NEWS FEATURE: For Cuban Children, Life Can Be Good, Even Without Happy Meals

c. 2000 Religion News Service HAVANA _ Home plate is a pothole in the middle of the street. First base is a chip on the curb. Second base is an asphalt mark in the street, and third base is a concrete patch visible amid dirt covering a driveway. Give 6-year-old Jose Carlos Prieto Sosa a […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

HAVANA _ Home plate is a pothole in the middle of the street. First base is a chip on the curb. Second base is an asphalt mark in the street, and third base is a concrete patch visible amid dirt covering a driveway.

Give 6-year-old Jose Carlos Prieto Sosa a bat, a ball made out of tape, and a few friends, and he will happily play baseball in a street shaded by laurel trees until dinnertime.


There are no Pokemon playing cards, no Happy Meals and no travel soccer teams. But the life of a 6-year-old in Cuba can be a pleasant one filled with friends and extended family, where economic hardship is balanced against free medical care. If the government does not allow every little boy or girl to dream of one day becoming president, it does provide a school system that allows kids to grow up with realistic ambitions of becoming doctors or engineers.

Barring any more court delays granted to his Miami relatives, this is the life Elian Gonzalez is expected to return to later this month, when an injunction keeping him and his father in the United States is set to expire. They could be eligible to come home as early as June 22.

Jose Carlos is a 4-foot bundle of energy with an endearingly mischievous smile who is almost a look-alike to Elian, who came to America six months ago. Spend a day with Jose Carlos and one captures an essence of youth that transcends borders. Being 6 in Cuba today may remind some of an earlier time in the United States, when children with more imagination than money made up their own games and the neighborhood was like an extended family.

Like Elian’s late mother, Jose Carlos’ mom, Maria Amparo, is divorced, and his father is active in his son’s life. She raises three children on a salary of $10 a month as a secretary at Caritas, a Catholic social services organization that partners with U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services in Cuba. Like many Cubans, she also receives some assistance from a relative in the United States.

A huge portrait of the Last Supper dominates the tiny living room cramped with old furniture in her simple apartment in a residential neighborhood. It is one of dozens of similar apartments facing a nondescript concrete courtyard. Before they even leave their building, Jose Carlos and his 11-year-old brother, Luis Rafael, have 20 kids to play with.

Jose Carlos’ days are full. On weekdays he has school, with karate lessons in the afternoon three days a week. In the school, a beautiful Spanish colonial-style building, the first-grader says he learns reading, writing, math and “how to have snacks sitting, not standing.”

On evenings and weekends, his days are filled with baseball games, cartoons, cards, hide-and-seek and dozens of other activities to hold his ever-shifting attention.


On a recent weekend, Jose Carlos and Luis Rafael duck through a hole in a fence onto a concrete playground where older children are playing baseball with a bat made out of scrap wood. Just as in the games on the smaller boys’ block, there are no gloves or regulation balls. The strike zone here is etched in chalk on a wall behind the batter.

On a basketball hoop without a net, Jose Carlos picks up rocks littering the playground and shoots them as if he were playing a game. When he tires of that, he uses the rocks to show off his pitching motion.

What eases the mind of his single mom is that there are no gangs in the neighborhood. Instead, she said, people look out for one another on the street where she has lived for 21 years.

She does not worry when her sons are playing outside in the neighborhood. “They are always being watched by someone,” she said. “It’s a family.”

When Jose Carlos was 17 months old, he was hospitalized with a bacterial infection for 15 days. “All the people, all the time, were coming to the hospital” to visit, while other neighbors brought her food and did her laundry, she said.

Even today, if she is called into work on an emergency, “I always have a person I can trust to leave my sons with, every time.”


There is a special relationship between Jose Carlos and his brother. He and Luis Rafael, both dressed in jeans and striped shirts, appear inseparable and rarely keep their hands off one another.

What kind of a life can Jose Carlos expect in Cuba?

First, a relatively long one. Life expectancy is 76, and medical care is free. Maria Amparo said she did not have to pay anything for her son’s two-week hospital stay.

However, even the country’s vaunted medical system is showing significant cracks. A struggling economy has made it difficult to obtain modern technology, and the U.S. embargo is blamed for shortages of medicine. “First World” physicians are increasingly having to deal with “Third World” conditions, one doctor said.

While the educational system does not transcend politics _ Jose Carlos passes by the slogan “Do it for Cuba” plastered over a wall on his short walk to school _ it does reward merit in the sense that kids with top grades can choose their professions, from doctor to economist.

Again, however, the reality of the Cuban economy is that some doctors and engineers will give up their jobs to become bellmen and waiters in hotels, where tips from tourists enable them to support their families better, some observers say.

Unlike his 47-year-old mother, who was told at the university she could not be a teacher because she is a Catholic, Jose Carlos will have an easier time practicing his faith. A law in 1992 officially made Cuba a secular state and permitted religious people to join the party.


Like his older brother, Jose Carlos will make his First Communion at age 9, and then work toward Confirmation at 17. When the 6-year-old boy is afraid of vampires or hopes for better grades, it is God whom he turns toward.

“God loves me. He’s my friend,” Jose Carlos said, clutching a mini-basketball to his chest. “I want him to sleep by my side.”

That does not mean his faith will go unnoticed. In first grade, when the teacher asked children to imagine what they saw in a drawing of smoke rising in the sky, Jose Carlos replied, “God.” At the next parent-teacher meeting, his answer was brought to his mother’s attention. But the instructor did not pursue the issue when Amparo explained that the child was being raised Catholic.

It doesn’t take long watching Jose Carlos go back and forth from the embraces of his mother and brother to realize what matters to this 6-year-old is family.

He treasures the visits of his divorced father, who also helps him over the phone with his schoolwork, his mother said.

Asked which person in his life most reminds him of God, Jose Carlos answered, “My papa.”


Neither of them could imagine Jose Carlos being separated from them.

Amparo, a gentle woman in a flowing dress who walks casually in the tropical heat, spoke animatedly and with the first hint of agitation when the conversation turned to Elian.

If anything ever happened to her, there is no question she would want Jose Carlos raised by his father, she said.

“He (Elian) has to be with his father. He has to be with his father,” she says, spreading her hands out in a gesture of finality. “Sometimes I get so mad about what’s going on; sometimes I just have to tune it out. It makes me sick.”

At the end of the day, an exasperated small boy keeps running in and out of his apartment with a mini-basketball that he bounces in the courtyard, pleading with a reporter to make his next question the last.

OK, Jose Carlos, one final question: What do you think of Elian?

“I want him to come back to play with me,” Jose Carlos said. “He is my friend.”

DEA END BRIGGS

(David Briggs is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland)

AP-NY-06-16-00 1448EDT

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