Dear Hugo,
That last night in Buenos Aires, when you’d driven us from the nightclub back to our hotel, we said goodbye in the forecourt and you asked, “When you get to Cuba, señora, will you do something for me?”. You pressed a crisp U.S. dollar bill into my hand and said, “Please give this to the poorest little boy you see, and say it comes from a friend in Argentina.”
(This probably surprised the hell out of the hotel doorman and the valet, because from a distance it must have looked as though the chauffeur was tipping the client.)
I said that of course I would. But I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you.
I suspect you were a poor boy once. And I think you may have been Cuban. So let me tell you about the children we’ve seen here.
They’re thin, fit and fast…bright-eyed and cheeky, and bursting with energy. Thin, because the Cubans have just enough food to go around. There’s rice and beans, and fruit and vegetables, and chicken and fish. Pork on a good day, and that’s about it. Snacks and soft drinks? You can find a few local brands in the shops, but most people can’t afford them.
Fit, too. Cuba puts a lot of effort into public health, especially education (clean your teeth, wash your hands) and prevention (like vaccination). And judging by the amount of time the kids spend running around in the street with their friends, they don’t watch much TV — possibly because although a lot of homes do have television, the local content is pretty boring.
And smart. (In spite of its poverty, Cuba apparently has the world’s highest literacy rate.)
The Constant Companion and I are familiar with several countries which are supposedly communist, or previously communist, and where the reality doesn’t quite live up to the theory: health care and education are no longer free, and grinding poverty still exists side by side with eye-popping wealth. In some of them you’ll frequently find yourself ankle-deep in begging children.
But during three weeks here in Cuba, Hugo, we haven’t seen a single child begging.
We did look. We saw a few older men, sometimes in wheelchairs, with one or more limbs missing. They might have been born with disabilities, or wounded in the war, but either way they were too old to benefit from the advantages (and disadvantages) that keep these kids fit and feisty.
So we gave your dollar, and a few of our own, to one of them.
So I’m sorry I couldn’t do as you asked. But I hope you’ll be happy that, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find the poorest little boy in Cuba.