Dr. Guziec, an American plastic surgeon teaching in Cuba by Denis Dextraze
Dr. Guziec and Gabriel, Marina Hemingway administrator
Dr. Robert Guziec was a facial reconstruction specialist in his early sixties from Chicago with a positive attitude towards life. His constant smile and sense of humour were hiding his very fragile medical condition. He daily consumed an incredible variety of pills, some just to counter the adverse side effects of others. He once confided in me that if he was not a medical doctor, he would have been dead years before. I first met him when he rented Aventura for three weeks with his friends, Marek another doctor of Polish ancestry, Bob a real estate mogul and Richard a stockbroker. I had picked up this bunch of millionaires in Isla Margarita, Venezuela and we did some island hopping stopping in the beautiful Roques islands, then the famous Dutch ABC which stand for Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. They were all very unpretentious about their high social standing and had sailing experience on Lake Michigan. Therefore, they were sailors and easy clients to satisfy. I missed their presence and our newly acquired friendship when they left us in Aruba. I believe that they were very satisfied with their charter judging by the generous gratuities and excellent reference letter which I received later.
While island hopping, I had mentioned that, when the charter season was over, I was planning to sail north across the Caribbean Sea to Cuba. Their curiosity was aroused about this mysterious island, off limit for forty years to American citizens. When I got settled down in Marina Hemingway, I sent promotional mailing to the list of previous charter clients informing them that Aventura was now available in Cuba. A few months later, Robert called me from Chicago. To my great surprise, he was officially invited as a guest of the Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) Department of the University Hospital in Havana. He was going to teach certain advanced surgical techniques. I guess that the exchange we had about my desire to go to Cuba had gone a long way. In a very short time, he had succeeded in getting a special visa for Cuba for humanitarian reasons.
I could not meet him when he flew into the José Marti airport because he was greeted by Dr. Teresa, the high-level political representative and officials of the Communist Party who gave him the red-carpet treatment, bypassed the usual Immigration and Customs formalities and chauffeured him to an official residence. When things settled down, he came to visit me and Aventura, the sailboat that reminded him of many great memories of island sailing. However, what excited him the most was my old Mercedes 300SD, the very same model he had back home and among his many cars still his favorite. De facto, I became the chauffeur, translator, and problem solver on top of being a friend. I did not mind helping him because he was such a good human being and I knew that he was there to help people. Beside I had no additional expenses for traveling since he was generously taking care of all that.
I sometimes had fun playing the role. I remember that he once asked me to drive him into Old Havana to an official building. I knew that parking in that area was always a nightmare for lack of space. So, I wore my only white guayabera, the uniforms worn by all Communist Party official drivers. As far as I knew, there were only two gold Mercedes 300SDs in the whole of Cuba. The second one was Fidel’s. So, when I got in front of the building, I got out of the car and, as a professional chauffeur, I opened the rear door where I had told Robert to sit. Then, I stood in front of the car in a rigid position with my hands behind my back, a position I had noticed was used by Fidel’s body guards. For all the time I stood there in this illegal parking area, nobody ever bothered me including the guards standing in front of the building. Later, over a mojito, we both had a good laugh about that ruse.
I owned that Mercedes for years. It was the most reliable car I ever owned. However, late one day on our way back from a tourist trip to Cienfuegos, we started smelling a strange persistent smell inside the car. I just kept going because we were in the middle of nowhere on the autopista (highway) far away from any service station. At nightfall, I turned on the lights and did not go five miles before all the lights went off. So, I slowed down and moved over to the right of the road which had no while lines at all, trying not to hit the local traffic of people on foot, bicycle and horseback riders crowding the side of the road. When I would see a car coming, I would get back in the middle of the road behind it and would pick up speed to follow its lights for a while. Since I did not want to get to the same fast speed, I eventually would lose sight of its tail lights, slow back down and move over to the side to wait for another car. My passenger, Robert showed some signs of nervousness. We did that for about one hour until we finally got to the circunvalaciòn, the lighted beltway around Havana.
When we got to the old Havana checkpoint, which is where traveling papers from havaneros trying to get out of town were being checked during the Russian days, I notice a policeman in the middle of a booth with his hands up. I slowed down but did not stop and he had to move out of the way. I could see that Robert was getting more nervous. I got into the tunnel leading into the city thinking that I made it but no, I did not for sure. On the other side, a police roadblock had been set up just in my honor. Now, Robert was getting even more nervous. The two police cars escorted me, one in front and one behind, to the police station back on the other side of the tunnel. Now, Robert was sure that we were all going to jail. After checking the car papers and my Canadian passport, the officer in charge asked me why I did not stop at the police signal. My genial answer was that I did not stop because I did not see him since the car had no lights. The officer grinned at this incredible answer. We both knew that this checkpoint was flood-lit with the same type of lights used in a baseball stadium. I told him of our situation with the lights and of my plan to get to town to leave the car in a safe place. I really don’t know why he let me go. Was it my captain’s uniform, was it the gold and unique Mercedes or was it my Canadian passport? I will never know.
So now Robert could breathe again. I went through the tunnel a second time and did not drive further than one mile on the Malecon, the waterfront avenue, before a city police car stopped me. For sure, Robert’s blood pressure now went to the roof. After checking my papers, the officer told me that I was driving without the lights on. I explained that the car lights did not work anymore and that I did not want to abandon a Mercedes in this dangerous area. It would be stripped overnight. I asked for his help in escorting me to the National Hotel just a mile down the road where I would safely park the car for the night and come back the next day with a mechanic. To my surprise, he agreed. He escorted me to the entrance of the Hotel, showed me the way but did not go in. So I went to the car trunk, picked up four beers and discreetly slipped them inside the police car. Whew! Robert was breathing again and so was I.
When Robert came to Cuba for a few weeks every other month, we spent a lot of time together. He liked coming to the Marina to sit at the table under the gazebo tent at the table by the pier. I liked to call it “The Bar”. “The Bar” was opened as soon as I sat under the tent. That is when neighbors from other boats would congregate beer in hand. Robert liked this friendly atmosphere. We shared the same tastes and passion for sailing but I believe that considering his health condition, he felt safer if he was in the company of someone he could trust in case of an emergency. Therefore, by association I got to meet the most important doctors at the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. I met the head of the Department, Dr. Ulises, a real gentleman, and his Communist party counter-part, Dr. Teresa. Why double? The Cuban system was a copy of the Russian Communist party paranoid system where even important decision makers were shadowed and spied on by a faithful and powerful representative of the Communist Party. So, Robert liked to invite all his other doctor friends like Dr. Fidel, Dr. Richard, Dr. Alfonso, Dr. Jose Maria to “The Bar” in Marina Hemingway. In compensation, the ORL doctors always invited us when they were celebrating a special occasion like an anniversary.
One day, Robert invited a few doctors in Marina Hemingway. When people would come to visit the “security guards” would come closer and spy our every move and listen to all our conversations like hyenas watching their prey. Nobody was allowed to come inside the boats unless they had a pass from the Harbor Master’s office. At one point, Dr. Teresa asked me where she could go the bathroom. I told her that there were two heads inside Aventura. I was testing! Testing! Testing! As soon as she went in, the hyenas got agitated on their walkies-talkies and moved closer to the boat.
When Dr. Teresa came out of the boat, she was met not only by two security guards but also by the security guard’s manager as well. They wanted to see her pass. I took pleasure, sitting under my gazebo tent next door to Aventura in watching the expression on their faces as this important Communist figure showed her credentials and basically told them to scram. The hyenas went away with their tails between their legs and surely reported this incident to higher authorities. I had gained some respect in that Marina. Not only was I close to foreign Embassy people who visited me regularly but I was also close to the local Communist Party as well! I even had a picture inside Aventura of me shaking hands with Carlos Lage Davila, the vice-president of the State Council, at the time the number two in the Party after Fidel. George Eldridge, my best friend in the Marina on Hot Tamale, the boat next to me, had a picture of him and Bill Clinton with a dedication by Bill for his birthday. Who the hell was I? Maybe I did get some special privilege for this ambiguity, maybe not. But I sure got away with a lot when challenging the system later on.
To compensate for the parties that we were invited to by the Cuban doctors, Roberto wanted to reciprocate with his own. Each time he wanted to do one, I was given carte blanche to find a large enough location and organize a decent party. Roberto would cover all expenses and let me invite all my friends as well. Each time we did one the number of guests grew bigger and bigger to a point where I needed a bigger place. I finally settled for a big house that had a huge garden in the back with a thatched roof bar, a stainless steel cooler, a large BBQ, a decommissioned salt water pool and a pier facing the entrance of Marina Hemingway. With the complicity of customs and the Coast Guard, I could transport some equipment like chairs and tables by dinghy from Aventura to the party site. We used that site many times. At the end, the number of guests settled at around sixty.
When I started organizing these parties, I basically copied the Cuban parillas (BBQ) by cooking a pig on the spit. Then, Robert thought of adding variety to the menu by not only cooking a large pig but a suckling piglet as well. I had no problem finding a large pig. I did not even have to go through the gruesome slaughtering process. When ordered and paid for, the pig would be delivered already dead and eviscerated sometimes during the morning of the party. However, my attempts to find a suckling pig on my own proved fruitless. The farmers sold their pigs by weight and it was not financially interesting to sell a small pig. They needed to be fattened.
So, having failed to find a suckling pig on my own, I decided to use the services of Jorge, who knew just about every under the table deal made in a fifty-mile radius. We called on many pig farms before we found one that would sell us a piglet but at double the price per kilo. I did not mind the price because I knew that for Robert, money was no object. What upset me was that he would not slaughter it and deliver it the next day as other farmers did. We had no option but to take the pig with us. So, I threw the live pig in the large and luckily empty Mercedes trunk.
On our way back, we passed by a small beach town called Playa Baracoa. I knew of a very large thatched roofed building called El Yunke which was used at night as a discotheque. During the day, they would set-up a few tables and chairs in the middle of this huge empty place and serve Cuban food. I wanted to buy lunch for Jorge for his help and since we had already been driving for thirty minutes in the midday hot sun, I was worried that the piglet would suffocate in the hot trunk. Although the pig’s fate was sealed, I wanted a freshly slaughtered pig for my parilla. So, I got a rope, tied it around its neck and we walked in the restaurant as if nothing strange was happening with the pig trotting behind like a good pet. I tied the rope to one of my chair’s legs and ordered water for my pig. It was delivered with our food, no questions asked. The pig drank and went to sleep. The waiters had a good time between themselves and I gave them a good tip to keep them happy. I must admit that I felt sad when knife time came for this cute pink little thing.
But, this story is not finished yet. The Epilogue of the story is that with all this movement and noise, piggy relieved its stress naturally in the trunk of the car on our way back to the Marina. Although I washed the carpet many times, I could never completely remove the odor of pig s… from inside my nice Mercedes. To my embarrassment, it lingered on forever! How I could I explain the real story to my future passengers? They never believed it just as many real events narrated in this book.
As I got to know my new doctor friends better, I could address some subjects that would have been taboo for a Cuban to discuss with outsiders. When asking about the prevailing conditions of the medical care system in Cuba, I was given an honest and accurate answer. The whole system was in total disarray, not only from lack of maintenance, supplies, medicine, instruments and service but also from the shortage of doctors. Doctors! I thought that the Cuban Universities produced more doctors per capita than most of the third world countries. Indeed, they did but Cuban had started renting these slave doctors to other countries in exchange for other services. Many were going to Venezuela and in exchange, the Fidelist president, Hugo Chavez would sell oil to Cuba at rock bottom price. A lot of that oil would never make it to Cuba, which experienced drastic shortage and power failure, but the tankers were diverted to other countries where the oil was sold at a good profit. The Cuban doctors “lent” to these countries would end up deep in the bush in areas where local doctors did not want to go. A lot of them who had no direct family for the system to harass would never come back.
Robert somehow got hold of two audiometers, instruments used to analyse the level and possibly cause of deafness, to donate to his friends in the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. They no longer had any working instruments. So, I volunteered to join him in his humanitarian efforts by transporting on Aventura the instruments from Key West to Cuba. When in Marina Hemingway, I reported to customs that I had instruments to be donated specifically to that Department under Dr. Ulises. After a delay, they informed me that someone from the Health Care Division would come to pick them up and officially take them off Aventura’s inventory. I told them that I was under strict instructions from the donor, Dr. Robert Guziec to release the instruments exclusively to representatives of the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. That’s when the real fight began.
They knew that these big instruments were taking precious space in my boat by occupying two bunk beds hence totally using one of the three cabins. So, they took their time and just let me rot. I knew that legally, they could not do anything until I got this donation off my boat, an American flagged vessel. Legally, these instruments were mine until I got them along-side to use a maritime shipping term. So, I told them that unless these donations were picked up by the intended Cuban recipients, I would dump them at sea the next time I sailed out and the Cuban family in need of ORL services would bear the consequences. That got them really peed off but they could not do anything. They eventually gave up on account of political pressure exercised by the University Hospital’s administration. My doctor friends and nobody else got their audiometers.
I had my reasons for taking this strong stand. I personally knew Hans, a retired physical education teacher from Norway who came to Cuba for a few months every year during the winter season. He was a real cycling fan and started bringing extra bikes to give away to needy kids near where he lived. His philanthropic gesture started being recognized in Norway as he started receiving donated bikes from all over the country. It got to a point where he came one year with a loaded container. So, he organized lotteries in a few schools near where he lived in Cuba. The second year when he tried to do that again, his two containers were held in customs. It was explained to him that he did not have the authorities or the permits to do what he was doing and that the State was going to distribute the donated bikes. He knew as all of us did after living in Cuba for a while that these bikes would be given to selected children chosen amongst the high level military personnel and the needy population would be bypassed as always. Hans remembered buying expensive medicine from a pharmacy reserved for foreigners who could pay with dollars or CUC, the pesos convertible invented by Cuba to replace the U.S. dollar. He had noted the following inscription in bold letters on the bottle: “Donation from Switzerland”. So, he shipped the two containers back to Norway and we never saw him again in Cuba. Well done Cuba. By stupidity, not only did it lose precious donations but also the money spent every year by a regular visitor as well.
As time went by, my relations with the doctors of the University Hospital became solid and continuous whether Robert was in town or not. I invited them for special events and they reciprocated. One day, mi girlfriend, Jacky, came down with a real bad case of tonsillitis. We were in luck for having a bunch of doctor friends specializing in ORL. Dr. Fidel, the second in charge after Dr. Ulises, took the case personally, bypassed the slow system and gave us an appointment within two days at the University Hospital. The conclusion of his examination was clear. These tonsils had to go. He gave her antibiotics to reduce the inflammation and bypassed the system again by scheduling the operation the following week instead of in three or four months, the normal waiting period for a non-military ordinary citizen. He also reserved one of the very few private rooms available since patients were generally lined up in crowded wards filled with twenty to thirty patients at the time. These dirty wards would not be fit for cattle with only one bathroom in bad and dirty condition and many windows with broken glass. The proximity, and the lack of cleanliness and maintenance were the reasons so many patients were lost to secondary infections not the lack of skills of the surgeons who operated in bad conditions missing proper equipment and even sometimes proper medicines.
Jacky knew quite well the sanitary and run down conditions of hospitals which were the same across the whole country. She begged me to convince Dr. Fidel to reduce the number of nights spent in the hospital. He explained to me that this intervention normally requires a three night stay in hospital. The patient checks in the night before to make sure that he is there the next day considering the uncertainty of the Cuban transportation systems and to make sure that he is fasting from eight o’clock the night before. He is kept the next night to recuperate from the ill effects of the anesthesia and kept under observation one more night before being released. I convinced Dr. Fidel to reduce the overnight stay in hospital from three to one day. I agreed to check her in at seven o’clock the morning of the scheduled operation and make sure that she did not eat or drink after eight o’clock the night before. I also told him that I would keep her in a cleaner post operatory environment in my boat that in the hospital and check her vital signs like temperature and blood pressure which I knew how to do.
So, on the prescribed morning, Jacky, her mother and I showed up at seven o’clock for the registration with our survival kit. Indeed, when Cubans are hospitalized, their family has to bring in bed sheets, pillows, pillow cases, towels, soap, toilet paper, clean drinking water because the hospital water is contaminated, a few candles for power outages and even food. A chair is provided next to the bed for the family member to sit and tend to the patient twenty four hours a day. The nursing personnel are so limited that they have no time to take care of the personal needs of the patients. They are too busy administering medicine or noting statistics of vital signs. Taking personal care of the patients becomes the family’s responsibility.
After we completed the check-in formalities, I was eager to see the “private room”. I wasn’t expecting a Taj Mahal but a normally furnished and a clean room would have been fine even without a color television or telephone. To my surprise, we walked into a dirty and bare room with a rusty single steel bed covered by a really stained and dirty mattress and next to it a straight steel chair with no back. Another backless chair on the other side of the bed served as a night stand table. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The window was missing a pane which allowed light to come through because the glass was so dirty that we could not see through it. This horrible sight did not outmatch the bathroom’s condition. No window, just the rotten window fame, no shower head, no hot water valve, no toilet seat, no water tank cover, no flushing mechanism, no drain pipe under the sink, just dirt everywhere (see pic below). There was though a handle-less pail which I figured could serve a double function. It could be used to flush the toilet when filled with shower water and serve as recipient under the sink missing its drain pipe.
This phenomenon of missing toilet seats and flushing mechanism was not new to me. I had observed it in most public bathrooms. The population would steal these items because they were not readily available from the mainly empty pesos stores or they did not have the money to buy them in the few dollars or CUC stores. At one point, I brought into Cuba dozens of forty watt light bulbs because the pesos stores were out of stock. This shortage got so bad that light bulbs in elevators and public places became protected from theft by a steel cage with a padlock. The centralized communist government had found an ingenious way of reducing the population electrical consumption. They stopped selling light bulbs. Brilliant solution! They were literally following the mushroom theory: “Keep them in the dark and feed them horse sh..” Not only was the population misinformed through Communist controlled Medias about national and international news but they were literally left in the dark. Diabolical!
Now, I knew why Jacky had been so insistent in not wanting to stay in the hospital more than she absolutely needed to. Her mother was not fazed at all by this Dantesque vision of a hospital room. She pulled out the remaining items in her “survival kit” i.e. the scrub brush, the cleaning rags, the detergent and the chlorine bottle and got going on her knees scrubbing the floor. She had visited in Cuban hospitals before!
As I finally escaped from this horrible sight, I was stopped at the exit by the security guards just like every other car going out. While he searched the car, I told the watchdog jokingly that I could not steal anything because there was nothing left to steal anymore. The only thing I could have stolen from the hospital would have been a mattress but it was too big and too dirty. He did not seem to appreciate my sense of humour.
As I drove away from one of the largest and most prestigious hospitals in Cuba, the Havana University Hospital, I could not help imagining what goes on in other smaller hospitals scattered around the countryside far away from all supplies. I thought that if I described what I had just seen to outsiders, they would not believe me. Some of my close friends who have never set foot in Cuba or just went for a one week vacation at an all-inclusive hotel in Varadero naively believed the content of the Cuban false propaganda about the Cuban free health care. They had heard of Cuba offering medical services to foreigners in need of medical care. What they did not know is that the facilities made available to outside patients were not the same as those offered to the Cuban population. Just like the tourist ghettos, these more modern and better maintained facilities were not accessible to the population. The health system in Cuban was just like everything else: a system of two weights and two measures.
While island hopping, I had mentioned that, when the charter season was over, I was planning to sail north across the Caribbean Sea to Cuba. Their curiosity was aroused about this mysterious island, off limit for forty years to American citizens. When I got settled down in Marina Hemingway, I sent promotional mailing to the list of previous charter clients informing them that Aventura was now available in Cuba. A few months later, Robert called me from Chicago. To my great surprise, he was officially invited as a guest of the Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) Department of the University Hospital in Havana. He was going to teach certain advanced surgical techniques. I guess that the exchange we had about my desire to go to Cuba had gone a long way. In a very short time, he had succeeded in getting a special visa for Cuba for humanitarian reasons.
I could not meet him when he flew into the José Marti airport because he was greeted by Dr. Teresa, the high-level political representative and officials of the Communist Party who gave him the red-carpet treatment, bypassed the usual Immigration and Customs formalities and chauffeured him to an official residence. When things settled down, he came to visit me and Aventura, the sailboat that reminded him of many great memories of island sailing. However, what excited him the most was my old Mercedes 300SD, the very same model he had back home and among his many cars still his favorite. De facto, I became the chauffeur, translator, and problem solver on top of being a friend. I did not mind helping him because he was such a good human being and I knew that he was there to help people. Beside I had no additional expenses for traveling since he was generously taking care of all that.
I sometimes had fun playing the role. I remember that he once asked me to drive him into Old Havana to an official building. I knew that parking in that area was always a nightmare for lack of space. So, I wore my only white guayabera, the uniforms worn by all Communist Party official drivers. As far as I knew, there were only two gold Mercedes 300SDs in the whole of Cuba. The second one was Fidel’s. So, when I got in front of the building, I got out of the car and, as a professional chauffeur, I opened the rear door where I had told Robert to sit. Then, I stood in front of the car in a rigid position with my hands behind my back, a position I had noticed was used by Fidel’s body guards. For all the time I stood there in this illegal parking area, nobody ever bothered me including the guards standing in front of the building. Later, over a mojito, we both had a good laugh about that ruse.
I owned that Mercedes for years. It was the most reliable car I ever owned. However, late one day on our way back from a tourist trip to Cienfuegos, we started smelling a strange persistent smell inside the car. I just kept going because we were in the middle of nowhere on the autopista (highway) far away from any service station. At nightfall, I turned on the lights and did not go five miles before all the lights went off. So, I slowed down and moved over to the right of the road which had no while lines at all, trying not to hit the local traffic of people on foot, bicycle and horseback riders crowding the side of the road. When I would see a car coming, I would get back in the middle of the road behind it and would pick up speed to follow its lights for a while. Since I did not want to get to the same fast speed, I eventually would lose sight of its tail lights, slow back down and move over to the side to wait for another car. My passenger, Robert showed some signs of nervousness. We did that for about one hour until we finally got to the circunvalaciòn, the lighted beltway around Havana.
When we got to the old Havana checkpoint, which is where traveling papers from havaneros trying to get out of town were being checked during the Russian days, I notice a policeman in the middle of a booth with his hands up. I slowed down but did not stop and he had to move out of the way. I could see that Robert was getting more nervous. I got into the tunnel leading into the city thinking that I made it but no, I did not for sure. On the other side, a police roadblock had been set up just in my honor. Now, Robert was getting even more nervous. The two police cars escorted me, one in front and one behind, to the police station back on the other side of the tunnel. Now, Robert was sure that we were all going to jail. After checking the car papers and my Canadian passport, the officer in charge asked me why I did not stop at the police signal. My genial answer was that I did not stop because I did not see him since the car had no lights. The officer grinned at this incredible answer. We both knew that this checkpoint was flood-lit with the same type of lights used in a baseball stadium. I told him of our situation with the lights and of my plan to get to town to leave the car in a safe place. I really don’t know why he let me go. Was it my captain’s uniform, was it the gold and unique Mercedes or was it my Canadian passport? I will never know.
So now Robert could breathe again. I went through the tunnel a second time and did not drive further than one mile on the Malecon, the waterfront avenue, before a city police car stopped me. For sure, Robert’s blood pressure now went to the roof. After checking my papers, the officer told me that I was driving without the lights on. I explained that the car lights did not work anymore and that I did not want to abandon a Mercedes in this dangerous area. It would be stripped overnight. I asked for his help in escorting me to the National Hotel just a mile down the road where I would safely park the car for the night and come back the next day with a mechanic. To my surprise, he agreed. He escorted me to the entrance of the Hotel, showed me the way but did not go in. So I went to the car trunk, picked up four beers and discreetly slipped them inside the police car. Whew! Robert was breathing again and so was I.
When Robert came to Cuba for a few weeks every other month, we spent a lot of time together. He liked coming to the Marina to sit at the table under the gazebo tent at the table by the pier. I liked to call it “The Bar”. “The Bar” was opened as soon as I sat under the tent. That is when neighbors from other boats would congregate beer in hand. Robert liked this friendly atmosphere. We shared the same tastes and passion for sailing but I believe that considering his health condition, he felt safer if he was in the company of someone he could trust in case of an emergency. Therefore, by association I got to meet the most important doctors at the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. I met the head of the Department, Dr. Ulises, a real gentleman, and his Communist party counter-part, Dr. Teresa. Why double? The Cuban system was a copy of the Russian Communist party paranoid system where even important decision makers were shadowed and spied on by a faithful and powerful representative of the Communist Party. So, Robert liked to invite all his other doctor friends like Dr. Fidel, Dr. Richard, Dr. Alfonso, Dr. Jose Maria to “The Bar” in Marina Hemingway. In compensation, the ORL doctors always invited us when they were celebrating a special occasion like an anniversary.
One day, Robert invited a few doctors in Marina Hemingway. When people would come to visit the “security guards” would come closer and spy our every move and listen to all our conversations like hyenas watching their prey. Nobody was allowed to come inside the boats unless they had a pass from the Harbor Master’s office. At one point, Dr. Teresa asked me where she could go the bathroom. I told her that there were two heads inside Aventura. I was testing! Testing! Testing! As soon as she went in, the hyenas got agitated on their walkies-talkies and moved closer to the boat.
When Dr. Teresa came out of the boat, she was met not only by two security guards but also by the security guard’s manager as well. They wanted to see her pass. I took pleasure, sitting under my gazebo tent next door to Aventura in watching the expression on their faces as this important Communist figure showed her credentials and basically told them to scram. The hyenas went away with their tails between their legs and surely reported this incident to higher authorities. I had gained some respect in that Marina. Not only was I close to foreign Embassy people who visited me regularly but I was also close to the local Communist Party as well! I even had a picture inside Aventura of me shaking hands with Carlos Lage Davila, the vice-president of the State Council, at the time the number two in the Party after Fidel. George Eldridge, my best friend in the Marina on Hot Tamale, the boat next to me, had a picture of him and Bill Clinton with a dedication by Bill for his birthday. Who the hell was I? Maybe I did get some special privilege for this ambiguity, maybe not. But I sure got away with a lot when challenging the system later on.
To compensate for the parties that we were invited to by the Cuban doctors, Roberto wanted to reciprocate with his own. Each time he wanted to do one, I was given carte blanche to find a large enough location and organize a decent party. Roberto would cover all expenses and let me invite all my friends as well. Each time we did one the number of guests grew bigger and bigger to a point where I needed a bigger place. I finally settled for a big house that had a huge garden in the back with a thatched roof bar, a stainless steel cooler, a large BBQ, a decommissioned salt water pool and a pier facing the entrance of Marina Hemingway. With the complicity of customs and the Coast Guard, I could transport some equipment like chairs and tables by dinghy from Aventura to the party site. We used that site many times. At the end, the number of guests settled at around sixty.
When I started organizing these parties, I basically copied the Cuban parillas (BBQ) by cooking a pig on the spit. Then, Robert thought of adding variety to the menu by not only cooking a large pig but a suckling piglet as well. I had no problem finding a large pig. I did not even have to go through the gruesome slaughtering process. When ordered and paid for, the pig would be delivered already dead and eviscerated sometimes during the morning of the party. However, my attempts to find a suckling pig on my own proved fruitless. The farmers sold their pigs by weight and it was not financially interesting to sell a small pig. They needed to be fattened.
So, having failed to find a suckling pig on my own, I decided to use the services of Jorge, who knew just about every under the table deal made in a fifty-mile radius. We called on many pig farms before we found one that would sell us a piglet but at double the price per kilo. I did not mind the price because I knew that for Robert, money was no object. What upset me was that he would not slaughter it and deliver it the next day as other farmers did. We had no option but to take the pig with us. So, I threw the live pig in the large and luckily empty Mercedes trunk.
On our way back, we passed by a small beach town called Playa Baracoa. I knew of a very large thatched roofed building called El Yunke which was used at night as a discotheque. During the day, they would set-up a few tables and chairs in the middle of this huge empty place and serve Cuban food. I wanted to buy lunch for Jorge for his help and since we had already been driving for thirty minutes in the midday hot sun, I was worried that the piglet would suffocate in the hot trunk. Although the pig’s fate was sealed, I wanted a freshly slaughtered pig for my parilla. So, I got a rope, tied it around its neck and we walked in the restaurant as if nothing strange was happening with the pig trotting behind like a good pet. I tied the rope to one of my chair’s legs and ordered water for my pig. It was delivered with our food, no questions asked. The pig drank and went to sleep. The waiters had a good time between themselves and I gave them a good tip to keep them happy. I must admit that I felt sad when knife time came for this cute pink little thing.
But, this story is not finished yet. The Epilogue of the story is that with all this movement and noise, piggy relieved its stress naturally in the trunk of the car on our way back to the Marina. Although I washed the carpet many times, I could never completely remove the odor of pig s… from inside my nice Mercedes. To my embarrassment, it lingered on forever! How I could I explain the real story to my future passengers? They never believed it just as many real events narrated in this book.
As I got to know my new doctor friends better, I could address some subjects that would have been taboo for a Cuban to discuss with outsiders. When asking about the prevailing conditions of the medical care system in Cuba, I was given an honest and accurate answer. The whole system was in total disarray, not only from lack of maintenance, supplies, medicine, instruments and service but also from the shortage of doctors. Doctors! I thought that the Cuban Universities produced more doctors per capita than most of the third world countries. Indeed, they did but Cuban had started renting these slave doctors to other countries in exchange for other services. Many were going to Venezuela and in exchange, the Fidelist president, Hugo Chavez would sell oil to Cuba at rock bottom price. A lot of that oil would never make it to Cuba, which experienced drastic shortage and power failure, but the tankers were diverted to other countries where the oil was sold at a good profit. The Cuban doctors “lent” to these countries would end up deep in the bush in areas where local doctors did not want to go. A lot of them who had no direct family for the system to harass would never come back.
Robert somehow got hold of two audiometers, instruments used to analyse the level and possibly cause of deafness, to donate to his friends in the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. They no longer had any working instruments. So, I volunteered to join him in his humanitarian efforts by transporting on Aventura the instruments from Key West to Cuba. When in Marina Hemingway, I reported to customs that I had instruments to be donated specifically to that Department under Dr. Ulises. After a delay, they informed me that someone from the Health Care Division would come to pick them up and officially take them off Aventura’s inventory. I told them that I was under strict instructions from the donor, Dr. Robert Guziec to release the instruments exclusively to representatives of the ORL Department of the Havana University Hospital. That’s when the real fight began.
They knew that these big instruments were taking precious space in my boat by occupying two bunk beds hence totally using one of the three cabins. So, they took their time and just let me rot. I knew that legally, they could not do anything until I got this donation off my boat, an American flagged vessel. Legally, these instruments were mine until I got them along-side to use a maritime shipping term. So, I told them that unless these donations were picked up by the intended Cuban recipients, I would dump them at sea the next time I sailed out and the Cuban family in need of ORL services would bear the consequences. That got them really peed off but they could not do anything. They eventually gave up on account of political pressure exercised by the University Hospital’s administration. My doctor friends and nobody else got their audiometers.
I had my reasons for taking this strong stand. I personally knew Hans, a retired physical education teacher from Norway who came to Cuba for a few months every year during the winter season. He was a real cycling fan and started bringing extra bikes to give away to needy kids near where he lived. His philanthropic gesture started being recognized in Norway as he started receiving donated bikes from all over the country. It got to a point where he came one year with a loaded container. So, he organized lotteries in a few schools near where he lived in Cuba. The second year when he tried to do that again, his two containers were held in customs. It was explained to him that he did not have the authorities or the permits to do what he was doing and that the State was going to distribute the donated bikes. He knew as all of us did after living in Cuba for a while that these bikes would be given to selected children chosen amongst the high level military personnel and the needy population would be bypassed as always. Hans remembered buying expensive medicine from a pharmacy reserved for foreigners who could pay with dollars or CUC, the pesos convertible invented by Cuba to replace the U.S. dollar. He had noted the following inscription in bold letters on the bottle: “Donation from Switzerland”. So, he shipped the two containers back to Norway and we never saw him again in Cuba. Well done Cuba. By stupidity, not only did it lose precious donations but also the money spent every year by a regular visitor as well.
As time went by, my relations with the doctors of the University Hospital became solid and continuous whether Robert was in town or not. I invited them for special events and they reciprocated. One day, mi girlfriend, Jacky, came down with a real bad case of tonsillitis. We were in luck for having a bunch of doctor friends specializing in ORL. Dr. Fidel, the second in charge after Dr. Ulises, took the case personally, bypassed the slow system and gave us an appointment within two days at the University Hospital. The conclusion of his examination was clear. These tonsils had to go. He gave her antibiotics to reduce the inflammation and bypassed the system again by scheduling the operation the following week instead of in three or four months, the normal waiting period for a non-military ordinary citizen. He also reserved one of the very few private rooms available since patients were generally lined up in crowded wards filled with twenty to thirty patients at the time. These dirty wards would not be fit for cattle with only one bathroom in bad and dirty condition and many windows with broken glass. The proximity, and the lack of cleanliness and maintenance were the reasons so many patients were lost to secondary infections not the lack of skills of the surgeons who operated in bad conditions missing proper equipment and even sometimes proper medicines.
Jacky knew quite well the sanitary and run down conditions of hospitals which were the same across the whole country. She begged me to convince Dr. Fidel to reduce the number of nights spent in the hospital. He explained to me that this intervention normally requires a three night stay in hospital. The patient checks in the night before to make sure that he is there the next day considering the uncertainty of the Cuban transportation systems and to make sure that he is fasting from eight o’clock the night before. He is kept the next night to recuperate from the ill effects of the anesthesia and kept under observation one more night before being released. I convinced Dr. Fidel to reduce the overnight stay in hospital from three to one day. I agreed to check her in at seven o’clock the morning of the scheduled operation and make sure that she did not eat or drink after eight o’clock the night before. I also told him that I would keep her in a cleaner post operatory environment in my boat that in the hospital and check her vital signs like temperature and blood pressure which I knew how to do.
So, on the prescribed morning, Jacky, her mother and I showed up at seven o’clock for the registration with our survival kit. Indeed, when Cubans are hospitalized, their family has to bring in bed sheets, pillows, pillow cases, towels, soap, toilet paper, clean drinking water because the hospital water is contaminated, a few candles for power outages and even food. A chair is provided next to the bed for the family member to sit and tend to the patient twenty four hours a day. The nursing personnel are so limited that they have no time to take care of the personal needs of the patients. They are too busy administering medicine or noting statistics of vital signs. Taking personal care of the patients becomes the family’s responsibility.
After we completed the check-in formalities, I was eager to see the “private room”. I wasn’t expecting a Taj Mahal but a normally furnished and a clean room would have been fine even without a color television or telephone. To my surprise, we walked into a dirty and bare room with a rusty single steel bed covered by a really stained and dirty mattress and next to it a straight steel chair with no back. Another backless chair on the other side of the bed served as a night stand table. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The window was missing a pane which allowed light to come through because the glass was so dirty that we could not see through it. This horrible sight did not outmatch the bathroom’s condition. No window, just the rotten window fame, no shower head, no hot water valve, no toilet seat, no water tank cover, no flushing mechanism, no drain pipe under the sink, just dirt everywhere (see pic below). There was though a handle-less pail which I figured could serve a double function. It could be used to flush the toilet when filled with shower water and serve as recipient under the sink missing its drain pipe.
This phenomenon of missing toilet seats and flushing mechanism was not new to me. I had observed it in most public bathrooms. The population would steal these items because they were not readily available from the mainly empty pesos stores or they did not have the money to buy them in the few dollars or CUC stores. At one point, I brought into Cuba dozens of forty watt light bulbs because the pesos stores were out of stock. This shortage got so bad that light bulbs in elevators and public places became protected from theft by a steel cage with a padlock. The centralized communist government had found an ingenious way of reducing the population electrical consumption. They stopped selling light bulbs. Brilliant solution! They were literally following the mushroom theory: “Keep them in the dark and feed them horse sh..” Not only was the population misinformed through Communist controlled Medias about national and international news but they were literally left in the dark. Diabolical!
Now, I knew why Jacky had been so insistent in not wanting to stay in the hospital more than she absolutely needed to. Her mother was not fazed at all by this Dantesque vision of a hospital room. She pulled out the remaining items in her “survival kit” i.e. the scrub brush, the cleaning rags, the detergent and the chlorine bottle and got going on her knees scrubbing the floor. She had visited in Cuban hospitals before!
As I finally escaped from this horrible sight, I was stopped at the exit by the security guards just like every other car going out. While he searched the car, I told the watchdog jokingly that I could not steal anything because there was nothing left to steal anymore. The only thing I could have stolen from the hospital would have been a mattress but it was too big and too dirty. He did not seem to appreciate my sense of humour.
As I drove away from one of the largest and most prestigious hospitals in Cuba, the Havana University Hospital, I could not help imagining what goes on in other smaller hospitals scattered around the countryside far away from all supplies. I thought that if I described what I had just seen to outsiders, they would not believe me. Some of my close friends who have never set foot in Cuba or just went for a one week vacation at an all-inclusive hotel in Varadero naively believed the content of the Cuban false propaganda about the Cuban free health care. They had heard of Cuba offering medical services to foreigners in need of medical care. What they did not know is that the facilities made available to outside patients were not the same as those offered to the Cuban population. Just like the tourist ghettos, these more modern and better maintained facilities were not accessible to the population. The health system in Cuban was just like everything else: a system of two weights and two measures.
Patient`s bathroom Havana University Hospital
