Cuba Is Focus of Educator’s Film

Strewn over Julian Nava’s coffee table are hundreds of photos taken on a recent trip to Cuba. A field worker with a skin infection that eats at her arms. A family so poor it cannot buy toothpaste. A newlywed couple who sleep on the floor.

Each snapshot contains a story that Nava wants to record in a documentary film as he travels through Cuba during the next three weeks--ordinary lives consumed by daily struggle. A Cal State Northridge history professor, Nava had already planned his trip when eight days ago the Cuban government’s downing of two civilian planes reminded the world anew of the island nation’s ailing economics and politics.

Although he hopes to focus his documentary on what life is like for average Cubans, Nava is also keenly aware of the influence international affairs have on individuals. A former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, he wants his film to address where future U.S. interests in Cuba should lie, and has requested an interview with President Fidel Castro. Before he left for Havana on Saturday, he still had not received a response.

Like President Clinton, Nava condemned the air assault on the planes, which were piloted by Cuban exiles who belonged to the zealously anti-Castro group, Brothers to the Rescue. But the Mexican American academic also said the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba has wreaked more damage than one Cuban MIG could ever cause.

“The loss of human life is deplorable,” Nava said, in reference to the presumed deaths of four Cuban Americans aboard the downed planes. “But how can you compare that to what the U.S. has been doing for the past 34 years?”

Nava said the embargo has made life miserable for Cubans, many of whom live in ramshackle quarters on the outskirts of Havana without running water or natural gas for cooking. Food and toiletries are hard to obtain unless U.S. dollars are used--both in stores and on the black market. In his research for the documentary over the past two years, Nava spoke to Cuban doctors who told him that thousands of lives had been lost because they lacked basic supplies and patients could not buy medication.

“I remember traveling to Cuba with a fistful of thermometers for the children’s ward of a Havana hospital because I knew they only had three,” said Nava, who visited in 1994 and 1995. “They took the thermometers like they were the crown jewels.”

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The human suffering caused by the economic embargo is Nava’s continuing theme. His recent visits to Cuba, he said, only confirmed his belief that the embargo is a misuse of foreign policy and the best way to weaken Castro is to normalize diplomatic relations.

Others argue that tightening the screws on the embargo, which Clinton agreed to last week, is the only way to bring Castro to his knees.

Nava also believes the Brothers to the Rescue pilots flew their Cessnas over the Caribbean on Feb. 24 in a deliberate attempt to provoke the Cuban government, particularly on a day when the Cuban Council--a coalition of human rights and dissident groups--had scheduled its first meeting in Havana.

He fears the tragedy will be used by U.S. government officials to promote their own patriotism in an election year. With the presidential campaign gaining momentum, Nava said, a response aimed at stirring voters’ emotions may prove detrimental to foreign policy.

“It’s critical to think with your head, not your heart. No one really knows what happened, and the last thing I will rely on is the words of an ambassador,” he said, in reference to United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s release of a report last week on the incident.

Nava should know.

As the first Mexican American ambassador to Mexico from 1979-1981, he found himself caught up in a series of international mini-crises during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. One notable victory came when he successfully persuaded Mexico to export more than its usual quota of oil to the United States during the Arab oil embargo.

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Born and raised in East L.A., Nava studied history as an undergraduate at Pomona College and earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1955. Two years later, he started what is approaching a 40-year career at CSUN.

The outspoken academic captured local headlines starting in 1967 when he became the first Latino on the Los Angeles Board of Education. An early advocate of bilingual education and mandatory busing to achieve racial integration, he soon became one of the city’s most visible Latino activists. He also ran for mayor in 1993. Today, however, the 68-year-old horse lover says his days in politics are over.

Aside from video equipment, Nava is arriving in Cuba with boxes of vitamins, chicken broth, toothbrushes and toothpaste. Not the stuff of an average humanitarian mission perhaps, but luxuries in Havana. Even more so when tighter sanctions threaten to bar the dollar’s entry into Havana.

Nava plans to cover a wide range of topics in his documentary, including housing, education, homosexuality and AIDS, even young people and rock music. He says the timing of recent events will not change the original intent of his project: to inform Americans about how Cubans feel. And neither will new travel restrictions imposed last week in the wake of the air assault change that goal.

The Clinton administration barred charter flights from Miami to Havana, but Nava and his three-man camera crew are traveling through Tijuana on AeroMexico.

“Cubans probably want to say to America, ‘We’ve never hurt you, so why are you trying to starve us to death?’ ”