Cuba, Communism, and Several Long Digressions

by Jim Washburn

If you recall our last installment, I was talking about my trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, and how their version of communism hadn’t worked out so well. The glum giant had a few things going for it, but it was not a joyous worker’s paradise by a long shot.

They had excuses: World War II had kicked the borscht out of them; they were surrounded by enemies; they were in a crippling weapons race with the US; they were getting their asses handed to them on a kebab in Afghanistan, etc.

But, at heart, the Soviet Union was a corrupt, tyrannical, empire-building regime with a warped notion of communism that made the place seem like the world’s biggest, worst DMV. It put on a big show for the rest of the world with its first class military and classical culture, but take a step behind that and nothing worked. They had no Scotch Tape, and not much to tape together anyway. I met one of their top jazz guitarists, who told me that usually when he broke a string, he’d have to play on just five strings for weeks until he could turn up a new one.

They couldn’t get an elevator to work, so Chernobyl shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to anyone. And without a free press or the other checks and balances we take for granted, Soviet bureaucrats could pretend bullshit was the truth for decades.

On a train there, I read a brochure printed for tourists that asserted the Soviet Union had no pollution to speak of. I read this in a train car where you could barely breathe for the fumes given off by a coal-fired samovar. And, of course, the Soviet Union was an ecological nightmare, where a body of water nearly the size of Lake Superior could be destroyed with barely an official mention of it.

But even the supposedly omnipresent KGB couldn’t keep kids from rocking. The Soviets I talked with were scared to death of Ronald Reagan and his missiles (They found it not so funny when Reagan had joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”), but they loved our music, jeans, and pop culture.

While there I met the “Armenian Stevie Wonder,” the “Estonian Frank Zappa” and other musicians only too proud to be mimicking Western artists. I knew one Russian who’d found pirated Captain Beefheart records on the black market in Leningrad, at a time they were nearly impossible to find in Orange County.

Bowing to the inevitable, the Soviets had slowly come to tolerate home-grown rock. I saw some “official” bands doing their best to sound like Journey or Pat Benatar. Then there were the outsider bands, doing their best to catch up with the West, but pretty much still emulating the prog rock of the previous decade.

The Soviets I spoke with didn’t seem to have much more trouble being individuals than people do anywhere else. It reminded me of something an Italian once told me: “We had the Romans, monarchy, the fascists, the communists, and everything else, and we just go on being Italians.”

And I expect that in Cuba, they just go on being Cubans. One friend who’d recently traveled there was told by a Cuban he’d met, “We don’t have most of the possessions you do, but we have sunshine, sex, and music, and it’s all free,” along with, he might have added, free housing, free medical care (the transgender-minded can even get free sex reassignment surgery), free higher education, and cheap mojitos.

They do also have repression; nothing nearly so bad as, say, our stout ally Saudi Arabia, but still pretty odious by our pre-Bush standards. Now why should Cuba be uptight? Let’s ask Hegemony Cricket:

“Well, first, when Fidel Castro came to power, we had Dick Nixon lecture him on how Cuba had to toe the U.S. line or else. Castro picked ‘or else’ and sidled up to the Soviet Union. As a result, we, Cuba’s immediate neighbor and the world’s premier superpower, with a history of orchestrating the violent overthrow of democratically-elected Latin American governments, sponsored an invasion to overthrow Cuba’s, then embargoed the island nation, mounted numerous assassination plots to kill Castro, and tried to sabotage the Cuban economy by covert attacks on a petroleum refinery and other targets.”

Thanks, Hegemony. We can see how they might be a little testy. Look how much more repressive the United States got after the 9-11 attacks—including our resorting to torture and an unjust, misplaced war—and remember that we’re the most powerful, most armed nation on earth, not a dirt-poor island adjacent to the most armed nation.

Our understated war on Cuba was a marked contrast to the way the U.S. had treated the island’s former leader, Fulgencio Batista. The US had backed him since the 1940s, and when he deposed Cuba’s elected government in a 1952 military coup, we immediately recognized his regime. He proceeded to lead a thoroughly corrupt, murderously repressive, mobbed-up administration, under which Cuba essentially became America’s brothel.

The month before President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was gunned down, he said this in an interview (thanks, Wikipedia!): “I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”

When Batista fled his beloved Cuba on New Year’s Eve, 1958, it was with a reported $300 million looted from his people, while his supporters by some accounts made off with another $400 million, patriots all.

As much as Kennedy could appreciate where Castro was coming from, his administration still tried to overflow Castro. Even now in the Obama era, Cubans are still very wary of America and its intentions, those who’ve been there tell me.

But enough of that. I’ll be there in a couple of days, so then I can tell you what people tell me. I don’t suppose it’s going to be anywhere nearly as glum as the Soviet Union. I mean, how much can you fuck up the Caribbean? Years ago—where most events in my life are—I went on a travel writers’ junket to Jamaica. It turned out the trip was to one all-inclusive Disney-like pig-trough of a resort after another, each hermetically sealed from the real Jamaica.

The first afternoon at the first resort, I was hardly there an hour before I had to get out. I walked the five miles into Negril, learning many things about Jamaica, one being that only genuine idiots walk five miles in the blasting, saturated heat. In town I bought a huge clump of raw ginger for $1; in the bushes by the resort I bought a sticky, richly-hued, banana-sized bud for $20. In the following week, I became convinced that weed and ginger form a beneficial synergy in the human body, though I can’t say I’ve explored that combo since.

That was augmented by a late afternoon swim in the sea while everyone else was at the trough: the water warm, blue-clear, and nearly still; dramatic gray clouds on the horizon, the sun radiating through in molten orange rays; me just bobbing along alone in the amniotic warmth, digging the planet being so fine, when this guy comes up in a ponga boat, stops the motor, and bobs along two yards from me. A man who looks sort of like Delroy Lindo strikes up a conversation. Why does this man want to talk to me in the middle of the ocean?

“Sey mon, you got smoke?”

My first thought was “This idiot is asking me for a cigarette when I’m submerged from the neck down.” Then I realized he was asking if I needed any marijuana. There is so much weed in Jamaica I’m surprised they don’t just make javelins out of it and kill every hippie they see.

When I told the man I was already equipped, he didn’t miss a beat. “Oww abut de ’ocaine den?”

I again demurred. He got a quizzical look and asked, “Why you out ’ere den?” as if it was just plain horse sense that when your head’s bobbing around in the middle of the ocean, it’s a signal you’re looking to score.

In the days following, I learned that’s exactly what that was about: Enterprising Jamaicans are kept out of the resorts so they approach guests by sea, in small motorboats, on jet skis, probably in submarines by now.

They get through the resorts’ plastic wrap, just as the sea does, just as the lush jungle encroaches, just as the egrets in the mangroves let out their cry. It gets through, the Caribbean does, and I’m sure it does in Cuba as well.

People there don’t have much. Nearly any little gift is appreciated, even hotel soap or crayons for their kids. How is it they have so little, I wondered, since the U.S. is the only nation that embargoes them? Then I realized that, along with being a poor nation, the Cubans speak a different monetary language. It’s like they’re a commune where yams are traded for house painting, neither yielding a paycheck you can take to the Safeway. And maybe some of the money and effort we fritter away on World of Warcraft they instead spend on education and healthcare.

Maybe that’s one reason why, when the earthquake hit in Haiti, Cuba already had over 400 doctors on the ground there, doing charity work, and when other nations’ relief agencies were balking at venturing out of Port-au-Prince without armed protection, the Cuban doctors were already in the decimated hill villages, performing amputations and doing the other horrid, necessary work, all-but unrecognized in the American press.

It’s an odd embargo, not to mention the world’s longest-running one, not to mention one that isn’t working. The supposed reason we enacted it was because the Cuban government allegedly makes life worse for its people. Our response was to impose an embargo that makes life even worse for its people, on the argument that if we make them miserable enough, they’ll over throw their government. The embargo is nearly a half-century old now, during which time Cuba had had one of the most stable governments in the Americas. Go figure.

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