They are a people without a country — more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees who were trapped between a nation that disowned them and another that wouldn’t take them.

For two decades they languished in United Nations refugee camps with nothing but bamboo huts covered by plastic tarps and meager rations, toiletries and other essentials. Then in 2007, the United States and other countries agreed to end their plight and take in the refugees. More than 22,000 have already immigrated, settling in cities across the country like Jacksonville, Fla.

And that is where two Flagler College roommates come in. For Sheila Acharya, it was a calling to help people from her homeland after her parents began doing whatever they could to help the refugees in Jacksonville. For Jessica Welch, president of Flagler’s Students in Free Enterprise team, it was a chance to develop a unique project around helping people.

They called the project “Suruwat” — Nepali for “creating new beginnings.”

“The first time you meet [the refugee families], you can’t help but want to help them,” Welch said. “It’s instantaneous.”

Welch says this venture isn’t a typical SIFE project.

“It’s the biggest challenge we’ve faced as a team because it’s not just teaching people how to run a business,” she said. “It’s teaching them everything. I mean, we taught them how to go grocery shopping. We taught them how to clean their house, which are not things that meet SIFE criteria. But until we do, we can’t teach them how to get a job.”

This is a heartstrings project, she says, and for her and Acharya, it has also become a passion.

The Life of a Refugee
The plight of the Bhutanese refugees is little known around the world — lost among much bigger and better-known ethnic cleansings and refugee crises, like Darfur and Sudan.

The U.S. agreed in 2007 to accept most of the Bhutanese refugees — about 60,000 in all — who were living in seven refugee camps on the eastern edge of Nepal. Bhutanese by birth, but ethnically Nepali, the refugees were victims of an ethnic cleansing when Bhutan expelled them and revoked their citizenship in the 1990s. Exiled, they crossed the border to Nepal, which also refused to take them.

“They fled to Nepal, but Nepal is a very poor country,” Welch said. “They didn’t have the infrastructure or the desire to support them.”

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, there are still more than 86,000 refugees in the Nepal camps, all of whom are expected to eventually be moved to new host countries where they will try to make a home.

Jacksonville is slated to receive 6,000 refugees, and about 300 are already living there. One of three charities helps setup the refugees, the oldest of which is a deaf and blind woman in her 80s and the youngest, infants. But the money they’re given doesn’t go far, and their housing is often substandard and in some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods. Many do not speak English, especially the older refugees, and the younger struggle to find jobs, especially in this down economy.

With not much more than the clothes on their backs, they come to the United States to start new lives from scratch.

“Sheila and I were lucky enough to be invited to go and pick up two families when they came in,” Welch said. “A family of four walked off the plane clutching these plastic bags that had all of their documentation and a duffel, which was an overnight bag by our standards. And that’s all the possessions that this family of four owned.

“It’s incredible,” she continued. “For Sheila and me, it’s not uncommon when we’re driving back, especially after that, to sit in the car and cry for hours because there’s just so much you want to do, but you don’t know how.”

Starting Over
In its first year working with the refugees, SIFE completed projects that helped the Bhutanese better understand how to succeed in the United States, like field trips to banks where they learned basic banking.

“There’s a fear of bank accounts because the money is no longer in your hands,” Welch said. “And so we have to explain the benefits and how it actually keeps their money safer.”

They took the refugees to grocery stores to teach them about the fundamentals of shopping, led workshops on English, and taught them other basics that most people take for granted.

The American culture is an alien world to the Bhutanese, and one that is very intimidating and overwhelming. And while Welch and Acharya find it an incredibly rewarding project, they also say it’s never easy.

“The hardest thing is you can’t do enough,” Welch said. “You have all these wonderful ideas, but it’s just a matter of implementing them and getting community support. You just don’t want to let them down, but it pushes you.”

The students experienced how tragic the situation can be in July when one of the refugees — 21-year-old Hari Adhikari — was shot and killed during a robbery. He’s someone both Welch and Acharya knew personally from working with the families.

“He was 21,” Welch said, her eyes growing heavy. “He was our age. He was the only one in his family who spoke English. The man who shot him got food stamps … that’s it. [Adhikari’s] family not only lost a member of their family, but also their sole financial support.”

Acharya said most people don’t understand much about the refugees — what they’ve been through in Nepal’s decrepit camps, how difficult it is to leave their homeland for a new country, and the challenges they face as they try to succeed here, especially in a slow economy.

“There are so many things that we see them struggling with,” she said.

Yet, for all the struggles and hurdles they face in their adopted country, Welch and Acharya say they see something much more positive: a chance for them to live out the American dream. Acharya said her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nepal, are prime examples of how that really can happen.

“When [the refugees] were living in Nepal, they had no opportunities at all,” Acharya said. “They were living in the camp, and they were educated, but they couldn’t do anything with it. And then they’re here now and they have these obstacles, but they always say the sky’s the limit. It’s hard for them at first, but my parents went through the same struggles, and I definitely think they can do well.”

Moving Forward
This year the SIFE team is planning on helping the refugees create videos for newcomers as orientations to this new country. That way the Bhutanese will learn from their own people in their own language tips on acclimating, as well as some of the ins and outs of coming to the United States.

“These individuals have incredible skills, but the job set in Nepal is very different than here,” Acharya said. “So it’s tweaking them a little bit so we can then create a business that we can sell their products.”

Acharya says she is excited about the opportunity because the refugees have so many skills and such a rich, vibrant culture.

“A lot of the adults can’t work because they don’t speak English and they just stay at home,” she said. “But many of them have skills like making jewelry, painting and different arts and crafts like that.”

For Acharya, who will graduate with Welch in the spring, it will be tough to let go of the project after it has become such an important part of her life.

“To see how strong they are after what they’ve been through and how optimistic they remain, it’s completely, I don’t want to say changed me, but I realize a deeper understanding of what people struggle with right here,” she said. “To see them improving every week … it’s really cool to see how much they’ve overcome.”

Osama bin Laden and Mohandas Gandhi are two names you wouldn’t expect to share the same cover of a book.

While the first is an international pariah whose acts of terrorism have brought fear, suffering, hatred and war, the second chose a path of absolute nonviolence as he waged his own “battles” to free India from British Imperial rule.

Both turned to religion to justify their actions, yet ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum. That is what troubles Flagler Assistant Professor of Religion James Rowell, and why he tried to make sense of it in his first book, “Gandhi and bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes.”

“On the one hand we have a person who believes that religion is nonviolence and must be nonviolence,” Rowell said. “That we must embrace the religious other whether he be Christian, Muslim, Jew or Hindu. On the other hand we have bin Laden saying we emphatically reject nonviolence and that we think that only violence will result in a solution for our problems.

We have two completely contrasting worlds out there. … These are two individuals both claiming to be religious. How can we assert that this phenomenon that we call ‘religion’ encompasses both of them? Can we say that?”

Rowell came to the idea for the book while at the University of Pittsburgh working on his doctoral dissertation, which was primarily about Gandhi and his nonviolent movement.

“I have a great love of Gandhi, nonviolence and his ideas, especially of inclusive tolerant religions — that there is a universal kind of calling to all faiths,” he said. “But right after I finished my dissertation, about 2002, we were of course dealing with 9/11 and the opposite extreme.”

He said it became harder to look at the idea of nonviolence, which also includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement, without taking into account bin Laden’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This prompted him to try and understand how two so-called religious figures could be so different.

“I was completely faced with this opposite figure,” Rowell said. “So not only as an American moved by this event, but also an academic feeling responsible to understand religion in the moment, I started studying bin Laden.”

Rowell later took his research and developed it into a class at Flagler before turning it into the book that was released in 2009 from University Press of America.

To him it’s a way to expose people to the significance of nonviolent movements led by the likes of Gandhi, King and even Islamic figures like Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

“Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a Muslim who believed passionately that the heart of Islam was nonviolence — that jihad is nonviolence,” he said. “That’s really a remarkable thing because he actually comes from the Pashtun tribal clan, which is the same clan that contributes to the Taliban.”

Sadly, Rowell said Ghaffar Khan’s memory has been eclipsed by a more violent alternative spouted by bin Laden, the Taliban and other religious extremists. But he felt it was important to include a chapter on Ghaffar Khan to show that throughout history there have been Muslims who were more closely aligned to the teachings of Gandhi and King.

And he hopes that more people will look to these leaders for inspiration, and that followers of bin Laden and Al Qaeda will begin to realize very little can be accomplished through violence.

“There’s no real coherent declaration to what bin Laden wants to do,” he said. “I think what’s substituted is a dark rage and a zealous religious hope that if we just create massive confusion as much as possible we will come to power.”

King and Gandhi, he said, both knew that once a movement took a violent path, it was almost impossible to bring it back. Rowell writes “Rebellion by nonviolence was more permanent, more lasting in Gandhi’s view. What was gained by the sword could easily be taken back by the sword, but what was established on principles of truth and justice might be held and prized forever.”

Which is why he is hopeful that some day a new Islamic champion of nonviolence will emerge as a “kind of counterbalance to the current extremism.”

“It’s very important that we try to recapture nonviolence,” he said, noting that today Gandhi and King are more relevant than ever. In fact, when President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December of 2009, he said that the two leaders must remain guiding forces in the world, even while countries like the United States find themselves dealing with extremists like bin Laden through force.

Rowell, who said his class on bin Laden and Gandhi is well-received by students, would like to see more classes on world religion taught — not to preach a certain value or belief, but to help students better understand how religion continues to play such a critical role in world history, politics and even economics.

Rowell, who came to Flagler in 2006, also teaches “Religions of the World,” “Religion from Tibet to India,” and a class he calls “God, Ape and Man.”

Those classes touch on topics often touchy and controversial. “God, Ape and Man,” for instance, focuses on the debate between evolution and religion — primarily whether they are compatible. “I like to think of them as compatible,” he said.

On the whole, Rowell said it is a thrill to be able to teach to students about his passions.

Excerpts from “Gandhi and Bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes”

ON GANDHI’S EARLY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH:
What made Gandhi a “Great Soul”? At the time of his life there were approximately 300 million Indians under British Imperial rule. Why did he stand out from the rest? Why do we remember Mohandas Gandhi as the Mahatma? It is a title he was reluctant to accept, to be sure, as he always spoke freely and openly about his own faults, yet he was the “Great Soul,” or “Mahatma,” the pioneer of the non-violent technique in politics during a very violent century. … How was it that this lone, frail Hindu, scarcely five and a half feet tall and not much over a hundred pounds, could bring such a monumental and heart-felt impact upon a heartless world?

ON BIN LADEN AND THE ROOTS OF JIHADISM:
The comparison of Gandhi with bin Laden is a striking mix of similarity and stark contrasts, a myriad of puzzling questions about our human nature, our politics, and our concept and use of religion. Why is it some have been captivated by the forces of
religious civil disobedience, while others are prepossessed by a dark religious rage? The answer cannot be as simple as that we are dealing with a different religion. In short, we cannot posit that Christianity and Hinduism are conducive to non-violence, and that Islam is not, because counterexamples are easily furnished to disprove this.

“I have a lot of respect for journalists in Latin America,” he said. “They deal with challenges that a lot of Americans never see in the United States. Their lives are threatened. They’re sometimes shot, killed and tortured.”

Which is why Eaton felt it was so important to help lead a workshop on investigative journalism this past September. Investigative Reporters & Editors, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving the quality of investigative journalism, sponsored the workshop at the Universidad San Francisco Xavier in Sucre, Bolivia.

About 80 journalists and journalism students — who came from TV, radio, and newspapers — participated in the two-and-a-half-day workshop.

Eaton said the workshop was designed to help journalists learn many of the investigative reporting techniques that go on in other countries, including finding documents, using the Internet for information and interviewing techniques.

“Developing countries are in need of investigative reporting to help strengthen their democracies,” he said. “That kind of reporting is really needed to keep the politicians honest and to try and tell the taxpayers what’s going on.

“Bolivia is a country where this is a lot of political and economic turmoil. It’s one of the poorest countries in Latin America. … To me it’s a fertile ground for investigative journalism.”

Eaton is a former correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle who has reported extensively from Mexico and Latin America. He served as the Havana bureau chief from 2000 to 2005 for the Morning News.

Want to know what it’s like to testify before Congress? Alumnus John Krieger, ‘02, will tell you in one word: terrifying.

“They make the chair that you sit in two times too low so you feel like a kid at the adult table,” he said. “The senators all sit extremely high up. It’s a very daunting experience. It’s something that I’m extremely proud of, but it was just so scary.”

A staff attorney for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington, D.C., Krieger was asked in 2008 to speak as an expert witness before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The bill his testimony supported came in the wake of the Minnesota I-35 bridge collapse that killed several motorists and prompted organizations like Krieger’s to call for federal transportation spending to prioritize failing infrastructure.

“The bridge collapse in Minnesota should serve as a wake-up call,” Krieger said at the hearing. “We urge this committee to embrace an approach to highway spending that prioritizes maintenance and repair of our existing roadways and bridges. Our country can no longer afford the cost of inaction and misplaced priorities as our bridges continue to age and deteriorate.”

Looking back on it, he still calls giving his testimony “the scariest proposition.”

“I mean, the thought of it. The hearing was covered on C-SPAN. It’s kind of a sense like you dread it going in, but when you leave you can’t wait for the opportunity to do it again.”

His seat at the table before a Senate committee has been just one of a number of highlights in Krieger’s short, but already impressive career — a career that won him the Flagler College Young Alumni Award this past spring. He’s been quoted by The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and National Public Radio, and is a featured contributor to the National Journal’s expert blog on federal transportation policy.

He’s lobbied congressman on a number of tax and budget issues, mainly related to transportation, and even worked with former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry on a bill that is now law.

Not Some Ordinary Corporate Lobbyist
These days lobbyist is a dirty word, but Krieger draws a big distinction between what he does and what other lobbyists who represent big industry and major corporations do.

“We work on health care, higher education, toxic-free communities,” he said. “A lot of those places where the public interest comes into direct conflict with big special interests and the places where the public doesn’t have a voice.

“We’re going in representing the public and without any ties to large corporations or government interests. Our organization is mostly funded by small donors — by hundreds of thousands of people who contribute to our organization so we will go and talk to members of congress, local officials and state officials to look out for the public benefit.”

Krieger’s area of expertise is in tax and budget policy including government contracting, public transportation and infrastructure spending. It’s a big area to cover, and one rife with fraud and waste, especially with so many billions of dollars
being doled out for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued rebuilding of Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and now federal stimulus spending on all manner of projects.

“I look at where our taxpayer dollars go to try and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” he said. “Two areas where that’s needed most are transportation funding, things like the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ and other large-scale, earmark projects that don’t benefit a lot of people. It’s kind of a big chunk to bite off.”

Krieger said his organization started zeroing in on transportation funding after the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis that killed 13 people when it tumbled into the Mississippi River.

“We’re trying to make sure that those things are getting attention before the more developer-driven projects do,” he said. “These are large sums of money and it’s sometimes hard to keep the public’s interests in mind.”

Going After Offshore Tax Havens
One of Krieger’s proudest accomplishments was working with Sen. Kerry’s staff to write a bill that helped close offshore tax havens for corporations receiving federal contracts.

“He (Kerry) took to it and we started writing a bill,” Krieger said. “We went over to Rahm Emanuel on the House of Representatives side and started working on a bill on that side.”

To get attention for the issue, Krieger worked to build major media coverage. “I knew this was outrageous, so every week for six weeks I tried to get a major story in the national media about a different contractor who set up these offshore tax havens,” he said. “One week it was USA Today. And then one week it was the Wall Street Journal, and then it was CNN-Money. So you just kept seeing it.”

The bill passed through both houses of Congress and was signed into law in 2008 by President George W. Bush. Called the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act, the closing of the tax loophole helped pay for permanent tax relief for
military families.

“By reining in tax-dodging private contractors who use gimmicks to avoid their basic responsibilities, this Congress chose good governance and accountability over cronyism and favoritism,” Krieger said at the time. “We applaud Congress for having the good sense to pay for this reward for military families by closing sham tax havens for private defense contractors.”

What does it feel like to see so much hard work payoff?

“It’s absolutely exhilarating,” he said, “and it reaffirms the belief that the government is actually built to respond to the people — that we are the boss of our Congress. It’s something we get pretty cynical about and forget about, but it really is true. It makes me think this is the way it should be.”

Navigating the World of D.C. Politics
Krieger calls D.C. a daunting and intimidating place, filled with big egos and crawling with high-powered lobbyists whose only interests are for the corporations who pay them. But he said working on behalf of the public makes dealing with Washington actually rewarding.

“There are obviously big problems when we look domestically, when we look at our health care system, the state of our education system,” he said. “There are just these kinds of enormous problems, but on top of that, this is the time when people are extremely optimistic and they’re tuned to what’s going on in government.”

Audio Slideshow: Making Math Fun

It began simply enough: a collection of songs about math meant to help school kids learn their multiplication tables. But 2000 alumna Kat Vellos never expected the funky little album — with its hip-hop beats put to math-infused tunes and her own soulful voice — would end up in regular rotation on Sirius XM Satellite Radio.

Called “Musiplication,” the independent album released in 2008 weaves stories about canoeing pandas and superheroes with everyday multiplication.

And it has caught on. The music found a following of kids, parents and educators, and one of the songs — “5 on 5” — even topped Sirius XM’s Kids Place Live’s weekly countdown, sharing time with will.i.am’s track from the movie “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.”

“I just thought it was going to be a small thing and I could give it to the school where I was volunteering,” Vellos explained. “I had no idea that within three months of being released it would be on Sirius XM.”

How does a former graphic designer and spoken-word poet end up writing and recording a CD about, of all things, math?

It happened more by chance than anything — a result of trying to find a way to help kids better understand a subject Vellos herself has always struggled with. In 2005, she joined AmeriCorps, an organization that is part of the federal government’s Corporation for National and Community Service, which encourages service and volunteering. She moved to Seattle to help tutor elementary students in reading and, to her dismay, math.

“When I was a kid, and all the way through college, I struggled with math. It wasn’t my favorite at all,” she said. “That was my anxiety area as a kid.

“They just put me where I was needed most. I ended up finding, actually, that I was great at teaching math … I’m not a typical math brain, so I could explain it to kids in a way that they could understand.”

Vellos found that typical memorization of multiplication tables didn’t work for a lot of kids.

“A couple girls had a particularly hard time with it,” she recalled. “Yet, they knew the words to every Beyoncé song on the radio. I was like, ‘You know, there ought to be some way for them to learn their times tables through music.’ ”

When she couldn’t find any material or music about math that kids could relate to, she decided to make her own.

“Kids learn through so many different ways. They learn through stories and they learn through songs. … If you make it interesting, if you put in stories, if you put in imagination, if you put in creativity and music, it’s going to stick.”

The songs that ended up on “Musiplication” began as experiments in those tutoring sessions. Vellos said it was a natural fit, blending the world of spoken-word poetry that she loved so much with music and times tables. So she hatched the idea of taking the songs and turning them into a CD.

That’s where Jacksonville DJ and music producer Britt Traynham, better known as Batsauce, came in. The close friends had always talked about recording her poetry to his music.

It took about a year from beginning to end, and while she was thrilled with how it turned out, she never expected such a reception – or that after mailing a copy of it to an on-air personality at Sirius XM’s kids station, it would end up in regular rotation.

“It was really cool and unexpected,” she said. “All I did was put it out there.”

Now Vellos hears from parents and teachers all over the world. Her songs have been played on the radio in London, teachers have begun using the CD in classes, and she gets e-mail from as far away as Israel.

Where do the themes for her songs come from?

“Really, my mind is filled with cartoons,” she said with a laugh. “I had a lot of fun researching numbers when I sat down to do it. … I knew I wanted each number song to have its own personality or its own little story.”

In her songs, Vellos looked for ways to incorporate little stories about food, superheroes and animals around numbers and multiplication tables.

“I love language,” she said. “I love words. To me it’s kind of magical to be able to string together the syllables of the English language to create an experience for the person who hears it or reads it. It invigorates you and makes your mind come alive.”

From there, Vellos worked with Traynham to infuse hip-hop beats and an old school flavor. They give the album a unique and catchy sound that comes across as anything but kids’ music.

She said hears from a lot of parents who tell her not only is it helping their kids with math, but that the CD is also something they enjoy.

While she doesn’t foresee any new recordings in the near future, Vellos is now working on a “Musiplication” curriculum that she envisions as a learning workbook to go along with the CD.

Communication professor talks about his days as a journalist in Havana, Cuba, meeting Fidel Castro and his thoughts on the future of the communist island

Slideshow: Cuba in Pictures

There’s a marker on the tip of Key West that proclaims Cuba a mere 90 miles south of American soil. As tourists stare out across the water trying to catch a glimpse of the communist nation, it seems as if the gulf between these two nations is bridgeable and small.

But distances can be misleading, as communication professor Tracey Eaton will tell you, and there is much more between the two countries than just water and miles.

An island he once called “strange and special, stirring and sad,” Cuba is saddled by years of communist rule and economic hardship, yet buoyed by an intense spirit, a strong sense of culture and above all, an electrifying zest for life.

Eaton will tell you there’s much more to Cuba once you scrape below the surface and get to know its politics, its people and its culture, all of which will also leave you scratching your head.

And Cuba is attracting renewed interest now that long-time ruler Fidel Castro — who Cubans often signified by stroking an imaginary beard with their hand — has stepped down and the political winds of American presidential politics are stirring. With Florida and its huge concentration of Cuban-Americans likely to figure prominently next November, presidential candidates have already begun laying out what their policies will be on Cuba.

That gives Eaton, who was one of the few — and first — American journalists to report regularly from Cuba, a unique perspective on the communist country’s future.

“I think the Cuban government is stronger than a lot of people who haven’t lived
there think,” he said. “It has controlled so many aspects of everyday Cuban lives. The demise of [Fidel] Castro won’t really mean the demise of the government, which is set up to sustain itself politically.”

It was in 2000 that Eaton set up shop in Havana Vieja as a correspondent and bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News — one of only five American news organizations that the Cuban government had permitted to report from its soil.

“This was no ordinary island,” Eaton wrote in a farewell piece after The Morning News re-assigned him after almost five years, and some 28 reporting trips before that.

It’s a country that is a mystery to most Americans — a land best known for its larger-than-life revolutionary leader, and made famous by Hemingway, memories of the heyday ’50s, pungent cigars as thick as sausages and the captivating sounds of its folk music and salsa.

“Cuba has seemed like it has been in a time capsule,” Eaton said in a recent interview, talking about everything from the 1950s American autos that still prowl the streets to its colonial architecture. “I think now it really is changing. Just how much, we’ll see.”

Castro ruled the communist nation since leading a rag-tag band of revolutionaries to power in 1959. But with his health failing, the 81-year-old stepped down as president in February and handed the reigns of the tight-fisted government (and its sputtering economy) to his younger brother, Raul.

Raul has led Cuba’s military for the past 50 years and is seen by some to be more willing to embrace change for the island. Even so, Cuba continues to struggle years after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had helped subsidize its economy. Others doubt that the younger Castro will make any significant changes at all, especially on critical issues like bringing about democracy, improving human rights, allowing capitalism to thrive, or loosening the clamp-down on opposition leaders and Cuban journalists.

“I think it’s real difficult to predict what will happen in Cuba in the future,” Eaton said. “Raul is much more pragmatic, and not as much an ideologue as his brother. He has to know that some of the things he’s doing will make people [in Cuba] happier.”

And he has loosened some restrictions on Cubans, allowing them to own cell phones and stay in expensive hotels once reserved for foreigners, if they can afford them. But so far there has been nothing more substantial.

For those reasons, Eaton doesn’t subscribe to the belief that once the Castro regime is gone, the communist government will crumble and democracy will suddenly flourish.

“I don’t necessarily see people rising up [because Castro is gone],” he said. “A lot of things are business as usual. There’s no revolt in the streets. Why would things be so different when he dies?”

Part of the issue, he says, is that the Cuban revolution that Castro launched and sustained for almost five decades is not so much a Socialist or Marxist revolution, but instead a nationalist revolution.

“It’s about being independent and free from foreign rule,” he said, which is part of why many Cubans, even living under harsh economic conditions and numerous state controls, still feel a bond with the revolution, and Castro himself.

Eaton said Fidel’s grip on the nation for half a century inspired great loyalty among Cubans, as well as great fear.

“There’s a whole cult of personality surrounding Fidel,” Eaton said. He remembers the first time he
got a chance to meet the bearded revolutionary: at a reception for American businessmen in Havana.

“Just to watch him work the room, he’s a master politician,” Eaton said. “When he’s talking to you, he makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room, and he’s very charismatic.”

Eaton left the journalism world in the fall of 2007 to join Flagler’s Communication Department and teach a future generation of journalists the art of newsgathering.

“I miss the action, and I miss kind of being at the center of things,” he said about leaving a career that spanned 24 years. “But I’m really enjoying it here.”

The “center of things” was a journalist’s cornucopia of assignments ranging from Cuba to assignments in Mexico, Haiti, the Middle East and even Afghanistan after U.S. forces struck at the Taliban following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Before Flagler, he worked for The Houston Chronicle, where he had been the Mexico/border editor and later the metro editor. He became somewhat of a specialist investigating Mexican drug cartels, organized crime and political corruption.

Fluent in Spanish, he had always wanted to cover Latin America, and began his career working for the The Miami Herald and The Orange County Register before moving to The Morning News.

“My goal was to be a foreign correspondent,” he said. The Dallas paper sent him to their Mexico City bureau in the early 1990s, just as Mexico started making international headlines, all beginning with the Zapatista uprising.

But it was Cuba — a land that few Americans are allowed to visit thanks to a U.S. travel ban — that fascinated him the most. Eaton first journeyed there in 1994 on assignment for The Morning News, which was trying to broaden its coverage of Latin America.

“We were really trying to raise the profile of the newspaper and take the place of The Miami Herald in Latin America,” he said.

After seven “very difficult” years of trying to open a bureau in Cuba, Eaton moved there permanently in 2000 to get a taste of the troubles a foreign journalist can have while trying to report on a media-adverse communist government. Cuban media is all state-controlled and primarily government propaganda — a far cry from the kind of journalism Eaton practiced.

“We wrote about economic and social problems in Cuba, which were often scathing and hard-hitting,” Eaton said. “That didn’t sit well with the Cuban government. But we couldn’t compromise and write fluff. We wanted to write what we felt was the truth [about Cuba].”

While it didn’t sit well, Eaton wrote it anyway, even if it meant occasional calls to visit the Foreign Ministry where a Cuban official would explain to him why a story was unfair or incorrect. But he said he was never censored or pressured to write pro-Cuba stories, and his travel was never limited. Cuban journalists don’t have it so well, he noted. In 2003, he wrote about how the government rounded up more than a dozen journalists and sent them off
to prison.

Eaton’s time in Cuba left him somewhat conflicted about the nation — on the one hand trying to understand its repressive and dictatorial grasp on the people, and on the other marveling at the Cuban people’s resourcefulness, pride, generosity and resilience.

There’s a much greater sense of community there — of culture and of unity — than you find in many other countries, he said. His wife is Cuban, and that has also given him greater insight into the island.

“People are poor in Cuba, but everyone is poor. You don’t have the rich exploiting the poor,” he said.

It would be great if you could take what’s good about capitalism and what’s good about their system and combine them.”

He recognizes that’s probably wishful thinking, and that change will come to Cuba — in many ways it has already started. The bigger question in his mind is in what form it will come, and how much it will change a “strange and special” island that has become so close to him.