The rum flows freely in a small, open-air bar near Havana’s wharves, where the salty breeze is tinged with diesel. A quartet tunes up and begins to pitch its irresistible woo. It’s impossible to sit still when a Cuban band is playing, and soon almost everyone is dancing.
A local tomcat asks a tourist woman to dance. He is a self-appointed tour guide, conducting her through the undulating musical landscape of Cuba. He’s not much to look at, but he dances like some Latin John Travolta. He dips her, twirls her, skates her across the floor, riding the rhythms and singing in her ear.
It’s no wonder Americans from the Ricky Ricardo generation remember this city fondly. Havana’s seductive hospitality captivated tourists in the 1940s and ’50s. They remember it as a glamorous tropical playground — like New York only sexier, more exotic. Gangsters. Gamblers. Gorgeous girls who showed it all. Havana. Where the rum was the smoothest, the cigars most sublime, and vice was taken to an Epicurean level. Hemingway’s playground. A place of romance and adventure, espionage and intrigue. And finally, of revolution.
For others, the name of Cuba’s capital city evokes far more painful memories, recollections of unimaginable loss and betrayal, of longing for loved ones. Of bitter divisions.
When our plane touches down at Jose Marti International Airport just outside of Havana, a cheer goes up. It gives me a lump in my throat I will not fully understand until I leave from this same squat, gray building in seven days.
The ride to town is hot and sooty, heavy with choking fumes from diesel engines and that cheap leaded gas burned by all those gorgeous old American behemoths. It’s the first thing American men ask about. How about those old cars? Yes, there are lots — some in cherry condition and others beat all to hell and strung together with spit and ingenuity. There are auto shows in the squares, where you can go and admire these oh so marvelous finned relics, lovingly preserved and polished to a gleaming finish. There are newer models too. Korean, Japanese, Italian. Not many Soviet-built vehicles left, though. The ones we built and shipped there 40 and 50 years ago have way outlasted anything the commies built during the Cold War.
Score one for the free enterprise system.
The parade of cars pales, however, in the face of Havana’s spectacular architecture. The city was a major international hub between Europe and the New World before New York was even a village. Spain was one of the richest and cruelest colonial powers in the 16th century, and Havana was one of her grandest outposts. The city’s history is etched in magnificent ruins. Street upon street, mile upon mile of grand mansions, peeling, crumbling, and crammed full of people.
Paint is scarce, and most people can’t afford it anyway. Even if they could, there’s another problem, according to an article in Granma, Cuba’s only newspaper. The story says paint buckets are scarce too. So even if you can find paint to buy, and if you can scrape up the money to buy it, you still have to provide your own bucket to take it away. It’s that kind of shortage — of the kinds of things we throw away without a thought — that starts to bring home how much we take our bounty for granted. And how very deeply the U.S. embargo cuts into the everyday lives of Cuban people.
There are virtually no fat Cubans. There’s not enough food for anyone to get overweight. And there aren’t many cats around. People say things got so desperate during the Special Period that some had to eat cats to stay alive. The Special Period is what the Cubans call the time in the early 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union ended aid to Cuba, leading to a crash of the Cuban economy and creating horrible shortages and near-famine conditions.
Habana Vieja (Old Havana) is the historic part of town and tourist central. Fairly well preserved though neglected, it is now being fully restored to its original splendor. European investors have opened pricey hotels and restaurants here to serve the burgeoning tourist trade. One of the ways the Cuban government has sought to draw visitors and dollars is through promoting cultural tourism with festivals, workshops and conferences. The Havana Bienal is one of the most important and well known. It’s an international art exhibition, held every two years, that showcases art from third world countries — mostly Latin America, Asia and Africa, with the odd Australian thrown in here and there.
In November, the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio led a flock of artists, scholars, students and art collectors to Cuba’s capital city for the Seventh Havana Bienal. Graphicstudio is one of Tampa’s hidden treasures, an international printmaking atelier that draws big-name artists (Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, Pearlstein, etc.) to Tampa and has made such trailblazing contributions to contemporary art that it has its own archive at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Bienal registration, symposia and exhibitions are in historic buildings scattered throughout Habana Vieja. Herds of pasty Europeans and New Yorkers moo through the squares, wearing their Bienal badges like cowbells. It’s hot, and pale flesh is cooking to a painful-looking red under the tropical sun.
But then the band in the square strikes up a clave beat, a handsome hands serves cool, refreshing mojitos (rum with a dash of sugar, a splash of bubbly water and fresh crushed mint over ice) and suddenly it’s party time. Let the shakedown begin.
A pair of beautiful young women in fake-looking Chiquita banana costumes pose for dollars, kissing old white men on both cheeks. A wild-looking old woman who tells fortunes in the square waves her cigar and does a slightly lascivious dance while tourists madly snap her picture. Flocks of locals, beggars and even schoolchildren pass through the square, tugging at tourists, holding out hands, asking for money. In one hand, a young man holds out a photo of an old woman covered with sores. In the other he holds an empty palm. Vendors surge through the crowd, selling cigars and souvenirs. Costumed performers on stilts pass long-handled nets through the crowd, collecting money for their show. After a set, the band passes the hat and sells CDs.
Here at this moment, the Revolution might never have happened.
Swimming to Tampa The Malecon is the Cuban big sister of Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard, a strip of road that hugs Havana’s northern coast from Habana Vieja and Bahia de la Habana (Havana Bay) past Centro Habana through a neighorhood called Vedado. If you had Superman vision, you could stand on the Malecon, look directly north across the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, and see Tampa. You could launch a raft and maybe die before you ever got to the open sea. Or you could paddle all the way to freedom and give up on the Revolution.
The traffic on the Malecon is swift and brutal. Policemen are stationed every few blocks in small kiosks. Their authority seems subtle but absolute. A barely perceptible gesture from a policeman will bring a motorist skidding to the curb. Taxis are everywhere. Some are privately owned cars allowed to carry no more than four passengers at a time; others are government-owned mopeds with brightly painted open-air egg-shaped carriages that seat two behind the driver. Unlicensed gypsy cabs abound too; they’re sometimes cheaper, but the drivers will make you duck out of sight every time you pass a policeman, which is often.
One large building on the Malecon stands out for several reasons. First is that it’s so closely guarded that no one is even allowed to walk on the same side of the street. Policeman make everyone dash across several lanes of speeding traffic to pass the building. Second is that, although it is in perfect repair, its ugly utilitarian design contrasts sharply with gorgeous ruins that surround it. Third is the weirdly fantastic modern plaza, stacked with thousands of chairs and parked under the building’s nose. The building is the U.S. Interests Section, what our country has in Cuba instead of an embassy. The park is Plaza de la Dignidad. Huge metal grids sculpted in lethal-looking phantasmagoric shapes tower over the plaza and hold lights and speakers for rallies. At the far end of the plaza, virtually staring down the symbol of U.S. interests is a romantic statue of a windblown revolutionary hero Jose Marti. The figure, holding a frightened, huddling child, stands tall and valiant against the Darth Vaderish building. Although Marti died a martyr of the Revolution before the 20th century even began, the child he is holding is none other than Elian Gonzalez. Castro built the $2-million plaza for staging demonstrations for the return of the 7-year-old to Cuba after he was rescued off the coast of Florida and taken into custody by relatives of his mother in November 1999, more than 100 years after Jose Marti died. Christopher Baker witnesses the reality behind the demonstrations in his book Mi Moto Fidel (see book review accompanying this story) and again in Cuba, his travel book published by Moon Handbooks. The things he saw and heard contradict the image of solidarity carefully crafted for the domestic and international news media.
I’m staying in an apartment with Graphicstudio staffers Jill Lerner and Noel Smith near the U.S. Interests section in Vedado — a short cab ride or a long walk from Habana Vieja. Noel is one of the major organizers of the trip, and Jill has come to mount an exhibition of the work of Cuban photographer Liset Castillo, produced at Graphicstudio in April.
In Vedado, fabulous 1920s art deco apartment buildings are interspersed with Spanish colonial mansions and suave 1950s hotels, nightclubs and restaurants, mostly closed or in use as other things now. The mark of the Revolution is cut deeply into these showy structures. The huge rooms of many of the old mansions have been walled off — vertically and horizontally — into cramped apartments with tiny rooms and low ceilings. Once grandiose entrances have been boarded over and inset with small doors. From inside, the only clue that a building was once a mansion might be a bit of pillar embedded in a wall or a scrap of lavish trim around a window. The house where our apartment is located stands out because it is freshly painted, meticulously maintained and well-lighted inside and out. Like most of the houses here, the windows have no glass. Instead, they have wooden slats that open and close to regulate light and airflow surprisingly well. The house belongs to a woman whose daughter lives in Miami, which may explain the family’s relative affluence. Her son lives in the upstairs apartment, and she occupies the downstairs one. When it is rented to visitors, as it is to us, she moves to a tiny studio apartment in the back. They are warm and friendly, but keep a businesslike distance.
This is a residential neighborhood where few tourists venture. People stop and stare as we make our way over an obstacle course of holes and broken chunks of concrete that once were sidewalks. Some faces hold curiosity and amusement — others hostility. Occasionally, men call out from porches or windows, making smoochy sounds and beckoning gestures.
At night, it’s very dark in Vedado. Light bulbs and electricity are far too dear to use outside, and many houses are dark inside as well. But the streets, the porches and stoops are filled with people. People wait in long lines at bus stops to cram into huge, crowded public transport vehicles called camels for their two humps of double-deck seating. An occasional sleek Mercedes bus whispers by, filled with foreign tourists relaxing in air-conditioned, cushioned comfort, a contrast no one can fail to notice.
People will tell you that before the Special Period, life was fairly comfortable in Cuba. Though they weren’t rich, people had what they needed, including excellent medical care and education. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union changed everything. The devastation it brought and Cuba’s mad scramble to establish a new economy over the last decade have brought seismic shifts to the society.
One of those shifts has been a new dependence on and desperation for dollars. There is still a peso economy for Cubans. That is, they are paid in pesos, but the Cuban peso buys very little. That means people with access to dollars are far wealthier than people who must live on pesos. Cab drivers, waiters and musicians — most everyone who works for tips — make more money than doctors and teachers.
Foreign employers pay the government in dollars for each Cuban they employ. The government then pays the Cuban workers in pesos. Joint ventures have to pay several hundred dollars a month to the Cuban government for each employee. Since many responsible employers are not prepared to see their employees only receive the standard 10 to 20 dollars a month wage, they must then pay their employees a second time directly, writes former U.S. Interests Section Economics Officer Gary H. Maybarduk in a report for the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
A few short years ago, it was illegal to possess dollars. Now it’s very difficult to exist in Cuba without them. Such conditions make a black market inevitable and force honest people to break the law to make ends meet. The situation creates frustrating paradoxes for the people.
Cuban people must be very ingenious to survive, says one young woman, who suffers chronic health problems as a result of malnutrition during the Special Period. It’s a common ailment among Cubans. They have to break the law just to eat. … Everyone must have two jobs, one legal and the other for dollars. She is one of the legions of people too young to remember the romance and idealism of the Revolution. Even so, she does not criticize socialist ideology, only the schizophrenic policies of a fallible man with absolute power.
The desperate scramble for tourist dollars has created the kind of grotesque inequities that the Revolution sought to abolish. Some food, medicine and other goods in limited supply are available only to tourists and privileged Cubans in dollar stores. Everything is for the tourists to bring in money, says the young woman. Tourists have a luxurious lifestyle while Cubans have nothing. Even the many excellent progressive social programs of the Revolution are failing without adequate resources. School is free, but there are no books, she says. Health care is free, but we have no medicine.
For all its idealism, Cuba is still a dictatorship, and people who are critical of Castro’s policies are very careful what they say, especially to a journalist from the U.S. One day in a restaurant, I ask a group of Cubans what will happen when Castro dies. A hush falls over the place, and a look of horror crosses the faces of my Cuban companions as they frantically shush me. We don’t talk about that, whispers one of them, pointing at the ceiling and making gestures to indicate listening devices.
But Cubans do talk about it; they are just very careful how they do it. In another conversation days later, a Cuban mimes Castro’s habit of stroking his beard — the universal gesture for Fidel — and says, When someone dies, many things will change. It’s not something they look forward to. They know it will get worse when Castro dies before it gets better.
If the Cuban people are tired of being beaten down by his idiosyncratic rule, they are even more put off by the Cuban exile community in Miami, whom they call those crazy people in Miami. Granma, the Cuban newspaper calls them the Miami Mafia and carefully nurtures the fear of them. The paper went so far as to say that the exile community engineered George W. Bush’s election victory in Florida.
Tourists who stay in the big hotels are unlikely to see the depth of deprivation among the population. The daily breakfast buffet at the Golden Tulip in Habana Vieja is obscenely lavish in the face of such need. Only Cubans who work in the hotels are allowed inside, perhaps to keep them from seeing who is eating the food they are not getting.
Outside the tourist places, the scarcity is more evident. There aren’t many restaurants or food markets, and those that are open have very little to sell. Tampans accustomed to Cuban restaurants in Florida expect to pay less than $10 for more food than they can possibly eat in one sitting. In Havana, it is not uncommon to pay $25 for a plate with two or three small slices of meat and a dollop of rice. More common yet, especially outside the tourist areas, is trying to find something on the menu that is actually in the kitchen. The conversation often goes something like this:
I’ll have the omelet.
Sorry. We do not have eggs today.
OK. Then just a small salad with olives.
No olives.
OK. Just the salad then. And bread.
Sorry, but there is no lettuce. And no bread
What do you have?
Ham and cheese.
And we’re not talking choice cuts and fine aged fromage here. Far from it. For some reason, processed pork product and extruded cheesefood are less scarce than almost anything else, including eggs, milk and most vegetables.
It does not take long to begin to feel a sort of constant, gnawing hunger. It’s disturbing to think that this is a condition of life for most people here and shocking to contemplate how much worse it was just a few years ago. The U.S. government’s embargo is a big part of the reason for this suffering.
But the people bear it with a dignity and grace you can’t help but admire. Even though they may be hungry, disillusioned, feeling hopelessly lost and isolated, you still sense this sort of pride and commitment and sense of sacrificing, says Maura Barrios, Assistant Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the University of South Florida.
If Cubans haven’t lost their sense of pride, they have long ago lost hope for an end to the U.S. embargo. (Cubans) see themselves as under siege and at war, explains Barrios. So you’ll still see a … paranoia — that sort of Cold War mentality that’s multilayered and complex and changeable. There’ll be dialogue between the two countries and there’s hope the embargo will be lifted. Then something will happen so that it ends. … Sometimes the Cubans provoke it because there’s always this question of do they want Americans coming in and invading the country again. … They already lived that nightmare. They know what it’s like, and they had a revolution to get rid of it.
Despite national pride and revolutionary idealism, Cuba is losing some of its best and brightest. Talented young artists who are allowed to travel have increasingly chosen to live elsewhere, often Europe or Latin America. And despite or maybe because of our government’s repeated bungling of relations with that tiny nation, Cubans still leave for the U.S. daily by any means possible — and sometimes by nearly impossible means. They leave everything behind — family, friends, the only place they have ever known — to come here in the hope of finding the liberty that continues to elude them.
The Long Road Home On the advice of the travel agent, Noel and I arrive at the airport at 8 a.m. for our noon flight to Miami. Most of the Graphicstudio group left a couple of days ago. Our cab pulls up to a huge, modern terminal that could be in any major city of the world. I don’t remember it being this lavish. With good reason, it turns out. Flights to the U.S. go out of a separate place. The attendant directs our driver to a spare, gray, military-looking building some distance away.
Inside the terminal for U.S.-bound flights, a dense crowd made up almost entirely of Cubans wait. There are no ticket agents at the counters; no one’s really sure where to line up, so people jostle for position to be ready to race for whichever spots open. At last, the ticket agent says there will be no check-in until 11. No big deal. Families wait outside for another hour. Noel buys a cup of coffee and a tube of thin, plain cookies.
A rumor surges through the crowd that the plane’s not leaving until 7 p.m. But there is no announcement, and they are taking tickets and checking baggage. So we wait. There is less elbowing this time. We are apparently not in a hurry. There is no grumbling. No loud sighs or complaints. Cubans have learned to be patient.
The only thing available to buy for lunch is processed pork product and extruded cheesefood on a small, squashed hamburgerish bun. Dessert is more cookies, washed down with rum. Later there’s an apple. And more rum. We share it with the family sitting nearby. There are lots of families, all dressed up, as if this is a very special family dinner. Except there is no dinner.
Sometime between 5 and 6, we’re allowed to pass through customs and it’s surprisingly easy. There’s no jostling at all. In fact, we’re the first in line. It seems strange that no one else has yet come through customs. Repeated messages over the loudspeakers instruct everyone to go through customs, and finally, they begin to trickle through.
At 8 p.m. we are told the plane will not even arrive until 9. Families with young children take the news quietly and settle in to wait some more.
Around 10, Noel strikes up a conversation with a young couple. Their tiny daughter is maybe 3 years old. She’s wearing a pink lace dress fit for a party or church. They tell Noel they have won the lottery and are moving to the U.S. It takes a while to figure out that they aren’t talking about hitting the jackpot with a Quickpick from the Circle K. No, this is the U.S. immigration lottery. The winners are allowed to move to the United States permanently and are given limited relocation assistance and aid by settlement agencies.
The couple is leaving with their daughter and her two grandmothers. They don’t want to leave Cuba, they say, but their little girl has kidney problems, and they can’t get medication for her here. The father is a curator and there is no work for him. They have no friends or family in the United States. They don’t know where they will live or what they kind of jobs they will do. It turns out many of the people on this flight are lottery winners. Some have family on the other side. Others are launching into the complete unknown. Most are leaving someone dear on this side.
The customs barrier is like a row of dressing rooms with walls that fall a couple of feet short of the ceiling and floor. The ‘migr’s pass the latest news of delay under the walls to loved ones waiting on the other side. On both sides of the wall, families with very old people and very young children wait, most now into their 14th hour with little to eat and Spartan accommodations. Still, the children don’t cry or run around and scream. No one complains. Their good clothes are still clean, but wilted a bit. Some lie on the hard floor, talking to people on the other side, or just looking at them, holding onto their last moments together.
At 11, they announce that we can board the plane, and a cheer goes up, raising that lump in my throat once again. Children and adults wave, blow kisses, call out final goodbyes, and tear themselves away at last and run into the dark night toward the plane. They do not know if they will ever return, if they will ever see their families again. But if they do, they will cheer when the plane touches down because they are returning to the place and the people they love and they thought they might never see again.
Contact Editor Susan Edwards at 813-248-8888, ext. 122, or ed@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2001.
