ormer Eugene mayor Kitty Piercy and her husband,
David Piercy, went on a trip to Cuba earlier this
year. After nearly a century of United States presi-
dents refusing to respect Cuba, President Obama’s
visit there during his second term signified a less
hostile relationship between the countries, allowing for
tourism to resume. Piercy recounts her experience as “a
little taste,” because at the time of her trip you had to be
accompanied by a guide in order to be in the country.
President Donald Trump recently announced, “I am
canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided
deal with Cuba.”
In effect there will only be a few changes, but one of
them will be tightening the restrictions on travel again. The
Trump administration says it will begin strictly enforcing
the authorized exemptions that allow travel between the
U.S. and Cuba.
erybody has access to food and everybody has access to
education and health care. It’s not fancy. It’s not luxurious.
But everybody has that opportunity and those rights and
I think there’s a lot to be learned from that. What they’re
struggling with right now is that, for instance, a doctor or
teacher makes $20 a month, which sounds like nothing, but
all of those other things are already taken care of.
Still, they are trying to get some kind of bonuses for
people. Our guide’s mother is a gynecologist, and her fa-
ther is a taxi driver, and he makes a lot more money than
her mother, the gynecologist. I think these tour guides ac-
tually do pretty well themselves because they get tips from
the people who are there plus the money they are paid from
the government to do the touring. I think that’s another ex-
ample of those bonuses they are trying to figure out how
to do without losing the basic social service network that
they have in place.
EUGENE WEEKLY: When did you go to Cuba and for how
When you were there did you eat at restaurants that
were private or was it mostly government provided
food?
We went to mostly private. The way I’m understand-
ing it is probably the tours have some kind of deal and the
government has some kind of deal with these private res-
taurants, so I don’t know exactly how that works out. The
food was very good and the service was very good but it’s
not what everyone has access to, that’s for darn sure. We
had an experience where they gave us some pesos to go to
the market to get an impression of what it’s like and how
much you can buy with your pesos. You can buy some but
not a lot with the allocation that you get each month. So
that was an interesting experience for us, just a little taste
of what it’s like.
The other thing I was going to tell you is that they have
days when things become available. For instance, if you
save up and want a washing machine, they are not avail-
able every day. There will just be one day where in the
store there’s washing machines available, so everybody
comes down and lines up, those who can afford it, to get a
washing machine. You get six eggs a month, so if you want
extra eggs there was a line of people to get a few extra eggs
too. So it is not a luxurious economy.
F
long?
KITTY PIERCY: It was a couple weeks after I stopped being
mayor. We had been looking for a trip that wouldn’t be too
strenuous, not too far, but very interesting. And I always feel
like one of the jobs of the old mayor when the new mayor
comes in is to get out of the way. So it seemed like a good
opportunity to go for a vacation, and we have always been
interested in Cuba and the history of Cuba, so that’s where
we decided to go and it was a really good choice.
Did you go to just experience the culture or was
there a different focus?
We were gone for six days with one day for getting
there and one day for coming back. What’s interesting is
the group that came after we did was the first one able to
actually land in Cuba, where before that you had to have
somebody meet you and go with you. I think things are
loosening up in a lot of ways. We went with the Road
Scholar program, which is a person-to-person program to
give you a lot of opportunity to actually meet with people
there. I think if we were on our own we probably would’ve
covered more ground but not gone as deeply into learning
the culture. Of course you’re learning it the way they want
to deliver it to you. But it was really interesting and I ap-
preciated that opportunity a lot.
How are Cubans able to have such widespread ac-
cess to health care and education despite their eco-
nomic strangle?
The infrastructure is very poor, but everybody has a
house, a shelter — everybody. There are no homeless. Ev-
What was your impression of the Cuban people’s
thoughts and feelings about their country?
This young man, who got a little extra cash for him to
come do these informal conversations with us, commented
that he understands [Cuba’s system of government] but he
feels it’s holding him back … his generation is feeling like
they’d like to get out in the world more and have an op-
portunity to go to other places and have other experiences.
To go and play music in other places. To do art in other
places. They feel like they have a lot of limitations on their
mobility, both income mobility and just general mobility in
the world. They would like things to be looser.
Did you see or hear about any form of protests or
demonstrations from any Cuban people?
There was one that looked to me like it was being put on
by the Cuban government. They had what we would call
a hippie bus with posters on it about wanting the embargo
to go away. But it was parked near the hotel and it really
looked like it belonged to the government as opposed to a
spontaneous protest. But it looked like they were trying to
make it appear as the Cuban people’s desire. We didn’t see
any protests as we were taken where we were taken. We
visited Havana and two other cities and saw a lot of art and
the music and met with old people and young people and
did a lot of things, but it was still very controlled in terms
of what you had access to. But in the evening, you could go
out by yourself, so we did that every evening and that was
fun. A lot of music and a lot of street dancing. You felt no
overwhelming police presence, I would say.
Would you want to go back without a tour guide in
the future?
Yeah, I think I would. I don’t know if we’ll ever go
back, but I think it would be very interesting to go back.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen with our own coun-
try right now, but if things stay open then I think things
will continue to evolve there because that’s what they all
seem to want.
Did you take anything back from Cuba? Any souve-
nirs? Cigars?
That cigar thing is so interesting because it’s such a
huge part of their culture and here I am in America where
we are trying to get smoke out of the public places and so
in the hotel in Havana, it’s a big old national hotel, and the
whole patio was filled with people smoking their cigars
and smoke is around all the time. And in my lifetime we’ve
gone from having to have smoke around me all the time to
not having to have smoke around me all the time, so it was
a little bit of a shock to my system to not being able to find
a place to sit outside around the hotel without the air be-
ing filled with tobacco. But it is one of the things they sell
along with rum. Of course, we brought back some of each
of those things for some people.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
P H O T O BY D AV I D P I E R C Y
eugeneweekly.com • July 13, 2017
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