Cuba Si, Soviets No

by Jim Washburn

You might have read elsewhere on this site that nearly the entire FourStory staff is going to Cuba in mid-March, to see what we can see. I’m delighted to be going, since it’s one of the few places in the world that isn’t yet thoroughly corporatized; and because I love Cuban music and culture; and the architecture knocks me out; plus in our current turmoil over healthcare, education, and other societal matters, there are perhaps things to be learned from the different approaches they take there.

And then there’s Huell Howser. Something like 15 years ago, I was flipping channels and there was Huell, not at the L.A. Farmer’s Market, but in Havana, looking at cigars, when a big racket arose out in the street. “Well, Wh-aat’s going on out there?” he wondered, and he and the camera moved outside to find a a flatbed truck slowly motoring down the street, with a Cuban band on the bed, playing at full gale while hundreds of revelers followed, drinking and dancing.

“Boy,” I remember thinking, “for a communist slave state, they sure seem to have a good time.” I couldn’t imagine anything so free where I live, in Costa Mesa, or practically anywhere else in the U.S. except maybe once a year in New Orleans. In Havana, they were celebrating Friday or something, just part of the regular scene.

Watching that reminded me of another occasion years before, when a spiffy performance artist named Siim-Tanel Annus showed me a film of a piece where he’d installed a winding track through his sprawling suburban yard. Wearing a white gown and a metal crown, he rode down the track on a platform, a long, blazing torch extended from each arm, which he used to light paper constructs along the way, the flames reaching skyward. On film, it looked like a fairly genial way to end the world. He was upset that the police had come and stopped him before he’d torched the whole yard, citing that as an example of how repressive his government was. And then, too, I remember thinking, and telling him, “See how far you’d get doing public art with fireballs in Costa Mesa, buddy.”

Siim-Tanel Annus

This was in a communist country, the mother of them all, the Soviet Union. The year was 1988, when there still was a Soviet Union, and it was one weird damn trip. Former McCabe’s concerts producer Nancy Covey had organized a music-based tour there. Her Festival Tours more typically takes folks to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest and such, but she’d made some Soviet contacts, and was curious to see what was going on musically there.

I got to go on the trip because I had quit my job at the Orange County Register, and they were worried that I might turn around and start freelancing for the OC edition of the L.A. Times. Competition was so fierce between the papers then that at the Register you could write four articles to your Times counterpart’s one, yet if his one was about something that your four weren’t, you’d get yelled at. “Why didn’t we cover this?” “Because it doesn’t matter?” “The TIMES thinks it matters!” And then the throwing of things would commence.

Conversely, you could go to your editor with a project idea and get turned down, then come back to him a month later with word that the Times was going to do it, and the only question was, “Can you beat them to it?” It was all about razzing the other newsroom, and “the public interest” wasn’t part of the equation. I mention all this as an illustration of how competition doesn’t always produce the best results, or, if so, does it inadvertently.

When I left the paper, they asked, “Are there any special projects you’d like to do?” which was as close as they could come to saying, “Please don’t write for the Times.” I said, “Sure, send me to the Soviet Union.”

So they ponied up, and I got to go. A small group of us flew into Helsinki, and took a ship across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, which had been a grudging part of the Soviet Union since WWII.

I had assumed the Soviet Union would be like prison, minus Johnny Cash. Surprise number one was the ship: despite the forbidding red hammer and sickle on the smokestack, it was a gambling boat, replete with slot machines, gaming tables, and two discos. Surprise number two was that, while we Americans were facing the far shore with a sense of apprehension, the Finns regarded their jaunt to Reagan’s “Evil Empire” as if it was a weekend in Tijuana: A pair of Levis sold on the ready black market could net enough money to stay drunk all weekend, plus pay for a hotel room to throw up in.

The heart of Tallinn dates to the 11th century, and grows more current the farther you get from the center, until you get to drab concrete, rust-stained Soviet apartment buildings. I met a mother there who had moved there from Chernobyl after the meltdown two years earlier. She was sickly and dying, and told me she could feel something in her blood change after the accident. Her teenaged son had posters of U.S. pop stars all over his bedroom wall. His biggest fear, aside from his mother’s health, was compulsory military service awaiting him in a few years, where they would beat the non-conformity, and often the humanity, out of you, then send you to die in Afghanistan.

When you met the Soviet people in their homes, they were the most open, giving people you could meet, but I hardly saw anyone at work who wasn’t sullen and disinterested past the point of rudeness. Later, in Leningrad, we were warned not to drink the tap water—it contains an organism that can wreck your digestive tract for months—but the official word was that water served in our hotel was fine because it had been boiled. One of our group had a sister living in Moscow who visited us, and told us we had better brush our teeth with Pepsi, because we couldn’t trust the hotel water. She explained, “Look, the people you’ve seen at work, do you see any of them doing their jobs? So what makes you think the people you can’t see are doing theirs?”

On the street, the government cab drivers would ignore your hail—they were paid the same by the state whether they had a fare or not. You stood a far better chance of flagging down anyone fortunate enough to have a car, who were generally looking to earn some unreported income.

Most restaurants had doormen. In Tallinn, one absolutely refused to admit me to my hotel bar, despite my trying to explain I was scheduled to meet with some Very Important Estonians inside. No matter what I said, this gruff, uniformed older man barred my way and kept saying, “Chikleiz.” Finally I realized, this son of a bitch wants gum! I proffered a pack of Juicyfruit and the door opened wide.

At a purportedly ritzy restaurant in Leningrad, another doorman also wouldn’t let us in until sufficiently bribed. Inside, it the restaurant was empty and the large staff was sitting around doing nothing. I never had a restaurant or hotel meal in the Soviet Union that wasn’t lousy. At this restaurant, you’d bite into a roll, and your teeth would crunch on a chunk of salt: maybe they’d put the ingredients in a bowl, but they were damned if they were going to mix them. In Leningrad, the breakfast porridge tasted like it had been heated in an armpit.

These were the days of Glasnost, but the new openness was a very iffy thing. The government almost never said it was now OK to do some previously banned thing. Instead, a lone Estonian might dare to wave the old, banned national flag. If he didn’t get his ass kicked and hauled off to seven years in prison, a few more people started waving flags, and in a couple of months everyone was. But there was still the lurking possibility of seven years hard labor.

I had cause to wonder about that when we were dragged to all-night Estonian rock festivals. The sun never quite sets in summer, and they took full advantage of that. Our first night in Estonia our musician hosts took us to an outdoor concert bowl—typically used for song festivals—where a succession of bands were rocking through the night while ten of thousands of youths partied, the only illumination being the rime of red sunlight on the horizon.

Siim-Tanel Annus

I’ve been to hippie rock fests in the ’60s and everything since, and I’ve never seen anything quite so anarchic. There were no cops in evidence, no yellow-jacketed security, nobody in this crowd of tens of thousands to instill order or control.

If KGB agents were there, they weren’t very interested in doing their jobs either, since some of our new musician friends went onstage to sing traditional Estonian folk tunes they’d rocked up and turned into anti-Soviet anthems. A couple of months previous, that, too could have gotten them a lengthy engagement at a gulag, and no one ever said it still wouldn’t.

Two nights later, some of us were pleasantly drunk and were pulled onstage by the band to join them phonetically in their most rousing anti-Soviet anthem. It was the weekend now and the audience was huge, maybe 40,000 people, again with no security. I have no idea what I was singing, but, Hey, look at the dashing American onstage, his fist raised in solidarity with you!

An Estonian journalist later told me what people in the crowd had been saying about me: “Jesus, look at all the clothes on that guy!” It was their summer, but I was cold, and even had woolen Belker gloves on, and looked ridiculous to them.

While we were singing, one of the tour members had her purse stolen from the edge of the stage. The theft was announced over the PA, and here’s something else I’ve never seen in the States: Thousands of people in the audience started chanting, “Give it back! Give it back!” That went unheeded by whoever took it, but it was still a mighty nice gesture.

One of our party also broke a wrist or something, and was treated for free. One of our Estonian hosts was one of the most prominent jazz critics in the Soviet Union, and had taken a lot of heat from officials for championing Western rock music. Even in 1988, the government was putting out propaganda posters equating rock music with AIDS, both decadent Western diseases.

The critic had some good things to say about the Soviet system as well. As he saw it, our bill of rights only spelled out what our government wouldn’t do to us, while their government made pledges of what it would do for you, in terms of rights to health care, employment, housing, etc.

In concept, their “godless” communism was something Jesus could have been proud to come up with, what with sharing and being one’s brother’s keeper. In practice, of course, it was a huge, lying, corrupt, venal mess. The flaws in the system got pushed to terrible extremes, much as the worst aspects of capitalism have come to the fore in our country.

There’ll be more about this, and Cuba, in the next exciting Lost in OC. I can hardly wait.

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