The Long Road
by Gary Phillips
My first two times in Cuba were in 1985 and 1987. This was during the era of the Soviet Empire and for geopolitical reasons and socialist solidarity, the island nation was heavily subsidized with resources like oil, gas, building materials, farm machinery, and what have you from the Eastern Bloc. The Cubans had an eye on the long road to building a society where basic needs like shelter, healthcare and food were met but didn’t gussie up their shortcomings with empty phrases like "workers paradise" or billboards of farmers gushing over their shiny tractors.
Even then, even before the Wall came down and the Special Period of severe scarcity wracked Cuba, there was unevenness and lack of resources - which they acknowledged. Certainly when the Soviets, Russia essentially, reconfigured itself and the previous levels of subsidization disappeared, and El Bloquero (the Cuban embargo we’ve maintained since the days of JFK) continued, there were many who didn’t think Cuba would survive.
But they did. The Cubans are tough. Back then I was out in the countryside and only got into Old Havana for one day to look around for myself. This time, the fourstory crew stayed mostly in the touristy part of Havana in the cool, funky Hotel Nacional, a place right out of a Graham Greene novel. A quarter of a century ago we the young Venceremos Brigadistas slept in barracks. We cut cane or did construction work, going to political meetings after work and laughing and talking with the Cubans in the camp late into the night.
Today there is still unevenness and lack of resources, with the Cubans painfully aware how precarious their economy is now based too much on tourism. But this comes at a time when shaky economic conditions, certainly always a reality in parts of Los Angeles, Detroit or Santa Ana, have sharpened and deepened in our own country and across the globe.
So what’s going on? And why does the relatively frank ’60s Cuban film, Memories of Underdevelopment, a film with what we’d call a limousine liberal as its protagonist, seem to resonate again? A government made film that was critical.
I won’t have definitive answers, but will explore some ideas on these matters in my usual column on our site in the next week or so. Meanwhile, here’s a still from Memories of Underdevelopment.
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