CSU administrator reflects on recent visit to Cuba

The day before the election last month, Ed Helton got off a plane in Miami and prepared to come home.

The Columbus State University assistant vice president for Leadership Development already had an interesting take on the presidential election — and he didn’t know how it was going to turn out.

Helton and his wife, Lana, had just returned from a week in Cuba. Talk about putting an election in perspective.

“I thought about all the people who might complain about living here in this country, hearing both sides of it and how bad things are,” Helton said last week. “They should go down there and see how those people are surviving.”

Life is about perspective.

“There was very little good news in our election,” Helton said. “The ad hominem argument against the person and against the groups and against almost everything. But go to a place where they would be extremely happy to have some of the options we had that they just don’t have.”

A trip to Cuba will work a number on your perspective about many things. In May 2014, I made a similar trip with People to People where various groups from the United States visited Cuba on guided and strictly controlled visits.

For me, the first four days were amazing. I was struck by the people and just being in Havana and the nearby countryside. As many times as I have stood at the buoy in Key West, Fla., and known that another world was only 90 miles away, it felt strange to be there.

The last three days I was just angry. Communism was the primary source of my anger. You spend a week in Cuba and you can clearly see the ills of a dictatorship and a communist regime. You see what it does to the people.

One small example is how Cubans farm.

“They are into organic farming,” Helton said. “They still farm with ox. But the real reason when the Soviet Union collapsed they lost the ability to get chemicals, fertilizer, parts for the tractors. We didn’t see any tractors.”

The manner in which they farm was evident in a tobacco farmer that Helton met in the Cuban countryside. The man rolled a mean cigar, in the barn where he cured the tobacco leafs.

“He was nice, friendly and honest,” Helton said. “He said the government gets 90 percent and I get 10 percent. He just laughs and said that is the way it is. It doesn’t matter if he is OK with it or not.”

And we complain about taxes.

Helton also saw Cuba in the final days of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s life. In 2014, you knew of Castro and his great influence, but you did not see it much. In fact, there were more photos and monuments to Che Guevara, a Marxist who assisted Castro in overthrowing the Batista regime.

Helton said that has not changed in two and half years.

“One of the things that I read was you don’t really talk about Castro and we didn’t — other than the videos,” Helton said.

Most Americans will never make that trip to Cuba. It’s not easy, though it is much easier now than it was in 2014.

“Americans should go meet the people of Cuba,” he said. “They are 90 miles from our shore. Not that I would commend Castro for anything he has done, but what the people felt he gave them was a place on the world stage that they were not going to have. ... Castro gave them a place.”

But with that place came this incredibly complex life for a society that provides your food, medical care and education.

“The complexity is how the population has figure out a way to have a seemingly good life based on their expectations,” Helton said. “I have been reading a bit, and if you look back and you were a peasant in the middle ages, you didn’t bathe. You wore the same clothes all the time. You looked around and everybody looked like you. There was no big self-image issue. I saw that there. Everybody looked like each other. They were all dressed nicely, but dressed alike.”

In a strange way what Helton, a Baptist minister, turned college administrator, noticed makes sense.

“It is people trying to figure out how to live in a complicated world. It is just like every one of us do. They are absolutely no different than us. ... But we don’t plow with ox.”

This story was originally published December 3, 2016 at 6:40 PM with the headline "CSU administrator reflects on recent visit to Cuba."