I got my first look at Havana at dawn, from the window of my room in the Hotel Nacional. The city was gray with the grizzled markings particular to tropical desolation. Bright colors were bleached to dirty pearl. There were ashen streaks from leaking roofs and dark whorls left over from stagnant puddles. Mildew spread across walls like a living soot.
Even from ten stories up, I could see holes in everything: holes in roofs, holes in streets, holes where windows ought to be. There were holes in everything, and chunks missing from everything else. Chunks had fallen from balconies, cornices, porticoes, marble and granite facades. The city blocks were missing chunks of buildings. Some of the remaining buildings were missing so many chunks I thought they were abandoned until I saw the hanging laundry. And the laundry was full of holes.
Cuba looked like it had lost a war. And it had—the Cold War. But Albania had lost the Cold War, too, and Tirana, as I’d see a year later, was a colorful, noisy place this time of day: cafés were full, cars collided, street vendors shouted their wares. Havana was silent.
I watched enormous breakers tumbling against the seawall of the Malecón, Havana’s oceanfront boulevard. Thousands of gallons of gray brine sloshed over the holes and chunks in its concrete pavement. Torrents of dingy sea foam flushed against the Malecón’s paintless old town houses. Very few tuberos, those brave souls who try to escape from Cuba aboard tied-together inner tubes, would be out today. They’d be washed right back into somebody’s living room. And a very crummy living room, to judge by what I could see.
I was feeling pretty crummy myself. I’d arrived the previous midnight and gone straight to the Nacional’s bar and started drinking mojitos. This was Cuba-fan Ernest Hemingway’s second favorite drink, after the wake-up slug out of a hidden gin bottle. A mojito is made by mixing too much sugar with too much rum in not enough soda water and adding crushed mint leaves and lime juice. It sounds disgusting and, believe me, the next morning it is.
The walls of the bar were decorated with black-and-white photographs of celebrities visiting the Nacional, all of them, except a couple second-string European intellectuals, before the Castro era. Bad rumba music boomed from the girlie show in the hotel nightclub.
After five or eight mojitos I went to the john. If you were designing a socialist system—a nation in which everyone had the same social status—wouldn’t eliminating restroom attendants be the first thing you’d do? And if I were designing a socialist system (what a hobby), I’d at least let the masses visit the hotel that they all supposedly own in common. But ordinary Cubans can’t enter the Nacional or its several acres of seaside gardens unless they are, for instance, restroom attendants.
A few Cubans manage to sneak in. When I went upstairs at 3 a.m., there was a North American–type fellow in the elevator with a young woman, a girl, really, maybe sixteen years old. She was clean and clean-cut, soberly dressed, without jewelry or makeup, wholesome of manner and apparently a prostitute. At least the elevator operator thought so. He ordered her out. She was not a hard-looking girl, but a hard look crossed her face as she left.
I rented a car for an exorbitant amount of money. The car-rental company’s manager spoke at length about Cuban-American friendship and how the citizens of both countries desired peace and mutual cooperation, “except for a few fascists such as Barry Goldwater and that Oklahoma bomber.” The manager seemed to have done pretty well in the revolution. “According to my Rolex …,” he said, noting the time on my rental contract. And I got to hear about how he liked women with large bottoms.
He gave me the keys to a dirty and dented Japanese sedan. It had a Toyota nameplate, but, looking at the fit and finish, I’d say I doubt it.
I drove through Habana Centro. In 1991, Fidel Castro told Mexican journalist Beatriz Pages, “The other Latin-American countries have tens of millions of beggars; Cuba has none. In other Latin-American countries, you see children cleaning car windshields, running among the cars to do that.” I stopped at a red light. Children ran among the cars, cleaning windshields.
Not that there were many windshields to clean. Traffic in Havana was mostly a matter of bicycles and pedestrians who had grown so used to empty streets that someone who looked both ways before crossing was probably a paranoid schizophrenic. People dawdled along, peddling at four miles an hour in the passing lanes and pushing baby strollers down highway exit ramps. Old ladies stood in the middle of the avenue puzzled that there should be someone who wanted to get by.
There were, however, still traffic police, hundreds of them, one on almost every corner. And traffic rules were completely in force, though stoplights were burned out and street signs were illegible with corrosion. It was, for instance, almost impossible to make a legal left turn in Havana, and all the streets in the city seemed to go one way to the left. These streets are numbered odd east-west and even north-south. I was inclined to give up mojitos when I found myself at the corner of Tenth and Eleventh streets.
Habana Centro looked like 1960 Cleveland after a thirty-seven-year strike by painters and cleaning ladies. But the old city, La Habana Vieja, was beautiful. Cuba’s Spanish-colonial architecture is classical and restrained, less Taco Bell influenced than Mexico’s. And unlike the rest of the Caribbean, Cuba’s old buildings are made of stone. The island has, during its history, suffered various periods of neglect, such as the present one. Maybe the Cubans were trying to design things that would look good as moldering ruins.
The tourist areas of the old town had been cleaned up, and somewhat more cleanup was in progress. A number of museums and government-owned restaurants were open and were, as Fodor’s Cuba guidebook says of one such, “decorated with antique furniture recovered from the great mansions of the local bourgeoisie.” Tactfully put. Outside of the tourist areas, however, there was a fair danger of experiencing some freelance socialism; you might find that you were the local bourgeoisie from which something got recovered.
Later in the morning, Havana’s streets grew crowded, but not with a madding crowd. Nobody was doing much of anything or going anywhere in particular. Thousands of people were just hanging around in the middle of a weekday in a country where, by law, there’s no unemployment. Some people were walking dogs. All the dogs were old and small, the kind kept by rich women for purposes of baby talk. Maybe the dogs had been left behind when the rich women fled the revolution—thirty-seven-year-old miniature schnauzers forced to pawn their costume-jewelry collars and have their fur clipped at barber colleges.
The dogs didn’t look happy. The kind of meat that goes into dog food would be eaten by people in Cuba, if there were any of it to be had. The people didn’t look happy, either. There was an edge and an attitude among the idling mobs in Havana. They gave out lots of hard looks, and, when foreign women were around, grabbed their testicles, and made hisses and sucky lip noises.
But when I actually met the Cubans—and I met a lot of them at a gas station after I drove the Toyota into a big hole, causing a front wheel to fold like a paper plate with too much potato salad on it—they were swell. They were pleasant, helpful, cheery, polite. They all had relatives in America. And an American woman told me that when she went out alone, the noises ceased. Or nearly ceased. The men grabbed their testicles in a formal and courtly manner.
The gas station was one of the few visible instances of anybody doing anything for a living. The Cuban government has not only eliminated the concept of unemployment, it’s eliminated the concept of jobs, if you don’t count begging or pestering strangers to buy “genuine Cohiba cigars” that “a good friend of mine sneaks out of the factory.” Either the fellow who sneaks Cohibas out of the factory has an unusual number of good friends, or Cohiba sneaking is Cuba’s largest industry.
There was little honest economic activity on the streets of Havana, only occasional kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers, which they were mostly out of.
At a few prescribed spots in the city, there were arts-and-crafts markets. The arts and the crafts looked like they were made by accountants, lawyers, university professors, and other famously unhandy types who’d been out on the patio with dull tools trying to turn pieces of scrap wood into Che Guevara wall plaques and cigarette boxes with CUBA IS BEAUTIFUL carved on the lids in a desperate attempt to get U.S. dollars.
The dollars were provided by a few tourists watched over by more than a few tourist police. Membership in this branch of the constabulary being proclaimed, in English, on the breast pockets of their uniforms. The tourist police did not, however, enforce fashion law. The tourists wore NBA balloon shoes on noodle legs, pie-wagon-sized jogging shorts, and idiot logo T-shirts.
The Cubans, poor as they were, looked much better. Not that their clothing was good. It seemed to be from American relatives who had gone to Price Club and put together large boxes of practical duds. But the Cubans wore that clothing well—tight where tight flattered, artfully draped where artful draping was to the purpose, and when all else failed, the clothes were simply absent. There were bare midriffs, wide skirt slits, buttons undone to the navel.
Cubans are stylish. Cubans are even glamorous, especially the women. And some of the women were entirely too glamorous for the middle of the day. Because there was a certain economic activity on the streets of Havana, and lots of it. Flocks of women stood along major roads plying the trade. “Why is that girl hitchhiking in her prom dress?” I heard a tourist ask.
The whores were budding in Cuba, and everything else was old, withered, blown, used up. Even the Young Pioneers, solemn kids in red kerchiefs doing calisthenics in the park, seemed to be obsolete children, products of some musty, disproven ideas about social hygiene. Tired, stupid slogans—SOCIALISM OR DEATH—were painted everyplace. The paint on the signs was peeling. All the paint in Cuba was peeling.
Of course, there was a good neighborhood in Havana. There always is in these places. Miramar is on the beach to the west of downtown. The streets were lined with royal palms and also with new BMWs. The cheerful mansions had been built in the style that’s called Spanish if you live in Pasadena. These were perfectly maintained and lavishly gardened, and every one of them was owned by a Cuban government institution, a foreign corporation, or an embassy, and so were the cars. In between the cheerful mansions were mansions of little cheer. The Castro government “recovered” these and turned them into housing for “the people.” It was part of the liberty, equality, and fraternity espoused by the Cuban revolution. The fraternity in question must have been the one portrayed in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Much of Miramar looked like the Deltas had been living in it for the past seventy-four semesters. They’d all gotten crabby and gray. And they’d run out of beer.
Nighttime was better in Havana. The city had so few lights that after dark I hardly noticed the electrical blackouts.
There were some privately owned restaurants. The food was good, and I could get a meal for five dollars. However, it did have to be dollars. No one in Cuba was interested in pesos. Even beggars checked to see if the coin being offered was American. The private restaurants were allowed no more than twelve seats, and only family members could be employed. This was as far as the Cuban government had been willing to go with capitalism among its own citizens. It will be interesting to see how this model works if it’s applied to other free enterprise undertakings, such as airlines. Mom will begin beverage service as soon as Junior gets the landing gear up.
The big restaurants were nationalized, and in a nation that’s suffering severe food shortages, this meant that only rice and beans were available to foreigners who had dollars. Ha, ha, ha. Hard-currency joke. I could get anything I wanted—lobster, steak, Cohiba cigars actually made by Cohiba, and rum older than the prostitutes sitting at all the other tables with German businessmen. The catch was, not only couldn’t Cubans afford these things, neither could I. In the Floridita, where the daiquiri was invented and where the New York City price of drinks was apparently also invented, cocktails cost five dollars—more, at the black-market exchange rate for dollars, than most Cubans make in a week. I was also in constant danger of being serenaded. Guitar players roam Cuba’s restaurants in packs. They know one song, “Guantanamera.” The complete lyrics are:
“Guantanamera, Guantanamera,
Guan-tan-a-meeeeera, Guantanamera.”
This unofficial national anthem was popularized by noted Cuban patriot Pete Seeger.
Was I missing something? Cuba is famous for its charm. I decided to hire a guide. Maybe he could find me some. Roberto, as I’ll call him, took me to Hemingway’s house in the village of San Francisco de Paula. It’s a white stucco plantation-style manor on a hilltop with twenty-two acres of land, a guest cottage, and a swimming pool. I must remember to write harder. There’s a three-story tower with a den at the top where Hemingway could go and think big thoughts. (“Where is that gin bottle?”) And in the toilet off the main bedroom, there’s a pickled lizard on a shelf. The lizard got into a fight with one of Hemingway’s cats. The cat won, but the reptile fought so bravely that Papa felt the need to immortalize it. The liquid in the container was low. It looked like somebody had taken a few nips out of the lizard jar. On second thought, I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a major author.
Hemingway’s widow donated the house to the Castro government. And Britain donated Hong Kong to China.
Roberto was chatty, full of official, government-approved information. On the way to San Francisco de Paula, we passed the dirty, bedraggled worker housing that everywhere mars the Cuban landscape. The buildings are nothing but concrete dovecotes: six-story-high, hundred-yard-long stacks of tiny apartment boxes open on one end. They must have staircases, but I couldn’t see any. Maybe the government comes along at night and plucks up people and puts them in their pigeonholes. “The workers made these!” said Roberto. Though, if you think about it, workers make everything. “The government gives them the construction material,” he said. “Then they rent for twelve years. And then they own them!” In other words, you get a free home in Cuba as long as you build it and pay for it.
When we drove into La Habana Vieja, Roberto pointed at a gutted hotel: “These are special worker brigades, doing this construction. They can work sixteen hours a day.” This must have been one of the other eight. Everyone was sitting around smoking cigarettes. “They get extra rations,” said Roberto, “a big bag with soap, cooking oil, rice, beans …” Roberto sounded as if he was describing the contents of a big bag from, say, Tiffany’s.
“In 1959 there were six thousand doctors in Cuba,” said Roberto, apropos of nothing. “Three thousand of them left after the revolution. Yet we are training new doctors. By the year 2000 there will be sixty thousand doctors in Cuba!” But Roberto could only talk government talk so long. He couldn’t stay off the real subject, what was on every Cuban’s mind all the time: the economic mess. “You see these cabdrivers?” he said, pointing to a line of tourist-only taxis. “People need to earn dollars. These drivers may be doctors.”
“In Cuba,” said Roberto, “anything you want is available—for dollars.” But people are paid in pesos, even if they work for foreign companies, which Roberto, in fact, does. The national tourist service isn’t owned by the nation anymore. It’s been sold to overseas investors. These people pay $300 a month for Roberto’s services. But they don’t pay Roberto. They pay the Cuban government. The Cuban government then pays Roberto 150 a month, in pesos.
Figuring out what the Cuban peso is worth is a complex economic calculation. To put it in layman’s terms, a pretty close approximation is nothing. Pesos are of use almost exclusively for buying rationed goods. The Cuban rationing system is simple: they’re out of everything. Although you can get a really vile pack of cigarettes for ten pesos. Think of Roberto’s salary as a carton and a half of smokes.
Roberto was able, however, to earn dollars through tips. Cadging these being, of course, the subtext to his economic discourse. He used to be a teacher but couldn’t live on the pay. His wife is a chemical engineer, but her chemical plant shut down three years ago. While we were walking around the old town, Roberto met another engineer, now working as a carpenter for dollars—building the table under which he’d get paid.
“Just to feed ourselves,” said Roberto, “we have to go to four markets. The ration store for, maybe, rice. Then the government dollar store—this is very expensive. Then the dollar market where farmers can sell what they grow if they grow more than the government quota. And then the black market.”
We drove down Avenida Bolívar, through what had been Havana’s shopping district. Hundreds of stores stood closed and empty, the way they’ve been since 1968, when the last small businesses were nationalized. “That is where the Sears store was,” said Roberto, pointing to the largest empty building. “But now we have nothing to sell.”
Every so often Roberto would snap out of it and resume the official patter: “Over there is a memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Perhaps you have a monument to them in North America?” I said I didn’t think so. But mostly, Roberto wanted to talk about free enterprise. He and his wife were sleeping on the mattress his mother bought when she got married: “It has been repaired over and over. We get the TV sometimes from Miami—oh, the ‘Beatty Rest’ mattresses! And what good prices!”
Roberto was optimistic. He kept showing me new family-owned restaurants. “Look, there’s one!” He pointed to a pizza parlor. “There’s more!” He pointed to several pizza parlors. In Cuba, capitalism’s thin edge of the wedge comes plain or with pepperoni.
Roberto thought small private retail shops would be opening soon. He thought the government’s new “convertible peso,” which is pegged 1:1 to the dollar, would become the national currency. He was even enthusiastic about the fees the Cuban authorities were beginning to charge, such as highway tolls. “Maybe we will get better service,” he said. Roberto told me that the economy had “come back since the low point of ‘94, a little,” and that this was due to the private businesses. “The only thing the government controls now is the taxes,” said Roberto.
He was wrong. Fidel Castro, in his 1996 year-end speech to the Cuban National Assembly, described the economic reforms thus: “We legalized robbery.” Castro then did, indeed, announce an income tax on the self-employed.
That night, after Roberto had been sufficiently tipped, I went to a bar on the east side of Havana harbor with a European reporter who’s lived for years in Cuba. He thought economic reform was over. He said the authorities were “still emphasizing that outside investment is ‘not vital,’” and that they “still think the state sector can be made ‘more efficient.’” He quoted a Canadian diplomat: “The pace of economic reform in Cuba is determined by the learning curve in economics of Fidel Castro. And he’s a slow learner.”
As we talked, a young Cuban woman came out on the terrace. She ignored us in a very unprostitutional way, chose a chair just within earshot, and began avidly appreciating the city skyline. “I’d buy it if she were a tourist,” whispered the reporter, “but Cubans do not go to dollar bars for the view.” There is one vibrant, exciting, and highly efficient sector of the official Cuban economy: the police. I was driving through the Vedado neighborhood in western Havana absolutely desperate to turn left. Finally, I just went and did so. Almost a mile away, in an entirely different section of town, a policeman walked out into the street, flagged me down, and wrote me a ticket for the transgression. There’s a space provided for this on the rental-car papers, and the fine comes out of the deposit.
The traffic-cop omniscience was creepy enough, but I happened to be on my way to visit a dissident couple. Well, “dissident couple” is a little dramatic. They hadn’t actually dissented about anything. They just wanted to leave Cuba. They went to Sweden and applied for asylum. But the generous Swedish refugee policy does not extend to refugees from progressive, socialist countries to which Sweden gives millions of dollars in foreign aid. They were sent back. And now they were in permanent hot water.
They lived in a shabby tower block with a ravaged elevator, piss stink in the stairwells, bulbs filched from the lobby light fixtures, and even the glass stolen from the hallway windows. And in Havana, this was a good place to live. The apartment had been inherited from a parent, a parent who had been an official in the revolutionary government. “Come on Friday,” the couple had said. “We don’t have power outages then.”
There were five rooms—small rooms (you couldn’t flip a pancake in the kitchen without standing in the hall), but five rooms nonetheless—and a bathroom (when the water was running). And not too many of the louvers in the jalousie windows were broken. Carlos and Donna—not their real names of course—come from families that had been prosperous (families that now, incidentally, won’t speak to them). The low, narrow-walled living room was filled with too much big, dark furniture from a more expansive age, like a Thanksgiving dinner for twelve put in the microwave. I felt claustrophobic although I was five stories in the air and could see the ocean shining in the distance.
Carlos and Donna are not allowed to hold jobs, but they each speak four languages and so are able to get work as guides and translators with the various groups of academics, philanthropists, conference delegates, and film-festival attendees who are forever traipsing through Cuba looking for international understanding and a tan.
“You have to earn dollars anyway here,” said Carlos. “‘Dollars or Death’ is what everyone says.” He showed me their ration books, which have categories for everything from tobacco to clothing. So far in 1996, only one liter of cooking oil per family had been available. Eggs were plentiful at the moment—fourteen a month for the two of them. Carlos and Donna also got two bars of soap a month, some months. There was virtually no meat, and it was inedible. “All red meat has been nationalized,” said Carlos by way of explanation. Cuban nationalization does to goods and services what divorce does to male parents—suddenly they’re absent most of the time and useless the rest. Cubans can’t even get real coffee from the ration stores. They get coffee beans mixed with the kind of beans you get in tortillas. This tastes the way it sounds like it would and gives everyone stomach cramps.
The few legitimate delights of Cuba—coffee, rum, cigars—require not just dollars but lots of dollars. And even this doesn’t always work. The Montecristo coronas I bought in a government shop had the flavor and draw of smoldering felt-tip pens.
Carlos and Donna had had one other brush with the law. Besides committing the heinous crime of trying to move, they were also caught with dollars. Until mid-1993 it was illegal for Cubans to own dollars. Given what the peso was worth, that meant it was illegal for Cubans to have money. Carlos and Donna found sixty dollars tucked in a book they’d inherited. They dressed in their best clothes and, being fluent in French, tried to pass themselves off as foreigners at a beachfront hotel. “To get a decent cup of coffee,” said Donna. But the hotel waiter wasn’t fooled. Perhaps the two bars of soap a month was the giveaway, this being more than most French tourists use. As Carlos and Donna walked home, they were arrested.
They escaped any serious jail time, maybe because of their foreign-diplomat connections. But they were threatened with six or seven years’ imprisonment. And a year later the block captain—the government snitch who resides on every Cuban street—called them in and threatened them with imprisonment again. “When dollars became legal,” said Carlos, “everyone was happy.” I wasn’t so happy thinking about all those people who were locked up for years sometimes, just for having one or two dollars.
“Still, I don’t have any hatred against the system,” he said. “But this is just for myself, for my own sake—I don’t want hatred to destroy me.”
“When we couldn’t leave,” said Donna, “we were in despair for a while. Then we became involved in the charity work of the church, in their hospitals. This created new meaning.”
“We’re happy now,” said Carlos.
But they don’t have children. They felt too cut off from Cuban society for that. Carlos doesn’t even know if his parents are still alive.
“The revolution brought some benefits,” said Carlos, “at least at first. There was better housing, but it was gotten by giving away what had been stolen from others. The health care is free—and worth it. I can go to the doctor, but he can do nothing for me. This is why the Catholic Church must have its own hospitals. The education is free, too. But it’s indoctrination. This is not a real education. Then they make the students work on the sugar harvest. Of course, the students wreck the agriculture. They don’t care. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Carlos and Donna thought it was important that people know what a disastrous and terrifying place Cuba is. “Not for the sake of future revenge,” said Donna, “but because of the frailty of memory. People will forget how bad it was, the way they’re already forgetting in Russia. But more important, they’ll forget why it became that way.”
It will take a lot of forgetting. Socialism has had a nasty reign in Cuba. Hundreds of low-level supporters of the ousted Batista regime were executed, and thousands were jailed. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with AIDS antibodies have been sent to concentration camps. Critics of the government are forced into internal exile or confined in mental hospitals. The Americas Watch human rights group has said that Cuba holds “more political prisoners as a percentage of population than any other country in the world.” Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization whose board of trustees runs an ideological gamut from Jeane Kirkpatrick to Andrew Young, says, “There is continued evidence of torture and killings in prison and in psychiatric institutions … Local human-rights activists say that more than 100 prisons and prison camps hold between 60,000 and 100,000 prisoners of all categories.” (This is about twice America’s generous rate of per capita incarceration.) How many of those categories are political? Well, from a socialist point of view, all of them. And any normal Cuban is probably going to wind up in jail sooner or later anyway, because, according to Amnesty International, serious offenses in Cuba include “illegal association,” “disrespect,” “dangerousness,” “illegal printing,” and “resistance.” Castro himself was in jail for a while under the previous administration and in a 1954 letter from his cell he wrote: “We need many Robespierres in Cuba.”
Maybe the potential for disaster lurks in all socialism, but what had caused this potential to be realized in Cuba and not, for instance, in Sweden? I asked Carlos and Donna if there was something fundamentally different about Cuba’s socialist ideology? Or had evil people simply taken control of socialism in Cuba?
“Neither,” said Carlos. “It’s because of power. They have total power. Think what you yourself would do if you had total power over everyone.”
Not a pretty picture, I admit. And I’m not even a socialist. Socialists think of society as a giant, sticky wad. And no part of that gum ball—no intimate detail of your private life—can be pulled free from the purview of socialism. Socialism is inherently totalitarian in philosophy.
In Cuba, the authorities have a Ken Starr grand jury–like right to poke into every aspect of existence, no matter how trivial. Imagine applying Marxist theory to rock and roll, this being what the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, or UNEAC, the official labor organization for creative types, is supposed to do. Karl Marx said in Das Kapital, “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.” Roll over Beethoven, indeed.
Professor Dr. Jose Loyola, who was, according to his business card, “Compository Musicologo” and “Vice Presidente Primero” of UNEAC, talked to me about utility. Specifically, he talked about trying to get Cuban elements into rock and roll to offset imperialist U.S. influences. Sex, drugs, and cha-cha-cha? Professor Dr. Loyola’s office was in a splendid nineteenth-century town house, the kind of house that should belong to a rock star. Although I had visited an actual Cuban rock star, Santiago Feliu. Feliu lived in what looked like a graduate student’s off-campus apartment.
The UNEAC town house had been spoiled by the cheap partitions and wobbly chrome-leg chairs loved by bureaucracies everywhere, and by photographs of Fidel where art used to hang. While we sat in the part of the former dining room that was now the professor-doctor’s stuffy office, the power went out repeatedly.
I asked how musicians got into this union. They submit an application with curriculum vitae listing their important concerts, the rewards and prizes they’ve won, and the recordings they’ve made. Then a commission made up of three or four “prestigious musicians” meets and decides upon acceptance or rejection. Which is just the way most people get into the business everywhere.
LEAD RAPPER WITH CREW Da Thug Murderz
PERFORMED Public park in South Bronx, Cell Block D Riker’s Island
CITATIONS Many, mostly from NYPD narcotics squad
ATTACHED DEMO CUT, “Kill Yo MoFo”
Mick? Elton? Do we let him in?
I asked what UNEAC did for its members. “The prestige of the organization opens many doors,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “It promotes the work of the artists and takes care of some of their, ah, material problems.” In other words, you starve if you aren’t in UNEAC.
“What if you aren’t a member?” I asked.
“Oh, most artists aren’t members,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “There are fourteen thousand professional artists in Cuba. Only four thousand are members. The other ten thousand have the government’s Ministry of Culture to promote their work.” The way our government’s National Public Radio plays “Kill Yo MoFo” by Da Thug Murderz on All Things Considered.
“What kind of problems do musicians face in Cuba?” I asked.
“Material problems.”
“Material problems?”
“Maybe,” said the professor doctor, “if we had stores where they could buy their instruments, it would be better.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Some people get musical instruments from the Ministry of Culture,” he ventured and changed the subject. “Before, there were many empirical musicians in Cuba. Now they have formal training. Now there is a kind of upgrading school for empirical musicians.” And what a shame this wasn’t the practice in America’s rural South during the time of Huddie Ledbetter and Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins. They wouldn’t have been so “downbeat” if they’d been able to get work in the New York Philharmonic orchestra.
“What does UNEAC do,” I asked, “if an artist gets in trouble with the government?”
“If he is right, we will help him out. And if he is not right, we will help orient him in the correct direction,” said Professor Dr. Loyola with a perfectly straight face.
Since 1959 the Cuban government has been “orienting” everybody in “the correct direction,” thereby making a total mess of the Cuban economy. And one of the things that’s so messy about it is that there’s no way to measure how messy it is.
There are simply no reliable Cuban economic statistics. Everybody, Cuban officialdom included, agrees that Cuba’s economy has shrunk by at least a third since the 1980s. But a third of what? Cuba’s per capita gross domestic product for the year 1995, for example, has been calculated at $2,058 by dissident Cuban economists, $2,902 by the Cuban government, $3,245 by wishful-thinking leftist American academics and—the highest estimate of all—$3,652 by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Now the per capita GDP in Cuba is about $1,200, according to the National Bank of Cuba, or $1,480, if you believe the CIA’s The World Factbook, while the Columbia Journal of World Business thinks the figure may be as low as $900. Nobody knows. Just as nobody knows what the peso is worth.
The black-market rate in March 1996 was 21 pesos per dollar. But there was something wrong with that rate. Just two years before, the rate was 150 pesos per dollar. And dollars hadn’t gotten any less necessary or much more available. Latin American scholar Douglas W. Payne thinks the Cuban secret police took over the black market. Or maybe the Cuban government was using the new convertible peso—which, though printed in bright tropical hues, is essentially counterfeit U.S. money—to flood the currency exchanges. “There will arrive the day when money will have no value,” Fidel Castro once said in a fit of Marxist utopianism. But apparently he meant it.
I went into the Ministry of Trade’s product showroom, and there, offered for wholesale export to the world, were coconut shells painted to look like turtles, baskets that seemed to have been woven by people wearing catcher’s mitts, posters for obscure brands of rum, pictures of Che Guevara, and Aunt Jemima rag dolls in half a dozen sizes.
The Cubans may not be good with their hands, but they’re very skillful with blame. They blame the Soviet Union. And not without reason. When the Soviet bloc collapsed, the Cubans lost somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion a year in grants, subsidies, and trade concessions. Taking the low figure, that’s a dollar per person per day for everyone in the country. You can live for less than that in Cuba, and almost everyone has to.
Of course, the Soviets used to get something in return for this aid. They got sugar and cobalt and nickel. Which is why it was always easy to get a plate of sugared cobalt and nickel at Moscow restaurants in the 1980s. Plus, the Soviets got to be a huge pain in the ass to the United States. But what the Cuban government got was the luxury of perfect shiftlessness. The Castro government took boatloads of money from the Soviet Union and took all the businesses, industries, and land in Cuba, too.
So the Soviet Union is to blame for Cuban poverty because the Soviet Union fell apart, which means that everything is really America’s fault. Everything usually is. Cubans have been blaming their troubles on the United States at least since independence in 1902 and probably since Columbus set course too far south and missed becoming an American citizen. Even as José Martí was leading the struggle for freedom from Spain, he was denouncing the United States as a “monster.” And he was living in the United States at the time.
My tour guide Roberto told me that the explosion of the battleship Maine was just an “American pretext to get into the Cuba-Spain war.” No matter that’s how Cuba won.
On the other hand, the United States has been less than an ideal next-door neighbor. “Just at the moment I’m so angry with that infernal little Cuban Republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” said Teddy Roosevelt in 1906. American armed forces occupied Cuba from 1899 to 1902, and from 1906 to 1909. There was further military intervention in 1912 and threats of more, plus an invasion by proxy at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. And a U.S. trade embargo, in force since that year, certainly looks to the Cubans like a “wipe its people off the face of the earth” gesture.
The Cubans estimated that as of 1996, this embargo had cost them between $38 billion and $40 billion. That happens to be much less than they’d received from the Soviets for doing the things that got them embargoed. But we’re talking politics here, not sense. Then in 1996 came the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, or Helms-Burton Act, as it’s called, after its respective sponsors in the U.S. Senate and House. This passed by whopping majorities because Cuba had just shot down two private planes carrying anti-Castro exiles who had a habit of dropping leaflets on Havana. Probably the leaflets contained dangerous information about the price of mattresses in Miami. Helms-Burton tightened the embargo by imposing sanctions not only on those who trade with Cuba but on those who trade with those who trade with Cuba and those who date them and their friends and pets. Or something.
And the Cubans were steamed. All over Havana, walls had been painted with six-foot cartoons depicting Senator Jesse Helms as Hitler and Uncle Sam as Hitler, and Jesse Helms as Hitler again. The Cubans didn’t seem to know what Rep. Dan Burton looked like. Come to think of it, I don’t either.
Of course the embargo is stupid. It gives Castro an excuse for everything that’s wrong with his rat-bag society. And free enterprise is supposed to be the antidote to socialism. We shouldn’t forbid American companies from doing business in Cuba, we should require them to do so. Bring them ashore with marines if necessary. Although I guess we’ve tried that.
And the Cubans are stupid for rising to the bait. There’s another little island next to a gigantic, powerful country that threatens to invade and enforced an embargo for decades. And Taiwan has done okay.
I went with two American newspaper reporters to interview a Cuban economist, Hiram Marquetti, a professor at the University of Havana and an industrial-planning consultant to various state companies and government agencies. I wanted to see what it was like talking to an “expert” who wasn’t allowed to tell me the facts and maybe wasn’t allowed to know them.
Marquetti, looking grave, said the U.S. embargo had cost Cuba $42 billion, upping the amount a couple of billion dollars from what Cuban Foreign Ministry adviser Pedro Prada said in his book Island Under Siege (available in English in hotel gift shops and complete with an appendix: “Opponents of the Blockade,” listing Danny Glover, Cyndi Lauper, and Cheech Marin).
Marquetti, looking graver, admitted things were lousy. Malnutrition was evident in some sectors of the population. During the last few years, he said, the average Cuban’s intake of vitamin A was down 35 percent, iron down 40 percent, and vitamin C down 15 percent. The last item is interesting in a country where citrus trees are basically weeds.
Marquetti, looking graver yet, said, “The highest percentage of disposable income goes to food, usually more than 50 percent. We need the free market to complete the supply.” But he also said that this free market and the dollars that make it work “do not necessarily have to do with the opening of the economy.” He claimed that “dollarization” was about Cuba acquiring “new technology, expertise in company management, and access to new markets.” It was not about any actual Cubans acquiring any actual money.
“Total foreign investment, including contracts, has been $2 billion since 1992,” said Marquetti, now looking proud. Though my European journalist friend thought only about $750 million had ever really been spent, and a New York Law Journal article cited estimates as low as $500 million. “Nickel mining provides $50 million a year in salaries alone, though such figures are not usually released, for security reasons,” said Marquetti, looking sly and confidential.
The newspaper reporters were getting bored. “What effect is dollarization having on families and society?” asked one of them. Said Marquetti, looking bureaucratically oblivious, “Number one: foreign investment. Two: intensive development of tourism. Three: opening to foreign trade.”
Sis has been out hitchhiking and someone made a foreign investment in her. It’s all part of Cuba’s intensive development of tourism. And, gosh, is she open to foreign trade.
“What about the prostitutes?” said the other reporter. “There are rumors that the government turns a blind eye because of the dollars they bring in.”
All at once, Marquetti looked human and, indeed, rather enthusiastic. “They are very inexpensive,” he said. “They are very educated. They are very young and very pretty. Cuba is a country that attracts tourism for cheap sex,” he said, stopping just short of a wink. Marquetti tried to look grave again. “Since the crisis there has been a negative social impact, but you can’t eliminate it through repressive means.” It’s not like these girls are scattering mattress-price leaflets. “We have to look for other solutions, such as education.” But he’d just said they were educated. “Some sectors of Cuban youth, they view prostitution as a solution to their economic problems.”
As for Hiram Marquetti himself, he was selling his report on the Cuban economy—five dollars per copy.
Before the revolution, annual per capita income in Cuba was $374; that’s about $1,978 in current dollars. So Cuba is poorer than it used to be, although the poverty is spread around a little more. Castro’s government is as dishonest as the prerevolutionary government was. The modern corruption involves more greed for power than passion for lucre, but that’s actually worse. And the depraved sex is still available if you can sneak the whores past the elevator operators.
Getting more people to sneak whores past elevator operators was, so far, the best the Cuban government had been able to do in terms of a plan to improve the economy. Tourism was supposed to be the salvation now that Soviet aid had vaporized and sugar was selling for less per pound than garden loam. About 700,000 tourists a year were visiting Cuba, an increase of more than 100 percent since 1990. The Cuban government expected foreign companies to invest an additional $2.4 billion in tourist facilities by the year 2000. This would double the number of hotel rooms on the island. And every one of those rooms will be occupied, I predict, by somebody as ticked off as I was.
Because Cuba does not quite have the tourism thing figured. When I checked into the Hotel Nacional, I was given the manager’s room, in which he was living. I was given another room. The key card didn’t work. The bellhop went to get another key card. Then the safe didn’t work—no small matter since Americans can’t use credit cards in Cuba and have to conduct all business in cash, an awkward lump of which I was carrying.
When I returned from the hotel bar bloated with mojitos, the key card didn’t work again. I went down to get another. The elevator took ten minutes to arrive. The new key card didn’t work. I went back. The elevator took another ten minutes. That key card didn’t work, either. The maid let me in.
I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a series of chirpy phone calls from the government tourism service in the downstairs lobby. CubaTrot or Havan-a-Vacation or whatever it was called had a driver and a translator and a guide and something else, maybe a circus elephant, waiting for me, bright and early, ready and willing, all set to take me anywhere I wanted to go, except back to bed. None of which stuff I had ordered.
At dawn on the second morning the operator called saying I “must go to reception immediately.” When I went downstairs the desk clerk said, “It was nothing.” When I went upstairs the key card didn’t work. At dawn on the third morning it was a wrong number. On the fourth morning it was someone jabbering expressively in French.
At least I was always awake in time for breakfast. Every day I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and I never got the same thing twice. I traveled to a beach resort in Trinidad on the Caribbean coast, and at dawn the phone rang—a hang-up. I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and got coffee, orange juice, and a cheese sandwich with ketchup on it. The next morning at about seven, a room-service waiter arrived at my door, unbidden, with a plate of dinner buns. As I was checking out, there was an irked Canadian couple at the front desk saying, “We got a message. You told us, ‘Call from Toronto,’ nothing else, eh? We’re thinking there’s maybe something wrong at home. So we try and we try, and we get through, eh? And it costs us fifty dollars. And nobody’s called us at all.”
I had driven to Trinidad on the autopista, which is a six-lane … a four-lane … sometimes a two-lane … The Russians never got around to finishing it. And it’s not like there are any lane divider lines painted on it anyway. The autopista runs from Havana southeast through the middle of the island. There was so little traffic that cows grazed on weeds coming up in the pavement cracks. I had stumbled into a radical ecologist’s daydream. Or so it appeared until I’d pass some East German tractor-trailer spewing a mile-long cloud of tar-colored exhaust.
You have to watch out when you drive in Cuba, but you never know what you’re watching out for. It could be anything. Potholes, of course, some of them big enough for a couple of chairs and a coffee table. Then there are the people who leap out from the side of the road frantically, desperately, even violently trying to sell you one onion. Or a string of garlic. Or a pale, greasy-looking hunk of something. Lard? Flan? Pound of flesh? (It turned out to be homemade cheese.)
At every major road junction there were scores of hitchhikers, not the prostitute kind but regular folks, whole families among them. Cuba’s national transportation system barely exists. Says Fodor’s guide, “Be prepared to wait three days for the next available bus.” Standing among the people with their thumbs out were the traffic police. They stopped cars and trucks (though not those with tourista license plates) and made them take passengers.
Cops helping you bum a ride—now here was the revolution the way I had it planned thirty years ago when I was smoking a lot of dope. Except, not exactly. The reason so many people were hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere was that they’d been sent there to work on the sugar harvest. I don’t recall that the workers’ paradise of my callow fantasies contained any actual work.
That sugar harvest was going on all around me. Or, rather, not going on. I’m no agricultural expert, but I’m almost certain that leaning against fences, walking about with hands in the pockets, and sitting on stalled tractors smoking cigarettes are not the most efficient methods of cutting sugarcane.
Much work had been done, however, painting propaganda slogans. SOCIALISM OR DEATH appeared on almost every overpass. What if the U.S. government had slogans all over the place? I tried to come up with a viable campaign. My suggestion, AMERICA—IT DOESN’T SUCK.
As for “Socialism or Death,” after a couple of weeks in Cuba, I was leaning toward the latter option. To which the Castro government’s response is: Death? Yes. No problem. That can be arranged. But, first, socialism!
I turned off the autopista onto a raggedy strip of pavement through the Escambray Mountains. The sun went down, and suddenly traffic materialized—gigantic Russian trucks driven without sense, headlights, or any idea of keeping to the right on the road. I emerged from the mountains at Cienfuegos. Says Fodor’s: “The people of Cienfuegos … constantly tout it as ‘la Linda Ciudad del Mar’ (the lovely city by the sea).” They’re lying. From here it was a thirty-mile drive through coastal mangrove swamps on a road covered with land crabs. Every time I went over one, it made a noise like when you were ten, and you spent two weeks making a plastic model of the battleship Missouri, and your dad stepped on it in the dark. I tried avoiding the crabs. They scuttled under the wheels. I tried driving at them. They stayed put. The road smelled like thirty miles of crab salad going bad.
It was almost 10 p.m. before I got to my hotel on the beach, the Ancon. But the buffet was still open. They were serving crab salad. I went to the bar.
In the morning the ocean sparkled, the sand gleamed, the cheese sandwich with ketchup arrived. Bright-pink vacationers frolicked in the surf or, rather, stood on the beach discussing whether to frolic in the surf, having seen large numbers of stingrays the last time they frolicked.
The Ancon was filled with middle-aged Canadians having the middle-aged Canadian idea of fun, which consisted mostly of going back to the buffet for seconds on the crab salad. The architecture was modernistic. The rooms were comfortablistic. The food was foodlike.
There are worse tourist facilities in Cuba, namely all of them. The Ancon is top of the line. I inspected the other beach hotels near Trinidad, and I had driven out to see those along the playas del este outside Havana. Most were stark. Some were dank and unclean. And one spread of tiny prefabricated cottages with outdoor sinks and group bathrooms looked like nothing so much as a portable toilet farm.
Cuba serves the very lowest end of the international holiday market. When some waiter in Paris recites the plats du jour like he’s pissing on you from a great height, you can extract your mental revenge by picturing him, come August, on Cuba’s Costa del Fleabag, eating swill in a concrete dining hall.
I wandered around the Trinidad region. I went to see the Iznaga Tower, an early-nineteenth-century neoclassical structure with seven arched and columned setbacks tapering to 140 feet at the pinnacle—monumental but so delicately proportioned that the whole thing seemed about to take flight. It looked like a spaceship designed by Palladio. The purpose of this beautiful and subtle artistry, which took ten years to construct, was to keep the slaves from goofing off. The plantation owner would get up on top and give everybody the hairy eyeball. The tower was no longer in use. With the block-captain system, the chattel labor now spied on itself.
I drove through the Valle de los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills, as it’s romantically called) and over the Escambray Mountains again. As late as 1967, anti-Castro guerrillas were extant here. The Cuban government prefers to call them “bandits.” Back in Trinidad, in what used to be a church, there’s the marvelously named Museum of the Struggle Against Bandits, which should certainly open a branch in the U.S., maybe on Wall Street.
Not much was actually in the museum. The centerpiece was a beat-up pleasure boat supposedly captured from the CIA. Two suspiciously new and definitely Soviet machine guns had been mounted on its deck with unlikely looking half-inch wood screws. The rest of the displays were mostly devoted to photographs of Cuban soldiers “martyred by bandits.” One of these poor soldiers was named O’Really.
Not much was actually in Trinidad, either. It’s very old, if you like that sort of thing. Trinidad was founded in 1514 by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the conquistador of Cuba. Although Cuba didn’t really take much conquering. Confiscador would be more like it. The local heyday was in the eighteenth century, when Trinidad was a major slave port. Then better slave off-loading facilities were built in Cienfuegos. Not much has changed in Trinidad since, and this gets the guidebooks excited. Fodor’s goes on at some length about how this “marvelous colonial enclave” has not been “polluted with advertising, automobiles, souvenir shops, dozens of restaurants and hotels, and hordes of tourists milling through the streets.” Which, translated, means nobody’s made a centavo here in two hundred years.
The buildings around the main square were patched and painted. The buildings not around the main square weren’t. Practically everything was one-story high and built flush against tiny, crooked streets paved in stones as large as carry-on luggage.
I got lost driving back to the hotel. The streets were becoming even tinier, and the people standing around in those streets were not looking full of glee that UNESCO had declared Trinidad a World Heritage Site. In fact, they looked depressed and mean. I was getting more than the usual number of cold stares and catcalls, and just when I’d thought to myself, “I wouldn’t care to stop here,” I stopped there.
The starter motor whined uselessly. The car was inert. A crowd of impoverished Cubans gathered around me. I was frantically looking up “Placating Phrases” in the Berlitz when I realized the rude noises and gestures had stopped. The people in the crowd were smiling. And not the way I would have smiled if I’d found a moneyed dimwit trapped in my barrio. “El auto es busto,” I explained, opening the hood in that purposeful way men have when we don’t know what we’re doing.
“Mi amigo es mecanico,” said a fellow in the crowd. He and two of his friends grabbed the fenders and pushed the car down the block and around a corner. A big guy about my age came out of a house, shook my hand, and removed the car’s air filter. While the big guy probed the carburetor, the crowd went to work. One kid brought tools. Another kid sat in the driver’s seat and worked the ignition on the big guy’s instructions. Two young men rolled a barrel of gasoline up the street and tipped some into the tank. An old man came out of another house with a pitcher of water. He checked the level in the battery cells and filled the windshield-washer reservoir while he was at it. A second man removed the distributor cap and inspected the points. He pulled the spark-plug wires and looked into their sockets. A third man detached the fuel line and began sucking on it, spitting the gasoline into the street. The big guy took the fuel pump apart. The distributor cap man disappeared for a while and returned with some scavenged spark-plug sockets, which he spliced onto the old spark-plug wires. Other people checked the radiator and the oil. “I have an aunt in Union City, New Jersey,” said someone. That was the extent of anybody’s English.
After an hour the big guy shook his head. It couldn’t be fixed. Which was fine with me. The car smelled like dead crabs, and I’d get another one from FlubaTour at the hotel. But now I had a problem in diplomacy. My crowd of mechanics didn’t want to take any money. I could, I gathered with some translating help from a cabdriver, pay for the gasoline. Gasoline was hard to get. But as for working on the car, well, they hadn’t fixed it. But they should get some money for their time, I said. They shrugged. They looked at the ground. They were embarrassed, time being the only thing everyone’s got lots of in Cuba. It was with negotiating effort worthy of Jimmy Carter fishing for a Nobel Peace Prize that I managed to get their price up to fifty dollars.
Che Guevara believed that socialism would create a “New Man,” someone who worked not for personal gain but for the good of humanity in general. All the murders, imprisonings, harassments, and deprivations of Cuba have supposedly been aimed at creating this New Man—somebody who would act like the big guy. Except the big guy wasn’t one of them. He had a handmade sign hanging over his door: PARKING 24 HOURS I CARE FOR YOUR CAR I DO SOME REPAIRS ON BICYCLES MOTORCYCLES AND CARS, written, with obvious hope of future capitalist imperialism, in English.