A version of this article was published in The Tablet
Just a small group of Cubans are with us on the Air France from Paris to Havana, and they are the only non-tourists on the plane, apart from the Chinese Olympic volley ball team. They are members of the national judo team, and have just been on a pre-Olympic warm-up tour of northern Europe. While the Chinese spend the flight playing computer claims, like automats, the Cubans crack jokes, eat, and play music. Their physiotherapist has bought a Zorro suit for his young boy. He says that while it was fun being abroad, he is longing to be back on the island, with his family and friends. He offers one piece of advice: “You must meet with Cubans, learn how they live.”
Cuban sportsmen, like ballet dancers, and musicians, can afford to travel for their tickets and expenses have been subsidised by the state. They are Cuba’s cultural exports. During my week long stay on the island, I was to meet many Cubans who would have also liked to travel, but couldn’t afford to. All men are equal but some are more equal than others.
We fly in at dusk, the last of the sun’s rays and a light warm breeze catching the leaves of the palm trees. Our first romantic glimpse of Cuba in temporaily interrupted by an intruder however-one that authoritarian regimes of widely different ideologies have thrown up throughout history. The policewoman at Havana airport may not have her holster made out of human skin-like the Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s Man in Havana-but she looks as if she might have had one. With a face chiselled in a dark menacing frown, Inspector Number 15685 looks up at my face and down at my passport at least a dozen times, before finally pushing a button and unlocking the door that separates me from the island.
Minutes later our first Cuban taxi drive involves negotiating the pitfalls of a crowded unmarked poorly lit road, with its chaotic assortment of Cubans seemingly going nowhere in a hurry, in an array of veteran cars, bicycles, open-roofed lorries, and rusty buses. The lights of one of Havana’s central squares remain dimmed by the time we reach the hotel. Cuba is trying to save on electricity, the taxi man explains, before we are ushered into the startling brightness of the main lobby and the multi-dialled luxury of our room.
On our first night we drift though the streets of Old Havana-its one-time single occupancy colonial buildings packed with subsidised poor tenants as part of the government’s social housing programme. With its walls cracked and peeling, and door frames and widows unhinged, this part of the city had bee crumbling as long as any resident could remember. There are streets where the government is slowly but steadily restoring swathes of a city Spain once considered the jewel in her Empire. The miracle is that some of the older untouched buildings are still standing and that there is laughter and music from their residents within and without. On one semi-derelict street corner, a band of elderly musicians are playing some salsa not for money but for their friends. It is a small impromptu party where the octogerians of the barrio have gathered. One of the women, slightly drunk on rum, dances with her dog. Another with her grandchild. Others stand around and clap rhythmically, occasionally shouting encouragement. They are joined by a young policewoman. No severity here, just a huge complicit smile and a hand that shares out cigarettes to the dancers. Neighbourhood policing Cuban style.
I am reminded, as I shall be on several similar occasions during my stay, of something that the American musician Ry Cooder has written on the sleeve notes to the Buena Vista Social Club CD – “In Cuba the music flows like a river. It takes care of you, and rebuilds you from the inside out.” There may be a shortage of CD’s in Cuban shops, but live music on this island is as generous as the song of mocking birds and parakeets.
Sunday Mass at the Jesuit church of the Sacred Heart. The priest takes the story of Lazarus’s resurrection as an example of liberation and hope, beyond the materialism of our daily existence. At the end of his sermon he asks that any new visitors identity themselves so that they can be well received. My wife and I lift our hands as do four Cubans distributed around the Church. The congregation turns to face us, as one, before breaking into spontaneous applause. I notice that the doors of the Church are opened wide onto the busy street, a gesture of encouragement as well as self-confidence one would find difficult to find in most capital cities in the world these days.
The amiable Jesuit priest Fr Alberto recalls that the turning point in Church-State relations came with the visit of Pope John Paul 11nd in 1998 when Castro and other senior party officials attended mass. Suddenly Cubans who had backed the Revolution while wanting to keep their Faith saw the reconciliation they had been praying for. “It allowed people to come out of themselves, to express their religiosity.”
A few days earlier an envoy from Pope John Paul 11’s successor had visited Havana and had asked that the regime allow greater access of the Church to the media and to the education system. “We are still waiting, “ says Fr Albertobefore adding: “The government hereknews it has three priorities it has to deal with, improve-housng, transport, and food. The question is how?”
The Church may be considered too collaborationist by its critics-there are no priests or bishops currently in Cuban jails – but it is positioning itself as potentially a key player in whatever reform process lies ahead.
Every embassy in town is obsessed with trying to predict what will happen next now Raul Castro has formally taken over the post of president from the ailing Fidel. A dedicated communist long before his old brother became one, Raul is nevertheless thought of as a pragmatist who sees the need to steer the island through some kind of economic and political renewal . One experienced diplomat I share a mojito with was sceptical there would be any real process of change until Fidel was long dead and buried. Another suggested that one of the problems Cuba faces is its lack of a structured opposition within the island capable of helping pave the way for a post-Franco style transition from the current one-party state to a parliamentary democracy. At present there are no signs of any major political shift although there are discreet diploamtic moves ging on behind the scenes in the spirit of a constructive dialogue. Despite George W.Bush demonsing Cuba as part of the ‘axis of evil’, the island has no serious drugs or terrorist, and is investing in life-saving pharmaceutcals not weapons ofmass destructin.
There are expectations that the election of a Democratic president of the United States may lead to the lifting of the US embargo that has helped Fidel fuel the mythology of a courageous island under siege from the world’s big bad oppressor. However the regime fears the example of the Soviet Union where economic liberalisation was accompanied by a period of political disintegration. It looks to China not as only one of its current major trading partners, but as an example of a regime that has brought about economic growth without sacrificing its political system. Cuban solidarity does not extend to the plight of Tibet it seems . Instead it counts Chavez’s Venezuela as its greatest friend and ally. Cuba provides Caracas with doctors in return for cheap oil.
A four hour drive across the island to Trinidad, early Spanish colonial settlements which, with its cobbled streets and wrought-iron grated windows has been preserved as one of Cuba’s most picturesque towns. It is linked to Havana by the Autopista Nacional the island’s main ‘motorway’ which the Soviet Union began building but never completed before the collapse of Berlin Wall. It survives poorly paved and unmarked much as the sugar plantations that once fed Russians lie covered in weeds.
While tourists have access to reasonably modern fleets of self-drive or chauffer driven cars, a majority of Cubans have to share their vehicles which range from battered reconstructed old Chryslers to small bicycle taxis-Cuba’s answer to the rickshaw, The clusters of Cubans waiting along the road, sometimes for hours, before they are picked up by a car or a bus is evidence that transport is one sector that the Revolucion has failed to deliver on.
Our driver Gustavo is one of thousands of Cubans who work for the tourist industry because it is the one sector that had can assure them something approaching a decent wage. The average Cuba salary of 400 pesos is worth about $16 dollars a month. But under the dual currency system, tourism and foreign businesses trade in a convertible peso which has a greater purchasing power. Gustavo believes that Cuba has an education and heath system it can be proud of, and none he knows knows has gone hung hungry since the late 1990’s when the colapse of the Soviet Union forced Cubans to eat cats. But he thinks that the economy should become strong enough to pay his countrymen better, allow them market their goods properly, and give them the freedom to travel where and when they like.
In Trinidad we walk up a steep hill to astatue commemorating Bartolome de Las Casas, the Spanish Franciscan friar who defended the rights of the native Indians after the Conquest. It is believed that that this early champion of human rights in Latin America celebrated his first mass here under a Calabash tree in the early 16th century. One of Trinidad’s most beautiful colonial churches –and there are several-is next to the main school. At the start and end of their day, the school kids-impeccably kitted out in starched white shirts and pale green uniforms- run through the church’s open doors, many of them stopping off to pray along the way. Cuba seems full of young happy school kids, many of them seemingly inheriting from their parents a sense that there is no contradiction between their political and religious faith but a potential symbiosis between the best aspects of each.
The high attendance of church goers, the discreet engagement of priests and catechists with social work, and the official authorisation of street processions underlines the extent to which Cuban Catholicism has revived since the hard-line Soviet days of the 1970’s and 1980’s .
Another long (seven hours) and bumpy road journey across the island, backtracking to Havana and then heading inland to the extraordinary beautiful national park of Vinales (note ed cedila accent over the n). Bulbous limestone knolls covered in lush vegetation border a valley of some 15,000 hectares of red earth where small farming communities grow an array of crops from tobacco and coffee to bananas, avocados, oranges, and sugar cane. While attracting a growing tourist trade, the area perseveres as an example of both the potential and limitations of Cuban agriculture. The Cuban regime’s enduring commitment to a planned economy has brought about some agricultural reform while at the same stifling productivity and enterprise. Cuban farmers are allowed to sell some of their surplus produce to private consumers, but the state takes the bulk of what is sown and grown, tying up financial transactions in bureaucratic bottlenecks and fuelling a parallel economy of moonlighting and middlemen.
With his greying moustache, and weathered face Vicente, is a veteran fighter of the Revolution, and now the patriarch of an extended family. As we smoke a couple of his cigars-hand-rolled and soaked, before drying, in rum and honey-he tells me how he fears his artisanship may be a dying trade as the 21st century creeps in on the island.“The young are no longer interested in my cigars or helping me work the land. They want to go to the towns and try and make more money.”
I thought about Vicente and men and women of his generation as we drive around an island. It is filled with iconic posters of Che Guevara and anti-imperialist murals, in contrast to the total absence of commercial advertising hoardings. In contrast to those who have over the years fled to Miami or Europe, there are those who chose to stay behind and have persevered in their belief that thanks to the Revolution of 1959 Cuba became and still is a better place than the corrupt and exploited US dominated whore-house that had existed before, and that there is now, thanks to Fidel, less poverty and social injustice than elsewhere in Latin America. It is also true that a majority of Cubans on the island have grown up knowing no other system but the socialism Fidel has imposed contributing to the sense outsiders get of Cuba living in a time-warp, out of step with the cruel reality that is the rest of the world.
My perspective is of a system that despite its poor wages and shortages, has managed to produce one of the most integrated multiracial and relatively crime-free societies anywhere in the developing world. While the system has undoubtedly some underlying problems, it has saved Cubans from the consumerism and personal debt that is the source so much social and financial stress in free market communities.
Cuba still has too many exiles (an estimated two million anti-Castro Cubans live in the US alone)and too many prisoners of conscience (some 69 according to Amnesty). And yet, as one western diplomat conceded, it makes those committed to the system Fidel has forged over five decades feel part of a collective enterprise with a social cohesion that would be the envy of most inner cities in the UK. How to shed the worst aspects of Fidelismo while preserving his more noble achievements and not losing control to a politically destabalising free-for-all is the challenge now facing Raul and the new generation of socialist Cubans that hope to follow him.
