Where Xutos tries to spin the spinners

Caravan to Cuba Stops in Idaho

By Nathaniel Hoffman, 7-06-07

	The bus. In Nampa, Idaho. En route to deliver medical supplies to Cuba.

It rolled into Nampa, Idaho right on time.

A rag tag bunch of “caravanistas” on their way to Cuba in a big old hippie school bus.

I was the featured speaker at the Hispanic Cultural Center of Idaho last night, addressing the 10 self-described “Cuba solidarity activists” and maybe 10 other interested Idahoans. I was supposed to talk about my recent visit to the island.

What do you say to people who love Cuba as an idea? People who have never been there and have very little direct connection to the island, but are really into Cuba as an activist cliché.

What do you say to Canadians, in general?

I tried to tell them what I saw and heard there.

I tried to avoid the tired Cuban storyline. The great medical care. The schools. The music. The Cuban Five.

I mean, those are all important things to look at if you are writing a school report on the island. Those are the things that everyone knows about Cuba, thanks to events like this annual caravan that delivers large amounts of medical supplies to the island.

I spoke for a bit and then listened to the travelers as they introduced themselves and explained why they were about to break U.S. law and visit Cuba.

I was getting increasingly irritated when a new thought occurred to me.

This was another example of the media disconnect that has been a staple struggle in my reporting career.

There were frequent complaints from participants about the lack of media coverage on Cuba. No Idaho media showed up to film the caravan’s arrival, despite some attempts by the Idaho Peace Coalition to drum up coverage.

Alex McNish, an organizer of the event in Nampa, told me she invited several politicians including Gov. Butch Otter, but they were only interested in the media that the event was going to draw.

Needless to say, no elected officials showed up. And no press. Just an indy blogger who was part of the program and McNish, who happens to be the vice chair of Boise’s public access cable television station.

I think this dawned on me while I was talking, when I launched into an aside about how I wrote stories for both the alternative press and the corporate press and felt pretty good about both.

I didn’t say it to their faces, because I do admire what the caravanistas are doing. It is a legitimate form of civil disobedience to break a law like the U.S. embargo and travel ban on Cuba. They could all be imprisoned for doing so.

But the Pastors for Peace caravans and the Cuba solidarity storyline is old news and not really that interesting.

It is not a great story.

It is fine for their own blogs and their own Web sites to write about it. But unless they can come up with some new way of looking at the 40-year-old stalemate between the U.S. and Cuba or devise a more effective tactic, there is really no news there.

I agree that Americans should get more information about the world in general. But I don’t really think that a bunch of activists riding buses to Tampico, Mexico and then flying over to Havana adds a lot of information to our media diet.

Also this week someone asked me to speak to a group about “earned” media and ways to get in good with the press, more or less.

I declined.

A good story draws its own storytellers.

As I left the Cultural Center last night one of the caravanistas followed me outside.

She was an idealistic young Canadian woman who had urged the audience to go to medical school in Havana.

She had something for me.

It was a book called “How I learned to love Cuba”.

Perhaps you can learn to love a country. But you don’t have to marry it.

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