When Havana journalist and editor Xenia Reloba came to Canada in 2014 to speak to Queen’s University students in a communications studies classroom, she used an interesting phrase as a title for her presentation: “How we stay current in a country off-line.” The subject represented a remarkable feat of teaching, because it is so remote from the students’ experience. Yet she soon had the group — most of them toting cellphones and laptops worth more than a Cuban journalist earns in three years — listening in rapt attention. The various alternative communications strategies that Cubans use to connect with each other and with the world make for a compelling story.
According to its national stereotype, Cuba is a land of long-winded chatterboxes. So it’s ironic indeed that its communications system is such a mess. The International Telecommunications Union is a United Nations agency that monitors communications issues globally. It measures national levels of connectedness, using telephone and Internet communications as yardsticks. The agency evaluates 166 countries, of which 42 comprise its lowest category. What it terms the “Least Connected Countries” parallel almost completely another commonly known category, the “Least Developed Countries,” and most of them are in Africa. Cuba is the only country in the Americas in the bottom section. In Cuba only 18 percent of the population use cellphones, and 3 percent have home Internet access. Cuba’s computer access rates are also low, with seven computers for every one hundred people — the lowest in the Americas. Yet, ironically enough, Cuba receives a great score for the price of its fixed telephone service. ETECSA, one of the few state-owned telecommunications monopolies in the world, offers Cubans the second-cheapest phone rates for land lines globally.1
Land line service is indeed inexpensive, pennies a month — and functions reasonably well, for those lucky enough to have home phones. The problem comes in entering the system, because telephone lines are the property of the resident. When you move, you take your line with you, or, if you no longer need it, you sell it separately. To connect a new line to the system, the wait can be interminable, and some parts of Havana — Cerro, for example — offer no new lines at all. It costs between $700 and $1,000 to buy a phone line on the black market.
Unlike most of the rest of the world, land line service is valuable because it is so much cheaper than cell rates. Cellphone rates are 35 cents (CUC) a minute for domestic calls; not exactly conducive to long chats. Texts cost 9 cents, which makes them the preferred method of communication, but here too people are extremely frugal. Over time I have learned that people rarely acknowledge or confirm text messages unless it is absolutely necessary, and no one engages in North American teenage back and forth text chatter — just the facts. Cuban texts are more like an old-style telegram than a conversation. Those without land lines visit friends’ homes to catch up on their phone calls, or they ring once to indicate their desire to talk. There’s a great scene in the film Habana Blues in which neighbours share a telephone by keeping it in a basket on a clothesline that sails between two apartments. Several of my Cerro friends pay their neighbours to share land line access. When I call Mirta, I am likely to hear the voice of her neighbour telling me sternly to “repita su llamada.” If it rings twice in a row, the call is for Mirta.
Similar ingenuity and entrepreneurship exists around Internet usage — as when, for example, Vivian sends and receives e-mail by opening the window to her shared internal courtyard and yelling at her neighbour who has a home computer. Other neighbourhoods have commoditized this system, creating self-styled home Internet cafés where they rent their connection to neighbours in ten-minute increments. It used to be that $20 could buy you a bootleg Internet connection with a limited monthly allotment. Infomed, the Internet system created for people who work in the medical system, was a popular black-market site. I know several people with Infomed accounts (none of whom had anything to do with the medical system), but these sites are tightly regulated and inspectors often crack down on phoney doctors with home Internet. There are also plenty of people who know how to hack Havana’s hotel wireless sites and sell a hotel’s access code for an hourly rate much cheaper than the six or eight dollars an hour that hotels charge their patrons. Antonio, a University of Havana student, explained how he and his friends bring their phones or laptops (the few who have them) to streets close to the big Havana hotels in order to maximize the signal strength. One of the hacker programs that opens the locked tourist Wi Fi is called “Your Freedom,” which echoes the name of a program that technologically overwrought North Americans can use to lock themselves out of Google or Facebook temporarily.
In 2014, ETECSA began offering a new service called Nauta, which provides limited Internet access via cellphones. A Nauta connection is cheap, only a couple of dollars, and e-mail messages cost one cent to send or receive. In July 2015, a number of WiFi hotspots opened in central locations in Havana. At a price of two dollars an hour, this is the cheapest way to navigate the Internet in the country. It is a fraction of hotel WiFi rates. Yet two dollars an hour is still almost a day’s pay for a state employee and the service itself is slow and frustrating. When ETECSA opened its cellphone Internet service, its already strained infrastructure groaned almost audibly under this new weight of users. Dannys, who works in the arts and has a number of international associates with whom she needs to maintain contact, told me that since Nauta was created, she does all her e-mail business before 6 a.m. Otherwise the lines are hopelessly clogged and she can’t log in. When it rains, cellphone service goes wonky. Even the more reliable land line service is susceptible to strange things. I couldn’t reach Ines for a few days. She finally explained that her land line service got scrambled after fierce rains hit the city and did something to the phone service, even though she lives miles away from where flooding had occurred. That was in May, over Mother’s Day, and a neighbour three blocks away kept trudging over to her place to convey the many Mother’s Day greetings she received from friends and family all over the world that were somehow ringing in on his line.
The entrepreneurship of the poor that is evident in the kiosk capitalism of Havana’s streets is obvious too in the rocky communications system. Revolico.com is an on-line classified advertisement system that was started by students at Havana’s polytechnic university. The Craig’s List or Kijiji of Cuba, it features everything from real estate to lawn chairs.2 In Canada, a group of Cuban immigrants, working with friends still on the island, began a website called “Havana Street View.” It is a creative alternative to Google Maps — which as a US enterprise obviously does not exist in Cuba.3
But the mother of all technologically disobedient Cuban initiatives has to be el Paquete Semanal. The US media have referred to “the weekly package” as “the Google of Cuba,” but I think the designation by Cuban intellectual Victor Fowler — “the Internet of the poor”— is more accurate.4 It’s a mix of Google, Netflix, TV, and Kijiji, delivered to your door on flash drives. Pamela, a Canadian I know, happened to be visiting Havana friends at their home when el Paquete arrived. “It’s like Christmas comes, weekly,” she told me. For a dollar or two, el Paquete provides the latest international TV shows, films, and sports events. Some versions include newspapers and magazines. The source is largely US programming, though Latin American material is also available. Every el Paquete also includes local classifieds, such as apartment listings and restaurant ads. Distributors go door to door and download the package onto home computers or TVs, or, for an additional fee, they leave the drive, returning a few days later with a new supply. According to one of the inventors of the system, recently the subject of a laudatory interview in Forbes magazine, el Paquete has been successful not only because it fills a great demand, but because it relies on the enthusiasm of distributors who make money from sales or rentals. Elio Hector Lopez, one of el Paquete’s founders, explained to Forbes that some distributors are making more money than el Paquete’s creators, because they have expanded their customer base like wildfire; which, he says, is fine with him.5
All of this technological creativity can be fairly awesome to behold, but as with other kinds of entrepreneurship, it is always wise to keep the limitations in view. When individual cellphones first became available they were permitted for foreigners only. Cubans got around this, as they did in the old days when only foreigners could buy in tourist shops, by asking friends for help. During one visit in 2008, I drove with Aldo and Vanessa to the grandly named Miramar Trade Center one afternoon to line up at the ETECSA office and buy myself a cellphone line. I uttered not a word during the exchange. Vanessa and the ETECSA clerk, in plain view of an office full of waiting Cubans, negotiated the whole thing. I showed my passport, signed where necessary, and handed over the cash (which Vanessa had given me in the car). We laughed about the ridiculousness of the situation on the way home, but at one point Vanessa got serious. “Look,” she said, “they put all this money into educating us so well, and then they treat us like children. How crazy is that?” I continue to watch my Canadian students consider how they might survive as students with the 150-megabyte monthly Internet allowance that their Cuban counterparts receive at the University of Havana. An hour on Facebook alone might swallow up almost a quarter of that. I observe Cuban colleagues when visiting Canada soak up the high-speed WiFi at my house or university office with the same intensity that Canadians soak up the Cuban sun in February. I see Cubans in Canada trying to stay in touch with their loved ones on the island with no Skype, little e-mail, and phone calls that can run two dollars a minute. Vanessa is correct: All of the education has led to a tremendous level of inventiveness, but it’s not solely technological. It relies on relationships and community. Imagine where else this ingenuity could go.
If I were to add up the list of things that I, my family, my students, and fellow teachers have brought along to Havana, it would fill a warehouse, or at least a paragraph. We repeatedly tell our students that they, for two weeks, are going to live and learn in a country that does not have a consumer economy. But like the Internet or the air, the absence of ready, constant shopping is a bit much for twenty-year-old Canadians to imagine until they get there. I must admit that even after ten years of regular visits, it is for me too. As my Canadian friend Ruth put it sardonically, in Cuba every day is “Buy Nothing” day.
Stores that sell consumer goods are located in the scant malls and shopping streets around the city. A few stores sell hardware, auto parts, furniture, domestic appliances, books, toys, and clothing. As well as the malls, Obispo, a long-time shopping street in Old Havana, caters to both the tourist and the habanero market. Just between Centro and Old Havana, Galiano Avenue (a.k.a. Italia, a name rarely used), the street that used to house several of Havana’s 1950s-era department stores, remains a busy shopping street. I have noticed improvements in the variety and quality of some things in Havana’s stores over the last ten years. Clothes in the stores are poor quality and expensive, but the clothes, shoes, and handbags in various small craft markets around the city are great. There is a terrific handmade shoe market in Vedado (at calle Primero and D street), and another one in the small craft market on Obispo in Old Havana. There are also extremely good art and craft exhibitions held occasionally in the Pabellon on La Rampa and in the Pabexpo Exhibition Complex further afield. In December, an international art and craft market in the Pabexpo features an overwhelming array of artistry. High-end furniture design is on the rise in Havana, and the work is both expensive and beautiful.
Yet in all the stores, whatever the quality or availability of the goods, prices are near impossible in relation to the level of Cuban salaries. Generally, things, almost all things, are in the same range as in Canada, and many are much more expensive. Given that a bottom-end electric fan costs well over a month’s salary, Cubans not surprisingly have a vexed and complicated relationship to shopping. Stores and malls are busy places; habaneros like to shop as much as anyone else. But stores themselves are not the first or last go-to place for finding that necessary something. People find things — from plumbing supplies to matches and brooms — through various other means. Some are legal, some less so; some are visible (broom vendors regularly walk the streets of Havana), some require a labyrinth of friends, contacts, and local knowledge that few visitors possess. The underground consumer economy is so strong it is often the case that the vendors gathered outside the Galleria mall on Paseo, or around the corner from the Carlos Tercera complex, for example, offer more useful products, at better prices, than do the stores inside.
People also get things from family and friends who visit from outside the country. Plenty of Canadian tourists tell stories of friendships they have developed with hotel staff they’ve come to know over years of visits, for whom they regularly bring vitamins or other necessities. Preparations for my own visits have become routine. We call it the drama de las maletas, the drama of the suitcases. My son jokes that we barely need a scale any longer to judge when the suitcases have reached the magic figure of twenty-three kilos, the airlines’ weight limit. When Jordi was younger and we were going for extended periods, packing had to include a wide range of child-related medicines and amusements. These days we are more focused on gifts for and requests from friends. Camomile tea, vitamins, baby wipes, eye drops, latex-free Band Aids, sheets, all manner of children’s medicine, hot sauce, allergy pills, data storage cards for phones or cameras, toothpaste, light bulbs, deodorant, scrub brushes, spices, inner tubes for automobile tires, a bicycle tire, and printer cartridges come to mind as specific necessities people have requested. Sometimes friends ask for bigger ticket items they insist on paying for — laptops, a computer monitor, external drives, once, memorably, a baby carrier. Xenia once asked me to investigate the cost of transporting an Akita puppy by air — a friend of hers in Havana had a lifelong dream of owning one. The conversation went no further when I reported the price, which ran in the hundreds of dollars (before the price of the dog). Of course, we also bring gifts, which over the years have also settled into familiar categories: items from the world of food, children, and school. Aged Canadian cheddar cheese is always really popular, and surprisingly easy to transport.
There is inevitably a moment, sometimes more than one, in pre-Havana preparations when all this packing seems sad, surreal, and futile. I hesitate to ask Cuban friends the question, “What do you need?” because it is so ridiculous and my contribution seems the very definition of a drop in a bucket. I am gratified when people ask me directly for things they need. This has become part of the fabric of reciprocal friendships in vastly unequal circumstances. But I am also fully aware that when people ask for tea or scrub brushes or cough syrup, they are conscious of my capacities, financially and physically.
A great deal of frustration and emotion about the geopolitics of underdevelopment, empire, and the Cold War is attached to every container of vitamins we carefully weigh in our suitcases. There is drama every step of the way: worrying about airline weight limits, and then worrying about what the Cuban customs agents will make of our strange luggage assortment. Generally Cuban customs receives visiting Canadians more graciously than they do returning Cubans. One time, two of my students were stopped for an hour while Havana customs officers tried to make sense of the two suitcases of medical supplies we had brought as donations from a Canadian NGO (actually we had brought three — one got through without incident). Rather than face another hour of Cuban donation bureaucracy, we left them there, which may have been their goal. From that experience we learned never to put a whole lot of the same thing in one suitcase. Another time, I had to convince a customs agent that a student was bringing a large box of paper clips as a donation to the university (another random donation from an NGO in Canada) rather than intending to sell them on the street herself. But because we’ve been so brazen in bringing such a strange assortment of things for so long, Cuban customs agents no longer scare me.
One December holiday visit, we decided to surprise our friends with as Canadian a gift as we could imagine: a fresh salmon. We froze it and wrapped it carefully in newspaper and tin foil. This was back when Jordi was quite young and, as many travelling parents know, you can get almost anything across a border if you have a sweet-faced child at your side. However, we hadn’t counted on the airline chaos that often occurs in December. One piece of our luggage didn’t make the sold-out flight, and, as luck would have it, it was the salmon suitcase. We tried to imagine the disgusting smelly mess that would arrive, not to mention the reprimand from Cuban authorities. But instead, the suitcase arrived intact two days later, with the salmon still partially frozen. We had a fine New Year’s Eve feast in Vedado that year; ten years later Aldo still tells that story, shaking his head at our audaciousness. My nervousness about crossing borders was vanquished forever.
I am standing with Joaquín Borges-Triana in Kingston’s Walmart store. He and Xenia Reloba are both in Canada to give lectures to Canadian students and celebrate the publication of the book about Carlos Varela that we worked on together. We are waiting for Xenia and Zaira, a Cuban student at Queen’s, to find something Xenia had just remembered was on her shopping list. As stressful and anxiety-producing as the drama de las maletas can be when it comes to packing and transporting them, it can be pretty fun to fill suitcases headed for Havana, particularly while shopping in the company of Cubans. The agreement my university has with the University of Havana is at least partially reciprocal: we send thirty students annually for our course, and we host one Cuban academic or artist in Kingston for a couple of weeks. Over almost ten years of hosting Cuban academics and artists in Canada, I’ve enjoyed plenty of shopping trips like this. Stores such as Costco and Walmart are places I try to avoid, but I permit myself what I call the Cuban exception: I go only when accompanied by visiting Cubans. It is indeed a peculiar aspect of my professional life that I can say proudly that I have accompanied some of Havana’s foremost intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers to the big box stores of suburban Kingston, Ontario.
It’s instructive to shop with visiting Cubans because, in my experience, they are just as blown away by North American consumer culture overdrive as my Canadian students in Havana are by Cuban consumer “underdrive.” They are serious shoppers — in Canada as much as at home — but they have a keen eye for the vast ridiculousness of what fills our stores. Imagine, for example, explaining that the aisles of stuffed toys in a pet store are not actually meant for Canadian children, but intended as toys for dogs and cats. Cubans are also, to generalize, friendly and outspoken with Canadian store clerks. I’ve watched in amusement as my visiting colleagues first pester, then charm the sales staff, many of whom have enjoyed a short visit to Varadero or other Cuban beaches and are delighted to speak to a Cuban in Kingston. Our shopping trips together tend to be really funny and allow me to reflect on my world through an outsider’s eye — which is, perhaps, why Joaquín’s question in Walmart that day catches me off-guard. “Ah, Karen,” he says, “you know Cuba better than many foreigners. Do you think we’ll ever be a normal country?” He is part joking and part wistful, but I still can’t tell the proportions of each.
Mobile Cubans are advantaged Cubans, but there are liabilities that accompany visas and passports. Cubans who live abroad and return for a visit used to be stock buffoonish characters in Cuban popular culture. There’s a dreadfully didactic 1986 film, Lejania by Jesus Díaz, about a Cuban family separated by immigration conflicts. The wickedness of the mother — who left her son behind when she moved to Florida — is underscored by her bulging suitcases as she returns to visit. All the jeans and toys in the world cannot redeem her. Cubans who left the island in the decades after the revolution were derided as gusanos (worms), because when you left the revolution you left the nation (and vice versa). Today, huge suitcases for sale on the streets of Miami are now mockingly termed “gusano bags,” an ironic reference to the importance of what the bags contain when they now arrive, filled, in Cuba. Frank Delgado has a beautiful song, “La Otra Orilla” (The Other Shore), that parodies those bitter days of immigration conflicts, heaping particular scorn on those Cubans — like him — who remained on the island and cursed their friends and family for leaving. “They didn’t say gusano any more,” he sings about his Miami uncle, because upon his return he had become a “communitarian,” another reference to the importance of remittances and gifts from outside Cuba.6 Those bitter days of migration conflicts are mostly over. Cuba relaxed some of its rigid rules in 2013 which had made leaving difficult, and nobody yells traidores (traitors) at Cubans who leave. But vestiges of mean-spiritedness toward mobile Cubans remain, in the complicated regulations facing Cubans returning from longer periods abroad (in the form of visa and luggage charges) and in the nastiness of many customs officials, who, I am told, treat returning Cubans extremely badly, even if they have just been away for a short visit.
I hate Walmart, and I’m still a critic of North American over-consumption. But years of taking Cubans shopping have cured me of any moralistic notions I once had about the nobility of deprivation. I understand what Joaquín’s question about the potential for “normalcy” in Cuba means, I think, when I consider what my Cuban colleagues purchase during their rare North American shopping trips. Their lists are not unlike my own pre-departure list of requests Cuban friends have made, but even more particular and intimate. I’ve helped two colleagues find good quality non-synthetic socks for family members with foot problems. Another spent most of her honorarium from her lectures at Queen’s on expensive orthopedic shoes for her young daughter. One friend bought a dozen simple cloth shopping bags, gifts for each of her child’s teachers in primary school. Others return with boxes of couscous or quinoa or rice crackers; things we’ve served them in Canada that aren’t available in Havana, and they want to share them with family members there. These shopping trips are hardly extravagant buying frenzies. Rather, they fill immediate needs and provide small pleasures. I sometimes try to nudge friends into buying things for themselves that have caught their eye, usually to no avail. The advantage of travel is something to be shared, even in tiny increments.
Before I started spending time in Havana, I was, for many years, a Canadian tourist in Varadero. I spent Christmas of 2000 there with my family and my sister’s family. A Queen’s colleague asked me to bring something to a friend connected to the University of Havana and gave me the telephone number of two contacts. I called one of them and we made a plan to meet up in a central location in Old Havana during a day trip we planned to make from the beach.
We enjoyed a beer and French fries together in a restaurant in Old Havana one afternoon. Ines admired the young Jordi, then an adorable one-year-old. I handed over the package we had been charged with delivering. It was a small thermometer wrapped in a resealable plastic bag and a small manila envelope. Ines, a philosophy professor at the University of Havana, was grateful we had delivered it, and explained it was for the young son of a colleague, another philosophy professor. The son was six years old, she told us, susceptible to frequent colds. The family will be really happy to have this, she said.
Some fifteen years later I was gathered with my family at the dining-room table of my colleague Lourdes, another University of Havana philosophy professor. At the table in her Vedado apartment was her son Dairon, a handsome twenty-one-year-old and one of my best friends in Havana. We were idly speaking about our long-standing family friendship and our various visits, and I suddenly remembered the thermometer story. Until then I had never really thought further about who the thermometer was for. “Are you the family we once brought a thermometer for?” I asked, starting to connect some old dots. Lourdes smiled and silently left the table. She returned with the same manila envelope, the same resealable plastic bag, containing the same thermometer. It still works and it’s now an important part of the family medical kit for the recently arrived granddaughter.
These kinds of stories are fun in any circumstances among any group of people who find they are connected through little moments of chance that sometimes grow into relationships. Another Cuban/Canadian gathering at another dining-room table, this time in Canada, produced a similar random but powerful story of connection. Zaira, a Cuban student at Queen’s, was living in our house in Canada while we were in Havana. Marcel Beltrán, a Cuban filmmaker visiting Canada, was passing through town and stopped to visit her for dinner. He looked up from his meal, noticed a small painting on our wall, and his eyes filled with tears. “My mother painted that,” he said. I had bought the beautiful painting of a crab, one of Jordi’s favourite things to chase on the beach, in a small tourist shop in Old Havana the year before.
What the thermometer story illustrates to me is that each package delivered or item purchased and transported to Cuba enters a web of relationships and exchanges that can, if the circumstances are right, generate something that goes way beyond the value of the item itself. It is a story that makes more intelligible the origins of my friendship with Dairon, a twenty-one-year-old Afro-Cuban male — an unusual pairing. Our friendship has grown, since our unwitting thermometer connection, because of our mutual love of contemporary music. I often introduce Dairon as my professor of Cuban Cultural Studies. He calls us his Modern Family (the US TV show featuring a gay couple with an adopted child that he knows from el Paquete). We go to concerts together in Havana and he is single-handedly responsible for a good part of my Cuban musical education. In exchange, I help him expand his English vocabulary beyond what he learned from his first teachers, Kanye West and Jay-Z. My son venerates him as an older, hipper brother, and now generations of my students spend time with him and his friends and negotiate their own friendships across borders. We keep in sporadic touch through Facebook when he can succeed in finding an Internet connection, and when something really big in Havana is going on Dairon texts me a brief report. “I am the happiest man in Havana today,” he texted a while ago. “I just saw Beyoncé and Jay-Z on the street.”
Boundaries and differences like ours are possible to cross at home, too. But there is something in the nature of this friendship that seems emblematically Cuban to me, perhaps because it began by a combination of a simple gift and multiple relationships.
On the morning of Wednesday, December 17, 2014, I was in Havana, walking to an appointment at an office in Miramar. I had been in Cuba for a couple of weeks; I had just come back to Havana from an intense time in eastern Cuba. I had accompanied Ines Rodríguez to that part of the island on a visit we had planned for a long time: retracing her steps from when she was a teacher in the 1961 literacy campaign. She hadn’t returned since that time and she was really keen to see the legacies of the time she spent there, teaching people to read when she was just sixteen years old. I felt blessed that I could accompany her and we experienced some remarkable moments trudging up mountains interviewing former students and teachers. Eastern Cuba, or “Oriente,” is known as the cradle of the revolution, the place where it all began. My savvy Havana friends warned me I was in for a world of more ideological rigidity than I had become accustomed to in relatively cosmopolitan Havana. They did not exaggerate. When I arrived back in Havana after our time in rural Oriente, I was still reeling. Most of the people we spoke with were enthusiastic and warm and spoke from the heart. But we had endured some really didactic, doctrinaire discussions with local officials — the kind of people I am generally able to avoid in Havana. One local history functionary gave us a long speech about how awful it was that the “bandera del enemigo,” the enemy’s flag, was arriving in Cuba through the current fashion for stars-and-stripes-themed T-shirts and other adornments. I felt like I had stepped back in time, at least a couple of decades.
All this made the announcement of US/Cuban rapprochement that day even more of a surprise. I heard about what was unfolding as I was heading to the Miramar offices of CARE Canada, one of the few Canadian NGOS in Cuba. I had an appointment with Christina Polzot, their dynamic director in Cuba whom I had met briefly before. I wanted to invite her to speak to our students when we were next in Havana. As I approached their office, my cellphone rang. I saw it was Emilia calling, which was strange for several reasons. I was staying with her and had seen her at breakfast a couple of hours ago. And Cubans text, they rarely call, due to the crazy phone rates. I answered and her first words were, “Did you hear the news?” My first thought was “Fidel died,” which was immediately followed by, “No, Emilia sounds happy. She probably would not sound so thrilled to announce someone’s death.” Of course, she was calling to tell me that Cuba and the US were swapping political prisoners — Allan Gross, the American, for the so-called Cuban Five (who were now four as one had already been released) — and that Barack Obama and Raúl Castro were scheduled to make speeches shortly. I said something like, “Wow, this might be it,” and Emilia agreed, though I now wonder what we thought “it” was exactly.
I continued to the CARE office and spoke to Christina. Our meeting was punctuated, however, by the constant sound of our cellphones receiving messages from friends in Canada and in Cuba about the unfolding events. Christina’s husband, Stephen Wickery, is a Canadian journalist who was extremely plugged in to the significance of the day. After my meeting, I continued with my day, which included a visit to a nearby Miramar shopping complex in search of a reading lamp for Emilia’s apartment. I spent the rest of the morning watching habaneros watch the news. The little furniture store I had been directed to in search of lamps (successfully, as it turned out) set up a TV and a few people were watching, but fewer than I would have expected. There was more going on in the bakery next door, where a radio was announcing Raul’s imminent speech and everyone was speaking happily about the release of the Five. Later that day I dropped by Casa de Las Américas, a venerable cultural centre housed in a beautiful Art Deco building at the foot of calle G, overlooking the Malecón. As I’d expected, it was abuzz. TV sets were set up everywhere and everyone was watching. My friends who work there greeted me with hugs and jokes. Gerardo held high his iPad — a prized possession, a gift from a US university colleague. “WiFi on the P1,” he declared, referencing a crowded popular bus route. The best Canadian translation for this fantasy scenario might be something like, “Free cocktails on the Spadina bus.”
The pattern I saw that day was a mix of optimism and irony, sarcasm and good faith. Ines told me she heard people in her market that afternoon yelling out, “OK, where is the American rice?” As luck would have it, December 17, 2014, fell on a Wednesday, Interactivo’s day to perform at el Brecht. So, late that night I gathered there with a group of Cuban and visiting Canadian friends. The Havana Jazz Festival was on and the place was packed. At the table beside us, a group of English speakers, a jazz ensemble from Chicago, started asking us questions about what to expect from Interactivo. Of course, the conversation turned to the announcement that day. “Is this Obama building a legacy?” I asked one of them. “I think it’s Obama doing what we fucking elected him to do in the first place,” he replied. Then the music started up, and the flamboyant Francis del Rio came on stage with new lyrics to an old song:
Ay Obama, Ay, Obama, vuélvete loco y ven pa’ La Habana.
Hey Obama, drive yourself crazy, come to Havana.
It was indeed a great day in Havana. I think the happiest person I spoke to that day was Emilia, a middle-aged woman who trained as an engineer in the Soviet Union — a member of the last Cuban generation to do that. She now works in a Havana clinic. She is a smart, well-educated professional. Some years ago she got to know people from the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA), a Washington-based NGO that lobbies for better relations between the US and Cuba. As part of its campaign to get the US government to lift the travel ban and the blockade, the centre basically tries to humanize Cuba for Americans raised on decades of Cold War fear-mongering. It regularly brings delegations of US opinion-makers such as Congress people and journalists to Havana to meet with a wide assortment of people. These visitors meet Havana luminaries such as Carlos Varela, who has for years welcomed a wide swath of American visitors: school children, musicians, and politicians alike. But the CDA also facilitates meetings with “ordinary Cubans” and that is where Emilia comes in. She’s become the poster child to show Americans that Cubans do not have horns. For several years, she has received regular invitations from the CDA to events that bring Cubans and visiting Americans together. Sometimes she e-mails me first to give me the list of Congress people whom she is going to meet. I look them up and jokingly recommend those she should avoid and those she should sit next to.
Emilia is the very definition of the active, informed citizen. She cares passionately about her country but is not superficially ideological, and no doubt that’s why she keeps getting invited for dinner. A couple of years ago she contacted me with exciting news: instead of bringing Americans to Havana, CDA had invited a number of Cubans to visit Washington for a conference, and she was on the guest list. In order to show off the entrepreneurial spirit of La Nueva Cuba to skeptical Americans, they mostly invited cuentapropistas, such as the owners of one of Havana’s thriving, high-end restaurants and another who owns a car rental company. Emilia was the only state employee to be invited, of which she and her family were extremely proud. It was her first time in the US, and she was especially excited about a tiny window of opportunity afforded by this invitation. Her travel arrangements permitted her one free day before the conference started, and she wanted to spend it in New York, the city in the world she most wanted to visit. So, one grey November Saturday, Susan Lord and I raced from Kingston to Syracuse, New York, jumped on a train to Manhattan, and spent twenty-seven hours with Emilia in New York City. You can see a surprising amount of New York in twenty-seven hours, and every time we glimpsed an iconic American sight, Emilia peered, looked around, and declared, “I don’t see the enemy. Where is the enemy?”
In academic work on foreign policy and international relations, there is a new recognition of what some call “foreign policy from below.” Relationships between countries are not made solely by men in business suits who conduct trade relations, declare war or peace, or open embassies. The activities of NGOs like the Center for Democracy in the Americas, and the enthusiastic willingness of people like Emilia or Carlos Varela to be active popular ambassadors, representing not their state but their families, neighbourhoods, and friends, are, I think, where foreign policy is really made. Emilia is no fool and like almost every Cuban I have spoken with, she is skeptical and anxious about what the new relationships with the US will yield. But she is also extremely happy to see her country finally emerge from the Cold War.
A year or so after our whirlwind trip to New York, I was in an IKEA store in Canada and happened to see a huge, framed, black and white photograph, a bird’s eye view of Manhattan in the 1960s. I knew just the wall for it, Emilia’s apartment on calle Línea. But it took at least six months for me to imagine how I might transport it. It was a more formidable project than even a whole salmon had been. Finally I bought it, and brought it, along with thirty students, on my next Havana trip. It didn’t fit on the conveyer belt of the scanner at Pearson airport in Toronto, it almost didn’t fit on the airplane, and Havana customs agents looked at me like I was insane when I told them it was simply a photograph, not a huge flat screen TV (which it resembled). But they waved me through and, later that night after the students were settled in the hotel, Susan Lord and Emilia and I made our way down the hill on calle Paseo toward Línea, a little tipsy and laughing like idiots, carrying a huge oversize picture of Manhattan to a Havana apartment.