So what about loyalty.  What kind of measure is loyalty for a person or a relationship?   I know lots of people who use loyalty as a measuring stick.  They want assurance up front about how generous and giving a person is going to be in return.  Usually they make the first offering of kindness or gesture of good will, testing to see just how the other person is going to respond- to see if they are going to reciprocate in a meaningful way.  I’ve known lots of people like that, some I called friends for to many years.  You see loyalty by its self doesn’t mean honesty or faithfulness or dignity or integrity or genuine care and concern.  I can be loyal to my job but still lie or steal from the company.  I can be loyal to a friend but still be disrespectful and careless behind their back.  I can be loyal to my family and still fail to fulfill my role as a parent or spouse or a brother.  Because loyalty, it turns out, is a very poor measure of a person.  Instead of honesty, sincerity, kindness or genuineness, people who demand loyalty are just holding others to an accurate account and timely payment in return for their generosity.   And not repaying the person who demands loyalty with loyalty means instant rejection.   I’m grateful for my wife and daughters, family and friends.  The people who’ve allowed me to express my creativity to a fault, my personalty to the point of embarrassment, my endless pursuit of ambition only to lose my way.   Yet they never ask me to surrender my dignity for the sake of loyalty.

When you ask someone only for loyalty, you’re asking for their lowest level of commitment in a compact that uses the cheapest currency with the least value.   Taken by itself, loyalty is a measurement that fails to assess the true worth of a person or relationship.

So what about loyalty then in Cuba?   The government in Cuba gets the kind of loyalty from the Cuban people that looks like devotion and consensus.  But what are the Cubans getting in return?  A broken economy that functions only in a black market.  The withered sense of self respect and self worth they get from their government is only restored by the deep devotion they have for their culture and one another.  The creativity and dignity they exhibit each day to have meaningful lives is separate from the system they live under- a separate world from the dictates of authoritative rules and demands for loyalty.