More thoughts on the Alina Fernandez Lecture. . .

While I also attended the lecture, and also thought Fernandez's actions in escaping Cuba were brave, I was somewhat surprised by her story. Fernandez did not find out Castro was her father until she was about ten, and by the time she was eleven she already despised her position. From her friends at school to the strangers that stood outside her house, people were constantly asking Alina for help. She said she never attempted to help them, since she thought she couldn't make a difference.  She also said as she grew up, she tried to live a normal life, or however close she could get to normal. In 1993, she, along with her daughter, quietly escaped to America. Today, she has no contact with her Cuban relatives. During the questionnaire part of the session, Fernandez was asked numerous times about her current involvement with Cuba or if she was involved in any action to improve the conditions of Cubans. She firmly answered no to all of the questions, that she was not in anyway involved with Cuba and that she was simply here to tell her story, which had ended in 1993 when she arrived in America. Being that it is 2009 I was surprised that her story had ended more than a decade ago, and that Fernandez was trying to live a noncontroversial life here. She said she believed revolution to be unnecessary, and she thought people often caused more harm than good when intervening in situations such as that of Cuba. I can understand where she is coming from in her anti-revolutionary ideals, since her childhood was filled with revolution that seemed (to her) to ruin her country. However, perhaps because I had just been overwhelmed by the civil rights revolution only two hours before, this blatantly apathetic view was quite disappointing. As Martin Luther King Junior said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere". It seems as though Fernandez, once escaping to America, chose to forget the injustices of Cuba. Also one of Thoreau's central ideas of Civil Disobedience is that anyone, no matter how small, can make a difference. He says even if one person were to go against the government, this would still be a revolution. By not paying his taxes in an attempt to be free of the government, he practices what he preaches. Fernandez's message, on the other hand, seemed to me to be that she was just one person, just a distant daughter of Castro's, and that there was nothing she could do, or even nothing she should do for the Cubans, since it would end up being more costly than good. So what do you guys think, do you think Fernandez is right? That Thoreau and MLK are just romanticizing revolution? That revolution is actually costly and people should just find their own way out like she did? Thoughts?