CHAPTER 28
GUANABACOA
April 19, 2018
When the day finally came for Raúl Castro to fulfill the promise he’d made five years earlier that nobody, not even a man named Castro, should stay in office for more than a decade, Cary was ready. She brewed a pot of coffee and made herself comfortable in a wooden rocking chair in front of the TV, putting her bare feet up on a stool and turning on Hopeful to keep her cool. She was excited and also worried as she watched the newly affirmed members of the National Assembly cast votes for a new president, a man who would mark a generational change in Cuba’s leaders from the age of those who remembered, and cursed, Batista to those—like her—who had known only the Castros’ Cuba.
As she sipped her coffee, she saw little that surprised her. It was not an election in any real sense. Rather, it was a succession, one deftly choreographed by Raúl. A commission made up of his allies had announced the day before that the first vice president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, a bull-chested, silver-haired, fifty-seven-year-old apparatchik from the center of the country, was the sole candidate for president of the council of state and the council of ministers, two separate titles that had been reserved for either Fidel or Raúl since they were created. The members of the newly reconstituted National Assembly then voted to affirm the commission’s choice of Díaz-Canel to replace Raúl.
The deputies waited a day to announce the results, as if they needed time to count votes about which there hadn’t been the slightest doubt. The transition to the post-Castro generation went off as smoothly as a Silvio Rodríguez ballad, and without either criticism in the Cuban media or input from the Cuban people. As Cary finished her first cup of coffee, the election commission announced that three of the five new vice presidents were black, and two were women. Cary smiled. Clearly these were good signs for Cuba. Her smile disappeared when Ramiro Valdés, the eighty-six-year-old general who had headed Cuba’s security forces for years, was confirmed as one of the vice presidents. And the name of Gladys María Bejerano Portela, a stone-faced seventy-one-year-old who earned a fearful reputation in her years as comptroller general of the nation, made her grimace.
Then came the announcement that she had been waiting for: Díaz-Canel had been affirmed by a vote of 603 out of the 604 members present. Cary assumed that Díaz-Canel, in a show of public humility, had not voted for himself.
All 604 delegates, including Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro, rose to their feet as if on command and applauded. Cary watched intently, recalling the euphoria she experienced when she had attended the Fifth Communist Party Congress years before. But now she knew better. She was no longer blinded by revolutionary zeal. Six hundred individuals all believing that this one man, whom most did not know, was the best person to lead Cuba for the next decade? This was neither democracy nor revolution.
Oscar poked his head into the living room to see what was going on. When every deputy raised a hand to confirm the vote for Díaz-Canel, without a single no vote or abstention, he jeered. The whole proceeding was nothing more than a sham. Cary turned away from the TV screen to try to convince him that they were witnessing something important, a step along the path that for years she had been telling him Cuba would follow. He didn’t buy it. “Nothing’s going to change,” he said, still smirking. “It’ll all be the same.” He watched for a few minutes more as Díaz-Canel was called up to the dais. The new president walked briskly, his expensive suit jacket unbuttoned. When he casually slapped the hands of the first-row delegates as though they were opponents at the end of a friendly baseball game, Oscar yelled, “Hey, look at that!” This new guy’s politics might not be any different from the others, but at least he had a sense of style.
It hurt Cary to see him sneer at the transition.
“In twenty years, you’ll be looking back and thinking that this moment was actually the beginning of an important change in Cuba.”
“In twenty years?” Oscar shook his head. “In twenty years I’ll be what? Forty-seven years old? I’m not going to be thinking about this moment. No way.” He kissed his mother on the cheek and finished getting ready for work.
There was no formal ceremony as Díaz-Canel took office. Like all the other deputies in the National Assembly, he had signed a form the previous day vowing to fulfill his duties as deputy. That was all. He wore no ceremonial sash with the national colors. He did not take an oath of office. No trumpets blared to intensify the spirit of the moment. When he spoke, he directed his words at his fellow deputies, not the Cuban people. And his fundamental message quickly became clear. In other countries, incoming officials promised change. In Cuba, they promised that nothing would change. Díaz-Canel offered a firm commitment to follow the path Cuba had been on for as long as most people could remember—in fact, longer than he’d been alive. To prove his loyalty, Díaz-Canel paid elaborate homage to Raúl and Fidel and the rest of the historic generation, including eighty-seven-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura, who was sitting at Raúl’s side. Both men, who had fought with Fidel in the mountains and had run Cuba with him since the triumph of the revolution, had just been elected to new terms as deputies.
The old generation of the Sierra had not yet faded into the shadows. But the next generation of Castros was not continuing the dynasty, at least not now. Raúl’s daughter Mariela Castro Espín was a high-profile member of the National Assembly, but she had not been given a leadership position. Raúl’s son Alejandro was not an assemblyman and therefore couldn’t constitutionally ascend to the presidency, although he had been a significant player in the secret negotiations with the Obama administration. And Fidel’s eldest son, sixty-eight-year-old Fidelito, had committed suicide just weeks before the handover.
As he wrapped up his speech, Díaz-Canel repeated the basic message that state-run media had delivered nonstop for weeks: faces might be different, but there would be no disruption. The revolution would continue. The new president ended with one of Fidel’s old rallying cries: “¡Patria o muerte! ¡Socialismo o muerte! ¡Venceremos!” (Homeland or death! Socialism or death! We will be victorious!).
Cary looked pleased. She knew that Oscar thought of her as a dreamer whenever she mentioned that changes were coming, though she hoped that one day he’d see things differently. Díaz-Canel surely represented a new generation, her generation, and she probably knew him better than did many of the legislators who’d just voted for him. She’d worked with him when she was vice minister and he was head of the party in his home province of Villa Clara, but she never imagined that one day she’d watch him take over as president. Based on her experiences in and out of the system, she saw through his rhetoric about continuity and was certain his ideas would someday conflict with those of the old guard he was replacing. Even though Raúl had groomed him to take over, there were bound to be differences. His reluctance to make specific promises was a sign that he realized he had not been given a magic wand that he could wave to create housing and food. Making promises he couldn’t keep would be far worse than not making any promises at all. She saw definite signs of hope. Small signs, but real hope. This was the end of an era and the beginning of a new day when Cuba could maintain what it had already achieved and change what needed to be changed. She was sure of it.
Cary listened intently as Raúl, in his long and sometimes rambling final address, sent the same message of continuity as his successor. She nodded when, in a brief summary of the revolution’s critical moments, he referred to July 1994, the summer of tugboats and protests, as the “peak of the most desperate part” of the special period. He didn’t specifically mention the sinking of the 13 de Marzo, the hijacking of the ferries, or the disturbances on the Malecón, but his mention of July 1994 reminded Cary and everyone else listening of how bad things had been then and how much better everything seemed now—a comparison that Cubans routinely made to take the sting out of daily life. He made it clear that although he was stepping down as president, he was continuing as supreme leader of the party for three more years. He then laid out his vision for the future—calling for a substantial rewrite of the constitution to set term limits and age restrictions on all political leaders. He said he’d like to see Díaz-Canel replace him as leader of the party in 2021 and then begin a second term as president in 2023. He admitted that he had not done a very good job of preparing the next generation to take over, and he described how hubris and scandal had eliminated many potential leaders. Cary understood the cryptic reference to the 2009 purge of Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque, Roberto Robaina, and other rising stars who were said to have celebrated with drinks at the Ambos Mundos Hotel the news that Fidel Castro was seriously ill. The government even claimed to have videotapes proving that, in Fidel’s own words, the disgraced officials had succumbed to “the honey of power.”
Cary perked up when Raúl mentioned that the process of “neoliberal privatizations” of nonstrategic sectors in the economy would continue, but she was disappointed when he failed to address the creation of a wholesale market or the unification of the dual currencies that made doing business a nightmare. Just then the doorbell rang, and Faru started barking. Cary looked out the window. “How much?” she shouted. An elderly woman stood outside the front gate holding a big transparent plastic bag filled with crackers. It weighed several pounds.
“Six dollars,” the woman said. That was half of her pension, but just a minuscule share of what she, Pipo, and Oscar were making at Procle. Cary shuffled to the kitchen for her purse. She knew without asking that the crackers came from a state-owned bakery on Vía Blanca, just past the Guanabacoa traffic light. The woman was luchando—hustling—but Cary bought the crackers anyway. Someone was always coming to their door selling something this way. That’s how she’d bought the Hopeful fan. A few pounds of unsliced mortadella imported from Spain? Stolen, but Pipo bought it. Fresh snapper from Pinar del Río, with the spear hole in its side? Illegal catch, but Pipo bought it. Several weeks after Cary purchased the looted crackers, she saw a news report about the cracker factory, and she had to laugh. The plant manager was praised for exceeding quotas in tiempo récord, but there was no mention of what everyone in Guanabacoa knew—that innumerable bags of crackers illicitly taken from the plant had ended up being sold door to door. The thieves made money, the buyers found food, and the factory manager was praised for meeting production goals. Luchando.
Cary returned to her rocker to watch the end of the inaugural ceremonies. For her, the significance of the handover was undeniable, despite the assurances of continuity from Díaz-Canel and Raúl. Cuba would not be transformed overnight; she knew that, and she harbored no illusions about Díaz-Canel turning out to be Cuba’s Gorbachev. But she sensed that the chains had been moved, steps had been taken, and as one era receded, a new one had dawned.
IN HIS STUDIO THAT NIGHT, Arturo Montoto forced himself to watch the rebroadcast of the speeches, another act in what he considered the tragicomedy that was Cuba. He had more than politics on his mind. In the outdoor section of his workshop, just beyond the lush garden with all his trees and plants, Arturo was spending most of every day overseeing the finishing touches to Dividendo, his gigantic watermelon sculpture. He and his assistants had built a scaffolding to get up high enough to finish the work that never seemed to end. First the challenge had been finding enough of the foam Arturo needed to complete the basic shape of the six-foot-tall melon slice. He had to rely on friends bringing in cans of spray foam, the kind used to insulate around windows. Once the foam hardened, he applied resin, which he purchased locally, but on this day, he was cursing the manufacturer—the Cuban state—because the resin hadn’t held up the way he expected. Alfredo, one of his young assistants, was scraping off layers of the resin with a wire brush and a hand broom to create the texture Arturo envisioned. It was tedious, backbreaking work.
“With a power washer we would have this done in a few minutes,” Arturo told Alfredo, who raised his eyebrows but did not stop scraping. Arturo had invented this time-consuming alternative, which had taken days, delaying the project yet again. His life seemed to be conforming to his art. The concept that unified the melon slice with much of the rest of the work he’d been wrestling with for four years was darkness, which he readily admitted probably reflected his view of life in Cuba.
“I’m not at all interested in who is chosen president because I know that they have not been elected by the people,” he said as his assistants waited for instructions. Nothing in Díaz-Canel’s speech had given him hope for the future, and he remained deeply pessimistic. “For the last sixty years all that I have seen here is demagoguery. I’ve lived practically all my life under this demagoguery, and I know that everything is a lie. When changes appear to take place in Cuban politics, they are not real changes. Everything stays the same, and we all know that everything will stay the same.”
A block away in her house on Corralfalso, María del Carmen had not bothered watching any of the assembly proceedings. Díaz-Canel’s promise of continuity, designed to appease hardliners in the government, had the opposite effect on her. In Villa Panamericana, Jorge García’s grandson Jorgito had scoffed at the notion of wasting time with elections that in point of fact were selections. And Miriam Díaz, alone in her one-room apartment perched above a filthy stream in Guanabacoa, had recently retired from her job at the municipal social security office and had nothing better to do. But even at the risk of boredom, she refused to watch.
Change was what people like Cary hoped for while it was what people like Lili and Carlos feared. They had the TV on throughout the entire handover, and they watched it again during the rebroadcast later that same day to make sure they caught every word. Lili knew that many people outside Cuba had predicted that without a Castro in charge, the revolution would flame out. “But on the contrary,” she said after she had watched Díaz-Canel take Raúl’s place. “Everything is moving forward. The legacy will continue.”
Next door, Joseíto had not bothered to watch any part of the proceedings. Old music videos were more interesting.
AS THE HANDOVER WAS UNDER WAY in Cuba, Jorge García was in Miami settling back into his regular routine after an extraordinary few days at the eighth Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, where he again denounced the Castro regime for its role in the sinking of the 13 de Marzo. The International Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against Humanity of the Castro Regime was one of several human rights groups that had participated in the civil-society meetings that led up to the Summit. As he had done in Miami in July, and then again at hearings the commission held in November in Washington, DC, Jorge poured out his impassioned memory of that day in 1994. In Peru, the commission’s activities were highlighted by the unveiling of billboards around Lima showing a photograph of Raúl Castro with the words WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The commission formally requested that the Trump administration bring charges against Raúl since he was no longer protected by international laws shielding national leaders. Jorge knew that the commission’s chances of getting any international court to prosecute Castro were slim. The commission had decided that its strongest case for prosecution was not the tugboat sinking but the 1996 downing of the Brothers to the Rescue plane. Nonetheless, the commission’s persistence on such an international stage fortified Jorge’s own commitment to finding justice for the victims, and he was willing to continue being patient. When the commission presented its findings to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington at the end of 2018, he left home once more to spill out his painful memories and continue his crusade.
“In front of you today, I renew my yearning for justice,” he told the commissioners as he wrapped up his allotted ten minutes. Although they had heard his emotional testimony before, they listened with rapt attention, and in the audience, people with stone faces shook their heads in anger and disbelief at the carnage that Jorge described.
Then, with his face red with emotion, he peered at the commission members sitting at their long table in the elegant headquarters of the OAS. It was a long way from the humble house he had built with his own hands on San Sebastián Street in Guanabacoa, and nearly a quarter century had gone by since he had told his son Joel that he would see him in eternity.
“I know that your work will bring vindication for my dead.” The anger had dropped out of his voice as he rededicated himself to those who perished. “And permit me here, in front of you, to renew my promise to continue denouncing these atrocities for as long as I am alive.”