MORE THAN A BEACH, MORE THAN A REVOLUTION
Over a million Canadians travel to Cuba every year. Most of them go to the beach.
Who can argue with that? Canadian winters are harsh, Cuban beaches beautiful. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it seemed no one was getting on airplanes, Cuban tourist officials worried about what would become of their industry. That fall, a leading Canadian-Cuban expert reassured a group of tourist industry leaders: “Don’t worry. They’ll be here,” he told them. “Canadians are more afraid of winter than they are of terrorists.”1
Over a decade later the Cuban tourist industry is booming and visitors are increasing. Canada tops the list of tourist-sending nations in Cuba, followed by Germany, the UK, France, and Italy.2 But when, on December 17, 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro made their surprising declaration that they would like to try to behave normally toward each other, many tourists must have begun to wonder about how this warming trend would alter their attachment to Cuba. A cartoon in the Globe and Mail summed it up perfectly: David Parkins drew a Canadian enjoying an empty beach, while just behind him a tsunami of Americans was poised to overtake the uncluttered paradise. “Better make it a double,” the Canadian says to the Cuban beachside waiter. The image is a great blend of friendship, arrogance, and insecurity. In Cuba, unlike almost anywhere else, northerners outside the United States can fantasize that these are our mojitos, waiters, and beaches.
Representatives of the US Chamber of Commerce, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and tens of thousands of US college students passed through Havana long before Obama’s surprise announcement. And shortly after “D17” (as it is now known in Cuba), everyone from Netflix to Conan O’Brien to Airbnb arrived to see (and benefit from) just what was so forbidden for fifty years. As the Americans re-assess their animosity toward Cuba since the 1959 revolution, it’s a good time for others to also look again at their relationship with the place we think we know. Countless visitors have had over fifty years of person-to-person experience in and with Cuba that Americans have generally missed. It’s one of the few places in the world where First World tourists can rub shoulders with each other without also bumping into (much less being swamped by) Americans. That’s unusual and sometimes uncanny. It’s also why people from around the world began a stampede to Cuba after December 17, 2014, to see it “before the Americans wreck it,” as I have heard many declare. Americans have definitely made their absence felt in the past fifty years and that is changing. But what do the rest of us actually know about the place beyond the beach?
Globe and Mail cartoon, December 18, 2014. Courtesy of David Parkins
Cuba beyond the Beach is one part travel book, one part city memoir, and large part reflection on a changing Havana in a changing Cuba. Havana, the “Paris of the Caribbean” as it was dubbed a century ago, is the nation’s soul and beating heart. It is a complicated, contradictory place, a combination of capitalism, communism, Third World, First World, and Other World, all at the same time.
It’s a beautiful, wounded city. It bears many scars, a good number of them from the past fifty years of battle mode. The prominent seaside building that has functioned as a US embassy since official diplomatic relations were severed in 1961 — and reopened with much fanfare in August 2015 — is a great example. The area around the building has often been a constantly moving Cold War tableau, ringed with rival flags, statues, plaques, and billboards. In the George W. Bush era, this was a site of political theatre at its Cold War/War on Terror finest. Across the street Cubans erected billboards featuring the iconic Abu Ghraib torture victim, linking him — visually at least — to Miami-based, anti-Cuban terrorism. The US responded with an electronic billboard on the top floor of their building that broadcast nasty things about Cuba. Cuban authorities tried to block this with huge flags commemorating victims of US wars. Over it all presides a statue of the venerable Cuban national hero José Martí, holding a child, pointing an accusing finger at the US. Irreverent Cubans call this area, officially known as the “Anti-Imperialist Tribunal,” the protestodromo.
All over the city signs and billboards proclaim revolutionary slogans, Che’s portrait is ubiquitous, and daycare centres have names like Futuro Communistas. If all a visitor did was read the billboards or scan the official daily paper, Granma, she or he would certainly have the impression of Cuba as a country of single-minded, ideologically over-stimulated zealots. Ideology is indeed everywhere, and at first glance, Cuba seems to exist only in shades of black and white. But first impressions can be deceiving, and ideologies are lived by people, not billboards. This book is shaped by my experiences with a wide range of Cuban people.
Former US diplomat Wayne Smith says that Cuba is to US policy makers “as the full moon is to the werewolf,” and US historian Louis Pérez terms Cuba the US’s “obsessive compulsive disorder.”3 Maybe it’s easier for non-Americans to avoid these Cold War stereotypes, to see beneath the surface. There is nothing thrilling, illicit, or even weird about a Canadian, for example, being in Cuba, because we’ve never considered it enemy territory. I’ve marvelled over the years as US colleagues — professors, usually fairly smart people — treat my frequent research and teaching visits to Cuba as something almost unbelievable, akin to visiting the moon or North Korea. “But how do you get there?” I am frequently asked by Americans who are completely oblivious that they are the only people who don’t get there. As relations between the two countries open up, US visitors are excitedly placing their toes in water other visitors have been experiencing for a very long time.
Yet Canadians ought not to be too cocky about our own understanding of the place. A Cuban tour guide once confided in me that he far prefers German tourists to Canadians because Germans are generally more interested in Cuban culture; they want to visit museums and art galleries. Canadians, he said, just want to go to the beach. Canadian airline advertisements and websites often refer to their flights to the Caribbean not by cities but as “Sun Destinations,” as though the nations are interchangeable and the purpose of all travel is tourism. Canadian pilots on flights to Havana almost always tell passengers to “have a great vacation” when they land, oblivious to the presence of business people, workers, Cubans returning home, students, and plenty of others among the tourists. Yet my experience in Havana has taught me that visitors, from Canada as elsewhere, have plenty of other interests in Cuba — histories, friendships, loves, ambitions, dealings both shady and legit — beyond the beach.
I started visiting Cuba in 1978, and have visited frequently since 2004, usually twice or three times a year. I also spent two six-month research periods living in Havana with my family. I had the good fortune to be there to witness the day normalization with the US began, December 17 2014. I come to Cuba as a visitor, but I am also a researcher, a teacher, and a friend of many Cubans. By training I am a Canadian historian, but in recent years I have done research in Cuba. I’ve written one book about Cuban child migration conflicts and another about one of Cuba’s most beloved musicians. That one has given me a great view of Havana’s contemporary music scene. In the midst of the US economic blockade, I would often arrive from Canada with auto parts for my landlord’s car, toner for a University of Havana printer, and vitamins, medicine, chocolate, and Canadian cheddar for everyone I know (including the musicians). Once I arrived with a whole fresh salmon to share with friends for New Year’s dinner. My partner Susan Belyea and I have watched our son Jordi grow up there, from barely reaching the wall of the seaside Malecón, to walking on top of it, to skateboarding beside it. He’s grown up climbing sculptures in the plazas of Old Havana as though they were playground equipment, befriending lizards, and collecting stray bits of cable and wire from the street to fashion into art. Most memorable of all, we hovered over him in his hospital bed after he fell out of a tree in a park (onto cement) near our Vedado apartment, breaking both wrists. It gave us all a crash course in the much heralded Cuban medical system, but also in a system of neighbourliness I didn’t know the extent of until we needed it.
For almost ten years I’ve brought several hundred Canadian university students along with me to learn about Cuban economic and cultural development. My co-teachers and I take them to art galleries, film schools, and medical schools, and they hear lectures from professors, curators, journalists, musicians, and filmmakers. In class they ask their Cuban teachers difficult questions and they generally receive thoughtful answers. After class, they roam around the city pretty much on their own, making new friends at the university, the seafront Malecón, and the vegetable markets. Havana permits a freedom of movement unimaginable in any other Latin American city. They discover things I don’t know, like where to get seriously cheap drinks and what the local skateboarders are up to.
There are plenty of guidebooks that explain the Havana tourist route and detail the latest restaurants. These are useful, but this book is for those who want to understand how people in Havana live and what visitors might learn from that. Along the way, it is also about the potential and limitations of relationships across the multiple boundaries that separate the First and Third worlds. How habaneros (inhabitants of Havana) live, what they eat, where they go, what they listen to, and what they think. These are difficult to get at because people in Cuba, just like people everywhere, don’t speak with one voice. (This was always one of the fallacies of US-government Cuban policy.) Foreigners shouldn’t take the slogans on the billboards or the headlines in the newspapers any more seriously than many Cubans take them, which is not very. I am persuaded by those Cubans who characterize their daily reality as more sociolismo than socialismo — more a reciprocal network of favours among friends (socios) than an abstract state ideology (socialism). It’s a system that is fascinating to see in practice.
Cubans have been formed by a society given to revolutionary hyperbole and polemical speeches. The most powerful country in the world labelled them “terrorists” and prior to that, a few decades ago, they were blamed (via the erroneously named “Cuban missile crisis”) for almost blowing us all to smithereens. What does all this political drama mean in daily life?
The years I have spent in Havana have been momentous. When I lived there in 2004 Cubans were still digging themselves out from the collapse of their main trading partner, the Soviet Union, a period of extreme deprivation euphemistically named the “Special Period” that began in 1990. The crises began the slow process of economic transformation that continues today: the state is relaxing exclusive control over certain sectors of the economy, most notably in the agricultural and tourist sectors. A parallel dollar economy had been introduced in 1993, legalizing access to hard currency. In 2004, the US dollar was withdrawn from circulation and slapped with a 10 percent surcharge, and Cuba entered a period of dual official currencies. Moneda nacional or Cuban pesos (hereafter referred to as MN) are what most people earn, and are roughly worth one-twenty-fourth of the Cuban controvertible peso (hereafter referred to as CUC), which is pegged to the US dollar. Incentives for international tourism were also introduced, including the legalization of private restaurants and apartments (both initially under extremely strict conditions.) These reforms pulled Cuba out of the post-Soviet free fall, but they also exacerbated inequalities (especially by race) that were obvious in 2004 and inescapable now. In 2006, Fidel Castro announced he was temporarily stepping down in favour of his brother Raúl. In 2008, Raúl took power officially. That same year, the country suffered three hurricanes that hit the agricultural sector especially hard, the damage from which cost the country an estimated US$10 billion, or nearly one-fifth of its annual GDP.4 In 2010, Raúl Castro announced sweeping economic reforms. The state took a further step away from being the sole player in economic life, and new opportunities for self-employment (cuentapropismo) and foreign investment have been created. In 2011, a private real estate market was legalized. And the mother of all surprise announcements came in December 2014 — that the US and Cuba would normalize their relations and work toward ending the US economic blockade and travel ban.
How have these and other big changes over the past decade played out on the streets and in the parks and neighbourhoods of Havana? The wisdom here is a compendium of what I’ve learned from Cuban people rather than Cuban politicians. I listen to music more than speeches; I watch more films than TV news. The conversations Cubans have with each other, their art, their music and other cultural forms, are intense, challenging, and smart. Opinions abound in Technicolor. The people in my Havana neighbourhood are old Communist ladies and their sceptical offspring, rock stars and peanut vendors, world famous street people, crabby store clerks, Spanish teachers, history professors, journalists, filmmakers, butchers, illegal seafood vendors, tour guides, and taxi drivers. All of them have lived this curious Cold War fault line in ways that are more complicated, subtle, funny, intelligent, poetic, tragic, and beautiful than any slogan could capture. As Cuba experiences some dramatic changes, there is much to appreciate and learn from in the unlikely world they have collectively built for themselves.
Over the past fifty years Cuba has been both isolated and cosmopolitan. It’s been closed to Americans but wide open for European tourists, African medical students, and Latin American political exiles, to take just a few examples. Zaira is a Cuban graduate student in Canada who translates for our course in Havana. She learned to speak English because her high school was located on the outskirts of Havana, next door to a farm where people came from all over the world to help with the harvest. A steady stream of solidarity visitors from Ireland, Norway, Japan, and South Africa helped perfect her English conversational skills, not to mention shape an excellent accent. The intensity of the US/Cuba relationship sometimes overshadows the multiple ties between Cuba and other parts of the world.
I’m a Canadian, and as such I have a particular relationship to the place. Canadians and Cubans have crossed paths with each other regularly over the centuries. William Van Horne, for example, a former president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a familiar figure in Canada’s past. He was present at the famous driving of the last spike that completed Canada’s railway in 1885. (In the famous photo he’s the one with the top hat who looks like a Monopoly game caricature of a capitalist.) Few know that Van Horne went on to help finance and run the Cuban Railroad Company, which connected Havana to the eastern provinces and the city of Santiago de Cuba in 1901. His observations of widespread rural poverty prompted him to offer some advice — ironic in hindsight — to the US military consul who ran Cuba when he was there in 1899. Van Horne tried to convince the US military government to enact land reform, taking untilled land away from absentee landlords and parcelling it out to Cubans. As Van Horne saw it, if more Cubans owned their own land, future social upheavals might be avoided. “In countries where the percentage of individuals holding real estate is greatest,” he wrote, “conservatism prevails and insurrections are unknown.”5
Canadian tycoon Max Aitkin (a.k.a. Lord Beaverbrook, one of the finest, or at least richest, sons of New Brunswick) also held investments in Cuban railway and banking interests. While touring the island in 1906, he encountered a number of other visiting Canadian capitalists who all, according to him, “seemed to be inclined to criticize and make fun of anything Cuban.” He did not feel the same way; he was actually very fond of the place. This is how he put it: “Cuba compares favourably with Canada in every respect barring morals.”6 A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, but it set a kind of ambivalent, two-sided tone for Canadian feelings about Cuba for decades to come.
In 1945, Cuba was the first Caribbean country with which Canada established diplomatic ties. We’ve maintained those official ties ever since. In 1953, when Cuba’s major opposition parties needed to meet safely, outside the country, to plan their strategy to topple the heavy-handed dictator Fulgencio Batista, they chose to meet at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal.7 We reprised this discreet role in the negotiations between Cuba and the US leading up to December 17, 2014, hosting both parties, secretly, in Ottawa and Toronto. Unlike almost every other country in this hemisphere, we kept talking to each other after the 1959 Cuban revolution. (Only Mexico also retained ties with Cuba.) Despite the Cold War, we didn’t see Cuba as the enemy. We didn’t join the American economic blockade. If Cuba is America’s wayward child, perhaps for ever-obedient Canadians, Cuba is that one bad friend you had in high school — the one you kept company with just to annoy your parents. Yet like all good children, we know our rebellion has limits. When Washington closed their embassy in 1961, they asked us to take their place spying on the Cubans and so we did. Former Canadian diplomat John W. Graham recalls that he outfitted himself in what he imagined to be “Soviet technician” attire at a Zellers store in Ottawa before he left for his posting in Havana in the early 1960s. The idea was to appear as Russian as possible once in Havana, in order to photograph Soviet trucks, tanks, and other military hardware, which were then sent via diplomatic courier to Washington.8
Some Canadians with sympathies toward the revolution made it their business to funnel information praising Castro’s social reforms to their counterparts in the US through the 1960s. Material that couldn’t be mailed directly to the US from Cuba was sent through Canada to various “Fair Play for Cuba” groups in the US. Ironically enough, at the same time, the Canadian embassy was sending Cuban periodicals they collected in Havana to Washington.9 Prime Minister Diefenbaker rejected John F. Kennedy’s demand that Canada fall into line with the US during the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Most famous, perhaps, was the 1976 visit of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau to Havana, the first visit of a NATO nation leader since Castro took power. It was a true bromance: Trudeau and Castro went fishing together. Fidel couldn’t take his eyes off Margaret, and neither could most other Cubans. A Cuban friend who now lives in Canada remembers this visit, which took place during his Havana boyhood, as an inspirational moment: “All those old military men who run Cuba drooling over the charming young Canadian prime minister’s wife. We loved it. It made me want to see Canada.”
There are plenty of Canadian-Cuban economic ties as well. Economic trade between Canada and Cuba runs at a rate of about $1 billion annually. Sherritt International accounts for a huge amount of that; it is Cuba’s second largest foreign investor. Sherritt operates an enormous nickel mine in Moa, on the remote northeastern shore. Sherritt, whose former CEO Ian Delany is dubbed “Castro’s Favourite Capitalist” in the Canadian media, also has oil and gas interests near Varadero, and their presence in Cuba was recently renewed until 2028. As one of Cuba’s largest foreign investors in the world, Sherritt has come under fire from the US government, and Delany himself is forbidden entry to the US.10 Cuba’s most popular beer labels, Cristal and Bucanero, are manufactured by a joint venture owned by the Cuban government and Labatt. Canada exports machinery, auto parts, electronics, and grain, and in return Cuba sends (in addition to nickel) coffee, seafood, and, of course, cigars.
As well as political ties, investment, and trade relations, Canadians have shown interest in Cuba in countless other ways. Canadian universities helped educate a new generation of Cuban engineers through a CIDA-funded exchange program that sent Canadian professors to teach in engineering schools in Havana in the early 1970s, and also brought Cuban students to Canada for graduate training. Thousands of professionals had left the country after the revolution, so international programs like this were crucial. There are currently over twenty Canadian universities with active research or teaching ties in Cuba, and at least as many have had shared research projects with Cuban institutions in the past.11
Bank of Nova Scotia building, the corner of O’Reilly and Cuba streets
Cubans are among the few people outside Canada who know who Terry Fox is.12 Cubans started a Terry Fox run in 1998, and it is now the largest such event outside Canada. There are plenty of other famous Canadians whom Cubans admire — Céline Dion and Justin Bieber being two celebrities Cubans seemingly can’t hear enough from. One tie we’d perhaps all rather forget about is the story of James McTurk. He was convicted in Canada in 2013 of sexual crimes against children during his dozens of visits. He claimed he supported the families of his sexual partners in Cuba financially. He’s the first Canadian to be convicted of child sex crimes in Cuba.
One of my favourite books about Cuban history is On Becoming Cuban, by the US historian Louis Pérez. It’s a huge compendium of how Cuba absorbed US cultural influences for a century before the rupture of 1959. He examines everything from hairstyles to baseball to movies in order to illustrate just how saturated in things American Cuba had become prior to the 1959 revolution. Signs of Cuban/Canadian relationships are nowhere near as visible. But if you look, you can see Canada in some odd corners of Havana. Cubans dress themselves in T-shirts and ball caps from Canadian universities, sports teams, and coffee chains. I recently picked up Havana music scholar Joaquín Borges-Triana at the Toronto airport. He arrived wearing a ball cap bearing the logo of Steam Whistle, a Toronto brewery (which he had no idea was Canadian, incidentally). You can still see the chiselled name of the Bank of Nova Scotia in its old location on O’Reilly Street in Old Havana, as well as the ornate remains of the Royal Bank in Santiago de Cuba. Their buildings were quite beautiful, but Cubans didn’t like Canadian banks any more than many Canadians do. Angry peasants stoned the Santiago branch in 1934, shattering its plate glass window, upset about its role in evicting five-thousand families from their homes on a sugar plantation. Over a decade later, in 1948, armed rebels trying to topple Batista assaulted the Royal Bank’s Havana headquarters.13 Despite such a mixed legacy, Canadian symbols persist. Flags and decals are ubiquitous in Havana taxis. I’ve watched in amazement as habaneros cart their groceries in reusable bags I barely notice in Canada: Metro, Loblaws, Canadian Tire. I once recognized a distinctive shopping bag decorated with red and white maple leaves coming toward me as I was walking along busy calle Línea in Vedado, and I was so absorbed by the sight of the bag I didn’t notice the person carrying it was smiling broadly at me. She was the sister of a Cuban friend to whom I had given it a year earlier. So I have contributed my share to the symbolic Canadianization of Havana, but it works both ways. I almost benefitted directly from the generosity visiting Canadians show Cubans. In an amusing case of mistaken identity, a family of Canadian tourists, identifiable by their sunburns and Vancouver T-shirts, approached my Guatemalan-born son as we were on our way to a park in our Vedado neighbourhood. Without words, they pressed a bag of school supplies on him. We continued, confused, for a few steps until we realized they thought they were giving a donation to a Cuban kid.
Cuba looms large in the imagination and fantasies of people all over the world, and getting beyond stereotypes can be a challenge. Pronouncements and photo opportunities of presidents and prime ministers are one thing; but small moments of encounter between Cubans and non-Cubans are where the relationships really reside. The Cuban diaspora in Canada numbers about 20,000, 7,000 of whom live in Toronto. I’ve seen the distinctive black and orange packages of Cubita coffee in grocery stores in small town New Brunswick and at cigar stores in small town Ontario. There’s a Cuban art gallery in Thunder Bay and Toronto now boasts a store that sells supplies for practitioners of Santaria, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion.14 Yet we are nowhere near equal in mobility — in our access to passports, visas, or plane tickets. Owing to the lop-sided circumstances of what Eduardo Galeano calls “our upside down world,” most Canadian/Cuban encounters take place on their soil. A million or so times a year.
I arrived in Cuba for the first time, along with 400 other young Canadians, for an international youth festival in 1978. I didn’t know much about the place, but what twenty-one-year-old who wants to change the world could resist an opportunity to visit? The World Festival of Youth and Students invited us to celebrate, with tens of thousands of like-minded young people from around the world, “anti-imperialist solidarity, peace, and friendship.” I was very young, I believed in almost everything. I was also very Canadian. It was August and I’d never experienced such heat. We spent ten heady days moving around the city from meeting to concert to art exhibition, always with too much speechifying, always on ridiculously slow buses. “Youth of the World, Cuba is Your Home” was the slogan we saw on huge billboards throughout the city. “Youth of the World, Our Buses are Your Home” was our ironic response. Despite the heat and the interminable delays, the experience was unforgettable. Another memorable billboard lined the road on the way to the airport the day of our return home. “We will never forget you, dear and beloved friends,” said huge images of Fidel Castro to thousands of impressionable young visitors. I took him at his word, and tried to make Cuba my second home. Years later, I learned that in order to make Havana more welcoming for foreigners like me, Cuban authorities had rounded up all the gay people to get them out of town for the duration. Not unlike what other governments do about other nuisances, such as poor people, during events like the Olympics. That’s the Havana I’ve come to know: the place that embraces me even as it occasionally slaps me in the face.
X Alfonso, a popular contemporary Cuban musician, has a powerful song that lists a number of the things he hopes will change in a future Cuba. One of them is the “importance of selling an image of paradise outside.”15 He isn’t just speaking of tourism. You can’t blame visitors alone for acquiring superficial understandings of Cuba. Images of paradise, “sex, sun and socialism” as Jennifer Hosek terms it, have been packaged, both through tourism and political solidarity networks, to entice Europeans and North Americans for decades.16
Tourists are always easy to mock, and it is perhaps even easier to laugh at the naiveté of the left or liberal First World visitor in Cuba who, like me when I was twenty-one, arrives in search of a political dream. Iván de la Nuez, a Cuban writer now resident in Spain, used an image of one of Cuba’s first famous leftist visitors, Jean-Paul Sartre, meeting with Che Guevera in Havana in 1960, as the cover of his book Fantasía Rojo. (The cover photo, like much of real life, cuts Sartre’s partner Simone de Beauvoir from the photo; all you see is her foot.) Red Fantasy explores the Western left intelligentsia’s prolonged fascination with Cuba. Both Sartre and Che are sitting, but Che looms over Sartre; his boots alone, in the foreground of the photo, are enormous. Sartre, furthermore, appears at first glance to be bowing his head. Che is actually lighting Sartre’s cigar, but as de la Nuez says, “there is genuflection in Sartre’s posture.”17 The dynamics of this scene — First World visitor glorifying the Cuban Revolution — have been re-enacted constantly, in some manner or other, over the past fifty years. I saw echoes of it in the T-shirt I noticed one day, worn by a visitor (blond, perhaps Canadian or maybe German) sipping a cocktail on the beautiful grounds of the Hotel Nacional, which announced “I (Heart) Fidel.” That image itself evoked a line from the 2007 song “Tercer Mundo” (Third World) by Cuban pop group Moneda Dura. The song mocks the “proletariado de los hoteles lujosos” (proletariat of the luxury hotels) who visit Cuba with their “cameras and solidarity dollars.”18
For decades, a steady stream of radical visitors, such as Susan Sontag, C. Wright Mills, Amiri Baraka, and Angela Davis, saw in revolutionary Cuba, to quote student radical Todd Gitlin, “everything that the US was not.” Cuba was the site of what Susan Lord has termed “decolonized cosmopolitanism,” in the 1960s especially, and this history of Cuba as a centre for global left-wing cultural and intellectual life is still visible all over town.19 There are statues, plaques, and monuments to an array of important counterculture or leftist figures. The statue of John Lennon in the eponymously named park is well-known, but there are plenty of others. My son used to play in a park with friends in Nuevo Vedado that featured a statue of Ho Chi Minh. There is a statue of Yasser Arafat in Miramar, a plaque to Irish martyr Bobby Sands in a park in Vedado, and my favourite, a monument to the US martyrs Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that I encountered by accident one day walking toward the National Library.
“For peace, bread and roses, we face the executioner.” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Murdered June 19, 1953, at the corner of 27 and Paseo streets
Cuba was a place to admire, to be sure, but also a place to project one’s political fantasies. Today, for many outsiders the fantasy runs in reverse. Cuba is not the utopian future but rather the world we have lost. As US art critic Rachel Weiss puts it, instead of imagining Cuba as they did in the 1960s as “a place where history is being made,” now for many visitors it’s “the place that time forgot — Cuba as time capsule, pointed backward rather than ahead.”20
There has been considerable genuflecting from outsiders visiting Havana over the years, just as there has been considerable condemnation. It is not just the left that sees the Cuba it wants to see; the right wing also projects their fantasies. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, broke ranks with his party to support Obama’s new Cuba policy. As he explained to the New York Times: “We’ve got a museum of socialism 90 miles from our shore.” According to him, that’s something conservatives should want Americans to see.21
It is so easy to stereotype: socialist utopia or communist hell. Xenia Reloba, a writer with whom I have worked in Havana, laughs that I have been “trapped in the spider web that is our everyday reality.” The spider web metaphor is more than her rhetorical flourish. I think she understands that what traps me are the infinite complex strands that hold it all in place. So rather than promising the truth, in this book I offer ambiguity, because Cuba is the most contradictory place I know.
I bring to this book the things I love and the things I hate about Havana, in the hopes that by sharing my perspective on a complicated place, visitors might, as I have, come away a little bit changed and a lot less certain. First World visitors in particular need not be blinded by ideology or guilt, which is perhaps one of the most significant things my time in Havana has taught me. I’ve been inspired by some beautiful writing by people who move between North America and their countries of origin in the global south: writers such as Teju Cole, Dany Laferrière, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Francisco Goldman, for example. That’s not my story, but I identify with their near-permanent sense of dislocation. North Americans who undertake volunteer or solidarity work in the developing world have also influenced me. That’s not my experience either, but people such as Canada’s long-time African development activist, Molly Kane, have taught me plenty about the folly of believing that, as she puts it, “those who have more to give also know more.”22 In many First World/Third World encounters, it seems to me, people grapple with the same questions: what kinds of human relationships are possible in dramatically unequal circumstances? What does reciprocity mean across such formidable borders? Does money ever not matter? Perhaps my biggest intellectual inspiration in trying to figure out what I’ve learned from Cuba has come from Leela Gandhi, a theorist of post-colonial studies. She asks provocative questions about how minor but significant moments of human connection, things I describe in this book, are produced. When do small acts of friendship triumph over the overwhelming logic of global inequalities? What makes it possible to avoid the temptations of superiority that seem to arise inevitably when people are raised with plenty? I take more comfort from the possibilities I see in friendship than I do from abstract or formulaic ideology. Cuba taught me that.
There’s an old joke I heard in 2004 when I spent my first extended time in Havana. It’s dated and I don’t think it still circulates. I recently asked my friends from whom I originally heard it to remind me of the exact wording and they had no memory of it. But for me it was a helpful introduction to Cuban complexities. A CIA agent has been in Havana for twenty years and has yet to file a report to his supervisors. They are constantly nagging him for information; finally he sends his report:
I will never understand this country.
There is no food in the shops, but everyone is well fed.
There is occasionally chicken in the markets but there are never any eggs.
The clothes in the stores are horrible but the people are beautifully dressed.
They never finish any construction project, but no one is living on the street.
Everyone complains about the revolution, but everyone loves Fidel.
That’s why I can’t write a report about this country.
The perfect bookend to that joke is this comment I heard ten years later, when filmmaker Marilyn Solaya came to speak to our students in Havana. Solaya is a brave and talented feminist filmmaker who has made documentaries about topics like Havana’s public masturbators (who, I’m sorry to inform you, you will hear more about in this book). She also just made a feature film Vestido de Novia (His Wedding Dress — a word play), which is about transgender issues. It won a slew of awards during the Havana film festival of 2014 and is winning awards in Europe and North America as well. Solaya is only the third woman in Cuban history to have made a feature film, and she is an unflinching critic of hypocrisy and patriarchy. When she spoke to our students she explained herself like this: “I have a conflict because I live in three countries: The country they say I live in, the country that some people live in, and the country that most people live in.”
As an outsider — albeit an intimate one — in Cuba I am a part of Solaya’s “the country that some people live in,” the emerging dollar-and-passport-wielding middle class whom we’ll hear about in this book. Solaya’s “country they say I live in” is easy to spot on billboards and official media — the fantasy Cuba of slogans and pumped up ideology. It’s the “country that most people live in” that I’m trying to keep in sight, and how the three countries coexist in one little island.
The Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has said that if he lived in Havana, he would simply plant a camera on a street corner and make a new film every day. This book is like Almodóvar’s imaginary camera, picking up the chaotic, everyday texture of life in a confusing and wonderful place.
Havana is full of curves and alleys, and even a few dead ends, and the best stories to come out of the city, in my experience at least, are just as idiosyncratic as that human geography. On any stroll through Havana you encounter some fundamental facts and rhythms of life: The hour the little girls pour out onto the streets to head to dance class; Or when everyone heads out, grocery bags in hand, toward the bakery at virtually the same moment every day; The women and men flirting or fighting on the Malecón, Havana’s living room sea wall; Apparently chaotic crowds at markets or bus stops who are actually observing a well-coordinated line-up system.
Gente de Zona is the name of a huge Cuban musical group. If you have turned on a radio in the last couple of years anywhere in the world you have probably heard them, along with Enrique Iglesias and Descemer Bueno, singing the infectiously upbeat “Bailando.” Gente de zona translates as “people in the neighbourhood,” and I think their popularity stems not only from their danceable music but also their celebration of Havana’s strong neighbourhood loyalties and the range of neighbourhood characters. We’ll meet a few of them here.
The sidewalks and streets of Havana are uneven and broken, as any skateboarder, wheelchair user, or baby carriage pusher can tell you. It can be a workout for the legs and feet, but when you move around Havana, you also use your ears. Those Who Dream with Their Ears is the name of a magazine Cuban music writer Joaquín Borges-Triana edited some years ago. (It’s a bit of an inside joke, as Joaquín is blind.) He is one of the people who taught me that the sound of Havana is the key to understanding just about everything: Cuban dreams, to be sure, but also politics, history, and daily life.
Havana is changing — “renovating” in official parlance — and offering up plenty of new stories as it does. What to make of “La Nueva Cuba”— the new Cuba of restaurants, real estate, and market opportunities that fill the pages of North American newspapers, particularly since the Cuba/US normalization? From the streets of Havana the “New Cuba” story is contradictory and also a great deal less “new.” Cubans, in their manner, have been entrepreneurial for a long time. As we’ll see, the various political and economic crises of the past fifty years made Cuba an incubator for ingenuity long before the current move toward a free market.
For all the insularity of a blockaded island, Cubans do, sometimes, move around the world, virtually and otherwise. The best thing about the course I co-teach in Havana is that it is part of a reciprocal agreement: we bring students to Havana and we host Cuban academics in Canada. As a host, I have seen, up close, that Cuban journeys off the island have never been easy. But Cuban inventiveness can have a global reach and has adapted to the Internet and many other material scarcities. It also, arguably, helped to end the Cold War.
