A Letter From Havana
“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. ”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
Writes Professor Noel Ignatiev:
Gwen and I spent a week in Cuba this past December. Except for a daytrip to the adjacent province of Pinar del Rio, we spent the entire week in Havana. It was my first visit to Cuba since June 1960, when I was there for six weeks. I do not claim that one week makes me an authority.
For the tourist, Cuba is probably the most desirable destination in the Caribbean. There is the weather, of course, and then the food, the variety of things to see and do and the comparatively low cost. And music everywhere: Cuba is, after all, an Afro-American country. We attended the Havana Jazz Festival, hosted by Chucho Valdez, and heard Christian McBride; tickets were twenty bucks for all seats.
Thanks to Airbnb and the decision of the Cuban government to allow individuals who own apartments to rent them to visitors, accommodations are cheap. One can, if one wishes, spend three hundred dollars a night to stay at a luxury hotel (as one would ordinarily do in the Caribbean), but it is not necessary. We had a room, for fifty dollars, with a private bath in an apartment on the thirteenth floor of a twenty-five story building in the Vedado neighborhood—a residential district (formerly mafia) with many early-20th-century buildings, a ten-minute walk to the Malecon (seawalk), a ten-dollar taxi ride to Old Havana. The owners occupied an apartment in the rear on the same floor, the mother-in-law had a room with her own bath, and one room was rented to another visiting American couple. There was a dining room where the hostess served breakfast (fruit, eggs, toast and coffee, five dollars) an attractive common sitting area with a TV and a balcony with a great view. The power went out one day while we were there and we had to walk down thirteen floors, but it was on by the time we returned.
The food available for tourists is abundant, cheap and varied. There was a restaurant on the eleventh floor of the next building—also with a great view—that served meals with a continental touch for around ten dollars, local beer a dollar-and-a-half, Cuban top-quality rum five bucks, and imported drinks a bit more but still less than in the U.S. We also found a restaurant on the next street, without the view, where one could eat pork ribs cooked slowly over an open fire, served with Cuban black beans and rice for five dollars. We went once to an upscale restaurant downtown, paid a lot more and were disappointed.
We saw no homeless people (we did see one man passed out on the sidewalk in front of a local restaurant, but I think he was sleeping off a drunk; no one bothered him); we were told that street crime is rare and that women walk safely on the streets late at night. It seemed to us—I do not claim authority—that there was more of a sense of community and that people were less alienated than in other countries in the region: uniformed school children everywhere seemed happy and well-behaved; one ten-year-old showed us what he was reading: quotations from Abraham Lincoln (who is much admired in Cuba). We saw none of the hostility toward North Americans, especially whites, common in the Caribbean and Mexico. The difference may be due paradoxically to the Revolution, and here I need to recount an experience from my 1960 visit: I lived with a family in a neighborhood similar to the one where we stayed this time, at the height of the tensions between Cuba and the U.S., right before the breaking of diplomatic relations and the embargo. My presence was known to everyone, and one young fellow (about my age), whenever he passed me on the street, would taunt me with “Cuba si, yanquis no” (a slogan popular at the time), and ask, “Right?” After a few such incidents I went up to him and said in my bad Spanish, “Do you know that Fidel says there is a difference between the U.S. government and the North American people?” Immediately his demeanor changed; he smiled, shook my hand, and asked me how I liked Cuba. It may well be that the political education the Cuban people gained during that period had an effect.
There was a revolution in Cuba fifty-eight years ago. It inspired me, a lad of nineteen, to hitchhike to Key West to see it for myself. (Parenthetically, I was struck by the beauty of Savannah while passing through, and vowed to return some day, which I have done, now spending half of each year in the S. Carolina low country across the river.) In Cuba I stayed with an American left-wing family I knew who had moved there to escape political persecution in the U.S. I want to tell two stories of what the Revolution meant then: first, I was among two million people who rallied in Santiago de Cuba following the U.S. announcement that it was canceling the sugar quota and would buy no more Cuban sugar, on which the Cuban economy depended; the slogan was “Without quota but without master” and I heard Fidel Castro say, “We do not want U.S. imperialism to commit suicide on our beaches, but if it is our destiny to die to free Latin America from imperialist domination, we are ready to do our duty; if the imperialists invade Cuba they will meet not their Guatemala but their Waterloo.” Of course leaders can say anything, but I was in that crowd, and I know he was speaking for the people who had stood up and reclaimed their dignity and would die, if necessary, to defend it. That moment has stayed with me along with other moments I have experienced in my sixty years of revolutionary activity, years that have imbued me with the faith that a better world is possible (a slogan, by the way, we saw on a roadside, attributed to Castro). Less than a year later was the U.S.-financed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, where the Cuban people gave their response to the efforts of their former masters to return. My second story is more individual and perhaps therefore more revealing: one of my neighbors in Havana was a young woman who wanted to join the others planning to go to the countryside to live with the peasants and teach them how to read. Her parents did not want her to go, for traditional reasons. The neighbors got involved in the discussions, some on one side, some on the other. I do not know how she finally decided—the decision was hers to make and no one else’s—but it was an exercise in democracy, far richer than anything I had seen in the U.S. (outside of some moments in the Civil Rights Movement) and a case study of how revolution transforms character.
The Revolution left a legacy: free medical care, free education through college, low-cost housing, security in old age. it appears that the color line, while it has not been entirely erased, is less distinct that it was, a spectrum rather than a line. (Again, I don’t think one week makes me an authority.) Compared with other places that had revolutions, Cuba isn’t doing too badly. (In Mexico 58 years after the Revolution, government troops fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing 400-1000.) But whoever visits Cuba expecting to see a living revolution will be disappointed. While there are still posters and slogans exhorting people, the public meetings, the competing newspapers, the wonderful creative disorder that characterized Cuba when I was there are not in evidence: the Revolution has become institutional, and Raul Castro wears a blue suit.
Popular excitement today is directed toward tourism. A word of explanation: there are two pesos circulating in Cuba: one for internal use, worth almost nothing, and a second, convertible (CUC), which can buy clothing, appliances, cars and other consumer goods. (One leftwing critic observed around 1965 that the Revolution had achieved a miracle greater than the Transubstantion: the disappearance of consumer goods from the shelves. Everyone knows about the 1957 Chevvies kept running by the marvelous ingenuity of the Cuban people.) The main way to acquire CUCs is through tourism, which has given rise to a curious class system, not between those who possess great wealth and those who labor—we saw no one with great wealth—but between those who have access to CUCs and those who do not. (In addition to the 3 percent charge which applies to all exchanges, there is a discriminatory 10 percent penalty on dollars, which does not apply to euros, Canadian dollars, sterling or any other hard currency; it is the penalty for the US embargo, which still exists and which Cubans call the blockade.) For instance, the son of our hosts in Cuba is a lawyer, who used to work for the government; his wife is a doctor, also government employed. He makes ten times his lawyer’s salary driving a taxi; his wife likewise. It is hard to fault a country where taxi drivers and waiters make more than doctors and lawyers, but there it is. The result is that, while people’s basic needs are met, there is an acute shortage of consumer goods. Whether this was a result of the blockade, of the Cuban government’s decision to shift its dependence from the U.S. to the Soviet Union (with disastrous effects), inevitable for any small country without coal, oil or iron, or a combination, I couldn’t say.
In any case, as I said, the enthusiasm once directed toward revolution is now directed toward developing tourism. Old Havana is packed with people selling whatever they can, including Che Guevara t-shirts. (What would Che say? By the way, I saw Che up close in 1960.) An American friend told me he was approached three times in as many days by people offering to connect him with a young woman. This did not happen to me, perhaps because I was with Gwen. It’s coming: the hotels, the gambling, the prostitution—all the rest from what Mark Twain called the Blessings of Civilization Trust. Better visit soon, before they turn it into a theme park. Two links of interest are here and here.