Definitely, I was not ready for Cuba.

It seems that getting a Cuban journalist’s visa is a great deal more complicated than I had been led to believe. My lack of attention to this particular detail led to a brusque reception by disbelieving bureaucrats, a long cold night in Jose Martí International Airport, and the first flight back to Cuba.

It was a costly, embarrassing and extremely painful lesson, but here’s what I learned. I’m sharing the story in the hopes that you will learn from my mistakes.

Outskirts of Havana from the airplane window

(1) Never believe your travel agent when she tells you she’ll handle the visa for you. Even when your agent works for one of a handful of companies licensed to take U.S. citizens to Cuba, and she knows you’re a journalist, and you’ve already received a specific journalist license from the U.S. Government, faxed to her at her request, and when she’s told you that you can just pick it up at the counter along with your ticket. Don’t believe her to be an expert in these matters. She is not.

In this case, she was a Brazilian native recently hired by the company – a nice lady who feels very badly about what happened, but in no way knowledgeable about Cuban journalist visas, which are notoriously hard to procure.

(2) Don’t assume the official-looking Spanish-language documents in your packet are what you think they are. Had I inspected the documents I was given instead of rushing off to the gate post-haste I would have noticed that there was no visa; only a swine flu screening document, an embarkation form and a customs form. At that point I might have had some options. But I didn’t notice this until I was in Havana, at which point my options were extremely limited.

(3) Don’t rely on the guidebook, which devotes many pages to explaining how to get U.S. permission to travel to Cuba, but only a couple of paragraphs to the Cuban journalist visa – one of them stating that if you come in on a tourism visa, you can request a status change and get a journalist visa in about a week. This guide is not written for journalists and while that may or may not be true, it’s no indication of the ease or difficulty in getting a journalist visa to enter the country in advance.

(4) Don’t do international travel – particularly to a country that has been estranged with your own for several decades – on two hours’ sleep.

(5) Blogging, tweeting, facebooking and texting family and friends are optional. Mindful attention to logistics is not.

Bruno Henríquez, a solar energy expert and science fiction author I was scheduled to meet, consoled me via e-mail when he received my bad news.

“Here in Cuba, we have a saying: ‘Lo que sucede, conviene.’”

Roughly translated: What happens is the best thing.

It’s a tough one to swallow at the moment, but it comforts me to think that in the long run, Bruno’s wise words will be made manifest.

Back home in Houston, I’m investigating my options. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, it’s time to turn this fiasco into the best thing possible.

And while I will embrace the cultural magic of this legendary land, my journey goes beyond culture to something more essential, something universal and urgent.


Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Salopek recently articulated my thinking better than I could have. Salopek won the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award last month from Colby College, and like a modern-day Horace Greeley, he uttered some sage words of advice to young journalists in his acceptance speech.

“I would advise any ambitious young reporter today not to head to Washington or to London to launch a career but to light out for the South, because that’s where the global narrative is rapidly taking shape,” he said.

Salopek, for those who may not know, is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who was captured and held captive in Sudan for a month while reporting a National Geographic cover story on Africa’s Sahel region. One can only hope that his words will inspire a fraction of the shift in the national zeitgeist reflected in the famous 1800s phrase attributed to Greeley, “Go West, young man.”

I am no longer a young reporter, but lighting out for the South is exactly what I am preparing to do. Over the course of the next year, I will be traveling through Latin America, reporting on the important and innovative work of world-changers at the grassroots. Here is where the passion and the color and the sazón of the Latino people finds its nexus with what’s been called the most urgent issue of our time: remaking society in a way that will avert an ecological catastrophe.

Citizens of the Global South have too often been portrayed as victims, villains and bit characters in the global narrative playing out around us. We see the images of the distressed and dismayed, buffeted by yet another catastrophe. We hear about the druglords and narcotraffickers, the swine flu outbreaks and the hordes of undocumented immigrants besieging our borders.

What I have seen in my travels in the Global South is a sharp contrast. Yes, there is suffering, but as Salopek also noted, there is great joy. He describes Africa, with all its entrenched poverty, as one of the happiest places he’s been. Paradoxical, yes; but paradox is the great crucible of the soul, and therein lies the story I am about to tell.
My Global South is peopled with heroes and heroines, men and women who face down their fears and the formidable challenges that stand in their way to produce meaningful change. It’s also peopled with ordinary folks who are tackling the same challenges we are, but from a different angle.

My Global South is working quietly to create a model for a future that is ultimately more sustainable than the one that we here in the overdeveloped world have created, and we have barely noticed.

In the year ahead, as humanity wrestles with what may be the greatest challenge of our times – re-creating a society and a sustainable way of life that is consistent with long-term planetary survival – I will be giving voice to some of these unsung world-changers in the pages of The Esperanza Project, a green bilingual (and ultimately, multilingual) news portal for the Americas.

Esperanza is the Spanish word for hope – a commodity seemingly in short supply these days. With the rapidly approaching Copenhagen conference, climate leadership is hard to find – unless one looks south, where Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest carbon producer, is pledging to cut emissions by a third; Cuba, which has turned crisis to opportunity with one of the hemisphere’s most sustainable infrastructures; and mega-metropolises like Mexico City and Bogotá, with green initiatives that go far beyond what most U.S. cities have attempted.

I’ve already begun the reporting on this project with an October trip to Mexico, where young professionals in Guadalajara are putting their bodies on the line for a more sustainable city, and in Mexico City where a sprawling, 30,000-person complex is making the conversion to an ecovillage.

In Cuba, I’ll witness the creative responses to the crisis that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of its main source of petroleum. The country was forced to rapidly rethink its agricultural, energy, transportation and health care systems with a fraction of its previous oil supply, and in a process borne of necessity, created some of the world’s most sustainable cities.

And in January, after packing up my belongings into a storage locker and saying goodbye to my family, I’ll be hitting the road on a yearlong southward journey seeking and training collaborators for a new media project.
On this news network, Latin Americans are the protagonists of their own narrative, and one that we here in the North would do well to follow, as there is much to be learned from them. We’ll be using all the tools of the digital age to tell their stories: video, photography, the new social media and, yes, the good old-fashioned written word.

Jorge Luis Sierra, an award-winning investigative journalist from Mexico City and a pioneer in online media himself, has signed on as The Esperanza Project’s Spanish-language editor, giving the project greater depth and an exciting edge. Patricia Martinez, an environmental journalist from Guadalajara, Alejandro Manrique, an investigative journalist from Colombia, and Tami Brunk, an environmental writer based in New Mexico, are also among our collaborators.

We are looking for contributors from all over, and you can be one of them. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed or receive updates in your e-mail. You can post relevant stories in the newsfeed, contribute to the discussion in the comment fields or even write stories of your own, if you feel so inspired.

I hope you will join the hemispheric conversation that is about to begin at www.TheEsperanzaProject.org. Click around the site, share your thoughts, forward it to your friends. This is how a new online media project is born, and you can be a part of it.

Paul Salopek’s inspiring speech, delivered last month upon receipt of the Elijah Lovejoy Award, is available in podcast here.

I awoke to the news this morning that one of Latin America’s most beloved voices, Silvio Rodriguez, was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department as he prepared to attend a celebration of folk music legend Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday gala.

Just when I thought we were about to put the nonsense behind us and accept Cuba into the brotherhood of American nations, this comes as a bit of a slap in the face. Generations of Latin Americans from Argentina to Mexico have grown up with Silvio’s classics, gentle and exquisitely crafted melodies like “Unicornio” and “Ojala,” the mysterious “Quien Fuera,” and passionate calls for self-determination and justice like “Cancion Urgente Para Nicaragua.” Indeed, one of his concerts in Chile drew more than 90,000. Take that, Rolling Stones.

Some of my favorite memories of times spent with my Latin American friends in Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Chile were times spent sharing the songs of Silvio, songs that bonded us at the heart. Beautiful songs that gave birth to a new genre, la Nueva Trova. I took a few moments today to reminisce, calling up on YouTube classics like La Maza and Sueño con Serpientes and Cancion del Elegido. I also pulled his only US-produced CD off the shelf, a compilation of his most famous works called Canciones Urgentes, produced by David Byrne of the Talking Heads.

I’m reminded of President Obama’s response to the criticism leveled at him by Newt Gingrich for having the audacity to shake the hand of another critic of US foreign policy, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Obama’s response: “It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.”

I think it goes without saying that Silvio’s presence at the 90th birthday of his US counterpart is unlikely to endanger the strategic interests of our country.

It’s ironic, too, that I awoke today to the news that Michael Savage, one of the great purveyors of hate in our times, was banned by Great Britain because of his propensity to incite violence and hatred against minorities and the poor.

Now, I’m not in favor of banning anyone because of their ideas. But if we’re going to do that, wouldn’t it make sense to choose people who present an actual danger to the peace and security of our country?

I’m dedicating this blog, and this day in my life, to the work of a musical master who has used his considerable talents to tirelessly promote social justice. I’ve created my own Silvio Rodriguez channel on Pandora and I invite you to do the same. You can also find dozens of his performances on YouTube. Meanwhile, here’s hoping we can one day see him face to face — on this side of the water.