Reality Check

It appears Uncle Sam and El Comandante, while not quite seeing eye to eye, are exchanging curious glances.

On baseball fields, in concert halls and in schoolyards, the citizens of Cuba and the United States have recently been getting a glimpse of cultures that have been closed to one another for four decades.

The United States says it hopes these exchanges will make it easier to export cultural values to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

But it’s worth underscoring that such exchanges go both ways.

I recently spent several months in Havana and the Cuban countryside as part of a language and cultural program hosted by San Francisco-based Global Exchange, one of the few organizations in the United States that legally sponsors trips to the island.

As someone of Cuban origin, I stepped into such waters cautiously.

I have a cousin now living in the United States who risked his life swimming to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to escape what he considers a prison. I also have a cousin who became president of his neighborhood block committee in Havana out of loyalty to what he believes is a worker’s paradise.

Both have made tremendous sacrifices to stay true to the values they hold dear.

That I would find some of my values in conflict with those I found in Cuba came as no surprise. But I was uncomfortable with how even my most basic assumptions would be challenged.

For example, as one of our core values, U.S. citizens presume the inherent goodness of individualism, of being ruggedly independent, John Wayne-style.

So it came as a surprise when one of my tutors said, “I would never want to think of myself as independent.”

“Me neither,” another said coldly.

Come again? As a program participant, I was paired with University of Havana students who served as language tutors and cultural assistants. We had been talking about their future hopes, and I had asked what they were going to do once they were independent.

“Being independent means being selfish, cold, unwilling to help other people,” my tutor told me.

After years of struggling to be independent myself, I was at first uneasy with that idea. But I recalled the communal spirit of the many Cubans I met: the ubiquitous hitchhikers getting free rides from passing motorists; neighbors borrowing the car and the telephone as if they were family; hotel workers trading shifts and bicycles in a spirit of companerismo, or camaraderie.

And there was the pedestrian who jumped into my cab to mooch a ride, defending his appropriation of my fare by saying to the driver, “Hey, we’re Cuban, aren’t we?”

I can’t imagine hitchhiking in downtown Los Angeles, or even calling my neighbor “cousin,” much less sharing with him a roll of toilet paper--a commodity rationed in Cuba.

The U.S. model encourages people to value individual effort over shared sacrifice. But to many Cubans, it can seem a lonely path to take.

Expressing the values I believe the United States stands for was not simple either, in large part because Cuban television shows the flip side of them, through news and entertainment. For instance, if I:

* Cite civil liberties, the state-run television network Cubavision will air a Hollywood movie about the Ku Klux Klan, hate crimes or out-of-control gangbangers in Los Angeles.

* Advocate multi-party democracy, a Cubavision documentary will point to a two-party system in the U.S. tainted by special-interest money and embarrassed by a 30% voter turnout.

* Stress the benefits of upward mobility, the government-controlled national newspaper Granma will remark that the majority of people who are born in poverty in the United States die in poverty.

Fair or not, the contrarian views fostered in the Cuban media take away the shine with which we like to present ourselves.

Wastefulness isn’t exactly one of my core values, but it certainly revealed itself as a personal trait while I was in Cuba.

Given the choice between buying a new backpack, or repairing an old one by hand-sewing it with used dental floss, which do you think I chose?

Or using my family’s old kerosene lantern during blackouts versus pulling out my fancy flashlight that, oops, used expensive and rare batteries? Or tossing plastic bottles without considering their secondary storage value?

I guess seeing thousands of commercials by age 10 has pushed me to think: “Where can I go to get or buy what I need?”

By contrast, most Cubans first ask, “What do I already have that I could use?” Some even bragged about such resolver, or resourcefulness.

My relatives, not terribly amused with my lack of resolver, were quite patient. Their frugality is probably borne of necessity rather than virtue, but my lack of it was embarrassing to me. Perhaps I’ve been too busy shopping for values instead of cultivating them.

More embarrassing was a discussion about personal hygiene and what it seems to say about one’s priorities. I was blindsided when asked, “Why do you all have the habit of showering in the morning before work instead of after work? You mean to tell me you come home to be with your family or friends, and you don’t shower then?

“You go to bed with your wife after a full day of sweat? Eeeeeyyyyewww!”

It was surprising for me, as an American photojournalist, to see how images in our media that seem clear-cut can have quite another meaning for a Cuban.

In Havana, I met a Cuban photographer working for an international news agency who showed me a picture he’d taken that day. It was of Castro, excitedly raising his fists in the air as he stood behind a lectern.

“Ha! Ha! Isn’t that great?” the photographer said proudly. “This will show the exiles in Miami that Fidel is still going strong!”

I looked at him, incredulous. From a certain U.S. perspective, the gray-haired leader waving his fists appeared as the stereotypical crazed pariah.

Becoming aware of our own preconceptions or biases, and accepting them, may well be the ultimate value of any cultural exchange.

Staging a sing-along, a ballgame or other cultural encounter might have great symbolic value and surface appeal, but if the two nations are to make a genuine connection and resolve the decades’ old conflict, we need to look deeper.

And not get lost on an island of assumptions.

Alex Garcia is a Times staff photographer in Orange County. He can be reached by e-mail at alex.garcia@latimes.com.