I hope the family I stayed with and the doctor who helped my son survive what may be to come.
But given that South Africa is also somewhere on the same Trump list as Iran and Cuba, it’s worth asking yourself if you would fight for this country in the admittedly highly unlikely event it were attacked.
I know I would. I was born and educated here and returned after 20 years working abroad. I’ve never regretted it. Yes, we have a rotten government but we’ve been run by nationalist English, Afrikaners and now Africans, forever and they all do the same thing: they take care of their own. It’s up to opposition parties to change that.
That’s not something a Cuban or an Iranian is able to say. We forget as we complain that South Africa is a remarkably free country. President Cyril Ramaphosa, for all his faults and deceptions, has been a solid guarantor of our democracy.
You watch a Ramaphosa opponent like the creepy ANC Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi promoting an EFF member to become the head of finance in our richest province and you get an idea of what Ramaphosa is up against from within his own party. While (or if ever) the opposition sorts itself out, we’re probably lucky Cyril’s there. Happy Easter.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.