Cuba - part one

Friday 16th April 2010, day 546, 9,648 miles. 21° 04’.28 N, 075° 57’.28 W, Bahia de Vita, Cuba.


Here are some words that won’t appear in any writing about Cuba: shiny, new, crisp; freedom, debate, efficiency; luxury, choice, plenty. And some others that won’t appear either: celebrity, tawdry, yob; drunken, surly, aggressive; ill-fed, unhealthy, obese.

The second-hand bookstalls in the Plaza de Armas in Habana Vieja sell a mixture of 1950s issues of Life magazine, coffee table books of photos of crumbling colonial buildings, and writings about Revolution, here and elsewhere. We bought three books, all written just before or just after the Revolution; the thoughts of Fidel and of Che. They inspire and depress at the same time: the bright hopes, the desperate desire to root out poverty and injustice, and the fervent belief that men can be motivated by an appeal to the best in their nature rather than by offering them material goods, all read more than 50 years later amid a failing infrastructure, agriculture which has gone back to ploughing with oxen, and little old ladies begging in the squares for soap.

In many ways it is a gravity-defying miracle that Cuba continues on its Revolutionary way, 20 years after the fall of communism in the East removed the props to its economy. One has to wonder for how much longer it can stagger on, until the very last tractor falls apart for lack of spares. When Castro took over, his immediate priority was to give land to the peasants, and make sure everybody had a house and access to the basics of life. His writings at the time display a visionary belief that giving peasants the right to farm their own land and removing them from a condition of semi-slavery, would so motivate them that, together with management by a wise and benevolent government, Cuba could become wealthy and self-sustaining by focusing on agriculture alone.

It hasn’t worked, or perhaps it’s fairer to say it’s worked in parts.

If you’re comparing the outcome of economic models, I would have to say that the average Cuban we met seemed happier and healthier than many of the miserably dough-faced and pudgy representatives of capitalism we met mooching off cruise ships up and down the Caribbean. Everybody we talked to was friendly, generous and open, ready to share whatever they had with complete strangers. The passegiata (or whatever the Spanish for it is) goes on in the evenings, and people sit around gossiping and flirting in the squares as dusk falls, having just as much fun as if they were in a chic bar wearing the latest fashions.

Which just goes to show that there’s more to live than possessions, because it is hard to imagine the level of material deprivation, the near-total absence of stuff, in Cuba unless you visit. A lot of basics are simply not available; while we were there, these included butter and potatoes – for breakfast we were given mayonnaise to spread on the bread, and for lunch and supper it was always rice and beans (or occasionally beans and rice). Things like razor blades and loo paper could only be found in hard currency shops, where they stood in proud, if well-spaced out displays, with other fancy goods like cooking oil or pasta. Simple things such as  moisturiser or saucepans are luxuries for most people; at a roadside stall, the going rate for more bananas than we could eat in a week was half an (unused) bar of soap, a biro and an old pot of nail varnish.

We spent one night, not quite legally, in a private house, just west of Santiago, that was not part of the government’s licensed chain of B&Bs. Built of concrete slabs, it sported three rooms, with a tiny shower room and kitchen tacked on the back. The walls were painted a chipped and faded blue, the concrete floor a certain red, which emphasised the similarity, in both style and size, to a spacious two-car garage. The son of the house was turned out of his bedroom for us, so we were free to examine the one piece of furniture in the room, a short railing across one corner, and to count up the two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four shirts and two jackets that constituted this teenager’s possessions. His six-year-old sister owned three coloured crayons, a pink plastic teacup and saucer, decorated with a large purple flower, and a shabby blonde partially-dressed doll, all stored on a shelf beneath a picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. But they were of course good company – perhaps better than some children we know, who have learnt to become grasping before they are eight. In the shower room, a bucket sat ready to be filled to flush the loo, and an empty shampoo bottle paraded on the single shelf, symbol of good times that had been, and a talisman that they might come again.

That’s the setting for people who earn the standard wage, of around 300 pesos a month, equivalent to £7. But not equivalent in purchasing power, when rent and electricity are minimal, education and health care are free, as are the weekly rations of rice, beans, bread and meat. Vegetables in the markets, where farmers are allowed to privately sell a portion of their crop, cost 5 pesos a kilo. Nobody starves in Cuba, nobody is homeless, but most people don’t have very much of anything.

Then there’s a parallel economy, one that runs on hard currency. Some Cubans get access to this via their jobs: a worker in an industry that has dealings with tourists might get an additional 10 Convertible Pesos (CUCs) a month, around £6, to buy themselves toiletries. But what keeps many families going, and gets DVD players and frilly china ornaments into the better-off houses, is remittances from family members who have escaped overseas.

Escaped? Yes, because this country is pure communist in its approach to personal freedom. Debate and discussion are not tolerated, let alone dissent. As an example, a person would drop their voice and check they were not being overheard before venturing the opinion that Raúl Castro is not as eloquent a speech-maker as his brother. No internet is allowed in private houses, and even those who work with computers have very limited access to the internet. The authorities aren’t particularly concerned about stopping visiting yachts smuggling goods into the country; what they worry about is that we might smuggle someone out. No Cuban apart from customs and immigration is allowed on a foreign boat – or probably a local one too – not even in broad daylight for a drink. Any GPS or radio that wasn’t wired into the boat had to be sealed up and accounted for on departure, in case it helped some Cuban make his way over the straits to Florida.

The other thing missing, in addition to butter and freedom, is advertising, at least in the way we recognise it. There is one brand, and only one brand in Cuba – the Revolution. Every community has its slogans painted in red on a blue background: “Hasta la Revolucion siempre”, “Unidad y Sacrificio”, “Remember the glorious martyrs of the revolution”, “Global Financial Crisis – the revolution lives” and, more ominously, “In a revolution there are no neutrals” or “Propaganda = Knowledge”.

These, with the constant pictures of the young, cinematically handsome, Chef, would be inspiring if it weren’t so patently obvious from everything around that the revolution, after fifty years of endeavour, has failed to give Cuba a functioning economy. Fidel’s words, from a book written in 1966, have an ironic and tragic ring to them: “In time it will become apparent that only those countries in which a revolution has taken place will be in a position to fulfil their international financial obligations.” A promise as illusory as the one he made at the same time to retire “at an early age.” (Though the subject of financial obligations isn’t one that any country can
afford to feel smug about at the minute.)

There is a terrible wistfulness about all these slogans now, reminiscent of Miss Faversham sitting in her wedding finery, feeding on the memory of youthful promise while real life decays around her.

This sense of the country being ready to crumble around its own ears makes it seem odd that the US maintains its embargo and antipathy towards Cuba. Certainly, they were made to look very silly in the Bay of Pigs, and certainly, Fidel has lost no opportunity of deriding “Yankee neo-colonial imperialism”. But it is hard to believe that the island poses any sort of threat now – or not to imagine that there are plenty of ways in which it could be a very much more dangerous neighbour if more effective operators took control.

Cuba has the feeling of being a failed harvest or two away from collapse. Everybody is housed, educated, and adequately (if monotonously) fed, but achieving that has exhausted the limits of the country’s capacity. It is  criss-crossed with overgrown railway lines which used to carry what used to be a surplus of sugar-cane. Now they import sugar. Horse drawn carts have replaced buses in the country areas, oxen have replaced tractors. Fields are lying fallow. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are crumbling, the electricity network, the distribution network, are crumbling. People’s faith in the revolution is crumbling.

This is a country in serious need of support and friendship. And if they don’t get that from the US, they will get it from someone else, who the Americans will like even less than what they have right now.  This period before the Castros die is perhaps the last chance to become Cuba’s new best friend, and to ease their transition to the new era that must follow, sooner or later. I don’t know who are the people who are jockeying for power when Fidel and then Raul dies, but for sure they will be sponsored by some heavyweight nasty countries, just dying to twist America’s tail. If the Americans don’t like having the Castros on their  doorstep, they will like Chavez or Ahmedinajad there even less.

The biggest challenge for anybody trying to help Cuba is how to move it forward economically, without losing all the excellent things about its society: its cohesiveness; its freedom from putting a monetary value on every pleasure; the warmth and unquestioning generosity of the people.

The second instalment, rather less serious, is about our travels in Cuba.