Author: opinionstogo

Be forewarned, this is one of those “in-my-day-things-were-different” columns. And, of course, “different” means better. And “my day,” undoubtedly, will seem like code for light years ago to some. It comes with having lived at another time and not having thrown away the minutes of previous meetings.

Anyway, such musing was prompted by a movement earlier this year in support of an amendment to Florida’s constitution that would require smaller classes for students in public schools. For example, the limit for grades 4 through 8 would be 20 students per teacher. The current average is roughly between 23 and 27.

As a former secondary teacher in Philadelphia and Tampa, I know the import and impact of student-to-teacher ratios. The lower, the better, whether physics or phys ed. But as a former student, I’m still tempted to shake my head incredulously over having survived elementary classes where the ratio sometimes hit 70-1. That’s not a typo.

I take you back to yesteryear, in this case the late ’50s, to St. Timothy’s, a blocky, stone-gray Catholic school in a working-class, row-house section of Philadelphia called Mayfair. We were the sons and daughters of WWII-vet families who couldn’t afford Levittown, but were upwardly mobile enough to escape the temporary, post-war project housing that dotted the city.

The intra-city migration was sometimes referred to as “Welfare to Mayfair,” which was much more a function of self-conscious, self-deprecating humor than accuracy. That’s because all fathers worked — mine was a city bus driver — and all moms stayed home raising ever-burgeoning families.

In my case, three brothers and a sister. And, yes, all parents came in pairs.

For demographic diversity there were variations on a Caucasian Catholic theme: Irish, Italians and Poles. Tolerance was shown in acceptance of the odd Protestant family — incongruously nice folks for infidels, we thought.

We all walked to school and came home for a lunch of baloney sandwiches while watching “Tic Tac Dough.” Whenever we left the building — lunch or dismissal — it was always in well-disciplined lines till we crossed the big streets that abutted the school.

The crossing guards were like extended family. The nuns, with stentorian voices, meat-hook hands and martinet manners, were the enforcers. (Even for fire drills. Never know when you would need to walk in straight lines — at a prudent pace — from a burning building.)

Our eighth-grade class was 35 school-tied boys and 35 uniformed girls. Boys on the left, eight or nine to a runnered row of desks; girls on the right. Some, undoubtedly, with all kinds of undiagnosed learning disabilities.

The Ten Commandments were posted prominently to remind us that there was yet another layer of authority beyond our parents and teachers.

Sister Charles Mary of the Order of St. Joseph arranged us according to academic average — if you can believe such pedagogic heresy. I was a fixture in the first row, periodically switching places with James Krawczyk for the highly sought first desk, which meant that you also doubled as the doorman who personally granted entrance to the Monsignor at report-card time.

Sister or “‘Stir” — as in “No, ‘Stir, I didn’t do it; in fact, ‘Stir, I didn’t even know it was a sin.” — presided as only a stocky, tough-love nun could. Doubt if she had a college degree, let alone a teaching certificate emblematic of a dozen courses in educational psychology. She taught everything — religion to math. All day long. No time off for our good behavior. She gave a lot of homework and never failed to collect it and promptly return it with some sort of comment.

She was the first, last and loudest word on all subjects — from what made a sin mortal to what made a rhombus relevant. You memorized; you recited; you applied; you learned. That was your job.

Amazingly, even David Massucci learned. David had been left back one year and struggled more than most. He anchored the class from the last desk on the boys’ side.

Years later we met up and he was married, the father of two, owned a house and made a good living as a General Motors salesman in Cherry Hill, NJ.

As you might infer, corporal punishment was more than permitted. More than condoned. It was mandated. No parental permission necessary. No Polaroids of black-and-blue butts. Your parents were on the same side as the teacher. And they hit you at home, because they knew what you were like. So parents couldn’t be used for intercession, let alone leverage, against ‘Stir.

Another form of punishment was staying after school. It meant, however, more than heel cooling. You had to do windows, clap erasers and clean the room, including inside and under every desk while ‘Stir checked homework and your buddies played audibly in the adjacent schoolyard. For those deserving hard time, there was heavy lifting at the convent next door.

‘Stir had a ruddy face and fleshy hands. Otherwise, she was all black robes, white habit and rosary beads that made an ominous swishing sound when she bustled down an aisle with hands-on discipline topping her agenda. She was probably about 40 years old, give or take 30 years. Just couldn’t tell with nuns. Most days we were convinced her assignment on earth was to make us learn — whether we hated it or just disliked it. Or her.

Of course, much has changed since that class of 70. The meltdown of the nuclear family, erosion of discipline, drugs, guns, an Eminemed culture and curricula that treat self-esteem as a goal rather than a by-product of learning.That eighth grade year at St. Timothy’s, frankly, was no fun. Thanks, ‘Stir.

HAVANA — For Americans, there’s no place like Cuba.

And it has nothing to do, of course, with pineapple farms, banana groves, banyon trees or thickets of majestic royal palms and sugar cane fields forever. Neither does it have anything to do with remnants of magnificent, neo-colonial architecture, world class baseball without commercial interruption and obscene salaries; spandex-clad young (and not so young) women; infectious music; and the absence of cell phoniness.

It has, however, everything to do with Fidel Castro.

As in nationalization, expropriation, Bay of Pigs, missiles of October and exiles of South Florida. As in embargo, revenge, assassination plots, the mob, and ego. As in Alpha 66, Brothers to the Rescue, Elian and political pandering.

We rebuilt the Axis powers of World War II and normalized relations with the Soviet Union of Stalin and the China of Mao. We’ve kissed up to Vietnam and cut deals with North Korea.

But Cuba is different; it’s the Cold War relic that won’t go away.

It’s also safe, must-see history still in the making.This much we think we know regarding Cuba: at some point America’s unilateral, counterproductive embargo against it will end. And the impetus likely will come courtesy of the “biological solution.” That’s mordant, euphemistic, Cuban shorthand for the mortality of the 74-year-old Castro.

This much, however, we do know. Cubans will retain their characteristic, coping-device sense of humor — and remain among the world’s most resourceful people. In addition, the compromises made to keep the Cuban economy afloat via tourism will continue to mock and erode a failed socialist experiment — like so many “Patria o Muerte” (“Country or Death”) signs incongruously proximate to dilapidated buildings and trash-strewn lots.

This was ever more apparent in a recent visit, this one legal — and the second in two years. This was under the auspices of the Friendship Force, an Atlanta-based organization that promotes private citizen exchanges worldwide. The reciprocal organization was the Cuban Council of Churches, which arranged home stays in Havana and Santa Cruz del Norte, about 100 miles east of Havana.

Whether the venue was a public housing-ambienced apartment in Havana or a small, plumbing-challenged, adobe-like row house in a small town, this much was clear: Cuba appears increasingly as a revolution in defeat, not transition. Its people deserve better than grim lives offset by hustling for the table scraps from tourism.

There is no more fitting metaphor for Cuban ingenuity, of course, than its stock of well-maintained, vintage American cars. It’s the first thing you notice in Havana after faded facades and laundry-bedecked balconies.

The ’50s fins are still there, but the Cubans have typically removed the gas-guzzling engines and replaced them with Romanian or Russian diesels. These are not museum pieces; they are transportation, many of them private cabs relegated to local peso-paying fares. With gas at more than $3.50 a gallon, siphoning hoses are as necessary as jumper cables.

In all, there are an estimated 150,000 cars, including barely-within-memory Ramblers, Studebakers and Edsels, that are older than the Revolution itself.

There are also the much-maligned Russian cars, notably boxy Ladas and the more recent, less reliable Moskviches. The latter has become the familiar butt of a Cuban joke that has been making the self-deprecating rounds: “Who’s the most deluded person in Cuba? Answer: The owner of a Moskvich; he thinks he owns a car.”

But most urban Cubans still get around on over-loaded, exhaust-spewing buses, bicycles, motor bikes and side-car-affixed motorcycles. In the provinces, animal-drawn transportation remains much in evidence.

Those without transportation can always hitchhike.

Government vehicles, from jeeps to flatbed trucks, routinely stop for those in need who queue up along main roads. It’s not at all unusual to see well-dressed women and girls in school uniforms, called botelleras, flagging down rides with impunity. It’s part of the make-do mentality brought on by the economic hardships of the “Special Period” — as the post-Soviet and Eastern Bloc-subsidy epoch is known.

For a number of Cubans and their children it also means living with the occasional rolling blackout and without hot water and reliable toilets. Wood scraps with ill-matched wheels become ad hoc scooters. There is always somebody who knows somebody who can tap into a TV satellite– and see what foreigners see, including CNN and HBO, at the tourist-only hotels. Ditto for those needing an E-mail address to communicate with the outside world. Currently, there are an estimated 60,000 Cubans with E-mail accounts, mostly through universities, workplaces or computer clubs.

Official Cuban television (two stations) is used effectively in the service of the state — furthering such government priorities as public health campaigns and English language instruction.

That resolviendo (making do somehow) mentality is notably evident in moonlighting, Cuban style. With the tourism-inspired influx of visitors — and the legal tender status of the dollar since 1993 — many physicians, attorneys, engineers and teachers can be found working for tips as waiters, bartenders, tour guides and cab drivers. To paraphrase Willie Sutton: That’s where the dollars are. Especially if you’re not fortunate enough to have cash-wiring family in Miami.

Without access to dollars, the professionally educated can’t expect to make much more than about 400 pesos ($20) per month. Plus, anyone who owes his education to the government — which is virtually everyone — is forbidden from seeing patients or clients privately. Those with lesser state jobs average half what professionals make. Pensioners receive $3-4 monthly.

Even those in business for themselves, such as it is, find themselves governmentally hamstrung by what is cynically called, by Cubans, the “internal embargo.” That is the incentive-stifling system of surprise inspections and relatively stiff fees and taxes for small, private restaurant (paladar) owners or venders.

For example, Ofelia, a middle-aged artisan, pays $15 a day for enough room to set up a small rack for her inexpensive, hand-made sweaters near the resort beaches of Varadero in North Cuba. That’s whether she sells anything or not. By decree, she works half the month: a pattern of two consecutive days on, then two days off. She also had to pass a rigorous exam after two years of studying Cuban folk art and prove to the government that she was, indeed, the artisan — not some capitalistic hireling.

Ration-card subsidies, which range from modest rice, beans and bread allotments to cigars, cigarettes and matches, will typically need supplementing from the parallel markets, Cubans tell you, at four times the price.

Increasingly, churches are playing a supplementary role to the erstwhile atheist — now “secular” — government by helping get food and clothing to the most needy. It’s hardly a windfall, but the modest aid is the quid pro quo Castro exacts for having eased off religious oppression.

In Old Havana there are scores of mostly benign hustlers making the rounds. The crackdown on prostitutes has been effective.

Some hustlers, called jineteros (“jockeys”) impassively inquire about your taste in cigars or whether they can direct you to a paladar, which are literally part of a family residence, seat no more than 12, and employ no one outside the family.

Others ask, on average, for a dollar “to practice” their English. The rate is the same for those crooning “Guantanamera” or posing for photos in Colonial garb.

Thanks to tourism (nearly 2 million visitors — predominantly from Europe and Canada — that now generates (at $1
.3 billion) more than half of the country’s revenue, and joint-ventures, Cuba’s gross domestic product is expanding in the 5% range. It was contracting severely in the early ’90s.

Castro, for example, has sold half of Cuba’s cigar export monopoly to the Spanish. Canada is buying into the nickel sector and Europeans into oil. Israel has a citrus export agreement. Sol Melia, an international Spanish hotel chain, is building its 14th Cuban resort. UNESCO underwrites some historic restorations.

But the down side of an economy that is barely off life-support is a societal issue no less threatening — if you think about what causes revolutions in the first place.

Cuba, Marxist ideology notwithstanding, now sports three blatantly distinct classes. High-profile foreigners, both tourists and joint-venturing investors, who have dollars; Cubans who have access to dollars; and Cubans who don’t. It’s an incongruously complicating position for a country grounded in command-economy principles and egalitarian tenets.

The juxtaposition of average habaneros — typically crammed into aging, tiny apartments within large, crumbling neoclassical structures — with affluent Canadians and Europeans coursing around town in Mercedes cabs could, one would think, foment frustration, disillusionment and bitterness.

Ruben, a 40-something Havana friend with four children, two jobs, a wife and a 15-year-old Moskvich, wouldn’t argue the point. He’s already been turned down for a visa to the U.S., and he knows he has no future in Cuba.

“Do you know what it’s like to live your life under socialism?” he asked. “To see those ‘Socialism or death’ banners every day. Ughhh

There was an overseas ceremony recently that should give all Americans cause for pause and reflection, if not an irony fix for the ages.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright formally dedicated a new U.S. consulate building in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The new American consulate reestablishes a diplomatic foothold in the erstwhile Saigon for the first time since 1975. That’s when U.S. diplomats fled the advancing North Vietnamese forces that overran the American-backed South Vietnamese army in the last stage of that tragic American misadventure.

In her prepared remarks, America’s Iron Lady said, “The United States and Vietnam will forever be linked by history. But by continuing to work together to transcend that tragic legacy, we can add to our shared history bright new chapters of hope and mutual prosperity.”

That shared history, of course, includes more than 50,000 dead GIs and another 2,000 service personnel still listed as missing in action a generation later. It even brought down a president.

Meanwhile in Washington, House and Senate negotiators are still trying to wrangle a compromise that would at least permit an easing of the embargo on sales of food and medical supplies to Cuba. Through four decades and nine presidents, beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, Americans have been banned from selling much of anything to Cuba. To those who have questioned presidential guts in dealing with the South Florida Cuban-American lobby, the Administrations’ responses have been, in effect: “That’s the way it embargoes. We don’t want to be known as the Administration that ‘gave in’ to Castro.”

Because Fidel Castro has refused to die off, the embargo lives on. Its impact, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s implosion, hurts nobody but American business interests and the Cuban people who, like people everywhere, are hardly responsible for the government they’re saddled with.

We’ve never been to war with Cuba, and the island was never a killing field for American soldiers. The embargo is a counterproductive, foreign-policy incongruity that induces global alienation and ridicule — and that’s from our allies.

Yet, inexplicably, a new chapter of “hope and mutual prosperity” applies only to Vietnam, not Cuba. Explained Albright: “It will help us better serve the American business community, which is concentrated here in the south (of Vietnam).” That eclectic business community, it should be noted, even includes the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. Perhaps JWT should pitch the Cuba account.

But back in the states, farm groups and agribusinesses continue to clamor for their piece of “mutual prosperity” and permission to move a glut of grain that has been depressing commodity prices. Such beseeching is belittling when the rationales of humanitarian aid, enlightened self-interest and common sense should be carrying the day.

So, while American officials in Vietnam say they now expect to receive up to 25,000 requests each year for permission to live permanently in the United States, Cuban smugglers continue to traffick in those fleeing from the deprivations ensured by the U.S. embargo.

Isn’t it, after forty years of failed policy, time to “transcend that tragic legacy”?