Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  Eventually, the job was done. Painting our house in the old-school manner that Mederos’s crew had employed—one painstakingly slow brushstroke at a time—had taken no less than seven months to complete. Along the way, things in Cuba being as they were, we had also found ourselves employing an ever-increasing number of people to help us negotiate daily life. These included two women in their fifties, Marta and Carmen, our neighbors in the apartment building where we had been living, whom I had put to work transcribing and typing up tape-recorded interviews for me. Carmen was a poet, while Marta was a retired counterintelligence agent who had once infiltrated the CIA before her cover was blown and then been forced to return to Cuba. Another woman, Lisette, in her thirties, helped us look after Máximo, who was just a few months old when we arrived. Lisette had been abroad only once in her life, to Ukraine, a reward for having outperformed her fellow workers in a Cuban factory where she had been employed.

  In Náutico, our staff expanded to include a gardener to tend to our tiny strip of garden, where we planted banana trees and hibiscus bushes; a jack-of-all-trades handyman for things that went wrong, which they invariably did; and a mechanic named Gilberto, whom we called el hombre de los brazos fuertes—the man with the strong arms—because he was muscular, and whom we kept on permanent retainer because the secondhand Lada I had bought from the departing second secretary of the Indian embassy was a useless vehicle, constantly breaking down. We also hired a housekeeper, Sofía, who had been the nanny for Che Guevara’s kids and now became ours. And we hired another woman, Aleidita, as well. Aleidita was a retired government secretary, who helped Sofía by acting as an extra pair of hands with our children. And there were more. (I once calculated that in the end, no fewer than forty-two Cubans, including the dependents of our employees or helpers-on-retainer, depended on our financial largesse.)

  Despite all the backup personnel, some things in Cuba were never entirely normal. Our home in Náutico was like-new: its walls inside and out had been freshly painted and its terrazzo floors polished, but as soon as we moved in, we discovered that it had no running water. Havana had severe water shortages, and most of our neighbors received only an hour or two of water every day, anyway, but our house didn’t even get that. It was a dry house. This posed a conundrum. The notion that we would have no running water in our house had simply never occurred to me.

  I asked our new next-door neighbors, Rodolfo and Annie, about the water situation and learned that they didn’t have any, either. They got by on water borrowed from more fortunate neighbors. Once or twice a week, Rodolfo and Annie came and went from that neighbor’s house with buckets and filled up an old oil barrel they had acquired; just enough for them to get through with the basic necessities of cooking, cleaning, and bathing. Since I had access to dollars, Rodolfo suggested, why didn’t I pay for a pipa—a state cistern truck—to supply us with water? It was soon arranged, and before long, in exchange for a single but highly coveted U.S. dollar bill, we had weekly visits from Nestor, an amiable man, who appeared religiously in front of our house every Friday to unfurl a hose from his truck, its cistern labeled with the logo and title of his employers, the Cuban Atomic Energy Commission. Nestor ran a long black leaky hose from his truck through our house into the kitchen, where there was a well in our kitchen floor, and pumped it full of water. During this noisy proceeding, our children jumped up and down delightedly, chanting, “la pipa, la pipa,” over and over again.

  As a gesture of friendship, I asked Nestor to fill Rodolfo and Annie’s cistern, too. They did their best to reciprocate by letting us know, via whispers over our shared rear garden wall, whenever black-market fish or pork was available in the neighborhood. In those days, Cubans were only legally able to obtain their foodstuffs through the government rationing system. Each head of family had a rationing booklet that entitled them to certain amounts of basics per week—food products as well as cooking oil, soap, washing powder, and so forth. In the halcyon days when everything was paid for by the Russians, this meant that food was plentiful, and most Cubans had grown accustomed to eating well and regularly. But in the Special Period, there was simply not enough food available in the rationing system. Cubans who could fish did so furtively, floating out to sea in truck inner tubes with an oar and some fishing line, in the hope of catching something they could later sell on la bolsa negra, the black market, in order to get enough money to buy whatever they needed on la bolsa negra.

  In Náutico, the chief black marketeer was a shapely Russian woman with violet-dyed hair, who could often be seen posing sexily in her open doorway. La bolsa negra had, in fact, been started during Cuba’s years as a Soviet client state, as Russians posted to the island made money on the side by selling contraband items to the Cubans. As a result, most of the Cubans I met held the Russians in contempt, and they referred to them as los bolos, because they were often drunk.

  The Cubans also despised the Russians because of their strong body odor, an unfortunate result of their habit of sticking to a fatty Russian diet in spite of Cuba’s sweat-inducing tropical climate. Cubans, by contrast, were obsessive about their personal hygiene and, however hard up they were, always strove to be scrupulously clean. (It was also sadly true that many young Cuban women prostituted themselves with foreigners in exchange for a few bars of soap, or a bottle of shampoo.)

  Most of the other Americans living in Havana were political fugitives of one sort or another. They included a number of former Black Panthers who had, years before, hijacked airplanes to get there, and who had stayed on under the protection of Cuba’s government. I met one of them, William Lee Brent, who lived near us in Miramar. He had once been Eldridge Cleaver’s bodyguard, but now, he taught primary school. Robert Vesco, the fugitive American financier, was another Havana resident. He, his wife, and their two sons, who attended Havana’s international school alongside the children of expatriate diplomats, were known as the Adams family, but everyone knew who they really were. There was also a pair of renegade former CIA agents, Frank Terpil and Philip Agee, who had offered their respective services to Cuba’s Revolution in exchange for sanctuary.

  And there was Ron. Ron was a thin American man in his midfifties, a sixties-era radical from California who had come to Cuba because he saw it as the “last best place” for someone like him. He had come to work for the Revolution and to live like a Cuban, and that was what he had been doing since he arrived a few years before. He had participated as a cane cutter in several zafras—sugarcane harvests—despite his age, and periodically traveled back to the United States to give laudatory public talks about the Revolution. As a gesture of its gratitude, the Cuban government had given Ron residency in Cuba, signed him up on their rationing system so that he could have food, given him a Chinese “Flying Pigeon” bicycle so he could get around, and had also allocated him a small house where he could live virtually rent free. Ron had made strenuous additional efforts to prove his revolutionary mettle. A couple of years earlier, in an act of protest against the 1991 American invasion of Iraq during the First Gulf War, he had gone so far as to burn his U.S. passport in front of the U.S. Interests Section, for the benefit of CNN’s cameras.

  After a year or so, Ron’s Cuban handlers had summoned him and gently advised him to go back to the Interests Section and beg for a new passport. They reminded him that his greatest value to Cuba was in being able to travel and spread the word about the virtues of its socialist revolution. They told him: “Ron, you’re of little use to us if you can’t leave the island.” Meekly, Ron had complied. He recalled ruefully how, when he presented himself at the Interests Section, the American official who had received him had been cool but polite. When he eventually received his new passport—notably, valid for a year only—the official had laconically asked Ron to “please try to avoid burning it.” With his passport, Ron began traveling again.

  By this time, Fidel had undertaken new emergency measures to ameliorate Cuba’s worsening economic predicament. In order to combat the grow
ing influence of the black marketeers and emergence of a counterrevolutionary underclass, he legalized the dollar as the de facto currency of choice in la bolsa negra; initiated a policy to promote foreign tourism to the island; and authorized a number of small private business initiatives, such as family-run restaurants, called paladares, and beauty salons. He also authorized some Cuban state agencies to establish joint ventures with foreign capitalist partners. And he okayed the creation of a national network of dollar stores where Cubans who received remittances, or who worked in tourism and were given small amounts of dollars each month as estímulos, could buy imported products. It was enough to allow them to buy a few bars of soap, a bottle of shampoo, a liter bottle of vegetable oil, perhaps, or other small things. It was not much, but it was the first real relief made available for many Cubans since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

  As Cubans’ living situations improved and as increasing numbers of tourists began to arrive—mostly Latin Americans and Europeans—Ron found life on the island more and more frustrating. He regarded himself as a “revolutionary internationalist,” and had come to share Cubans’ socialist reality by living and working alongside them. But as the Cubans he had come to help turned to private enterprise as the key to relief for their misfortunes, he turned sour. We had become friends, and he had gotten into the habit of dropping by our house in Náutico on his bike for dinner or a glass of rum once or twice a week. He often vented about the island’s growing contradictions, and once he arrived in a terrible rage because earlier that same day he had been approached by Cubans who thought he was a tourist and tried to hustle him for dollars.

  El jineterismo, the hustle that all foreigners in Havana were subjected to by streetwise Cubans, either trying to sell them black market cigars or rum, or to pimp them girls, was something I was accustomed to, but not Ron. He took it as a personal affront to his revolutionary self-image, and it was not long before he left Cuba and went to live on a socialist cooperative farm in rural Denmark, where daily existence seemed more in concert with his deeply felt principles.

  Ron’s departure from Cuba was only one of many. In the summer of 1994, as many as thirty-five thousand Cubans fled the island on improvised rafts and boats. La crisis de los balseros, as the extended drama became known, capped months of mounting tensions in Havana’s poorer neighborhoods. There was a series of hijackings and attempted hijackings of boats by Cubans seeking to escape to the United States across the Strait of Florida. The mood had darkened considerably after an incident in which a tugboat belonging to Cuba’s coast guard had rammed a boat attempting to head out to sea, causing it to sink and drowning dozens of people. Finally, on August 5, a popular uprising broke out on Havana’s seaside promenade, the Malecón. In el maleconazo, as it became known, thousands of angry men and boys gathered, throwing rocks and bricks and shouting antigovernment epithets.

  It was an unprecedented situation that looked as if it might spin out of control, and Fidel dealt with it with aplomb by personally going to the site, wading into the crowd, and asking the protestors to stop what they were doing. Incredibly, they did as he asked, and, once calm had returned to Havana’s streets, Fidel went on state television and told the nation that if anyone wished to leave the island, they were free to do so.

  For the next three weeks, thousands of Cubans took Fidel at his word and set out from Cuba’s coasts on improvised rafts and boats. Entire families left and, in some cases, drowned or were eaten by sharks as their precarious craft broke up in the waves. The U.S. Coast Guard and private yachts and other vessels rescued many of the refugees, but untold hundreds died. Our next-door neighbor, Rodolfo, was among those who left.

  Early one evening I was at home when a great commotion came from the Náutico seashore. I rushed there to see what was going on. Most of our neighbors were already there. Sofía carried Máximo in her arms, while Rosie and Bella clung to me as we observed the drama taking place. A truck with two peasant families had pulled up to the seashore and the men had unloaded a rickety raft they had built. As the evening sky descended over the sea and distant lightning bolts heralded a coming storm, they placed their raft on the water and, one by one, helped their women and children onto the raft. Some of our neighbors began crying and beseeching them not to go, telling them they were headed into certain danger. The rafters did not reply, or speak, and silently began pushing away from the shore. At the last minute, a woman on the raft with a young boy, about four years old, thrust her child toward a woman on the shore, who held out her arms. The boy fell into the water but a man hauled him out and he was delivered, shivering with cold and emotion, into the hands of the woman on land. After more shouting and chaos, his mother asked to be returned, and the raft came and let her ashore, where she gathered up her son, weeping. Then the raft, with the rest of its passengers, nearly twenty people, including many children, pushed away and headed out to the darkening sea.

  The crowd on the Náutico shoreline stayed, watching in shocked silence until the night sky had enveloped the raft.

  A few days later, I looked over Rosie’s shoulder as she drew pictures with crayons. She was about four years old at the time, the same age, roughly, as the boy who had plunged off the raft. Normally Rosie drew princesses and other fairy tale creatures, but this time, I noticed her picture consisted of a square with three podlike creatures assembled on it, side by side. “What are those?” I asked Rosie, genuinely curious. “Balseros,” she replied matter-of-factly, and went back to her drawing.

  After three years in Cuba, we left for a new life in Spain. The children’s nanny, Aleidita, emigrated herself not long after we left. Sofía, who was a Cuban cane cutter’s daughter and a true child of the Revolution—a Fidelista through and through—also expressed her wish to join us in Spain. We began the necessary paperwork, but Sofía sadly died of a sudden heart attack within a few months of our departure from Cuba.

  Our former neighbor Rodolfo survived his sea crossing and went on to make a new life for himself in Miami. His wife, Annie, who had decided not to join him on his maritime adventure, remained behind in Náutico with their little boy, Rodolfito, and it was not long before she had a live-in boyfriend. Rodolfo dutifully sent regular cash remittances to Annie, but in his absence, his son began calling the new man in the house “Papá.”

  Over the years, I have returned to Cuba many times to witness the evolving dramas of its revolutionary life. I watched carefully from afar as Fidel hosted Pope John Paul II, played baseball with his new best friend, Hugo Chávez, and launched a “battle of ideas” to instill socialist fervor in a new generation of Cuban youth. He was indefatigable, until he fell seriously ill. He recovered but remained in delicate health. After being replaced in his duties by his younger brother, Raúl, Fidel spent the last decade of his life on the sidelines, alternately grouchy and reflective about the shape of things as illustrated in a string of letters he had published in the official Communist Party daily, Granma, and in the occasional public interventions.

  Fidel’s coterie of loyalists dwindled as some passed away and others fell out of favor. There were also those who fell out of faith. Most kept their silence, but some fled to Florida—as two generations of exiles had done before—and wrote tell-all books. These included one of Fidel’s own daughters and a trusted former bodyguard. Others returned. A friend’s son who had fled Cuba on a Windsurfer during the rafters crisis came back, years later, transmogrified into a middle-class doctor with his own private practice in the United States. We ate lunch one day with his elderly parents at a new private restaurant on the Malecón. Seated at a table nearby was a famous Cuban rap artist with his entourage of friends and pretty girls, who were all wearing colorful sports apparel and gold jewelry, eating lobster, and drinking wine. With private enterprise beginning to flourish after being authorized a few years earlier by Raúl, Cuba was beginning to change.

  On the day the U.S. embassy was reopened after a closure that had lasted for more than fifty years and the then secretary of stat
e John Kerry came to oversee the hoisting of the flag, Cuban residents of the adjacent apartment blocks cheered and waved. One of them, a man in his late fifties, told me nostalgically of how as boys he and his friends had dived into the water off the Malecón for pennies, thrown for them by the embassy’s marine guards. Nearly an entire lifetime had gone by, but now the Americans were back.

  The restoration of U.S. and Cuban relations in 2014 and Barack Obama’s historic trip to Havana two years later were extraordinary milestones in an ongoing epic. My arrival in Cuba to study Che and the Revolution had once been a source of bemusement and disbelief to many Cubans. Twenty years later, the American president himself stood in Revolutionary Square paying his respects, and all around Havana, American and Cuban flags fluttered alongside one another. Unlikely as it was, it seemed to be the end of a long estrangement.

  Cuba’s story has no definitive conclusion, of course, but with Fidel’s death at the age of ninety in November 2016, just a few months after Obama’s visit, it felt as if the Revolution he had sustained for a half century with equal measures of obstinacy, guile, and charisma had died with him. In post-Fidel Cuba, the talk was no longer of revolution but of business deals.

  After years of neglect following our departure, our house in Náutico has been repainted and is once again inhabited, but the houses around it look as beat up as ever. On a recent visit with my daughter Rosie, who is now a young woman in her midtwenties, I took her to the old neighborhood. We walked past our house to the spot by the seashore, where the rafters had fled when she was a little girl. Rosie pointed to the ground. It was littered with used condoms. The departure point for desperate Cubans escaping into lives of exile was now a rendezvous for a new generation of Cuban lovers.