Ellen Creager: Is the door slamming shut for travel from U.S. to Cuba?

Wednesday, 08 August 2012 18:16
By Saul Landau

Gore Vidal died July 31. In 2005, I interviewed him for my weekly TV-radio show Hot Talk. We had first met years before at a dinner party at Marc Raskin's house in Washington, DC, where I had watched him monopolize the conversation by verbally destroying the head of a major museum. "He's a phony, you can smell it," explained Vidal later as the reason for his ferocity.

"And he does so little for the public's benefit. He thinks only of each exhibit in his museum as another notch on his career gun – a typical Washington bureaucrat. I despise them."

In the TV interview he showed his loathing again, this time for the people who ran the country, not a museum. "The Founding Fathers feared kings and tyrants, so they made it clear in the Constitution that no one man can declare war; only Congress. We've had many wars after World War II: Congress has not declared one of them."

The man who wrote Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and "Dreaming War: The Bush-Cheney Junta" excelled at essay writing, but became better known as America's historical novelist and play and screen writer. His script for The Best Man, a fine movie, is currently re-running on Broadway.

By Dr. Babette Becker
Psychotherapist, Geriatric Care Manager, Writer

Introduction

I visited Cuba for 18 days to learn about the physical and mental health care and the response to the social and familial needs of the elderly. As a practicing psychotherapist and geriatric care manager in New York City, this trip was to be a preliminary attempt to see what I could learn, with whom I might be able to talk, and what sites I would be given permission to visit.

I put together a list of questions that I hoped would be flexible enough to include the range of health care professionals I wanted to interview and/or the sites I hoped to visit. My next task was to find out whom I had to see to secure the permission(s). Once I started interviewing, I revised my list of questions a few times to more appropriately reflect the Cuban health care system as I learned more about it.