Ellen Bernstein - Cuba, Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan (1999)

Mike Thornton: On the line joining us is Ellen Bernstein, who is with Pastors for Peace to talk about this year's Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba. Ellen, thank you for being with us. We appreciate that you were able to be with us. Let me let the listeners know the numbers in the studio are 530-265-9555, 1-800-355-5867. We make a real effort here on Full Logic Reverse to try and help publicize the Caravan to Cuba every year because I personally think it's a tremendously important, and not only important, but I think very, very courageous thing that Pastors for Peace does regarding this whole issue. Ellen, can you let the listeners know about Pastors for Peace and how that all got started and the various activities that you're involved with? And then we can talk about the Caravan to Cuba.

Ellen Bernstein: That's great. I'm happy to do that, Mike. Pastors for Peace is a project of an ecumenical agency that's based in New York City that's called IFCO, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. And I've been a member of the staff of IFCO for, oh, I guess it's about seven years now. Ifco got started in the late 60s working mostly in civil rights activities and economic empowerment and community development for the poorest people in our own country, and also did a lot of solidarity work with people in Africa and some of the liberation movements there. In the 1980s, Ifco was approached by some pastors from Nicaragua and El Salvador, asking that Ifco focus some of its attention on the struggles that were going on there, partly the movements for people to liberate themselves and partly the effects of U.S. policy on those countries, which by now are very well known, I'm sure, to your listeners. Our first Pastors for Peace caravan was just about 10 years ago, in November of 1988, and it went to Nicaragua with humanitarian aid that was collected from all parts of the United States. That caravan was inspired after our executive director, Reverend Lucius Walker, who's an American Baptist pastor, was actually wounded in a Contra attack in Nicaragua with a visiting delegation of folk from the U.S. He was shot when a little ferry boat coming from the Atlantic coast was attacked by the Contras. And in that attack, there were two people killed and 20-some-odd who were wounded. He said he spent the night in the hospital praying about what's an appropriate response when you get hit by a bullet that's paid for by your own government. And he founded the Project Pastors for Peace based on that premise that The U.S. ruling powers didn't want the people of the United States to see the real effects of what was going on in Nicaragua, but that we were determined to bring back as many people as we could at the grassroots level and to organize people to be involved in hands-on solidarity with people who were being victimized by U.S. foreign policy. So we had our 10th anniversary caravan to Nicaragua last November, and we've also taken caravans to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, to Chiapas. We've taken eight caravans to Cuba, and we're about to take our ninth.

Mike Thornton: We're speaking with Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace. Ellen, let me ask you, because perhaps we may be going in a different direction than you plan to go, but let me ask you anyway. We're certainly hearing a lot coming out of Washington regarding the whole situation in Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing, we've got to do all of this stuff. But as I know from my own experience in Central America, we weren't doing much to support human rights there.

Ellen Bernstein: Right.

Mike Thornton: Can you talk a little bit about the situation in Central America, if you would?

Ellen Bernstein: In Central America? The situation in Nicaragua, I guess, is what I'm closest to in terms of the dynamic there. We've heard that there's a new militarization taking place, that the government of Nicaragua, which interestingly for us who are involved in the Cuba work, the government of Nicaragua is supported by the same Cuban American National Foundation, that's trying to throw so much money and energy into overthrowing the government of Cuba. What they're looking for is a sort of a... Well, it's for Nicaragua to go back to being a banana republic again. From the time of the Sandinista years until now, unemployment has gone back up to about 70% in Nicaragua, and the people are desperately poor. The government is putting up big... hotels and recreation centers for the factory owners and the folk who run the maquiladoras, and people are struggling to get jobs that pay them next to nothing because they're the only jobs that are available. We've seen a lot of the social justice structures that were put in place during the Sandinista years be completely dismantled in this model that they call neoliberalism, that Nicaragua, in order to get lots of money or to try to get money from the World Bank and the international financing organizations, they've had to make a commitment to spend less money on social services. So they close schools, they close hospitals, they start charging tuition for schools, even though people don't have jobs to pay. And the country in a very short time goes back to a potential for high illiteracy, high unemployment, things that we tend to think of as basic human rights. In Cuba, they raise that human rights specter a lot, and they talk about how people don't have the same freedom of speech. or the same right to realize themselves individually and become millionaires that people do in the United States. But the Cubans say, we think that health care is a basic human right. We think that education is a basic human right, and we have those things for free. We think it's a basic human right that people shouldn't have guns in the street, that we shouldn't have to be afraid to go to school. We think it's a basic human right that people shouldn't be homeless, and we don't have homeless people in Cuba. So what we see when we move back and forth between the U.S. and these other countries is that There are different perspectives on what this human rights issue means.

Mike Thornton: We're speaking with Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace. My name is Mike Thornton. This is Full Logic Reverse. Ellen, in part the reason why I brought up the issue of Central America is that historically the United States has supported some of the most bloody dictators in history, be it Samosa or Dubuisson. certainly contributing to the violence in Colombia and Guatemala. So there's this duplicitous nature in the way the U.S. government presents itself and its actions to which most people in the United States are completely ignorant because they only hear what's being put to them by the major media organs, ABC, CNN, and so forth and so on. Can you talk a little bit, and you did talk a little bit about it, but if you could talk a little bit more about the realities of life in Cuba and also the effects of the now somewhat 36 or so year old embargo?

Ellen Bernstein: Yeah, first of all, let me say that, and you're right, that the picture that the people in the U.S. tend to get is what they get from the mainstream media. And that's why we're grateful every day for the work of folk who do community radio. just as you're doing now, because it's an opportunity just to educate people in the very simplest ways about the reality of what we've seen. One of the reasons that we make repeated trips to Cuba, even though our government tells us that we're not supposed to, is that we need for somewhere in the discourse in the United States for somebody to be able to stand up and say, hey, the emperor has no clothes. They're telling a lie here about what's really happening in Cuba. The whole discourse about Cuba has been controlled by a very small and very vociferous and very pathologically obsessed group of folk who left Cuba when the revolution happened. And I understand that they grieved their losses and they thought they could be prosperous there and it turned out that they couldn't be. And they had their own interests and they would like to see Cuba go back to be the mafia-controlled playground for rich people that it was before Cuba. But when they left and the new system came in, what happened was that all the other people in Cuba, the ones who remained, the 11 million who are still there, started to reap some different kinds of benefits that they hadn't seen before. They had access to free education from preschool to graduate school to medical school. Someone in Cuba once asked me, what's a student loan? And that was a really mind-blowing question for me. What's a student loan? Why do you have to borrow money to go to school?

Mike Thornton: Free health care.

Ellen Bernstein: from a well-baby checkup to an organ transplant. And folk in Cuba say, you mean you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get surgery? And what if you need surgery and you don't have money? And what if you don't have insurance? And, I mean, folk in the United States struggle with that every day. It's a society that really tried to outlaw prostitution, to outlaw institutional racism, to try to set up a system where people could be basically pretty equal, and have access to the same kinds of things. Here in the US, it's hard to comprehend, because what we hear is, oh, the Cubans are forced to live on only 400 pesos a month, and that's only $20. But in a system that's regulated, and they were able to do this as long as they had relations with the Soviet bloc, because they had some good trade agreements there, they were able to maintain a system where you could live very comfortably on a very little bit of money. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, and the Cold War ended, right? The United States didn't have any pretext anymore to keep Cuba as an enemy. There weren't Soviet missiles there anymore. There wasn't this big power block. But the folk who left Cuba in the early 60s couldn't let it go. And they paid a lot of money to some people in Congress, and they got some new bills written that instead of saying, okay, the Cold War is over, we're going to end the blockade, they made the blockade even tighter. They put shipping penalties in. They made it impossible for Cuba to get medicines not only from the U.S., but from any drug company in the world that's at least partly owned by some U.S. corporation. And as the mergers and acquisitions go on, more and more medicines are completely unavailable in Cuba. So we have this place that's got a model health care system, but the pharmacy shelves are bare. And we think that's sadistic. We don't see any reason for that kind of U.S. policy to be maintained. It hasn't weakened the Cuban government. It has caused immense suffering for 11 million Cuban people who don't hold the U.S. people in any ill regard, but who understand that they're being victimized by this U.S. government with a big grudge. And the people who are trying to keep the blockade in place are the same ones who disrupted the baseball game last night. And they just can't let it go. They can't allow for the fact that maybe we could start to be friendly with our Cuban neighbors.

Mike Thornton: This is Full Logic Reverse. I'm your host, Mike Thornton. Stay tuned for contact and ordering information at the end of the program. We're speaking with Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace. You bring up so many topics. I'd like to try and just flesh a few of them out. When you're talking about this group of former Cubans, we're primarily, of course, talking about the Cuban American National Foundation, which was up until relatively recently headed by Jorge Masconosa, correct? That's right. They wield a tremendous amount of power in the U.S. Congress.

Ellen Bernstein: They certainly do. They have campaign finance money in 70 congressional offices. They've given lots of money to Clinton and to Gore. And it's interesting that two of the biggest recipients of their funds are Senator Torricelli, who now is the head of the Senate Campaign Finance Committee, helping to raise money for Senate campaigns, and Congressman Menendez in the House, who is the assistant Democratic whip. So they're very well placed within the Democratic Party in both the House and the Senate. We know from spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill that there are many other people in the House and in the Senate who seriously oppose the embargo of Cuba, who think that it's past time to let it go, who see it as counterproductive, who think that U.S. businesses shouldn't be excluded from trading with Cuba, and that it's inhumane to keep food and medicines from people. But they've been... a little slow to take on the very vociferous voices of this Cuban-American minority.

Mike Thornton: Speaking of vociferous voices, Mosconosa and Caniff managed also to reap quite a bit of U.S. taxpayer dollars as a result of their operation of Radio and TV Marti as well, correct?

Ellen Bernstein: Absolutely right, and they still broadcast that Radio Marti every day. That was the It's a funny thing because here in the U.S., there's so much indignation about the idea that Cubans want to leave Cuba, that people come out on rafts and risk their lives to try to come to the United States. But what they don't say is that Radio Marti, which is from the U.S. Information Agency, broadcasts to Cuba every day about how the currents are running and encouraging people to get on the rafts and telling them once they get into the United States, the streets are paved with gold and they'll be well taken care of. They were encouraging people who were in extreme economic distress, which was created by the US economic blockade.

Mike Thornton: One of the things that the US government allegedly was involved in was allowing What was it? They called themselves Brothers to the Rescue or something like that. But in reality, they were actually kind of quasi-terrorists who were invading Cuban airspace. And then eventually, after repeated warnings from the Cuban government to both the U.S. government and so-called Brothers to the Rescue, two of these intruder planes or one of these intruder planes was eventually shot down. We had this issue whereby, in essence, what some people would refer to as terrorist organizations were actually operating from United States soil, correct?

Ellen Bernstein: Yes, and it's just that kind of double talk that we're trying to confront when we do our public education campaigns, not only on the grassroots level around the United States when we do the caravans, but also when we go to talk with members of Congress, because they hear that Brothers to the Rescue is a humanitarian organization that cares about placing and rescuing the people who come out of Cuba on rafts. What we hear is that Brothers to the Rescue has repeatedly violated their contract with the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, violating their flight plans to make overflights of Cuban territory, to drop weapons and money and propaganda and literature, some of which comes from U.S. government sources, to try to create unrest in Cuba. And I tried to think of what would happen if two small Cuban planes flew over Andrews Air Force Base.

Mike Thornton: Well, we know what would happen.

Ellen Bernstein: We know what would happen. But when that happened in Cuba, we were so up in arms that our Congress went ahead and passed the Helms-Burton Law. And Clinton signed it very happily. And now we're in a situation where the Cuba policy is kind of frozen until we can get the Congress to make a change in it. Just last week, the State Department made an announcement of a new Clinton administration policy, saying that the Clinton administration had decided that it was inhumane to sanction food and medicines against other countries, and it was counterproductive, and it damaged the U.S. image abroad, and it hurt U.S. businesses, and it hurt innocent people, and from now on, we're not going to do food and medicine sanctions anymore. And on the list of countries where we already have food and medicine sanctions, we're going to lift them against Libya and Sudan and Iran. Not incidentally, there was a $500 million grain deal to Iran that was in the works. And the fact that they call Iran the greatest terrorist nation all of a sudden didn't seem to matter anymore. But the sanctions will remain in place on food and medicines in only three countries, and one of them is Cuba.

Mike Thornton: We're speaking with Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace about Cuba. My name is Mike Thornton. This is Full Logic Reverse. Ellen, I guess that really leads to what the biggest question is. I mean, the U.S. has normalized, well, perhaps the wrong choice of words. I'm using their vocabulary to describe it, but nevertheless, for lack of a better term, the U.S. has normalized relations with Japan, Germany, Vietnam, and any number of other countries that at one time were, quote, unquote, the enemy. But yet here we have this little island nation. And yet they they just continue to try and beat Cuba into the sea. Why? I mean, you know, I mean, Canada, you know, Canada may be powerful, but I can't see them as being that powerful. You know, I mean, there's something like some sort of like psychotic mentality or something working here. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ellen Bernstein: I'm happy to do that because we're always trying to answer that question ourselves. And I'm always grateful that before I came to do this work full time, I worked as a psychologist. Because I think there is something psychotic in it. When you see this kind of absolute thinking and belligerent acting out and the grandiosity that says our way is the only way and we have to crush our neighbors that don't agree with us, that's a narcissistic disorder. It's a borderline personality disorder. Those are very hard to treat. And the way to treat them, psychologically speaking, is through a lot of very intensive education about how the world really isn't that way. You don't have to be the only... superpower and you don't have to crush all of your neighbors in order to maintain your power it's okay to have a neighbor off your shore that runs its economy in a slightly different way i think that the the psychosis has been maintained for all these years in part because of the information blockade and the travel blockade because so few of us have been to cuba since the revolution that there there weren't people in the u.s who were able to stand up and say you know the conif is lying Cuba is not a prison for 11 million people. Cuba is a place that has a lot of good going on. Cuba gives a lot of service around the world to the poorest nations of the world. Cuban people are actually very content and prosperous and happy to be there. They're dignified people. They're generous people. They're not imprisoned. They don't have the same individualistic kinds of freedoms that we do, but they certainly speak their minds and they certainly are critical when they see that criticism needs to be given. And, you know, they're not free to go on the Jerry Springer show and slug people. But, you know, but that's okay. They say that they would trade that in order to feel safe when they go to school. And they would trade that in order to have the gains that they have received. So when people say to us, what's the threat of Cuba? If, you know, the Soviet missiles are gone and the Cold War is over, what's the threat? And we say maybe it's that they know how to do health care and we don't. Maybe it's that the people who wanted to be there and still control Cuba, the conf folk and the people who fought in the Bay of Pigs, the people who worked with the CIA and who still have continued to try to assassinate Fidel, to overthrow the Cuban government, what they want is to put their hotels back again, to have their mafia interests back again, to run the sugar plantations again, to have their little playgrounds. And there are 11 million people in Cuba who are saying, we're tired of being the playground. We're not going back there.

Mike Thornton: One of the things that is very interesting, I almost every evening listen to Radio Havana Cuba on shortwave and very frankly have heard them report on news events here in the United States whereby I had somewhat personal knowledge of the event. They seem to be reporting on it pretty accurately. And I tremendously like listening to Roberto Robine. The guy is great because he certainly does point out things. I mean, their news coverage to me at least seems to be, you know, as objective as what we get here in the United States, if often not more.

Ellen Bernstein: I agree with that, and I think it's very instructive to see that and to remember that our perspectives here in the U.S. are so conditioned by the atmosphere that we're in that we need to be reminded that there are other ways to think about how the world is. When the massacre at the Littleton Colorado High School happened, I had recently come back from Cuba, and one of my first thoughts was that I could hear the voices of my Cuban friends in my head saying, how could you allow that to happen? How could you allow kids to have guns? How could you allow neo-Nazi organizations to have Internet sites? How could you allow those kinds of things to fester? Because look at what it's raising in your society. So it's very interesting to hear the news from that other perspective. Yes.

Mike Thornton: Well, the issue is, of course, when we start talking about, you know, what should take precedence, the individual right of one person to do whatever they want, including perhaps starve to death or beginning to look at the collective needs of a society. My name is Mike Thornton. This is Full Logic Reverse. We're talking with Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace. Ellen, I would like to move, if we could, to the actual caravan conversation.

Ellen Bernstein: I'm happy to do that.

Mike Thornton: But first to say that I believe not last year but the year before that, the caravan was actually attacked by U.S. government officials as it tried to cross into Mexico, correct?

Ellen Bernstein: We were not attacked by U.S. government officials. I apologize. We were attacked by members of Alpha 66. Oh, I'm sorry. A right-wing paramilitary Cuban-American fanatic organization that is based in different parts of the United States that... is connected in some way with this Cuban American National Foundation and that whole movement. These are a lot of the guys who fought at the Bay of Pigs and they still can't get over the idea that they lost. And they have continued to do, they have a paramilitary training camp in Florida. They get money from the Cuban American National Foundation. They were involved in some kind of way with recent terrorist attacks against Cuba, including the hotel bombings that took place a couple of years ago. And the Los Angeles chapter, of Alpha 66 actually came out to a Catholic church in San Isidro, California, where our caravan was gathering to cross the border into Mexico, and physically attacked the caravan and our members through exit people, jumped on people's vehicles. When we took off and started driving on the highway, one of their vehicles, driven by the head of the local chapter of the organization, actually rammed one of our vehicles. They tried to run us off the road and cause accidents. And the person driving that vehicle pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter. We actually have a lawsuit against the organization Alpha 66 that's still pending.

Mike Thornton: Didn't the U.S. government, though, confiscate a number of the materials?

Ellen Bernstein: That was the year before. I'm sorry. Yes, thank you. The U.S. government, every time we've tried to take a caravan, they've had some way of indicating that they want us to stop. that they don't want us to take aid to our brothers and sisters in Cuba, that they don't want us to take anything to Cuba without asking their permission first. We were taking a shipment of about 400 computers. There were 286s and XTs. They were obsolete by U.S. standards, but they were precious commodities in Cuba because they could be used as email terminals for a medical information network that was going to cover the island. so that a doctor in Santiago de Cuba, who had a dying child on his hands, could locate the medicines that were needed to try to save that child, even if they were in another part of the island. The U.S. government seized those computers, seized them again when we tried to cross the border again. They beat people up at the border. They put people in federal prison. We started a campaign in which five of our members, including Reverend Walker, fasted on lemon juice and maple syrup and water for what turned out to be a total of 94 days They started the fast just at the time that those planes were shot down. And it was a remarkable thing because the Helms-Burton law went into effect and everyone said to us, this is a terrible time to fast because no one in Washington is going to want to talk with you about Cuba. And what happened instead was that the fasters moved to Washington and we spent a couple of months in Washington visiting congressional offices one by one and doing outreach to our network all around the country who in turn did outreach to their members of Congress. And what we found was that the people in the Congress who now had responsibility for the blockade because of the Helms-Burton law, they were so uninformed about U.S.-Cuba policy. They didn't know that medicines weren't getting to Cuba because they've been hearing from Torricelli and Menendez that, oh, the U.S. sends lots of medicine to Cuba and the laws allow lots of medicines to be sold to Cuba. In reality, the restrictions are so tight that almost nothing gets through. But here we were educating the Congress people one by one by one And they were saying, well, we don't want to stick our necks out on this issue because it's such a controversial issue. And we would say, well, we've already talked with 30 people who said they support us. We've already talked with 40. We've already talked with 50. And they would say, oh, can we see who else is on that list? And once they had more of a critical mass, they felt safer in sticking their necks out on the issue. Eventually, it was the pressure that came from all around this country and internationally that convinced the Treasury Department to release the computers and let us take them to Cuba. But then the people in Congress who had been involved in that effort formed a working group and wrote a new bill to take food and medicine out of the blockade. And that bill got about 135 co-sponsors in the last session, and it's been reintroduced again. And we're hopeful that it's going to pass in this session.

Mike Thornton: And now we find ourselves with another caravan to Cuba this year. And how can people support that? And what type of support do you need? And let me ask you to let the people know that relatively briefly as we're beginning to run out of time.

Ellen Bernstein: Okay, that's fine. Our caravan is stopping in about 150 cities around the United States and will be in Sacramento on the 4th of June. I'm going to give you two phone numbers. One is a local contact. in Sacramento for Gin Wenslaff, who's organizing a local event in Sacramento on the 4th of June. Reverend Skylar Rhodes, who's the head of our board of directors and the chaplain at UC Berkeley, is going to be speaking at that event. Gin's phone number is 916-457-5018. And our phone number in New York is 212-926-5757. Or you can reach us by email at ifco.org. dot IGC dot APC dot ORG. We are collecting medicines and medical supplies and funds to buy raw materials for medicines for Cuba to help them to maintain their own model health care system and also to support an initiative that they're doing to bring health care to Central America.

Mike Thornton: And the number that people could call if they wanted to get more information about being of assistance to the caravan when it reaches Sacramento on June 4th?

Ellen Bernstein: Well, the local number for local organizing about collecting aid and giving donations locally is 916-457-5018.

Mike Thornton: Ellen Bernstein of Pastors for Peace, thank you for taking the time to be with us on the program today.