This helps us to understand why, with some exceptions, the quality of Cuban literature was quite poor in the ensuing decades. Many authors remained silent, became “unpolitical” or, as in the case of Miguel Barnet, suffered a crisis of creativity. Barnet eventually came to an accommodation with the regime, and was soon sitting as a deputy in the National Assembly and representing Cuba at UNESCO. Anyway, in the nineties Castro appointed as culture minister the writer Abel Prieto, a Politbureau member considered to belong to the Party’s liberal spectrum who, in his new role, fought to achieve some leeway in cultural matters. Thus, Cuban cinema again commands considerable international attention – for example, Fernando Pérez’s Life Is To Whistle, an everyday fable which has earned several distinctions abroad because of its fascinating, lightly worn images, its music and its satirical overtones.
The longer the Comandante has ruled, the more has it been the case that what good writers and artists produce in exile is impregnated with bitterness (as in Jesús Díaz), vapid anti-Communism (Guillermo Cabrera Infante), or banal sex (Zoé Valdés). Cabrera Infante’s hatred for Castro soon went so far that he no longer smoked Cuban cigars and no longer spoke to people who visited Cuba.70 “The works of Cuban exile literature,” judges Walter Haubrich, “are in danger of becoming interchangeable.
For their authors have been living in a shared routine of everyday nothingness, and their experiences in the alien outside world have again been similar to one another.”71
The decades of restrictions are all the less understandable if one considers that Castro’s educational policy succeeded in making Cubans a reading nation, ahead of most other Latin American countries. Books – when they are available despite the paper shortage – cost only a fraction of what people have to pay in Chile or Mexico. Selected classics of world literature, including contemporary foreign authors such as Günter Grass, have always been very reasonably priced, though in small editions. For decades, Castro made sure that state-commissioned pirate editions were available to the population.
His conduct is also incomprehensible because we know that he has been a manic reader all his life. He is not known to be particularly interested in other spheres of culture. When he went to New York in the spring of 1959, for example, and his companions advised him to visit the Museum of Modern Art, he decided to go instead to the Brooklyn Zoo. Nor is music his thing. “I have a very bad ear for music,” he told his friend Tomás Borge. “I like classical music and … have a real soft spot for marches.” But “I have to blame nature because it didn’t give me musical genes, a good ear for music or a good singing voice.”72 His real passion has always been the written word: “I’ve always read as many books as I could, and it makes me sad that I don’t have more time for reading. I suffer when I see libraries and lists of book titles of any kind, regretting that I can’t spend my life reading and studying.”73 He has read historical biographies, “all the books ever written about the French Revolution, many about the Bolshevik Revolution, countless numbers about the Mexican Revolution, and also many about the Chinese Revolution.” In prison he made his reading more systematic and organized real classes “with courses in philosophy. We read a lot of world literature. For two years, I spent between 14 and 15 hours a day reading, except for the time I spent writing manifestos, messages and letters in invisible ink: lime juice.” He read Dostoevsky, Romain Rolland, Victor Hugo, and Balzac. In his Mexican exile and the Sierra Maestra, he read nearly “all the books ever written … about World War II.” Various specialist books followed after the victory of the revolution, “70, 80 or 100 books on agriculture.” One of his aims in reading this kind of book was to turn the material to practical use – often to the regret of those around him, and not always with the intended effect.
As Castro’s revolution grew in years, the turn came for books on ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, early Chinese culture, and the old Indian cultures. But contemporary writers are also on his list, especially Latin American writers such as his friend Gabriel García Márquez. But not only they. “Last night, I was reading a little novel called Perfume, by Patrick Suskind. It’s an unusual subject, very interesting and pleasant.… Suskind’s book teaches you a lot. It’s incredible what I’ve learned about perfumes, even about the technology of perfume making.” His favorite, though, is Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which he has read “five or six times, at least.” And what of Cuban writers? Surely someone like himself, having “such a great love of literature,” must also have close links with Cuban writers – asked Borge guilelessly. And the answer he received tells us a lot: “With some, but not many.… Because of my work … ; I’m a slave to it.… contact with writers hasn’t been in the immediate sphere of my work.… I haven’t been able to cultivate that, Tomás; my workload hasn’t made that possible.”74
8
Alone against All
Exodus to Florida
On April 1, 1980, a bus crashed through the barrier outside the Peruvian embassy in the Havana district of Miramar. There was an exchange of gunfire between the Peruvian security guards and Cuban militiamen posted at the gate, one of whom was killed. The six people inside the vehicle asked for political asylum.
Castro was so incensed that he removed all further “protection” from the embassy. The news spread like wildfire that no one would be prevented from entering the grounds, and within five days 10,000 people were occupying nearly every square inch, some even perched on roofs and trees. A week after the original incident, US President Jimmy Carter intervened to declare: “We see the hunger of many people on that island to escape political deprivation of freedom and also [of] economic diversity. Our hearts go out to the almost 10,000 freedom-loving Cubans who entered … the Peruvian Embassy just within the week.”1 As the tension mounted, the Peruvian government showed no willingness to accept a single one of those wanting to leave Cuba, and in mid-April – evidently on the initiative of the United States – Costa Rican President Rodrigo Carazo offered to set up an air link to ferry the refugees to his country. Granma reacted to this scornfully on April 18: “To travel to the US, there is no need to make a stop in Costa Rica. It costs less and is quicker to travel directly to Key West, some 90 miles away.”2 Shortly afterwards, Castro got his interior minister to announce that anyone in the embassy grounds could go home, pack their bags and leave for wherever they liked. The port of Mariel, west of Havana, was opened specially for this purpose, and the authorities let it be known that boats could cross over from Florida to pick people up. Castro saw an opportunity to rid himself at a stroke of discontented gusanos (worms).
Two boats hurried across from Florida to pick up relatives. The next day there were dozens of boats, soon hundreds, and in the end thousands – an exodus of unexpected proportions. People flocked down with their families from all over the country, occasionally clashing in the streets of Havana with the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs). Castro organized the propaganda offensive. On May 1, 1980, in a speech to a crowd of a million on “Revolution Square,” he exclaimed: “In our country, we don’t need those who don’t have revolutionary genes, revolutionary blood, minds adapted to the idea of a revolution, and hearts adapted to the effort and heroism of a revolution. After all, those who lack these qualities are an insignificant part of the people.”3 He spoke of them as riff-raff, using not the Spanish word canalla but the German lumpen, which has become part of an international revolutionary language. Does it allude to Marx’s concept of a “lumpenproletariat?” “The idea of sending boats to pick up the lumpen arose spontaneously in Florida. Then all we had to do was tell them that we wouldn’t shoot at them because they weren’t coming to make war, and that we would show them every courtesy.”4
The United States, whose president, Jimmy Carter, had horrified his own officials by announcing on May 5 that the refugees would be “welcomed with open hearts and open arms,” was now overwhelmed by the sudden rush. It is estimated that by the end of September, when Castro responded to US pressure and blocked
the outflow, some 125,000 people had poured across from one port to the other. Among them, as Castro cynically remarked, were a number of “chicken thieves” for whom the prison gates had been thrown open; in fact, there were several thousand common criminals in their ranks. Numerous inmates of psychiatric institutions also found a new home in the United States. It was later discovered that as many as 26,000 marielitos (as they were called, after the port of departure) had served prison sentences, many apparently for political reasons. But the figure included 4–5,000 serious criminals, who, soon after landing in the United States, found themselves back behind bars in the penitentiaries of Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
In the end, the “Mariel boatlift” was a dubious victory for each of the two heads of state. The public sense that Carter had ceded to Castro’s pressure and been made to look small was a factor in his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan at the next presidential elections. Castro also managed to cause a blip in the career of another Democratic politician, for it was in the wake of a revolt by newly exported Cuban criminals at Fort Chaffee that future President Bill Clinton was voted out as governor of Arkansas in 1980.
It remains true, however, that even without the crooks and psychiatric inmates the influx of refugees was by no means as welcome as Washington outwardly showed. There were simply too many of them. Whereas, in March 1980, the US government had set a quota of 19,500 for the acceptance of Cuban refugees on grounds of political, racial, or religious persecution, those who had been crossing from Mariel had economic rather than political motives, and presented fewer occupational skills than the previous average. Furthermore, the United States had to deal at the same time with boatloads of refugees from Haiti, a Caribbean island hit by political instability. Worldwide attention to the issue meant that it was morally impossible to treat the two groups in different ways, and so both won the right to stay in the United States.
In the white-dominated community of Florida, this sudden influx led to growing social problems and a bitter struggle over jobs and housing, as well as to a rise in crime. This time, moreover, there were many black Afro-Cubans among the refugees, and they were viewed as competitors by blacks already living there. The Cuban exile community, in particular, was far from happy at the prospect of having to share the cake with so many unexpected relatives. True, none of Carter’s political rivals in the Democratic Party or among the Republicans directly opposed acceptance of the Cubans, but there were unmistakable hints that the resources were not enough to integrate such a large number. All these fears and worries were camouflaged, however, by the Cuban hardliners’ media-effective reproach that Carter had cooperated with Castro by accepting everyone the enemy had thrown at him. In their view, Castro had emerged victorious over Carter and the United States.
That is not how things looked at first. Pictures of the exodus on the world’s television screens caused Castro an undeniable loss of face, as it became clear that he had underestimated the degree of discontent among his citizens and the preparedness of many to pack up and go. One factor fueling rejection of the system had probably been the officially permitted visits to the island by Cuban exiles in the two years before the Mariel episode; the guests had left behind not only a good hundred million dollars in badly needed foreign currency, but also presents packed at home for their needy relatives. And they told a thousand and one fabulous tales about the glittering world not so far from the shores of Cuba, where milk and honey flowed and it seemed to be Christmas the whole year round.
This had its corrosive effect, and in the end Castro’s familiar device of allowing people to leave the country, as a safety valve for domestic political tensions, led to an uncontrolled rush that no one had anticipated. Economically, the cost–benefit calculation did not work out, since the loss of skilled labor was so huge that it outweighed the additional foreign-currency revenue from relatives’ visits. On the other hand, Castro had accepted a similar brain drain before, and he would put up with it again in the future.
The exodus of 1980 had a long pre-history in which the United States had served as a haven for political refugees from Cuba. It was there that one of the most prominent exiles, José Martí, had spent 1895 preparing the liberation war against the Spanish. And, on the eve of Castro’s revolution on January 1, 1959, 125,000 Cubans were living in the United States, most of them awaiting the end of the Batista regime. Castro had numerous supporters and sympathizers among them who, despite official obstacles, gave him political, financial, and material assistance (including supplies of weapons). Some 85,000 of them returned to Cuba in the first year after the fall of the dictatorship, while just under 74,000 (mostly upper-class people or members of Bastista’s repressive apparatus) left the island. In almost three years between 1960 and the missile crisis of October 1962, a further 196,000 – mainly from the middle classes – turned their backs on the revolution. Castro did not try to stop them. Subsequently the figure averaged 12,000 a year, before climbing again from 1965 as a result of political repression and mounting economic problems. At that time, 20,000 people are thought to have been in prison in Cuba for political reasons.5
In 1965, as ever more “illegal emigrants” made for Florida in small boats and inflated rubber tyres, Castro decided for the first time to handle things in the “Mariel” way, through what became known to Cubans as Operation Camarioca. On September 28 he announced that participation in the revolution was a voluntary matter; anyone who preferred to leave and had relatives in Florida could arrange for a boat to pick them up at Camarioca Harbor on the Varadero Peninsula. Within a month, some 5,000 people had taken up the offer and left for Florida. A few days later, faced with the sudden rush, President Johnson signed a new order lifting all restrictions on Cuban immigration: “I declare here this afternoon to the people of Cuba that those who seek refuge here in America will find it. The dedication of America to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld.”6 On November 6, the first US–Cuban agreement on emigration was signed, and by 1971 more than 260,000 people had flown across in a US-funded airlift. Permission was given only to those who had relatives in the United States, or men who were no longer of an age for military service, and anyone leaving automatically lost Cuban citizenship as well as all their personal possessions. Having registered on the waiting list, they were usually dismissed from their job, ordered to vacate their flat, and sent to work in agriculture.
Cuba’s East European allies – especially representatives of the GDR – were horrified by Castro’s opening of the route to Florida, which completely contradicted their own way of dealing with such matters. They were especially alarmed when he announced that 200,000 people had applied to emigrate, but the word in unofficial circles was that the figure was as high as half a million. There were even fears “that, by the end of the year [1966], the number of people wishing to emigrate might be so high that every fifth Cuban would be planning to leave the country.”7 In one of his confidential reports to the government in East Berlin, the ADN correspondent in Havana, outwardly a journalist, described Operation Camarioca and the emigration agreement with the United States as the “greatest error in Cuban internal politics,” and criticized Castro for his unwillingness to “revise” it.8 As if a more humane socialism prevailed in the GDR, the East German ambassador noted in a report to his superiors in mid-October 1965:
In this context, the serious question arises as to why the Cuban Party does not instead fulfill its essential duty to offer all citizens … a clear perspective within socialism, and struggle to win over each individual through the method of persuasion. Here we again see the effect of the poorly differentiated class analysis and immaturity of the Cuban Party leadership.… There is also the question of the material damage that such a procedure might cause, the medical profession and the technical intelligentsia being just one case in point.9
Referring to a leading Communist from a South American country, the diplomat asked for it to be borne in mind that “this procedure on the part
of the CP of Cuba is by no means calculated to make the Cuban example appear more effective in Latin America.”
In a further letter some two weeks later, the ambassador wrote that the “Soviet, Czechoslovak, Polish, Hungarian, Mongolian and other comrades from socialist diplomatic missions have reached similar views to our own;” namely, that the “mass emigration” represents “a retreat in the face of imperialist propaganda, and a consequence or aspect of the inadequacy of the Cuban Party’s work with people.” He stressed that his interlocutors had “supported our Party’s policy vis-à-vis West Germany and West Berlin" – a policy that required GDR soldiers to shoot at people trying to escape the country at its heavily guarded borders. He assured his superiors that he had had no trouble explaining this on the spot: “On questions directly concerning our own problems, we naturally always defend our Party’s policy – there can be no doubt about that.”10 Around that time, Western diplomats and journalists heard of “a protest by the GDR ambassador to the Cuban foreign ministry” concerning its emigration policy. Yet, according to the ADN correspondent, “attempts to use the emigration operation as an argument against the GDR’s anti-fascist defensive wall, and thus artificially to construct conflicts between Cuba and the GDR, . . . were of no avail.”11
At first, Castro did not allow himself to be deflected by criticism from his socialist brothers. But the persistently high number of people seeking to leave Cuba, and the resulting loss of skilled labor, finally induced him to put an end to the “freedom flights” in April 1973. Castro reproached the Nixon government with trying to use its emigration propaganda to undermine the political system in Cuba. There were also critics inside the United States of the large-scale emigration from Cuba: exile circles took the position that it only shored up and stabilized the Castro regime. In any event, the number of emigration permits now sharply declined, and for most people the only way of leaving was to cross the open sea illegally. Between 1959 and 1980 (the year of the Peruvian embassy incident followed by Operation Mariel), a total of 800,000 people are estimated to have left the island.
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