The Land of Oz

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 3/27/02

HAVANA - It would be an ordinary family visit, if anything in Cuba could be ordinary: a warm winter afternoon, a plush Havana hotel, two men - Oswald Mondejar and his cousin, Omar Gonzalez - at a table by the poolside bar.

But these cousins are almost strangers, shy and formal, and their visit is prescribed by strict government rules. Gonzalez, 27, a quiet Cuban doctor, can see his cousin, who's known as Oz, in the hotel's public areas, but he isn't allowed upstairs to Oz's room. He doesn't seem resentful; this is simply the way things are. In Cuba, you learn to live within your limits.

It's different for Oz, 44, a Brookline resident and human resources specialist who once owned a Cuban restaurant, Mucho Gusto, in the Back Bay. He grew up in America, with an American sense that limits don't exist. He is disabled - he has only one hand - but never thought that should impede him. He isn't wealthy, but he has access to what, by Cuban standards, is incredible largesse.

So now he wants to use that largesse to donate medical supplies to Cuban hospitals and braille books to Cuban libraries. But as he travels around the island, he keeps thinking of more. He wants to give out gifts, to order cans of paint. He wants to paint Gonzalez's hospital. He wants to paint everything. ''I would like a brigade of paint to come to this country,'' he says.

Goodness knows Cuba needs paint, and goodness knows there are Americans eager to provide it. Officially, the borders might be sealed by the embargo; in fact, a visit to Cuba is so commonplace, it feels trendy.

Museum delegations and student groups come on government-sanctioned trips to save the crumbling buildings, study the culture, examine the health-care system. American tourists slip in illegally by the thousands to gape at Cuba in a way that is both loving and condescending.

There is much to love about this poor, bright cousin of an island, close but distant, admiring of the United States but resentful. And Oz is, in some ways, another well-meaning American passing through. But there's something different about his brand of benevolence. He belongs to a bevy of minority groups - he is Latino, disabled, and gay, and sometimes jokes about the bounty of it. But he has never been a political, banner-waving type. His is an accidental activism, hard to squeeze into the structure of an official charity mission. With Oz, you quickly realize, everything is personal.

Much of what drives fate is accidental - something as basic as where you were born - and the fact that Oswald Mondejar was born in Jersey City, not Cuba, changed everything. That was 1958, and Oz was the second child of a Cuban-born couple who wouldn't stay together long. At first, doctors weren't sure how long Oz would last, either; his mother had taken thalidomide, a morning-sickness drug that causes birth defects. But Oz's disabilities weren't life-threatening: He has a right arm that ends without a hand, a left hand that is functional, but with short fingers and a small palm.

Family First

When he was a year old, Oz's mother took him and his sister to Cuba to visit relatives in her hometown, Fomento. After Fidel Castro's revolutionaries triumphed in 1959, the family might have been stuck there forever. But because Oz was born in the United States, the US Embassy claimed him. At 3, he was sent to Miami with his mother and sister.

He wouldn't return to Cuba for another 40 years. But in 2000, his friend Jarrett Barrios, a Cuban-American state representative from Cambridge, organized a charity trip to Cuba and invited Oz along.

''The first thing that came to mind was, `How am I going to break this news to my mother?''' Oz says. She thought of Cuba as a trap and feared for her son's safety. He had a different worry: that his vision of the island, patched together from old memories, wouldn't match reality. Seeing his old home would be ''almost like meeting my father for the first time,'' he says.

But he went, met his relatives in a hotel lobby, and realized he had made the right decision. The next summer, under a US provision that allows Americans to visit Cuban relatives, he came back with his grandmother, his sister, his mother, and his partner, John Verlinden.

In January, he's on the island again, with the same charity group - and a chance to build connections with a bigger family. As he sits at the poolside bar with his cousin, he marvels that Gonzalez's 2-year-old daughter ''recognizes me now. And she says my name. She says my name.''

Origins of an Activist

On this third visit, a lot of Cubans seem to remember Oz. A lounge singer squeals with glee when he appears at her piano. A woman behind a gift-shop counter cries out ''Oswaldo!'' when she sees him. He is a memorable presence, to be sure, impish and always moving, a hugger, joker, and goofy dancer who asks for your name and remembers it right away.

It stems, he would tell you, from Cuba; this is, after all, a country where aquaintances throw their arms around you and children are brought up to kiss the strangers in the room. And Oz's mother raised her son and daughter to be Cuban - speaking her language, hearing her stories, eating her food.

Oz also grew up learning how to live with a disability - when to be aware of it, when to ignore it. Doctors once fitted him with a prosthesis that ended with a hook. When he was 5, he pretended he had lost it. His disability never stopped him from riding a bike, driving a car, carrying groceries. It kept him only from joining the Reserve Officers Training Corps in college. He needed two hands, he was told, to shoot a gun.

Now Oz uses his left hand to shake strangers' hands in greeting. His right arm, at first, stays out of sight, tucked beneath a table or inside a pocket. But he talks with his hands, so when he's comfortable or off guard, both arms are everywhere.

Oz's unselfconsciousness might help explain his unusual path toward activism. He led a regular middle-class life, fell into a career in human resources, and was working in Worcester for an abrasives manufacturer when Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. He represented his company on Worcester's disabilities commission. A few years later, state officials asked him to join a state advisory board, the Governor's Commission on Employment of People With Disabilities. Five years ago, he became its cochairman.

But even though he's lobbied for job opportunities for the disabled, Oz has tended to treat his own disability as an afterthought. When a newspaper story once stated that he had been ''robbed of his hand,'' Oz and his friends had a giggle. So that's what happened to it.

A Man and His Island

Like his work on behalf of people with disabilities, Oz's first trip to Cuba, in 2000, wasn't long-planned. It began after Barrios, the state representative, visited a cousin who ran a rural library in Cuba. Cuba might have one of the world's highest literacy rates - more than 90 percent, according to United Nations statistics - but its libraries are filled with frayed, outdated books. So Barrios gathered a group of delegates and developed a book donation program, sponsored by Oxfam America. Oz went along and found himself fixating on the plight of Cubans with disabilities, who struggled to make do in a country with few curb cuts or wheelchair ramps.

He found that Cubans didn't have much, but they were resourceful - people like the middle-aged man who roamed the streets in a makeshift wheelchair, a contraption rigged from construction equipment and bicycle parts.

When he returned to Massachusetts, Oz helped organize the next year's trip, and he changed its mission to focus on disabilities. He also gave the group a name - ACCESO (an acronym for Americans and Cubans building Community through Exchanges, Support, and Outreach) - that spells out the Spanish word for ''access.'' He recruited graphic artists and environmental designers and collected medical supplies, Braille books, and a Braille printer. On its second trip, the group traveled to libraries, medical clinics, and hospitals, delivering supplies and meeting local leaders.

But Oz had another agenda: to help some people he'd met in his previous visits. He brought comfortable shoes for the chef in the jazz club who stands on her feet all day, and an umbrella for the woman in the art market who sits outside in the sun. For the lounge singer, he brought false eyelashes to make her feel more dramatic.

There was nothing systematic about his generosity; he tried to help whomever he happened to meet. But there was a principle, he says, behind the gifts themselves.

''If I can leave a tool for someone, to improve something that they're doing,'' he says, he will feel better. ''It's not going to fix the world.''

A Traveler's Gift

The trouble is, Oz wants to fix the world, in a sweet, haphazard way, person by person, gift by gift. But in a country where so many people need so much, it's hard to know where to begin. Wherever tourists gather in Cuba, beggars gather, too, asking for everything from painkillers to pens. If you can't even bring your cousin to your hotel room, how can you possibly help them all?

There is a bittersweetness, then, to many of Oz's reunions - particularly the one with Jorge Martinez, a professional baseball player in Cuba whom he befriended in a hotel lobby a year earlier. Martinez has an opportunity, but also a problem. His wife, Yanisia, was one of 20,000 Cubans who won an annual national lottery to emigrate to the United States. She wants to go with their son, Jorgecito, but they can't afford the $2,200 cost; the average Cuban makes only $9 per week. The Martinezes have no family in the States, so Yanisia suggested that Jorge call his new friend, Oz.

Now the family has traveled an hour and a half to meet Oz, who has taken up a collection and gathered about $200 from the American group - a good start, but nothing close to what they'll need. Still, the Martinezes are grateful, and Oz is hopeful. They sit at a breakfast table and talk.

Suddenly, Jorgecito, who has been fidgeting in his seat, notices Oz 's right arm. He stops, mid-squirm, and stares. ''What's that?'' he asks in Spanish.

His parents, embarrassed, try to shush him, but Oz is unfazed. I don't have a hand, he tells Jorgecito in Spanish. Nada. But it doesn't hurt. OK? He shrugs. Jorgecito, satisifed, goes back to squirming. But it could be he'll remember something about this day, this cheerful American who brushes off limits as if they mean nothing at all.

And that, too, might be a gift to Cuba.

This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 3/27/2002.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

Source: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/086/living/The_land_of_Oz+.shtml

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