Features

Treuhaft Sends Pianos To Havana —This Time With Bush’s Blessing

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday April 27, 2004

Piano tuner Ben Treuhaft says he started sending pianos to Cuba in 1995 “as sort of an enema to [then-President Bill] Clinton’s Cuba policy, but somehow his Commerce Department gave their approval.” 

Not so under the regime of George W. Bush, whose Commerce Department ordered the program shut down in February after the State Department said it wasn’t in the interests of the president’s foreign policy. 

But Treuhaft’s not known for turning away from a scrap, due in part to his exuberantly scrappy parents, both active communists when he was born. 

His mother, muckraker Jessica Mitford, was the daughter of English aristocracy. Her first husband, a nephew of Winston Churchill, perished during World War II. In 1943 she married Ben’s father, Robert Treuhaft, a scrappy labor and civil rights attorney born in the Bronx to Hungarian Jewish immigrants. 

Ben Treuhaft was born five years later, after his parents had settled into a comfortable house at 6411 Regent St. in Oakland . 

His parents left the Communist Party in 1958, part of the mass exodus that followed Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev’s exposure of Josef Stalin’s bloody misdeeds. But neither gave up their commitments to labor, civil rights, and the exposure of corporate corruption. 

Robert Treuhaft played a major role in the defense of students arrested in the Free Speech Movement’s struggles at UC Berkeley. Mitford worked with current City Councilmember Maudelle Shirek to bust the restrictive covenants barring African Americans from owning homes in much of Berkeley.  

Small wonder, then, that their son turned his ostensible trade as a tuner of Steinway pianos into an act of political defiance. 

“I went to Cuba in 1993 on a trip organized by Global Exchange to challenge the embargo on tourism,” he said. “We wanted to get arrested so we could challenge the policy in a courtroom. But they never arrested us.” 

Treuhaft did learn that Cuba’s pianos were in terrible shape, leading to his first shipment of pianos to the island nation in 1995 after the Clinton administration approved their request for an exemption from the trade embargo. 

Three years later, he departed for the Big Apple. “I decided 50 years was enough,” he said. 

He loaded up his gear from the Underwater Piano Shop—named, he says, “because I sometimes work under middle-C level”—and set up shop in Manhattan, while he continued his Send-A-Piana-to-Havana campaign (see his website, www.sendapiana.com). 

With the help of volunteers and donations, he had sent 237 instruments and made several trips to tune pianos in Cuba before the Bush administration clamped down in February. 

Treuhaft enlisted the support of Oakland attorney Tom Miller and Congressional Representatives Barbara Lee of the East Bay and Jose E. Serrano of New York to help plead his cause. 

In a joint letter, the lawmakers praised his program as “a first-class example of Americans applying their expertise to improve the lives of Cubans, while sharing the democratic and humanitarian principles of the United States.” 

Miller’s letter, written with a dry wit, included a direct jab targeted at the administration’s heavy tilt toward the evangelical community. After pointing out that many of the pianos ended up in Cuban churches, the attorney asked, “How an attempt to silence Cuba’s churches is the fulfillment of U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba is difficult to comprehend. Please explain.” 

“I figured that appealing to religion was the way to them,” Miller said. 

“After they read Miller’s letter, they capitulated,” Treuhaft said. “They called on Friday and told us they were sending a letter confirming that we’d get our license,” he said, adding, “I think they pulled our license originally because they realized we were anti-embargo.”›