In the year and a half that I’ve been visiting the island, I have not met anyone who talks to me about democracy. And except for the Ladies in White, who demand the freedom of their relatives arrested for political reasons and who number no more than fifty-something, no one talks about human rights, either. It’s true that if you dig deeper you uncover pain, the frustration of what could have been and was not, or, in the younger people, the boredom with what they never wanted anyway, a feeling of premature failure that relaxes and distresses at the same time. But it’s domestic problems—electricity, water, the infrequency of almendrones, the price of onions, the disappearance of beer—that dominate conversations. The press, the radio, and television never give bad local news. Terrible things only happen outside Cuba.
I covered almost the entire island following Pope Francis in September 2015. We saw him in Havana, in Holguín, and in Santiago. As we drove, we listened to the pontiff’s speeches on Radio Rebelde. My secret hope was that, as a lot of people gathered to hear him, spontaneous protests would break out, cries of unrest. That’s what had happened in Chile when John Paul II visited during Pinochet’s regime. Every one of his appearances became an excuse to make all kinds of denunciations so the whole world would hear. Popes bring in a lot of international press. But nothing like that happened here, where people aren’t living with an unsustainable tension and there are no cauldrons about to boil over. His visit didn’t even awaken the slightest religious fervor. A large portion of the crowd attended because they were brought by their respective Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs). Gerardo himself preferred to wait for me in the car drinking a beer while I attended the homilies. He didn’t feel any curiosity.
During that trip, we crossed thousands of hectares given over to that robust weed called the sickle bush, plus old sugar factories that had engendered some of the largest fortunes in the west (estates that have become infinite plains, interrupted only by shrubs and white-bellied royal palms) and ex-plantations of citrus (Oriente had been an important orange producer), now barely cultivated in small plots plowed with oxen that pass alongside the ruins of old Soviet machinery. If Havana was paused at the height of fifties modernity, the life of the peasants—guajiros—has returned, technologically speaking, to the abandoned poverty that existed during those same years. They aren’t lacking in medical attention or in schools (the Revolution’s two great achievements in the countryside), but they have made no material progress. According to them, people in Havana are materialists corrupted by money. And it’s in the rural towns that fidelity to the regime remains most fervent.
Over the course of the trip I saw Gerardo enter into action several times. The same night we arrived in Santiago de Cuba, he asked a waitress to close her eyes and think of a number. The waitress, who was not exactly young, did it. Then Gerardo asked her to tell him what it was. And she obeyed: “Three.” He raised his arms and shouted: “Girl, I swear I can’t believe this! I was thinking of the same number! This must mean something. Let’s get together when you get off work?” That night, however, he went to bed with another woman. While I’d been chasing the pope, he’d worked out the details of the date. The next day, while he was saying good-bye to the girl, I saw him pass her some bills. He explained that it wasn’t because she charged him, but she did expect something. “I give her ten CUC [Cuban convertible pesos] and we all leave happy,” he said. “The truth, Pato”—he rarely called me that, because in Cuba they call homosexuals “pato”—“is that around here, all the women are whores. I don’t even trust my wife, or my sister, or my mother, or my daughter. There isn’t a woman in the world who gets undressed faster than a Cuban one. And there’s no woman in the world I like better.”
Perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now they’ll be able to write objectively about the way of life we called socialism. Without all the tears and obscenities. They’ll unearth it like ancient Troy. Until recently, you weren’t allowed to say anything good about socialism. In the West, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they realized that Marxism wasn’t really over, it still needed to be developed. Without being worshipped. Over there, he wasn’t an idol like he’d been for us. A saint! First we worshipped him, then we anathematized him. Crossed it all out. But science has also caused immeasurable suffering—should we eliminate scientists? Curse the fathers of the atom bomb, or better yet, start with the ones who invented gunpowder? Yes, start with them . . .
—Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
“I was never a Communist. My father was, but I just wasn’t made for it. I like to have a good time, brother. Have myself a rum, grease a girl, and I don’t ask that I always eat well, because as we say here, ‘He who eats well and eats badly ends up eating twice.’ The ladies have been my vice since I was little, ever since a neighbor lady brought me to her room for the first time. As you know, man cannot live on bread alone.
“I get by with what I earn. My family doesn’t lack for anything and they don’t have anything extra. My wife sometimes complains there’s no meat or potatoes, but since the Special Period, you can always get rice and beans. Now that was a hard time. We ate whatever turned up. In the food basket they’d give you six pounds of rice per person per month. That’s not enough for anything. Three pounds of sugar. A packet of coffee per person. Oil only showed up every once in a while. All fowl and meat disappeared from our diets. The minced meat they gave you at the butcher’s was supplemented with soy, and you hardly ever even got that. Everything else you had to order on the black market. There was no fuel, no transportation. You could lie down to sleep in the street with no problem. There was almost never any electricity, and that’s why we didn’t talk about apagones, or blackouts, anymore, but of alumbrones, or “light-ons.” There were plenty of family men who worked for a normal salary that wasn’t enough to buy anything. Hunger, hunger, hunger, no, but with six pounds of rice per month along with the little piece of bread you got once a day, well, if you had a teenager in the house and you saw how things were, you had to give your rice to him, my friend, and then you’d eat a little less. Then that family man with no way to find a little extra, he’d take his bicycle to work, and there were a lot of people who fainted in the street from the physical exertion, since sometimes they hadn’t had breakfast. That was when this country started to go down the tubes. We’ve always had prostitutes, but they used to be more reserved. Now you got these hookers, and along with them come the police. Since they were supposed to combat prostitution, they jumped all over the girls, and then the corruption started. Since there was no superior to mediate, everything got fixed with a few CUC. Instead of chasing down crime, they went around fucking with the girls.
“During that time my older brother left, not long after the tugboat 13 de Marzo tragedy. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, especially not our father, who got furious if he even saw someone chewing gum, because according to him that was a yuma habit, only for Americans. Imagine that! He hated gum for being capitalist! He never forgave my brother, and only after Obama’s visit did he let my mother tell him how my brother had gone to sea in a raft made of eight truck tires, with fifteen other people on it, one canvas sail and another one of plastic. It took them four days, and by some miracle they all made it alive.
“A month ago, my brother came to visit. He brought his two sons—George, fifteen, and John, twelve—and he told us that he’s been separated from his wife for two years. He’s a pretty calm guy, not like me; I’ve been married three times. He came loaded down with presents: he brought my mom a suitcase full of clothes, perfumes, soaps, things like that, and he gave my dad some Puma soccer shoes like the ones Fidel’s started wearing. That’s what he told him when he gave them to him: ‘They’re the same brand Fidel uses, Dad.’ And the old man laughed. Then he started to cry.”
“One night we stayed up drinking rum, me, my brother, and my dad, and the old man, once he’d had a few, started complaining that the Revolution has stolen his life. He rep
eated several times that he’d given everything, he’d even sacrificed the love of a son, and then he did something I never thought I’d see in my life: he asked my brother to forgive him. He said, ‘I should never have judged you, I’m sorry,’ and while my brother hugged him the old man cried like a baby, and I had never seen him cry like that, I swear. He said life had passed him by, that this fucking revolution had rotted his soul; he felt poisoned, because he saw how the people who left were now coming back as conquerors, and the same guys who’d called them shit-eating worms and antisocial scum were now offering them businesses and possibilities that they, the ones who stayed, would never get. ‘What are they going to offer us,’ he said, ‘when we’ve already learned to be happy with nothing!’ He said, ‘They cut off our balls!’
“I like Cuba, Patico. I swear it on a virgin’s pussy. I like the people, I have what I need—although I have to save up CUC so I can send the Lada to the body shop and freshen her up—I have fun with my friends, my kids have education and health care, and if things change, I just hope it’s for the better. Because it’s true that we lack some things, but there are also a lot of things we could lose if the yumas show up with their suitcases full of dollars. I’ll give you just one example: You think anyone would get into this heap if one of those companies can offer a new car? And the females—what do you think?”
Gerardo told me these things and more the morning of August 13, 2016, before he brought me to Karl Marx Theater, where an event was to be held in celebration of Fidel Castro’s ninetieth birthday.
The four days that Barack Obama was in Cuba at the end of March 2016 led to unthinkable consequences: with his ease and warmth, he captivated a population used to aged, hierarchical leaders, and he contradicted the imperialist discourse that would have been predictable in a U.S. president. He declared the failure of his country’s historical policies toward Cuba and said he wanted the two nations to understand each other through their differences: “You have a socialist economy, we have an open market; you have a single party, we have a multiparty democracy. . . . The important thing is that it’s the Cuban people who decide their future.” He said the Cold War was over, and he went with his family and Raúl Castro’s to see a baseball game during which, with a packed stadium watching, they laughed together. He won over the Habaneros by telling them that they had unusual talents, a genius that can achieve complicated solutions with precarious tools—they make replacement parts for their cars using tin cans—and he told them that with the education they possess, they can go far. He had a meeting with small-business owners, attended by hairdressers; designers of books, pamphlets, and refrigerator magnets; and another twenty-odd cuentapropistas (freelancers), which is what everyone who doesn’t work for the state is called. Afterward, people were left with the feeling that it was Obama who was coming to offer unattainable utopias, except that, to show that these utopias were possible, he had a successful U.S. small-business owner speak and asked him to tell about how he started out and how far he had come. Obama’s words and his figure were the subject of conversation on every corner. His visit to the island came to revolutionize the Revolution.
The great absence during those days was Fidel Castro. Not only did he not show himself, but his name was not mentioned in any of the speeches during the visit of el negro, which was how some people referred then to the U.S. president in this country where most people are black or mestizo. He only appeared a week later, to remind people who was in charge: “My modest suggestion is that he reflect, and not try to elaborate theories about Cuban politics for now,” Castro wrote in Granma. In the same text, he said that Obama had used “convoluted” words, and he rejected the proposal to leave the past behind: “What about those who died in mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airplane full of passengers blown up midflight, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and force?” he reminded people.
After that, official TV and newspapers, and the Web site Cubadebate.cu, threw themselves into redirecting the feeling after the yuma’s visit. Fidel had drawn a line. There were multiple analysts who, falling in line behind his orders, wrote columns pointing to Obama’s disgraceful willingness to erase history and the importance of upholding the nation’s values. Obama’s trip to the island had resonated more widely than expected. In Cuba’s current process of opening up, one of the greatest concerns of the upper echelons is keeping control and regulating the speed at which things happen, and after the president’s visit they felt the reins were slipping from their fingers.
Many people expected that the Communist Party’s Seventh Congress, which was held in April, a month after Barack Obama’s departure, would indicate the next steps on the path to liberalization, from which, regardless of obstacles, it now seemed there was no turning back. But that’s not what happened: the “Obama effect” had the opposite result. Instead of designing the new map of power in the post-Castro era, power was reconcentrated in the old guard, and especially in Raúl’s family. State Security was put into his son Alejandro’s hands, and the economy into those of his ex-brother-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas. The congress’s final call was “for the achievement of a sovereign, independent, socialist, prosperous, and sustainable nation.” For those who follow the island’s politics closely, this showed that the brakes had been put on all the exuberance.
Fidel is seen or heard from only on the rarest of occasions. After that editorial in Granma in which he talked about the U.S. president’s visit, he has appeared only twice: during the Seventh Congress, when he gave a speech that sounded more like a grandpa saying good-bye than an all-powerful statesman, and on August 13, for his ninetieth birthday, when he published one of his reflections. In it, he remembered his father and his childhood in Birán, writing that “the human species today faces the greatest risk in its history,” and he took the opportunity to chastise the head honcho of the American empire (his eternal interlocutor) for his speech on May 27 in Japan, when “words failed him in excusing himself for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima, though he was aware of the bomb’s effects.”
That Saturday, August 13, 2016, the day he turned ninety years old, Fidel attended an event organized in his honor at the Karl Marx Theater. The area was full and the stage overflowed with military men. He could barely stand up. He was wearing a white Puma sweat suit. He was accompanied by his brother Raúl and the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, but the tribute’s central figures were the children who sang and recited odes in his honor. All the children in all the island’s orphanages did the same, and in all the schools and many CDRs of the capital. To those children, Castro is that little old man who looks like Santa Claus, not the illustrious warrior or the authoritarian father of contemporary Cuba. I was in a bar when a scene came on TV of Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, and I heard a little girl ask her father, “Who is that?” The man, surprised, laughed uncomfortably and replied, “It’s Fidel Castro.”
August was entirely dedicated to Fidel. Looking in the windows of stores where they sold crispy fried chicken, or in the markets that are less well stocked than usual because of the new crisis in Cuba after Venezuela cut its contribution of oil (in Havana’s outer districts there have even been blackouts, bringing back nightmare memories of the Special Period: “The people here can’t take another special period” is a frequent refrain), you can read the same slogan painted with the same handwriting and the same colors: “Long live July 26. Fidel, 90 and many more.” The carnivals that had to be held in commemoration of the Moncada Barracks siege were moved to the weekend of his name day. Documentaries about his life, and interviews and round tables about the significance of his work, played nonstop on TV. Granma published a special issue dedicated to glorifying him: “Every age has its man who marks it in history; the 20th century belongs to Fidel” (Juan Almeida); “Fidel, in a few words, is the truth of our epoch. Without prejudice, he is the greatest world statesman of the past century and of this one; he is the most extraordinar
y and universal Cuban patriot of all time” (Ramiro Valdés); “Let us go / fervent prophet of dawn / down hidden, wireless paths / to free the green alligator that you love so . . .” (Ernesto “Che” Guevara).
There are two ways to read this Fidelist upsurge on the occasion of his birthday: one would point to the effort to retake the historical reins of the Revolution after Obama’s visit brought on such a hunger for reform, and many Cubans came to feel that the cultural and economic opening-up was just around the corner. Only three days after Fidel’s birthday, Madonna rented the entire terrace of the restaurant La Guarida—where they filmed the interiors of Fresa y chocolate—to celebrate hers. Ever since the Rolling Stones came at the end of last May, it’s not unusual to see rock and pop stars on the city’s streets.
But there is another way to read this grand finale of Fidelism. It’s clear that the Comandante has little time left, and love him or hate him, he’s not just any man. The Cuban Revolution is not the work of a people, but rather of an individual, and the Cubans know that well. Even his worst enemy recognizes in Fidel the greatest of his kind. Fidel is also a bad aftertaste left over from the nineteenth century, an anachronism from a more nationalistic era. The only Cuban who doesn’t dance. A guy who the present left behind to become a personage of History with a capital H, which he was always addressing, and which he himself, before he turned thirty years old, claimed “will absolve me.” His true enemy was never capitalism. Fidel will die fighting the United States.*
The day after Fidel’s birthday, Gerardo had planned to bring Giro, his fighting cock, to the Wajay cockpit. He had owned this rooster for five months and had raised him with good food in the yard of his house, in Marianao. Though at first, knowing nothing about cocks, he’d laughed when some cousins gave him to him for his forty-third birthday, one week later he was imagining the animal’s great exploits that would bring him glory. One day as we were entering the Old Square—which, with its recent sprucing up, is regaining its sophisticated Italian feeling despite the poor neighborhood surrounding it—he told me that his cock crowed “real loud” and that it had “the dick of a pig.” He got himself a chicken foot, tied it to a stick, and used that instrument to goad the cock, to train his anger. When he wasn’t doing that, he had Giro in his arms. As he told me, he’d started to care about the animal from so much dreaming about his warrior exploits, admiring his curved beak and his intelligence when he attacked the foot tied to the stick. After they’d spent five months together, one of the cousins assured him the animal was ready for any showdown and put him in touch with a certain Amadeo, owner of the Wajay ring, where that very Sunday they were holding cockfights.
Cuba on the Verge Page 13