30 years of Communism, via spokes
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Thirty years ago Nick – more about him in future posts – and I entered China for the first time. We were on bicycles, which caused much excitement and worry among friends, families and my editors. An adventure! 10 weeks in a mysterious land with only 10-speed bicycles, panniers and maps we couldn’t really read. On the spot, nothing could have been more mundane, for everyone was on bikes, albeit without gears, and cycling is really about rolling from point A, where you are now, to point B, somewhere down the road, one spin of the wheels at a time.
So this week is an odd anniversary at our house, coming as it does, just post-launch of our son’s new high tech product in China, our 29th wedding anniversary and both children’s birthdays. We considered returning to China on bicycles to commemorate going through the Bamboo Curtain in 1985, but we’ve been back to China several times, I’ve written a small e-book about it, and riding a bike there has less appeal today than in the past because cars have replaced bicycles. Our other adult child is handicapped and we don’t like to leave her without family for too long; a bike trip across China requires time.
Instead, we are cycling around Cuba, one of the 5 last strongholds of communism, according to Public Radio International. It’s smaller than China although its population is a bit bigger than Switzerland’s, the modern US invasion hasn’t yet begun and it’s time to get back on our bikes. Thirty years is a good physical cycle, from the bloom of youth to the bloom of incipient old age.
We recently re-read and then watched Che Guevara’s “Motorcycle Diaries”, which Wikipedia describes as “a classic coming-of-age story”, diaries kept of a voyage taken the year after we were born. Che would have been a bit younger than my mother-in-law, had he lived. Maybe we’re trying to tie up loose threads of our own political, intellectual, emotional lives, coming back to central themes of rebellion and revolution versus the status quo and stability, poverty versus wealth, market economies and capitalism and communism, adventure versus staying put. Fidel Castro seems to have softened a bit and I wonder how Che would view his own diaries today.
Or maybe we’re just keen to get back on our bikes.
Several things have changed, starting with communism and the countries the West sees as the Bad Guys. Certainly Cuba has changed as it prepares to embrace American tourists and business. We have also changed – on the one hand we have the physical damage of 30 years of life, on the other, the wisdom we’ve gained. The goal is to ride a bike 75 km every day (close to 50 miles) for a couple of weeks; the tradeoff we like to console ourselves with suddenly won’t count for much.
My bicycle diaries here run parallel to a series of postcards written in minuscule handwriting in 1985, my best means of ensuring I would have notes on my trip in China, paranoia oblige. I sent them to USA Today, my parents and a close friend because we’d been told the post office in China was reliable, quick and no one bothered to try reading postcards. Time, unlike USA Today, was available in China, so my bureau chief and I agreed it was best not to write to him; I was working for the Paris bureau of the magazine.
The only place to begin a bike trip is with the bike, so I invite you to join me for the first daunting step, getting bike legs again.
Cuba comes next week. In between I expect I’ll be reflecting a bit on the trip: bicycles give you time to do that.
The series, Ellen’s bicycle diaries