Getting Old In Cuba

Portia Siegelbaum On How Extended Families Care For Island's Elderly

(CBS) 
A case in point is Laura Clark, a very healthy 73, who was born in Banes, the same town as Fidel Castro. She lives with two daughters, a son-in-law and four grandchildren in the working-class Havana neighborhood known as Pogolotti. It’s the kind of neighborhood where family life spills out into the streets, music blares and conga lines form at the slightest excuse. But inside their modest crowded apartment, Laura runs a tight ship.

"I can't imagine living without her, not for anything. It's impossible," says her daughter Marisol, 42, an X-ray technician. "I don’t have to worry about anything. I can go to work knowing when my girls come home from school, Mom will be here."

Her 12-year-old daughter Rachel depends on her grandmother for meals, for help with her schoolwork, for ironing her school uniform. Asked who does more for her, her mother or her grandmother, Rachel doesn't hesitate: "In reality, my grandmother. She has more time to pay attention to me. My mother's work doesn't leave her with practically any time for me."

Another granddaughter, Leidy Laura, a 21-year-old, fourth-year medical student, said her mother Ileana is always so busy with work that only her grandmother has time for her.

"She's there when I get up in the morning, when I come home from school. She wants to know how my day went. She makes sure my uniform is washed and ironed."

Free education and free universal health care take the financial burden off the family. The biggest problem when Laura needs to go to the doctor is transportation. The family has no car, and Havana's public bus system is sorely taxed. But that's where Leidy Laura steps in.

"I'm always on top of her. I make sure she takes her pills on time, I take her blood pressure every day and if she has a problem I take her to see one of my professors at the hospital where I have classes.”

Laura beams as her granddaughter Dionne, a last-year music student, picks up a guitar and begins to sing. "I'm not old, No, no. The word 'old' describes a person who can't stand alone. I walk, I move, I dance. I’m not decrepit yet, so I like to say I belong to the Third Age or even better, Accumulated Experience, that the prettiest thing to call me.”

Laura is active in her local Baptist Church and occasionally cooks dishes brought to Cuba by her Jamaican parents: dumplings and rice and beans with fish in coconut cream. She herself retired after 24 years as a sewing teacher when her brother, who was "everything" to her, fell ill.

"My two daughters and my son were studying and I say no, the one who has to stay home, I have to stay home because they are coming up and I am going down," she said in English with a slight Jamaican accent. Her brother died 10 years ago.

Now with her daughters and their husbands working, the grandchildren clean the house, she says. "My daughter says my work is done already,' so she doesn't let me do a lot. I have my own room with a television set in it and whenever I want to rest I go in there and watch my favorite programs and do my sewing.”

There are others like Laura.

My 88-year-old neighbor Ana, who rules over a household filled with a divorced daughter, married granddaughters and great grandchildren. She's an amazing woman who hands out advice, watches that the right seasoning is added to the black beans and supervises the great grandchildren.

Or, take the case of Olivia, a retired nurse in her 80s who lives with her now 60-plus daughter Eunice, also retired, and a retarded grandson. Money is always short in their house and Olivia's cataracts make doing household chores difficult. But she still cooks and even prepares desserts like bread pudding as gifts for her neighbors.

Others are not so fortunate. A local church in the Marianao section of Havana runs a once-a-week informal group therapy and dance class for those 60 and over. It gives those who attend an opportunity to discuss their problems and socialize. I watched as the group leader asked participants to describe what a family is. One woman in her late 60s bitterly described what it was not. She lives with her daughter in a small, one-bedroom apartment; because of Cuba’s critical housing shortage they have no way of expanding. That has provoked a bitter conflict: The daughter wants her mother to give up her bedroom and sleep in the living room so she can move her boyfriend in.

Despite problems such as this one, Diaz Tenorio believes that economic shortcomings and a traditionally strong Cuban family can and do merge in a constructive way.

"The elderly prefer to live with their family; they don't like to live in institutions or asylums. Remaining in the family gives them a link to social life, to family life, they can feel useful by providing support to their family in such a way that despite the shortages their human condition is recognized and they are the object of affection," she concludes.

Objective reality may change this picture in the future. The island’s low birth rate — 11.89 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2006 — can be linked to the economic crisis that began in the 90s. At the same time, its already-high life expectancy continues to grow, with Fidel Castro's personal physician Dr. Eugenio Selman heading the "120 Years Club" designed to promote longevity among the population.

This combination of factors has already resulted in shifting statistics.

In 1981, 40% of all Cuban families had at least one elderly person living with them. In 2007, as a result of Cuba's shrinking families and low birth rate, only 28.4% had a senior citizen at home. This means there will be fewer families to care for the elderly.

In the future, more and more elderly will have to fend for themselves or depend on strained state resources to provide for them as their faculties decrease.

[agnim]

"So much for their "free" health care. Nobody really has anything or ever gets ahead, but they can live longer in their misery. Woohoo!
Posted by ajaxrose1 at 05:22 PM : Apr 24, 2007"

People DO NOT live long in misery! DUH!
Misery SHORTENS life!

The Cubans may be poorer; but their relatively good socialization and family life keeps them young, less stressed and HAPPY at heart, compared to the increasing dysfunctionality in American families, which destroys life!

You are so dense and materialistic; you prolly can't wait to get to the grave? LOL

[ajaxrose1]

So much for their "free" health care. Nobody really has anything or ever gets ahead, but they can live longer in their misery. Woohoo!

[eyewideopen]

BTW, Castro is 80, not 81

[cornholio622]

Don't be fooled by the media, which by the way, totally controls Cuba. A life of ignorance may be long and blissful, but still wrong. Thanks to the Clinton's we're China's ***.

[jmann27273]

Things aren't much different in the US unless you are rich. I lost my home and my retirement caring for an elderly mother and a sick daughter. Now I owe back taxes on my retirement. There are resources, but if you have a job you do not qualify for them. I now have nothing at 61 and will have to work until the day I die. Most Americans may find themselves in the same boat. Cubans don't have it any worse than we do in the US.