@ - Sunday, Nov. 8, 1992 — North Shore News

Cuba 1961: The young man and the sea]

Be tion.

AS THE world was drifting toward nuclear war 30 years
ago, courtesy of the Cuban Missile Crisis, | was aboard a
Yugoslavian freighter named the Vares, heading straight

toward Havana.

I was 21. | was carrying a duf-
fel bag, a sleeping bag, and a por-
table Hermes typewriter.

Thad quit my job as a reporter
at the Winnipeg Tribune, escaped
from the embrace of my beautiful
but tormented fiance, and fled for
Europe, dreaming of becoming an
expatriate writer living in a
squalid tenement somewhere, hav-
ing affairs and drinking and”
smoking a lot, and learning about
Life.

Which is, of course, precisely
what happened.

Thinking about it three decades
later, from the vantage point of a
world in which the Soviet Union
no longer even exists, | realize
more than ever just how much of
a turning point in history those
couple of weeks in mid-October
1962 were.

I basically missed out on the
whole drama, by the way.

1 was physically closer to the
action on the high seas —- the
confrontation between the Ameri-
cans and the Soviets — than any
Canadian I have ever met, but I
was almost entirely out of com-
munication through most of it,
and didn't have a clue what was
going on beyond the next wave.

Having left Montreal on the
Vares on Oct. 10, I dida’t get to
read anything in English about
what had actually transpired
around Cuba until weeks later, in
Rome, when I stumbled across an
old issue of Time magazine with o
cover that said something to the
effect of: WORLD ALMOST
DESTROYED.

Ali L knew for sure during the
voyage was that for some
mysterious reason, we hadn’t
docked in Havana.

Sifting through a collection of
my own old manuscripts the other
day, I came across 108 pages of
breathless single-spaced prose
written cn board the Vares in the
midsi of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Almost entirely, my youthful
literary ramblings were about the
meaning of Life, and how | was

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Rorth Vancouver

984-4407

Bob
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STRICTLY PERSONAL

already too overburdened with
wisdom and experience and suf-
fering and cosmic insight.

Mainly, I wrote about the
splendor and power of the ocean.
This was my first deep-sea
voyage.

As luck would have it, we got
socked by an carly winter North
Atlantic storm the moment we
cleared the mouth of the St.
Lawrence. | was awe-struck.
Ecstatic. A young man and the
sea. Hey!

There is only one reference in
the entire manuscript to the nu-
clear apocalypse meanwhile un-
folding somewhere ahead of us:

“*At supper a broadcast came
over the radio in English -—‘-
Report To Europe’ — an Ameri-
can-slanted version of the latest
Cuban crisis.

“Twenty-five Soviet ships sail-
ing for Cuba, presumably with
more arms; Kennedy’s embargo
gone into effect with the navy
warning that Cuban waters might
be ‘dangerous.’ and that all ships
of all nations will be stopped,
boarded, and their cargoes in-
spected to make sure no azms get
into Cuba.

**Russia has declared it will not
permit its ships ta be boarded,

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64 He tipped me off that you could
get across the Atlantic on a Red

ship for a mere $99.99

and they will continue to move
toward Cuba.

“The Latin-American states
have agreed to back the United
States even to the point of war, if
necessary.

“The Cuban missile bases have
a range that covers most of North
and South America. {¢ looks like
another war shaping up, a crisis
more dangerous than Bérlin or
Laos because there can be at the
most only a week or so to negoti-
ate their way out of it.

“My first reaction was despair,
my second a2 desire to be part of
the battle, my third to turn my
back on it in disgust. Perhaps the
mutants will make a better job of
it than we will.

**My fourth reaction, a lust to
be able to stop it.

“If we prove ourselves in-
capable of growing past the in-
fancy of the nuclear age, then weil
and good, we deserve to become
extinct, just as the dinosaurs did
when they couldn’t cope with the
Ice Age, but every effort must be
made to survive. | would like to
make an effort.

“Perhaps, if { have time to
grasp that great Thought growing
in me, if thousands of others
could get their own great
Thoughts on saving the world out
of them, if we had time, we might
be able to do it.

“There was a subtle tension
around the supper table after the
broadcast. The fellow next to me,
Nick, a machine operator leaving
Canada in disgust with the Capi-
talist system, is a Communist. |
looked at him involuntarily in
terms of fighting him shortly.

**He probably lookeu <4 me the
same way. We discussed the crisis
with exaggerated casualness. But
he said the Capitalist system was

“no good’, and { agreed, but said
the Communist system was worse.

“*Then, tactfully, perhaps hop-
ing to enjoy a few precious mo-
ments and days of peace, we
dropped the subject. It flares up
too easily. But we could not drop
the creeping unconscious ten-
sion.””

After that broadcast, somebody
ordered the radio tuned only to
non-English channels.

I couldn’t fiad anything else out
from anybody on board. The
Vares, obviously, hung a hard left
to avoid the American blockade,
and headed straight for Europe,
scratching Havana as a destina-

Being of Yugoslavian registry,
the Vares was a Communist Bloc
ship.

I hadn't been able to book
passage on her directly because
travel agents, by law, were for-
bidder to do business with Com-
mie ships, but I'd known a guy
who was a travel agent, and he
tipped me off that you could get
across the Atlantic on a Red ship
for a mere $99. It wouldn’t be
luxury, but it would be cheaper
than any other way.

Little did f realize that the
Mounties would open a file on me
as a result of that trip. From that
point on, I was some kind of na-
tional security suspect.

The irony is, as the manuscript
shows, like a lot of people at that
time, I was driven by the Cuban
Missile Crisis to start thinking
about ways to avoid future nu-
clear confrontations, even if, in
my case, it was only my fourth
thought, not my first or second or
even third.

Baha’u llah

(1817 - 1892)

“The diversity of the human
family should be the cause
of love and harmony, as it
is in music where many
notes blend together in the
making of a perfect chord.”

Baha’i
Faith

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