Our Lovely Enemy, Part 2

by Jim Washburn

Havana bears a semblance to Disneyland, if you mixed New Orleans Square and Tomorrowland, with a fevered Autopia running through it, with a few cabins from Frontierland in the older sections, and the vines of Adventureland growing in from the edges. But there’s no Main Street USA whatever to it.

Oh, and it’s a Disneyland that’s gone broke, where a lot of the Old World, New Orleans Square architecture is crumbling, and the Tomorrowland structures are peeling layers of once-colorful paint, and the Caribbean heat glues dogs to the sidewalks.

I took a course on utopian societies in college. The final paper required us to posit our own plan for a working utopia, and I figured, why not Disneyland? You break the population down into three shifts: one sleeps; one works the park; one enjoys the park; there you go: Utopia.

Fidel Castro can be forgiven if he overlooked that model. Disneyland was far from a success in its first few years. Besides, when the park opened on July 17, 1955, Castro was two months out of prison—where he’d been for two years since staging an unsuccessful insurrection against that bastard Fulgencio Batista--and was in Mexico plotting his next move.

Once his revolution prevailed, he looked to the U.S. President, Eisenhower, for help. Instead, Vice President Richard Nixon met with Castro, dictating how he expected the new government to toe the line for U.S. interests. This had been the U.S. script for Latin America for decades, punctuated by military interventions.

Castro might be the avuncular Walt Disney of Cuba’s socialist utopia, but Che is its Mickey Mouse, the public face of the revolution. Fidel evidently discouraged monuments and posters in his image, because he wasn’t dead and because he just didn’t like them, which makes sense, because you’d probably be creeped-out if you saw statues and posters of yourself everywhere, plus you know people would get sick of seeing your mug after a while.

So it is Che you see immortalized in statues and billboards, in keeping with Cuba’s Spanish Catholic tradition, which loves its dead martyrs. But the Cubans are ecumenical in their love of statuary: you’ll find statues of John Lennon, Don Quixote, Mother Teresa (in a park named for Princess Diana), obscure flamenco dancers and giant crabs.

There isn’t all that much propaganda around, but it stands out because the commercial visual clutter we’re accustomed to is absent. No one’s selling you anything, and it’s a nice, if alien, feeling not to have your eyes avulsed by billboards touting casino payouts, elective surgeries and car-sized sandwiches with labial slices of moist meat, cheese, bacon and every other arterial clog known to man unfolding toward you, beckoning, because you are wanted, inasmuch as you are your labor, and your labor is your money, and your money is what the men who own the billboards want to talk to. I’ll take crumbly, fading, human architecture over that every day.

Did I mention that Habana seems ungovernable, not that it’s some Mad Max scene, but that whatever it is that makes the city a convivial chaos instead of a hellish one lies beyond the ken of any government? Neighbors help neighbors. Women help lost dachshunds cross busy streets. The revolutionary soldier’s horse saves him from explosives.

That last bit was in a Saturday morning cartoon on one of the two Cuban TV stations we got in the hotel. Cartoon bullets are flying everywhere. The brave but klutzy soldier and his klutzier horse—always backing into the campfire and knocking over the camp coffee pot—are ordered to blow up a train bridge. But the soldier falls onto the trestles right next to the lit dynamite. The klutzy horse saves that day, rescuing his rider and kicking that dynamite right onto the cattle pusher of the counterrevolutionary train. Good horse! Boom! Hooray!

Their programming looks like public TV in the ’70s, without the pledge breaks. There’s news, baseball games, English lessons, dance lessons, tons of live music. I think the Cubans get one of the other stations we had at the hotel, the Venezuelan state channel. I watched two repeat episodes of Cuba’s great friend and fellow socialist Hugo Chavez on his Sunday TV show, Alo Presidente (“Hello, President!”). Chavez hosts the show, talks to children, addresses the questions of audience members, ridicules his enemies, uses packages of rice and beans as props, and generally has become the Latin American Gene Scott, holding the stage for several hours each week.

 That would be it for televised entertainment were not the Cubans an industrious people, who find satellite signal theft to be an excellent entertainment value. Some of us went to a neighborhood restaurant one night, where we were the only foreigners, and also were the only party not engrossed in watching America’s Funniest Home Videos on a TV. From their perspective, it probably is pretty funny watching fat Americans hit their heads on diving boards.

It was also funny during the dinner when it started raining on our editor, Nathan. Just because you’re indoors at a restaurant it doesn’t mean you should presume there’s a roof over all of it.

There is so much in this historic and vibrant city that is in disrepair. There are plenty of reasons for this. One is that Cuba is a hurricane magnet, and so many of the big ones such as Katrina that tore their way into the American consciousness stopped first to tear off a piece of Cuba. The government is great at disaster preparedness and response, less good at replacing the missing roofs and such, because they lack the resources.

Such resources as they do have went disproportionately to Cuba’s poor rural areas in the decades after the revolution, because they had been ignored for generations. So that’s where schools, libraries, hospitals and infrastructure went. It is probably also easier to get things done in the hinterlands, where the streets don’t crowd in on one another and where you don’t have to retrofit electrical wiring into buildings that predate gas lamps.

It’s only since the 1990s that the cities have begun to be renewed, both because it’s overdue and because after the collapse of Cuba’s chief trading partner, the Soviet Union, tourism has become Cuba’s Number 1 source of foreign income.

Tourism has posed conundrums of its own, such as the fact that some tourists like a crumbly Havana. I recommend you check out the Taschen book Inside Cuba, which gives a fabulous overview of Cuban architecture and style, from the grand palaces of the now-displaced rich to the humble sheds of tobacco farmers. Much like New Orleans or a beat-up old Fender Esquire, the patina and weather-checking of time really does add to Havana’s charm. In that respect, asking Cubans why they don’t fix their ruinous buildings is a bit like asking Greeks why they don’t fix the Parthenon. It is pretty damn scenic.

But only a bit, because people don’t live in the Parthenon, while Havana has a huge housing shortage. Married couples move in with parents because there’s no place else to go, and it’s not unusual for three generations of a family to live under one strained roof. We talked with a scientist who, like many other folks, lives in a run-down, subdivided home where the bathroom is shared by other families.

She could live in a bigger, better place on the outskirts of town, but then she’d have to deal with the other huge shortage, transportation. All over, we’d see queues of people waiting for a bus to take them somewhere where there wasn’t enough of something else.

In Old Havana, we saw the goddamnedest thing: three men, each suspended from a single rope from a building, a few floors up and in a diagonal row, with the guy on the left the highest. The guy on the right, on the bottom, reached out and steadied the guy in the middle, who held the feet of the guy on the left to steady him. It looked like performance art, but they were painting the building; or, rather, one of them was, with a brush in one hand touching up a spot of the building’s blue paint, while the other two kept him from twisting on his rope. That’s how things are done when you have more painters than scaffolds.

We saw some of the standard tourist sites, including the Havana Club Rum Museum. Havana, we were told, is the town that rum built. The museum takes you through the history of sugar cane on the island—introduced from Asia by Columbus on his second voyage to America—and its processing into some very nice rum. It was a lovely museum, with a scale model of the massive cane and rum works of old. I wonder if somewhere in America there’s a similarly romantic High Fructose Corn Syrup Museum.

It’s a little known fact that when Hemingway stuck the shotgun in his mouth, he first filled the barrel with Havana Club. What a rush!

I made that up but it should be true. There are memorials to that quitter all over the place—Cubans will point out that Hemingway only turned suicidal after he returned to the States—and his old hangout bar, La Floridita, is thick with young tourists paying drunken homage to him.

Some of us wanted to see a Santeria church, so our nice Chinese bus ventured to a decidedly non-touristy side of town, out where the mobile steel rims crack. I’ve seen equally ramshackle places in California’s Central Valley, but they’re pretty darn crude wherever they are. Along with rundown plaster buildings looking like the proverbial cake in the rain, there were shacks made of slats of rough-hewn wood, like something out of Deadwood circa 1877. But the kids playing in the streets weren’t dressed in rags—one was wearing a Captain America t-shirt—and they weren’t malnourished, especially the ones eating ice cream cones.

Everybody gets housing—and no one in Cuba is allowed to own more than two homes—but not all houses are equal. Some people live in beautiful little masterpieces on tree-lined streets near the shore, others in these barely viable huts. The socialist dream doubtless seem more successful to some than others.

José Fuster has a house near the sea, and it seems more like a dream than most places I’ve seen anywhere, thanks to Fuster. He’s known as the “Cuban Picasso,” and he is a chip off the old cube in his two-dimensional art. But he also likes to build things and in that regard is a crazed cross between Antonio Gaudi and Simon Rodia. He’s got fanciful, colorful tile structures, statuary and filigree jutting not just from his house but throughout his immediate neighborhood. Noted artist or not, I couldn’t imagine his little Fusterville being allowed to sprout in my home community or any other one in Southern California. Oh my, the property values! The community association!

Cuba has its own once-notorious community associations, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Back in the day, the CDR’s schtick was to be East German-style block wardens, reporting on neighbors’ possible anti-revolutionary activities. These days, we were assured, they mostly go around reminding parents to vaccinate their kids and not to leave standing water around during mosquito season.

Things have loosened up a lot since the Soviet Union collapsed in the late ’80s. At its best, Cuba seems like what a country might be like if PBS ran it, benign, fond of the symphony, and kind of charming in its inefficiencies.

In several respects Cuba has a freer, less restrictive culture than ours. Then there are the other respects: You might be assured of work—Raul Castro this past week announced the government employs a million more people than are actually needed for anything—but it’s not necessarily a job of your choosing. You can’t change jobs without the government’s permission. If you want to quit your job and start a company making fuzztones and wah-wah pedals, that’s not going to happen, though the tide may be slowly turning that way. This past week, Raul privatized the nation’s barbers and hairstylists: they’re now self-employed, and will pay a nominal rent and tax to the government.

The government is nearly as protective of its unquestioned leadership as the Vatican. The press is not free. Political dissenters tend to wind up in prison. The prisons are not where anyone wants to be.

Look up “Human Rights in Cuba” on Wikipedia to get an earful of the many things wrong with Cuba. For a more personal look at the softer daily repressions there, check out Yoani Sanchez’ blog.

The week we were in Cuba, Raul still had his Depends in a bunch over the U.S. and the European Union’s condemnation of the death of prison hunger striker Orlando Zapata Tamayo. According to Amnesty International, Tamayo was a political prisoner; according to Cuba’s state-run press he was a common criminal, a machete-wielding thug, who had been protesting to get a TV in his cell. I tend to believe Amnesty International before I do most governments. Raul was quoted asserting that Cuba’s prisons were a model of humane treatment and reeducation. Uh huh.

Thanks to George Bush, when the Cuban government claims the US is in no position to lecture them on human rights, they need point no further than to the southern end of their island, where Guantanamo Bay has become a global symbol for inhumane treatment and extrajudicial imprisonment.

I did hear some people publicly cursing the government, but it was our government. Our last day there, some of us went to a free concert by the Grammy-winning Puerto Rican reggaeton band Calle 13 (Hey, they’ve even played the Orange County Fair!), during which singer Rene Perez hurled a few epithets at the U.S. Interests Section building not far behind him.

We don’t have an embassy there, since we don’t have diplomatic relations with Cuba, so what little business there is to transact is done in the drab, Soviet-looking concrete Interests Section building.

The band performed to a crowd of what I’d estimate to be 70,000 people, packing the site—the prosaically named Anti-Imperialist Plaza—with the audience spilling over to fill the side-streets, crowding the balconies and roofs of nearby buildings.

It’s no coincidence that Anti-Imperialist Plaza is next to the U.S. building, and even less of one that 73 flagpoles stand in front of the building. During those marvelous Bush years, our president decided to antagonize the Cubans by ordering the Interests Station to hang anti-government propaganda in the windows.

The Cuban government responded with the flagpoles, which in their heyday hoisted flags to block the U.S. windows.

Why 73 poles? Remember the justified outrage when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics? Four years later, most of the world, especially us, paid scant attention when the entire 24-member Cuban fencing team was murdered, along with 49 other passengers, in the terrorist bombing of Cubana Air flight 455. The alleged mastermind of that bombing and of Cuban tourist spots is former CIA contract goon Luis Posada Carriles, presently breathing the free air of Miami, a palpable reason why those 73 deaths remain a sore spot for Cubans and other Latin Americans, along with our military interventions, longtime support of right-wing death squads and hideous dictators such as neighboring Haiti’s Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, and so on. When the Cubans do propaganda, it isn’t like we haven’t given them the ammo for it.

Calle 13 had a hit song about one of their beefs with the U.S., the FBI’s shooting of a Puerto Rican political opposition leader a few years back. Jeez, doesn’t anyone like us?

I’ve been going to rock festivals and concerts since the ’60s, and I’ve rarely seen a concert setting as free and uncontrolled as this. The police presence was minimal, and most of what I saw was them helping people who had passed out in the heat and the press of the crowd, which stretched nearly as far as one could see beyond the plaza, onto the Malecón, the famed seawall and boulevard that runs much the length of the seaport. (Guess who did the initial construction of it? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, during one of our occupations there.)

As will happen at concerts, the crowd was pushed forward by all the late additions trying to get closer to the stage, those in front getting squeezed against the metal traffic barricades. So the cops moved the barricades back and formed a human wall in front of them. These were mostly young cops, men and women, and most were not at all physically imposing, and there’s nothing combative they could have done with their arms linked. And, facing a barrier made of fellow humans instead of metal, the crowd backed off.

At the fringes of the concert, stalls were set up with soda and bottled water. And because people could easily become dehydrated, it was given out free. Concertgoers had to bring their own beer and rum, though, and I saw several parties drinking rum out of the bottle. Only one person I saw became openly belligerent. The cops pulled him out of the crowd and he took a few swings at them, then calmed down and apologized. They were on the verge of letting him back into the crowd when he decided to start throwing punches again, and only then did they restrain him and drag him off, more gently than I’ve seen U.S. cops do it.

And even in that crowded mess, if I accidentally bumped into someone, he’d apologize before I had a chance to. You can pick your reasons why, but from what I saw of Cubans, they’re a very civil society. At the concert, and like Havana in general it seemed to me, things only function because people are so civil to each other.

Not far from me, a child was playing with an interesting balloon, oblong, with a nipple on the end, so she could hold it with her mouth. “What a clever idea,” I thought, “Why haven’t we come up with anything like that?” Then I saw several other such balloons bouncing above the crowd and realized, “Oh, that’s a reservoir tip. Those are condoms,” but also that these weren’t stoners flouting convention by making, ha ha, a condom balloon, but just folks for whom balloons are practically a luxury item, whereas condoms are handed out free by the government and sometimes you’d just rather have a balloon than a fuck.

One other thing distinctly different about this show: Here it was, a concert of reggae-bred music, on a Caribbean island, and I caught at most one whiff of marijuana in that huge, festive crowd. Possession’s still a crime there. The first time you’re caught, you get a warning, the second time jail. The island could definitely benefit from industrial hemp—it could alleviate their paper shortage for one thing—but they lag behind even the U.S. on that front.

A couple of islands over, Jamaica is one of the weed capitols of the world, but also one of the murder capitols of the world. It was Number 1 in 2005 (and people say weed kills your ambition). In Cuba, crime in general is low, and violent crime in particular. One woman there told us, “At worst, someone might steal your purse. They’re not going to murder you.”

The low crime may be attributable to the aforementioned civility of their literate, educated, everyone’s-equal society. It may also be that there isn’t much to steal. And again, no one is that personally curious to see how bad the prisons really are.

Gun ownership has been outlawed in Cuban cities since 1973, and regulated in the countryside. Most people know how to handle firearms—due to two years of mandatory government service—but if you allow your weapon to be stolen while you’re in the service, you go to jail.

One fellow we talked with had done his two years as a spy, which mainly entailed watching C-SPAN and CNN for any news that might affect Cuba, plus listening in to American servicemen’s calls home from ships and bases in the Caribbean. It’s nice to hear that their spies make mistakes, too: One year, he told us, they were convinced that 100 Turks were being sent to Guantanamo. Then they realized Thanksgiving was coming up.

A couple of days before the Calle 13 concert, we’d been on Callejon de Hamel, a small street closed to traffic that had been turned into an artist’s village, sort of like Santa Ana’s Santora arts district, but eight times as colorful and chaotic, and with rhumba dancers and percussionists, and street musicians hawking their homemade CDs.

I talked briefly to an artist with a small gallery, who, after he’d asked and learned where I was from, responded, “Ah, our lovely enemy!”

I made some brief apology for the way our country treats Cuba, and he said, “That’s OK. We enjoy the game.”

Like the Interest Section’s windows, and the flagpoles, I thought, like the Cuban and U.S. guards who taunt each other at the perimeter of Guantanamo; like us training and funding an armed invasion of their island, trying to assassinate Fidel and sabotage the sugar crop; like Fidel sending his convicts and criminally insane stateside in the 1980 Mariel boat lift. The Game.

The Cubans I spoke with are practically as wary of Obama as the teabaggers are here. They’ve seen 10 other US presidents since the revolution, and every one, Republican and Democrat, has stuck it to the Cubans, so they’re not holding their breaths for change.

They are no more enamored of their own Raul Castro. He’s instituted a number of small freedoms and improvements, but they haven’t made much difference in people’s daily lives. It’s too little, too late and lacking boldness, they say, plus he’s not his brother. Fidel would go out and sell the hell out of any new government policy. Raul doesn’t, and people feel their island is drifting without a rudder. The young adults I spoke with—students, waiters and others—chaffed at the lack of opportunity and change in their lives, and talked of wanting to leave their homeland to find some.

That’s something of a universal feeling. “A young man ain’t got nothing in the world these days,” Mose Allison sang in the Eisenhower-era U.S., a year before Fidel came to power in Cuba. Johnny Rotten sang “no future for me” in Thatcher’s England in the ’70s, when Fidel was still in power in Cuba. With an uncharismatic Castro still in power today, it’s no wonder Cuban youth is singing the blues.

The Internet is something most Cuban kids have only heard about. A university student told me there were a total of ten computers for the whole university, with limited online access. The few Internet cafes are expensive and filtered. Along with having a government that’s uptight about the flow of information, Cuba has no fiber optic cable linking it to the rest of the world. The obvious linkup spot, the U.S., still embargoes Cuba. So Hugo Chavez is now running one all the way from Venezuela. Alo Presidente! Maybe there will still be some young people left in Cuba when the cable arrives.

At one end of Anti-Imperialist Plaza there’s a touching statue of Elian Gonzalez’s dad, cradling his young son in one arm and with the other pointing an accusing finger towards the U.S. Interests Section building.

A limited number of Cubans are allowed to travel to the States each year, chosen by a lottery, and the winners need to get visas from the Interests Section. It’s typical of Cubans’ political humor that they’ve come up with a caption for the Gonzalez statue. One told us, “He’s saying, ‘Go that way to get your visa.’”

The Cuban academics we spoke with had a more optimistic view of their land and the changes in it. I’ll go into more detail in a blog or three, but there’s a good argument for the progress Cuba has made. Compared to many other nations with far greater resources, Cuba takes better care of its people, and the country scores high for literacy, healthcare and other important markers. Of the 190 nations listed on the World Health Organization’s rankings of healthcare systems, Cuba is Number 39, just two spots below the world’s richest nation, the U.S.

The academics told us that Cuba’s decision-making process was becoming less centralized under Raul, and that communities and enterprises were having more say in their fates. Changes are afoot. Progress is on the march.

A cynic might argue, that, along with having the big picture, these people also have a privileged vantage, that academics have more opportunities and perks.

If they do, they can’t be that great. The day before I spoke with the musicologist Rafael Lam—the one who’d said, “The capitalist economy is efficient, but it is cruel. Socialism is inefficient, but it is not cruel”—he had traveled from Santiago on the other end of the island by riding on a bus for 14 hours.

And even if intellectuals and academics did get first pick of the plantains, being a professed smart guy myself, I might not mind a system like that so much. Give the writer some, folks. Give the teacher some. Feed the birds.

Could I live in Cuba? That’s a question that’s been haunting me since I’ve returned. I get the feeling Jesus would be more comfortable in secular socialist Cuba than he would in the U.S. of A. Cuba’s a nation that really does judge itself by how the least among them is treated. They are their brothers’ keepers. He wouldn’t have to drive the moneylenders from the temple, because there are no moneylenders. There’s no worry about Cuba’s rich passing through the eye of a needle, because there are no rich, and there’s probably a shortage of needles.

Cuba does suck weasel dick when it comes to human rights, but I could introduce you to dissidents here who have been beaten by cops, unjustly arrested, and/or spied upon by their government.

That’s not why I couldn’t live in Cuba. Here is the U.S. we rent a house we can barely afford; we pay through the nose for health insurance that doesn’t kick in a cent until we pay another $5,000 out of pocket first; I have no idea what work, if any, I’ll have six months from now.

But I like my guitars and other hoarded stuff. I like being able to go on the Internet to read how fucked things are. I like having the right to fail on my own terms. I don’t mind paying a little more so that schlubs even worse off than I am can have health care, but I don’t want them calling me comrade.

You ever read Henry Miller’s stuff from the 1930s, where every sentence is recoiling from the obscene, loud, soul-numbing, monetized, commodified thing his America had become? It’s only grown worse since then, to where we nearly seem a parody of how vapid and greedy a society can become. I love our country, but I scarcely recognize the country I dreamed it was as a kid in it, where there’s liberty and justice for all.

I don’t think of myself as selfish, but compared to a Jesus, Gandhi or Ammon Hennacy I sure am. Maybe I am compared to the average Cuban, too. Theirs is a society where people have less so that others can have some, where they eat less so that others can eat.

Cuba could do to learn a few things from us. They are at least as much in need of daring change as we are. If we could admit that we have a few things to learn from them, we just maybe might get our national soul back.

To which I can only say, Mr. Obama, tear down this wall.

Comments

Comments closed.