Six members of First Presbyterian Church in Greenville including myself, Kendal Cox, Wade Chambers, Tom Atkins, Mike Caulfield and Lea Turner, left the chilly Delta for hot and humid Cuba on the evening of Thursday, April 6.
It was cold at 3:30 a.m. Friday morning in Memphis when we loaded our church bus and headed to the airport.
We had a total of 12 bags to check which held the equipment our water partners need to sustain the systems they used to produce clean water for their neighbors and community.
We’d spent the last weekend meticulously packing the bags as we knew once we left the US, we would only have what we brought with us.
After a short layover in Miami, we boarded a packed 777 for the quick flight to Havana.
As is the custom, the occupants of the plane clapped as we touched down in what is the ancestral home for many of them.
In the past, entry through customs has been touch and go. It is the only time we are in Cuba where we don’t have access to our interpreters or our in-country fixer. We have had to wing it in the past, but not this time.
After loading four of our bags on a push cart I headed for what I thought was the door to the second round of customs. There were a couple of agents standing nearby but I pushed by them without slowing down.
The doors did not lead to another round of customs but to the exterior of the airport. I was in Cuba. The rest of the team would follow after about 10 minutes.
Later, Kendall told me the agents stopped them and asked if I had stolen their bags.
It was noon and we had visits with partners in Havana before a late lunch.
The restaurant probably had about a dozen tables and we sat in a private room in the back. The menu boasted 400 different items. All were available.
We spent the night at Luyano church in Havana and rose early for a 5.5-hour, cross-country jaunt with driver Osmanny at the helm of our Pastors for Peace, Yellow school bus.
Osmanny is a lively driver. According to our interpreter Yosmel Fernandez, Osmanny basically did a 5.5-hour standup comedy routine while driving.
We bumped and banged along the main federal highway in Cuba at a leisurely pace of about 45 mph. It’s all the road would allow.
We arrived at Iglesia Presbyteria Reforma in Camajuani in the early afternoon on Saturday to find a church in the middle of a sleepy town.
We sat down to what would be the first of many lunches of mostly rice and beans with some boiled meat on the side. The food is filling and not bad, but we could have used some Crystal or Tabasco.
We got straight to work that evening by meeting with our partners and outlining the schedule for the coming three days.
The next morning was Easter and Marielys Cabrera, the pastor of the church, spoke a beautiful sermon as the sun rose to her right and the nearly full moon showed to her left.
She even took care to make the language as simple as possible so our interpreters, Yosmel and Linda Busquet, could translate in real-time. Though I did not sit with either of them, I was able to understand most of the sermon on my own even with my limited Spanish skills.
Camajuani is a unique partner for us. They have a water system previously installed by a different mission. The American partners did not keep up their end of the partnership and the Cuban church was left adrift. We were there to initiate a new partnership and return their water system to working order.
Our work began in earnest that afternoon with our first training session. The operators went off to one room and the educators worked in the sanctuary. In Living Waters for the World, there are separate training sessions for system operators and community educators.
Both are important to the successful use of the water provided by the system.
While we are not allowed to proselytize outside the church in Cuba, we do open each session with a religious story, a song and then get down to the business of clean water.
We teach lessons on how bacteria spread and are everywhere in the world. We teach lessons on how hand washing helps to eliminate bacteria. We show how water can be infected without any outward signs.
One of the more effective lessons calls for us to infect an agar culture plate with raw water from the church.
We did so this time and, as is usual, it produced a mountain of bacteria.
On the second day of training, the operators discovered a disturbing element in the system.
There was a gooey, tar-like substance in all the pipes and valves. It took hours into the night for four men to clean every piece and part.
It’s the first time any of our experienced team had seen such.
This was also the first night we had a power outage. We sat on the covered porch of the church while Tom read a lesson for us lit only by a small flashlight.
It was hot and the impending lack of air conditioning in our dormitory had me worried, but the lights came back on about 20 minutes before it was time to sleep.
Sleep wasn’t easy in a room with five other men, but it wasn’t the number of men that was the problem.
The irregular traffic along what must have been the second busiest road in Camajuani lasted all night long.
Everything from tractors and trucks to horse-drawn carriages and bands of children made enough noise to wake some of us multiple times during the night.
We spent four days and nights in Camajuani, signed a renewed covenant with the church, met new friends, cleaned the system and trained new educators. We ticked off all the action items we needed to complete in this town on this trip.
We then left for the Iglesia Advetista in Placetas to see the partner whose installation was completed in February of 2020.
On Wednesday morning in Placetas, Cuba, we got to see firsthand what the work from three years ago has done in this community.
There were at least 40 people standing in line waiting for their chance to fill a jug of clean water.
The church had already been serving water for an hour or so, but there was a problem.
As has become the norm lately, the power was out on a government-mandated shutdown.
The infrastructure for power supply in Cuba has actually been quite good for the past few years, but an influx of air conditioning units and decreased supply of fuel for the power plants means periodic blackouts.
Generally, the blackouts stick to the planned schedule and the system operators in Placetas are able to make water when the power is on.
It takes a couple of hours for the system to fill its clean water tank from the raw water tank for storage.
But if the power has been out long enough, the raw water tanks might be empty as well.
Word got out on the Coconut Telegraph and people started to trickle into the courtyard. As soon as a handful arrived, the power was back on and the work of making clean water began again.
Since the system was drained and hadn’t had power for long, it would take time to refill the tank and thus the Cuban national pastime of waiting-for-something-to-happen began.
The Cubans wait for water.
The Cubans wait in days-long lines for gasoline.
The Cubans wait outside empty stores for food.
The Cubans wait for something to change in their country.
Until 2021 they did this waiting mostly patiently. A year of COVID-19 and food shortages led to mass protests. These protests were ominously quieted. Our Cuban partners spoke not at all to me about the situation except to say there were still people in jail because of the protests.
When we met with our friends in Placetas, we gave them a book full of photos from the system installation.
When Ypsi Castro, one of the water team members there, turned to the page of portraits of her fellow educators, she pointed at each one of the people and gave us their status.
Roughly half of them had left. Most had fled the country for either South America or the United States.
The same story was repeated by other partners.
They told stories of family members flying to Venezuela and then walking north through the terribly dangerous Darien Gap to the US-Mexico border to request asylum.
It seemed as though they’d all made the trip successfully and were living in Miami or other parts of Florida.
Roughly 300,000 Cubans have made a desperate attempt to leave the country.
I can understand why.
For some, there is a good life to be had in Cuba, but others face an on-the-edge existence where one accident could lead to a total disaster.
While the story sounds bleak, it’s not quite as bad as I was expecting to see.
There were regular Cubans eating in restaurants and staying in state-owned hotels. The hotel we used in Sancti Spiritus was quite nice at $20 per person per night.
The people did not look malnourished but rice and beans go a long way in the calorie department.
There were more rice farming operations than I saw in the past.
There was definitely less automobile traffic on the highways. The number of horse-drawn carriages and pedal bikes seemed to have doubled.
But I also saw a brand-new Jeep Rubicon, a mid-2000s Ford Mustang, a few BMWs and hundreds of electric bikes.
The Cubans do tell a story of existence on the edge and perhaps our partners sacrificed so we could enjoy amenities to which we have become accustomed.
We also spent our time in churches that have become focal points of service in their communities.
The people who are not doing all they can to help the rest of their neighbors may not tell the same story as those folks in the church.
But, we know, life in Cuba right now is not easy. As they say, “no es facil.”
