Royal 70 Project interview
HUCK talks to the surf non-profit organisation about their impending trip to Cuba.
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In August 2011, youth surf group Royal 70 Project are embarking on a new Cuban development project Reuse. Recycle. Revolution, a month-long trip across Cuba to introduce surfing, skateboarding, music and art to the local kids.
The duo of Blair Cording and Krishna Mathrubutham, a visual merchandiser and journalist respectively, are giving up their life in Sydney for the trip that will see them travel from Havana to Baracoa, stopping at many towns and to offer instruction and beach clean-ups.
This is building on their previous work that saw them help fund the set up the Royal 70 Surf School in Havana, a project that is entirely Cuban owned and run by Cuban Surfriders Association president Eduardo Valdes.
HUCK caught up with them before their departure to talk about surfing, development and their passion for Cuba.
HUCK: What’s the story behind Royal 70 Project?
Blair Cording: I did a story on Cuba for a local Aussie surfing mag Surfing World. It was all done through emails and research but I got hooked on it. I got to know Ed [Valdes] quite well and he said he’s love to have a surf school in Havana.
Krishna Mathrubutham: The island is surrounded by awesome waves but they’ve got no means to enjoy them. We started it in collaboration with Ed. He shapes boards from whatever he can find in his garage, like refrigerator foam. The basis was to set up the school with some surfboards so Ed could teach with them. He came up with the name Royal 70 after the surf break in Havana. Our first fundraiser concert was Stick it to Cuba [in 2009 and raised over $3000], and that was just to get equipment over there. It all stemmed from that.
What have people's reaction been to your work?
Krishna: Some people don’t quite understand it. If you say your trying to help kids surfing in a country that is well known for it's natural disasters, people seem to want to help. We found when we wanted to help Cuba, we got asked questions like 'why Cuba? I get the sense that people don’t generally see Cuba as a place where kids have nothing, where people don’t enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy. Usually when people think Cuba, they think communism and its such a archaic thing now. So this education program we’re hoping will open peoples eyes. Perhaps if Blair hadn’t done all the story and the research he had done I wouldn’t have got it either. But having been immersed in it since 2009, you realise how difficult it is for them.
What are your aims for the project?
Blair: We’re focused on surf and skate because that’s what we know that best. But we’re also going focus on environmental education like beach clean up. We’ve just got in contact with an author Joel Harper who brought out a kids' book [All the Way to the Ocean] that teaches young kids about the importance of taking care of the coast and the beach and things like that. We are taking about 20 of them with us. At the moment we’re in talks with the National Aquarium because they are running a program that educates kids on the value of looking after the coast and sea life. So we’re looking to work with them and adding this book as part of their curriculum. Interestingly enough though, Cuba is so self sufficient there is no real problem with waste, everything is re-used – tin cans, aluminium cans, plastic bottles. But we know that much through speaking with our contacts in Cuba, they want to do something on this.
How has it been dealing with the Cuban government?
Blair: We're trying to develop an honest relationship where we can send what we want, when we want for the surf school. Let's say you went in with 10 surfboards and say your going to donate them to someone, they will try and take them or charge a 1000 dollar tax on it because they feel you will be ripping off the revolution. They worry about when donations go in and people just sell them on and make a business out of them. That’s why I want to build a relationship with the government so that there is a trust factor and they know that we are honest, that we love Cuba and we love the Cuban people. We’re not for or against the revolution, but we want the kids to enjoy sports.
It's interesting that you are calling this the Re-use, Recycle, Revolution project?
Blair: It's a play on that. It’s the same idea that people are using Che shirts and stuff like that. When I first started doing this I used revolution in a lot of the flyers that we sent out for the first fundraiser that we did. We said the 'Surfing Revolution'. I noticed a lot of the big brands like Volcom and Insight were doing the same. So it was just a play on that and I’ve carried it through. Anything to do with Cuba seems to have revolution in it. It's just saying the next revolution is going to be the extreme sport revolution. Hopefully the government sees it as something positive.
Some of the local Cuban surfers in Havana.
Some people may see such ventures a cultural colonialism where western past time is pushed onto a country that doesn’t really have it. How do you feel about that?
Krishna: Well, surfing was already there in Cuba, we are just trying to helping develop it. It was never anything that he introduced. He talked to Ed about surfing for that story so Blair actually learned from them what was happening and wanted to help, so it was already in existence that were just in need of means to enjoy it.
Blair: But it’s a Cuban project. It’s their idea, I’m just trying to help them take those first steps, and then follow those steps through when they start getting momentum. It;s their project, even though we enrolled Royal 70 here in Australia under our name, Ed owns it.
Krishna: The thing is, we’ve got the advantage of geography, they don’t. So they can't do any of these operations inside Cuba, so Blair is basically and arm outside Cuba to help them achieve what they want.
Blair: And that’s something I’ve stood by since the beginning. I was approached by a surf filmmaker last June, who said he loved what I was doing and wanted to come to Cuba with us. But I did some research, and the guy was he was involved in this massive church in Australia. Straight away I emailed him saying that Ed has the final say [on whether he came], all proceeds go to the Cuban kids, and there was to be no religion and no politics. I never heard from him again.
Krishna: I think also the reason for not being political, religious or having no affiliation with subjects like that is because Ed has expressed how many people have tried to help him with a hidden agenda. We figure if we stay as open as possible then people will believe that we are for real. Not that we have any political or religious agendas anyway, it’s just better all round.
Blair: We just want to be honest as well, 100% honest.
So what are your long term plans for the project?
Krishna: The long term goal is to see Cuba become part of the international surfing scene.
Blair: We’re putting all into this Cuba trip and we’ll worry about what happens when we get back. We think it will be worth it, I’m really excited and I think that the footage that we get from this because we’re documenting everything with film, stills and blogging it when we can, I honestly think we’re going to educate a few people.
Krishna: There's a look of bewilderment when you say what the fundraiser is for. People look at you and go ‘why Cuba? There are so many other needy countries in the world, why don’t you help them?’. They just don’t get it. There's been so many years of restriction and it has meant that this country lives in the 1950s and they don’t have access to anything we have access to. Cubans are surrounded by ocean and awesome waves but they can't even get a stick of wax to wax a surfboard made out of refrigerator foam. So we just want to bring those sorts of issues out.
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Royal 70 Project interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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