The burly man at the customs counter at Houston airport wore a smart grey suit and a cap. “Ah, Cuba!” he said as he looked at our passports. “Have you brought any Cuban goods with you?”
We were returning from three weeks on the island, so yes, we had Cuban goods – gifts for family and friends. Embroidered hankies, chocolates, small handicrafts, rum, a tablecloth, books, CDs and cassettes of music. “Hmm,” he said. “Show me the rum, please.”
It was a bottle we had bought on the recommendation of Barbaro, a friend we made in the town of Baracoa. Rum all the way from a small town in Cuba? My 88 year-old uncle in Bombay would love it, we just knew.
I pulled it from my backpack and handed it over.
The burly man turned and walked to a sink at the back. Almost theatrically, ostentatiously, he opened the bottle and, over our despairing wails, poured the rum into the Houston drains. He dumped the bottle in a trash can below. He came back to us, the couple from India he had just rendered speechless. “You cannot bring Cuban goods into this country,” he said smugly. “It’s called trading with the enemy.”
With that reminder of the law that legitimised rum down the drain – the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act – he waved us into the USA.
Down the hatch
Blockades of countries can be cruel. That day in Houston, I also understood that they can be stupid. The man was intent only on making a point. After all, he let us carry everything else Cuban into the US – tablecloth, chocolates, etc. Why single out the rum?
In Cuba, we could hardly miss how the US blockade has affected the economy. Cars were few because petrol is expensive. A qualified doctor we met moonlighted as a taxi driver to earn dollars. Cuban pesos bought us a minimalist meal whose foul taste I still remember; dollars were our ticket to elaborate meals in a “parador” – restaurants in homes. So many women – some looked as young as 15 – were prostituting themselves; on our last night in Havana, we actually met a man and wife and he was pimping her.
“El Bloqueo” – what Cubans called the US blockade of their country – and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s had together pushed Cuba into what Cubans called “Período especial”, the special period. Everything was rationed: two or three eggs a week, chicken or fish once a month, one bar of soap per family per month. Essentials like rice and beans were hard to find; coffee, shellfish and, yes, rum were almost completely out of reach for Cubans (but, as we well knew, affordable for dollar-carrying tourists).
El Bloqueo even affected chess. In 1988 the Cuban grandmaster Guillermo Garcia Gonzales finished second in a New York tournament. The US Department of the Treasury confiscated his $10,000 prize, invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act. To claim the money, he would have to abandon his country. More stupidity.
Yet strictly, the Act should never have applied to Cuba. It requires that the US must be at war with the country concerned, or at any rate in a “state of emergency”. Neither applied to Cuba born of its 1959 revolution. But conveniently, Harry Truman had declared a state of emergency in 1950 because of the “threat of world communism”. John Kennedy used this essentially ideological device to put the Cuban embargo in place. The result: by some estimates, El Bloqueo has cost Cuba over a trillion dollars since 1960.
Worth thinking of all this, as another large country applies an embargo on a much smaller and poorer neighbour. This time there’s no Act to apply, no war going on. There’s no emergency, unless you count the devastating earthquake the poorer neighbour suffered about six months ago, whose lasting effects it is still struggling to cope with. The large country will not even acknowledge that there is an embargo.
No, this blockade is also essentially ideological. Nepal wrote itself a new constitution this year. There has been plenty of opposition to the form it has taken, particularly from ethnic groups in Nepal with strong ties to India. Certainly the Nepali government has treated dissent with contempt and violence. But crucially, they paid no attention to repeated entreaties from the Modi administration to wait and reconsider the document. These issues deserve thought and discussion.
Nothing official about it
Regardless, Nepal adopted this constitution on September 20. Since that day, “Delhi has tightened the screws on Kathmandu by shutting down the border transit points – although, officially, there is no blockade." For an impoverished and landlocked country that is utterly reliant on supplies that come through such transit points, this is cruel punishment.
Already there are accounts of the effects in Nepal. Petrol is scarce, to the extent that the government has had to place restrictions on driving. Food prices have risen. Medical drugs and supplies are getting harder to find. A report by Scroll.in's Shubhra Dixit tells of a “No Gas Menu” in restaurants. With earthquake relief camps still operational, and with winter setting in, it’s not hard to comprehend the extent of suffering that likely lies ahead.
Should it be any wonder that the Nepali Prime Minister, KP Sharma Oli, considers India’s unofficial blockade more inhuman than war?
Cuba’s communism was anathema to its larger, richer neighbour. Nepal’s new constitution, much the same to its own larger, richer neighbour. Put aside the merits of these arguments. Do these ideological differences justify the actions the larger neighbours have taken? Do they justify the suffering imposed on already hard-pressed people?
Also, do they justify stupidity?
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
We were returning from three weeks on the island, so yes, we had Cuban goods – gifts for family and friends. Embroidered hankies, chocolates, small handicrafts, rum, a tablecloth, books, CDs and cassettes of music. “Hmm,” he said. “Show me the rum, please.”
It was a bottle we had bought on the recommendation of Barbaro, a friend we made in the town of Baracoa. Rum all the way from a small town in Cuba? My 88 year-old uncle in Bombay would love it, we just knew.
I pulled it from my backpack and handed it over.
The burly man turned and walked to a sink at the back. Almost theatrically, ostentatiously, he opened the bottle and, over our despairing wails, poured the rum into the Houston drains. He dumped the bottle in a trash can below. He came back to us, the couple from India he had just rendered speechless. “You cannot bring Cuban goods into this country,” he said smugly. “It’s called trading with the enemy.”
With that reminder of the law that legitimised rum down the drain – the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act – he waved us into the USA.
Down the hatch
Blockades of countries can be cruel. That day in Houston, I also understood that they can be stupid. The man was intent only on making a point. After all, he let us carry everything else Cuban into the US – tablecloth, chocolates, etc. Why single out the rum?
In Cuba, we could hardly miss how the US blockade has affected the economy. Cars were few because petrol is expensive. A qualified doctor we met moonlighted as a taxi driver to earn dollars. Cuban pesos bought us a minimalist meal whose foul taste I still remember; dollars were our ticket to elaborate meals in a “parador” – restaurants in homes. So many women – some looked as young as 15 – were prostituting themselves; on our last night in Havana, we actually met a man and wife and he was pimping her.
“El Bloqueo” – what Cubans called the US blockade of their country – and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s had together pushed Cuba into what Cubans called “Período especial”, the special period. Everything was rationed: two or three eggs a week, chicken or fish once a month, one bar of soap per family per month. Essentials like rice and beans were hard to find; coffee, shellfish and, yes, rum were almost completely out of reach for Cubans (but, as we well knew, affordable for dollar-carrying tourists).
El Bloqueo even affected chess. In 1988 the Cuban grandmaster Guillermo Garcia Gonzales finished second in a New York tournament. The US Department of the Treasury confiscated his $10,000 prize, invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act. To claim the money, he would have to abandon his country. More stupidity.
Yet strictly, the Act should never have applied to Cuba. It requires that the US must be at war with the country concerned, or at any rate in a “state of emergency”. Neither applied to Cuba born of its 1959 revolution. But conveniently, Harry Truman had declared a state of emergency in 1950 because of the “threat of world communism”. John Kennedy used this essentially ideological device to put the Cuban embargo in place. The result: by some estimates, El Bloqueo has cost Cuba over a trillion dollars since 1960.
Worth thinking of all this, as another large country applies an embargo on a much smaller and poorer neighbour. This time there’s no Act to apply, no war going on. There’s no emergency, unless you count the devastating earthquake the poorer neighbour suffered about six months ago, whose lasting effects it is still struggling to cope with. The large country will not even acknowledge that there is an embargo.
No, this blockade is also essentially ideological. Nepal wrote itself a new constitution this year. There has been plenty of opposition to the form it has taken, particularly from ethnic groups in Nepal with strong ties to India. Certainly the Nepali government has treated dissent with contempt and violence. But crucially, they paid no attention to repeated entreaties from the Modi administration to wait and reconsider the document. These issues deserve thought and discussion.
Nothing official about it
Regardless, Nepal adopted this constitution on September 20. Since that day, “Delhi has tightened the screws on Kathmandu by shutting down the border transit points – although, officially, there is no blockade." For an impoverished and landlocked country that is utterly reliant on supplies that come through such transit points, this is cruel punishment.
Already there are accounts of the effects in Nepal. Petrol is scarce, to the extent that the government has had to place restrictions on driving. Food prices have risen. Medical drugs and supplies are getting harder to find. A report by Scroll.in's Shubhra Dixit tells of a “No Gas Menu” in restaurants. With earthquake relief camps still operational, and with winter setting in, it’s not hard to comprehend the extent of suffering that likely lies ahead.
Should it be any wonder that the Nepali Prime Minister, KP Sharma Oli, considers India’s unofficial blockade more inhuman than war?
Cuba’s communism was anathema to its larger, richer neighbour. Nepal’s new constitution, much the same to its own larger, richer neighbour. Put aside the merits of these arguments. Do these ideological differences justify the actions the larger neighbours have taken? Do they justify the suffering imposed on already hard-pressed people?
Also, do they justify stupidity?