Thinking in Cuban.

Like more and more of us in this privileged country, I have begun to question the delightfulness of certain luxuries, most especially that of e-mail. Occasionally, however, amidst the barrage of spam hoping to sell us a lower mortgage rate, more hair, a guaranteed weight loss plan, or a larger penis--apparently anything really can be bought in the United States of America, with the most personal and fantastical of needs best met as impersonally as possible--something drifts in of genuine human meaning and value.

Today, for example, a poet-friend in Paris e-mailed me a column from Britain's The Guardian, written by a former Labour MP, that addressed Cuba. While it may be true that this writer, too, was trying to sell something of his own--namely, that fond liberal dream of a more normal trading and diplomatic relationship between Western democracies and the small, defiantly Communist island nation that is my family's homeland--I found the piece strangely moving. After a compelling critique of the hypocrisy of Cuba's conservative detractors, buttressed by a summary of the many injustices Cuba has suffered at the hands of the U.S. (the puny victim of a trade boycott by the world's greatest heavyweight champion of free trade), it ends with a rousing endorsement of a country that has conquered poverty, disease, and illiteracy in spite of its ostracism. Cuba, he writes, is "a symbol of human potential."

I immediately forgave the article's polemical elements, having long ago learned that any discussion of Cuba by necessity attempts to oversimplify. What so powerfully engaged me was the notion of a Cuba wronged, isolated, and thus impoverished by its bullying neighbor to the north, a not-unfamiliar image that resonated in a new way for me now, with opposition to the spiteful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq so much in mind these days. I found myself repeating my family's arduous journey once again, reexamining my citizenship in the Land of the Free, and reconsidering my paradoxical identity as at once a "revolutionary" with strongly leftist inclinations of my own and a refugee from a nation that proclaims itself (apparently persuasively, at least to one genteel Briton) as the purest, and thus most successful, emblem of Marxist social change.

Might Cuba, I wondered, with its lofty socialist ideals and rejection of the callous Enron- and WorldComstyle materialism that has lately also so disgusted me--might Cuba, with its frequent and resounding condemnations of American imperialist actions across the globe--really be a freer society than America?

Yet my own family had fled Fidel Castro's murderous, rampaging soldiers. My parents and grandparents were grateful to escape the nascent oppression of his regime with only the clothes on their backs to reach this mythical place, to dream their particular American Dream, and to venerate always those who fell in the hail of bullets along the way.

It was happening again: Such "thinking in Cuban," which I have experienced before, can produce an altered state of consciousness that can often lead to my writing bizarre, feverish, magically realist poems (perhaps as absinthe did for the likes of Verlaine and Rimbaud), followed by a bad headache. How was I to reconcile my ardent belief in the inherent goodness of American democracy, inculcated by parents and grandparents who included our Presidents (except John F. Kennedy, of course) in our thanks-giving prayers before dinner, with an equally passionate idealism that pulls toward precisely the kind of socialist revolution that seemed to have been achieved, at least in the eyes of plenty of people who did not eat roast pork every Friday, in Cuba?

"Communists and homosexual pigs!" I remember my grandfather's branding of these apologists for Castro's regime, who were ton comfortable in their fancy professorships at well-heeled colleges to understand what we had endured. By then, he had given up cigars, though his voice retained the smoker's guttural seriousness. "Look at all the freedom you have," he would then growl. "Be thankful for it."

But Elizabeth, New Jersey, where one branch of my family first settled, hardly seemed to me the same idyll in which they seemed to dwell. A sulfurous haze hung constantly in the grey air, which I suspected had to do with the unbeautiful smokestacks and refineries plainly visible in the distance. Pushers haunted certain street corners only blocks away, and watching their movements, whether erratic and jerky or more languorous and fluid, became a game to us kids, as we guessed whether they peddled cocaine or heroin.

Still, it was the place my grandfather, speaking only broken English, found decent work, on the line in a factory that made plastic tables. My family also found a safe apartment there, six people crammed into two rooms (never mind that one had a leak in the ceiling), in an enclave bounded by the Cuban bakery and the Cuban grocery; into which the local prostitutes, hair teased into piles as big as a campesina's laundry, rarely ventured.

Hearing his rants, I could feel my anxiety levels rise, since I knew even at that early age I myself was gay. At the same time, the stories I heard about Castro's inhumane treatment of gays--and artists and intellectuals of all persuasions who disagreed with his policies--were offered as proof of the revolution's stinking hypocrisy. By this point in the ritualistic discussion, which seemed to last my entire childhood, my grandmother was producing some improbable feast from the tiny kitchen: boliche, a kind of Cuban pot roast, or maybe arroz con pollo, with congri and maduros. How she created these elaborate meals was a miracle to me, and the apartment was full of the warm smells of sofrito and those sweet fried plantains, displacing for a while the ubiquitous chemical odor. Walking out on the street afterwards with my full stomach, I was suddenly grateful for the oil drum in the vacant lot across the way dissolving to cinnamon rust, and I admired the grimy brick buildings with their oddly hopeful chain link fences, like patient old dowagers in their aprons. We would be on our way to pick up meat and guava pasteles for breakfast the next morning, joining the line of other Cuban families that extended out the bakery's door.

Maybe Elizabeth wasn't so bad, after all. I felt sorry for my cousins back in Cuba, who I was told would be going to bed hungry that night, as they did every night.

Such conflicting questions were hard enough for an eleven-year-old to ponder. Unfortunately, as I have grown older, the questions have only become more complicated, more impossible to fathom, and even more resistant to any kind of definitive answer. I have since become a physician. (I attended Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, much to my immigrant parents' it-can-never-be-big-enough pride. Such a grand education would have been unattainable in Cuba, and it certifies me in their eyes as truly American.) I have a few lefty colleagues who have visited Cuba for medical conferences and returned extolling the successes of the government's public health programs, where vaccination rates and prenatal care are far better than what we have accomplished here in the U.S., despite our almost infinitely greater resources. At the same time, in part because of the American trade embargo, Cubans die every day for lack of antibiotics and other medicines that are plentiful here, easily obtained if one has health insurance or enough money. Needless to say, most of my Miami relatives vociferously support the embargo, while at the same time they tirelessly send medications and other necessities to our relatives back on the island, despite never knowing what actually reaches them.

My Miami relatives still speak often about the great institutions of democracy in this country, and surely their votes were among those that gave George W. Bush his unverified, highly suspect, and razor-thin victory. As a Cuban expatriate all-too-familiar with Castro's rigged elections, I was forced to admit the travesties of the 2000 election here. How profoundly distressing for me, a member of a community that fled tyranny, to witness such anti-democratic machinations and, moreover, to be implicated in their ultimate triumph over fairness.

Yet part of me still trembles to question my adopted country's freedoms. Even as I contend daily with homophobia as expressed in Bush Administration policies that in turn set the tone for society at large, even if I fear being among the one in three gay men who will be subjected to anti-gay violence where I live now in Boston, I still must count myself fortunate to live openly here because in Cuba I might be living in a concentration camp instead, quarantined for the risk I represent for AIDS transmission. Or worse, I might be executed without a fair trial, under the pretense of some political charge, after being denounced by a resentful neighbor. At least, I think reflexively, here I can vote, and be reasonably sure that my vote will be counted; I can even write, and perhaps publish, this not unambiguously patriotic essay.

Then I am plunged further into despair as I watch America intervene in the Middle East. I recognize some legitimate motives--our fears of terrorism and hatred of totalitarianism--as well as baser desires for ready access to oil and the old imperialist fantasy of controlling "the unruly other." But how dare I question the need for American soldiers to die in Iraq if they were going to end torture? How dare I question Bush's war in Afghanistan, where religious extremists would not hesitate for a moment to beat my own sister or mother for not dressing according to their standards for hiding women's bodies and would not hesitate to do something worse to me, an openly gay man?

I know that some of these questions, no matter how palpably real to my mind, would be easy to brush aside for the savvy cultural relativists out there. Of course they would beat your sister, or throw you from a high cliff, but you and your sister are not of their culture, so your outrage is misguided; one simply cannot transpose one system of beliefs or social constructs upon another, they would say. They could conveniently excuse Cuban human rights transgressions in a similar fashion.

Perhaps my anguish is the exile's irremediable plight, to be trapped between two societal orders, where it becomes a matter of survival to believe that the new one--the one to which so many others are drawn--must be better, or less fallible, or more advanced.

Perhaps some of what I "know" about Cuba is necessarily distorted, an attempt (deliberate or not) to vilify the old place--which justifies its rejection and eases the pain of its loss.

Are gay Cubans really locked away in concentration camps?

Do neighbors really spy on one another?

And is a word spoken in secret really enough to denounce a counterculture intellectual?

Even if I could go there myself to find out--and here it seems both Cuba and the United States conspire to hinder me--might what I observed with my own eyes be more reliable, more accurate?

The impulse to imagine it once again proves irresistible. It has become almost a habit for me to transform myself into a latter-day, would-be Lorca, who would write letters just as dutifully to his parents. Here is what I might describe to them:

I am in a small town, Guantanamo, in the province of Oriente. What my father tells me were once neat, whitewashed buildings bordering the small plaza are now painted bolder colors, yellows and bright pinks and blues, some patched with white plaster, some with cracks or broken-off ornaments no one has yet bothered to repair. The fountain at its center is dry, out of order, but as I look off to the west, across the unlittered public space, toward the mountain enshrouded in dark green jungle, something more than fast food wrappers and flattened cans seems absent; I realize that what is missing is high-tension power lines cutting through the vegetation. It is also very quiet. Except for the occasional bark of a gaunt stray dog, or the cough from one of the much rarer 1950s-era automobiles, mostly what I hear is the chitter of insects and caws of birds. Some faded revolutionary slogans are scrawled in red on some of the walls of alleyways that open onto the plaza. I am peering down one in particular, where I imagine my tia Chila might appear. She is ninety-two years old, the last surviving sister of my grandfather. Ironically, she has outlived all the rest, the lucky ones who managed to escape either to Elizabeth or Union City or Hialeah or Miami. Her husband, a teacher, supported the revolution and joined the Communist Party. I do not know anything else about him, except that my grandfather felt especially embittered toward him, because his choices obligated his own sister to stay behind. A successful cattle rancher, my grandfather had always given them money, which they used on such extravagances as weekend trips to Havana or Miami, or to buy one another gifts of jewelry or fine clothes, instead of saving it. He died ten years ago, without ever speaking to either of them after he left the island. I wait, but she never comes. Instead, I observe a cluster of sweaty men in guayaberas and straw hats ordering cortaditos from a makeshift counter facing onto the plaza, shots of hot black coffee thick with sugar, jovially conversing beneath the burning sun. The sound of their Spanish, with its surprisingly heavy Cuban accent, is magnetic to me. I think it would be pleasant to talk with them, to learn what they think of Fidel, to ask what kind of work they do, how they can live without laptops and summer blockbusters and fifty brands of breakfast cereal--without America's love. Then, suddenly, they are gone, and my imagination falters. "Comrades," I want to call out to them, but it sounds utterly contrived. Instead, I shout "companeros," too late. The very ordinary plaza is empty again.

What seems ultimately so discouraging about this not-so-terrible place is just that: its disappointment of the imagination, its failure to uphold its self-proclaimed ideals, its inability to be perfect, its betrayal of the dream of social justice that is dearer to me than any political system. While no one could ever truly believe in the socialist model espoused by the now-defunct Soviet Union after the utterly unconscionable atrocities of the Stalin era, Cuba has doggedly remained a possibility, however remote, for the existence of that elusive utopia, the genuinely more egalitarian alternative to brute majority rule, the imagined repository of our unquenchable thirst to be better than ourselves.

More than Canada, whose social liberalism and good environmental stewardship are compromised by deep trade entanglements with its far less progressive partner to the south, more than France, whose cultural arrogance and bourgeois self-importance alienate so many, and more than Tibet, whose Buddhist pacifism has "allowed it to be overrun by China, it is lowly, ostensibly uncontaminated Cuba that can still capture the radical imagination. Picturesque palm trees swaying in its benign breezes, little dark unthreatening children scampering in its sun-splashed plazas, the red kerchiefs of their uniforms more cute than symbolically Marxist--doesn't everyone own by now a coffee-table book of "forbidden" photographs like these, to complement their Buena Vista Social Club CDs? Yes, Cuba is the one unspoiled paradise that can still engender optimistic gushings in a column in The Guardian.

So despite the ever-gamely kind words about Fidel Castro, who as an old man can still speechify for hours on end, a kind of awful metaphor for the longevity of what not even the most generous observer can deny is his dictatorship, Cuba is still at risk for appropriation by greater powers, even if by goodly well-wishers who unconsciously project their own foiled dreams of a kinder, gentler world onto its underdeveloped landscape of crumbling buildings and poor and dispirited, and yet proud, populace.

True, Cuba has remained insulated from most of the pressures of unfettered economic development that have threatened to destroy the landscape and imagination of the industrialized West--ugly strip malls and hateful talk radio and unclean factory farms and deteriorating air quality for all, as already eloquently heralded by the likes of Hayden Carruth and Adrienne Rich.

But the alternative Cuba offers is no less dreadful. No lack of freedoms in the United States or the United Kingdom or anyplace else can ever erase the deficiencies of Castro's revolution. Recasting us, a hopelessly divided and deeply wounded people, as what you want to see is just another less noxious form of what is happening in Iraq, little more than another wave of colonization that will never alleviate the suffering of Cubans who have not and cannot realize the fairy tale of a classless society promulgated by Castro. Even if American hostility is partly to blame for the evident failure of Cuban comunismo, so too are they whose revolution replaced one despot for another.

This thinking in Cuban leads back, then, to what I do know. I suppose I do wish Cuba were what the United States is turning out not to be: that is, a haven for free thinking, governed by intelligent politicians with an empathetic concern for the less fortunate and the marginalized, which a well-educated, secularly moral, peaceful, and economically equally endowed populace guides through its democratic institutions. Something closer, maybe, to some composite of what Rousseau and Jefferson and Marx and Mills and Thoreau imagined.

Then, I would be ready to return home, and on taking that first step onto a soil that I have never known, I would realize that I had never really left. Then, in the next impossible moment, I would realize I was alone.

Rafael Campo practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry. His third book, "Diva," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his most recent, "Landscape with Human Figure," won this year's Gold Medal from ForeWord for the best book of poetry published by an independent press. Copyright by Rafael Campo 2003.