Cupertino Rotarians visit Cuba, deliver much-needed medical supplies

Cupertino Rotarians visit Cuba, deliver much-needed medical supplies
By Matt Wilson
mwilson@community-newspapers.com
Posted: 06/12/2013 06:02:15 PM PDT

A delegation from the Rotary Club of Cupertino has returned from a place
most Americans have never set foot. A 14-member group of Rotarians and
friends of Rotary made a long-awaited trip to Cuba to deliver medical
supplies, including an electrocardiogram.

For three years, members of the Rotary Club of Cupertino had yearned to
step foot on Cuban soil and deliver medical supplies to hospitals
desperately in need. The humanitarian and cultural exchange trip in
mid-May was not easy to book.

Travel and commerce with the communist nation are notoriously difficult
due to an all-out embargo that dates back to 1962. It remains illegal
for most Americans to travel to the island.

Rotary's trip was originally scheduled for last fall, but was indirectly
halted due to the issue of licenses being given out for so-called
people-to-people educational trips to Cuba. The licenses are issued by
the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is part of the U.S. Treasury
and deals with economic and trade sanctions.

Rotary was working with an organization that has been arranging trips to
Cuba and other nations with sensitive ties to the United States,
according to said Teresa Erdman, a Cuban-born Rotarian who spearheaded
the trip and project.

Organizers suspected that the problem with the licenses might have been
an election year issue. In October, Rotary and Erdman told the Courier
that a trip could happen in April or May. Their estimate was correct.

"All the issues surrounding the problems we had back in October went
away, as expected, after the election," Erdman said.

As a Cuban-born American, Erdman can travel to the country with a
general license. She traveled to Cuba for the first time last year and
met with distant relatives.

Erdman's family left Cuba in 1961 during the middle-class flight from
the island. She was only 5 years old.

Cuban-born Naida Schumacher attended the trip with Rotary as well. It
was her first trip to the country since she and her family left when she
was a toddler.

"If they had parachuted me into Havana, I would have sworn I was in
Miami. It was very similar to Florida," she said. "The people are very
warm, even though they did not have much; the family unit, values and
closeness was amazing. It got to the point where they thought I had
grown up in Cuba because of my cultural background."

Along with being a difficult trip to book, the trip was not cheap. Each
attendee had to make a $500 minimum donation toward the $40,000 cause.

The trip was Jerra Rowland's first to Cuba; however, she has traveled to
numerous developing nations through Rotary, including Honduras, India
and Guatemala.

"It's the same, the living circumstances for all these places," she
said. "There's a small percentage that are very wealthy, and there's a
large group who spend most of their day just getting the essentials to
stay alive."

Rotarians remarked how happy, healthy and vibrant the residents on the
island seemed to be despite a landscape of crumbling infrastructure and
dated technology. The Cuban stereotype of roads lined with classic
American cars made up of random spare parts and pieces from various
makes and models were a common site.

"Those were 'hybrids,'" Rowland mused.

Project and trip planning began three years ago when several Rotarians,
including Erdman, met two Cuban pediatric heart surgeons. The doctors
came to California from Havana in March 2010 to visit the Lucile Packard
Children's Hospital at Stanford.

http://www.mercurynews.com/cupertino/ci_23447608/cupertino-rotarians-visit-cuba-deliver-much-needed-medical