With the twinning with Kingston and Cienfuegos, we set up a relationship with the labour council and the labour movement and are encouraging this with other labour councils across Ontario. We meet with labour unions. In 2004 I met with the local labour council president. And because I'm a steelworker working in an aluminum plant in Kingston, I also met with the steelworker president of the local plant down there and a number of other workers. At that time we were on a tour for three days with the union on our bus. We had a bus and toured all over. We sat at night and talked. We had our own interpreters with us, people from the labour movement who could speak Spanish. We had a lot of discussions at night, and in the daytime I talked to workers wherever I could find them, especially about the special period, because that is the debate I like raising with them, whether they think they are still in it or out of it and how they felt about it.
There is a resilience, a real sense of pride from everyone I talked to about being able to endure throughout the embargo with very little. I saw an old car one time and it was running like a top. The fellow showed it to me and I looked at the carburetor and it looked like the worst contraption you could ever see. That old '48 or '49 car was running perfectly. They are very ingenious. They have very little to work with, but they make the most of it.
A lot of the labour leaders in Cuba, unlike myself or a lot of others, are highly educated, a lot more educated than most people in Canada. They have a very good education system, a very good health care system.
On the last trip down, we actually talked to some Venezuelan doctors at the provincial hospital in Cienfuegos and watched a live cataract surgery and talked afterwards to the doctors who were doing the surgery. That is part of their need to get around the issue of the embargo by getting oil from South America.