The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  /// The military exercises were happening for a reason, one that neither the Reyes family nor I knew about at the time. Tiny bursts of protest were erupting across Havana.

  In October 2009, an argument at the art university had turned into a cafeteria protest over the foul food that students—many of whom were dancers—were given at the becas. “I’m not going to class,” shouted a student surrounded by a circle of about a hundred nodding people. On the video that was uploaded to the Internet, he is filmed from the back in a yellow T-shirt and a blue baseball cap. His watch glints in the sun as he waves his arms. “This isn’t a demonstration, we’re not going on a strike . . . we’re just trying to resolver the problems that are affecting us, like our health, because most of the kids in this program are sick or getting sick,” he says, directing his comments at two older men who stand at the front of the circle, their arms crossed in front of their chests. They shake their heads.

  The student holds up a tray of gray food: gluey mash over rice, watery beans, a sugared lump of dessert. “I’ve been here for five years, I’m in my final year, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a piece of pork or a decent piece of chicken on this plate,” he hollers over hoots of support. Castro and the generals never eat like this, he continues; they ride in cars and wear jewelry and eat meat.

  He climbs onto a chair or a bench, his head and shoulders above the crowd now, and he talks through the lack of freedom of expression and censorship in Cuba. “We need to be united!” he shouts. “If they ask me, I’ll say what I think. You should, too.” Students yell and clap.

  Another video was released a few days later. The same student stands alone in a room, now, and reads from a sheet of paper.” To our leaders, listen to the voices of your students. We are the young people in whom has been planted the essence of the Revolution . . . we will give our blood and sweat to this Revolution . . . but our great love is art. . . . It’s not logical to take measures that are both difficult and questionable, like the lack of proper hygienic conditions, the awful quality of food, and the unacceptable amount that is offered . . . it would be inappropriate for a young revolutionary like me to accept a reality like this.”

  After a two-minute speech, it cuts to a newscaster, who explains that these comments are a follow-up to some discontent voiced at “el ISA.” That first time, the clean-cut, gray-haired newscaster says, the student had spoken “with no papers.” He looks like he is trying to hide a smile, as if he either agrees with the young man or finds the situation risible. He cuts to a clip of the protest: “We don’t have freedom to say things . . . don’t ask my opinion if you don’t want to hear it,” the student had shouted.

  “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” This was the policy upon which Fidel had settled in 1961, after a purge of an overly critical intellectual scene that writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante called “Kafka in Cuba, Prague in Havana.”

  Just after the Revolution, Cabrera Infante, the son of founders of the Cuban Communist Party and the editor of Revolución’s newsmagazine, Lunes de Revolución, had in two and a half years expanded the periodical from six pages to sixty-four, and one hundred thousand copies to a quarter million. After a documentary about Havana’s nightlife made by the other Cabrera Infante brother was banned by the Party-run film commission in 1961, Lunes collected signatures in protest and its staff were subsequently called in for a meeting with Castro, Che, Haydée Santamaría, Armando Hart—the minister of education and soon-to-be minister of culture—and others. All involved intellectuals, “and then some,” Cabrera Infante later wrote, were invited.

  Fidel Castro himself talked to us. Characteristically, he had the last word. Getting rid first of the ever-present Browning 9mm fastened to his belt—making true a metaphor by Goebbels: “Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol”—Castro delivered one of his most famous speeches, famous not for being eight hours long, but for being brief and to the point for the first time since he became Cuba’s Prime Minister,” wrote Cabrera Infante. His deposition is now called “Words to the Intellectuals” and it ends with a résumé which Castroites everywhere claim to be a model of revolutionary rhetoric but which is really a Stalinist credo: “Within the Revolution, everything,” he thundered like a thousand Zeuses. “Against the Revolution, nothing!”

  The result of the meeting, apart from Castro’s speech: The film was still banned and the newsmagazine closed, owing to “an acute shortage of newsprint.” Eventually, Revolución was reborn as Granma. Cabrera Infante left Cuba in 1965 and died in 2005 in England, where he had lived since, publishing novels and political essays that questioned the validity of a system that taught its citizens to read but controlled what was published.

  These were the sorts of questions that had been posed to the then-president of the National Assembly a year earlier at the University of Information Sciences. Computer programming students had passed around a microphone at what had been billed as a speech by Ricardo Alarcón, broadcast to all of the school’s 10,000 students on closed-circuit television. One student in particular had aired eloquent complaints about the regime and its inconsistencies, spurring cheers of the same tone as those that had wafted through the ISA. But in this case, the confrontation had been quickly covered in the Spanish press under a headline adapted from a student’s quote: “If only we could travel and see the real world.”

  To that statement, Alarcón had infamously responded that, if the globe’s “six billion inhabitants could travel wherever they wanted, the collisions that there would be in the world’s air would be enormous.” The quote was prominent in the news articles. And within days, the students appeared on national television and Cubadebate.com, the Communist Party’s YouTube channel, slumped in a semicircle of plastic chairs. Any criticism was meant to be taken constructively as ways to improve the Revolution, “to better construct socialism, and not to destroy it.” The foreign media, they said, had perverted their intent. This was what the capitalist media did, blew things out of proportion and imposed its own agenda on independent actions. They were good kids, students, not political dissidents. Of course they’d meant to act within the Revolution.

  Some dissidents meant to act against whatever it was that the Revolution meant today. Blogger Yoani Sánchez was defined by an antirevolutionary stance carved from blog posts that focused on the indignities of everyday life for Cubans under the Castros. Her emphatic writing was translated into sixteen languages and had earned her a spot in Time magazine’s 2008 Most Influential People issue. Yet few Cubans in Havana knew who she was until early that November, when she reported that she was tossed in an unmarked black car by two plainclothes officers from the Ministry of the Interior. She emerged, she wrote, battered and bruised. When foreign reporters pressed her, a few days after the incident, to show the marks that officers had left on her body, she demurred: the only bruises that remained, she said, were on her buttocks. Three weeks later, her husband, also a blogger and dissident, was heckled and then beaten by a pro-government mob. MinInt officers had thrown him into a car, too, but this time to remove him to safety. “Did you hear about that Internet writer, whatshername,” replaced the previous electoral year’s optimism in living room conversations among the politically engaged.

  The United States government wanted to support this sort of dissent. In 2008, $45 million had been dispersed to nongovernmental organizations focused on promoting democracy in Cuba via the U.S. Agency for International Development. But because the Cuban government existed to crush dissent in reality, with physical actions rather than Internet smear campaigns, many American plots appeared absurd, as if they’d been sketched out by Our Man In Havana’s Wormold himself. Two of the initiatives supported by U.S. taxpayers included Radio Martí, a radio station that broadcast Miami programming toward Cuba but was blocked on all Cuban radios by the state, and a plan to smuggle satellite equipment into the country disguised as boogie boards. This last scheme was discovered by Cuban informants i
n the States before implementation and never came to fruition. These actions went largely unknown by Cubans in Cuba. What was known, was splashed across Granma in angry black-and-red headlines, was declaimed on the Mesa Redonda nightly news program, was called neocolonial espionage, was that some dissidents were in fact on the U.S. payroll. When this turned out to be true—about 4 percent of U.S. pro-democracy funding was spent on the ground, supporting dissidents, I learned—I was surprised.

  Even when reimbursed by the Americans, dissent, acting outside the Revolution, appeared to have little purpose. Nothing linked one event to another in Havana, though from the outside, there seemed to be a clear connection: school protests, military exercises, dissident beatings, and, that winter, a jailed American. The American was arrested in Cuba in December 2009 while working on a secretive USAID-contracted program.

  In the absence of any independent local media or a unified response to the events, the narrative of protest had no visible arc or discernible crescendo. Television had allowed Castro, in 1960, when there were more TVs in Cuba than in Italy, to create a common enemy in the personage of “counterrevolutionaries,” to link disparate events in a story of his regime’s success, to spread propaganda with an illusion of candor, to create the illusion of a consensus and punish those, like the staff at Lunes de Revolución, who would have punctured it. State news programs now showed contrite protesters but not the protests themselves, skipping straight past the meetings and the consequences to the repentance and forgiveness.

  The TV showed military exercises and Union of Young Communist parades like the one I stumbled into that winter. Students walked down the hill from the university into Centro Habana with headphones in their ears, girls linked arm in arm and gossiping, boys positioning themselves strategically to bump into the girls they’d been checking out. Brassy rhythms floated from speakers. Photographers from foreign news outlets crouched at waist-level on the edges of the street. Cameras rolled for Cuban state television. Traffic was stopped in all directions.

  /// That winter was the coldest to visit Havana in years. A few warm days tucked into January weeks with temperatures that dropped as low as 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Havana is not made for true winter, a fact clarified by the deaths of between twenty-six and fifty-four adults in the state-run psychiatric hospital, depending on who was to be believed—the Cuban media or dissident activists. The hospital, known as La Mazorra for the estate on which it had been built, reportedly starved its patients, too. The accusation, seemingly borne out by grim photos of bony yellow corpses, was a gesture back in time to 1898, when four hundred Mazorra patients died of starvation between January 1 and February 27.

  Elaine, Nicolas, and their sons had spent those days bundled in every long-sleeved shirt and sweater they owned, multiple pairs of socks on all eight family feet. They cuddled under the covers on Elaine and Nicolas’s bed to watch movies on their new Chinese laptop, night bleeding into day and then back into night, accompanied through this weather crisis by characters from Lost, a show about people stuck on an island with season upon season of metaphysical explanations as to why.

  Then, in February, political dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after eighty-five days on a hunger strike. After six years in jail on charges of “disrespect,” “public disorder,” and “resistance,” he’d stopped eating and died, a husk of a body. People alternately praised Zapata’s cojones and scoffed that the truly tragic part of his story was that he actually believed that his death could have an impact. Granma announced that Zapata had been a sad casualty of the war with the United States, pushed toward his death by the forces of imperialism.

  “Look at him,” a friend of Carlos said to me. It was a few nights after Zapata’s death and we walked to a party in the dark, damp night. “That man had nothing to lose. They filmed his family in their shack of a house, and m’ija, it was bad. He was poor, black, and definitely not one of them.”

  As much as she disagreed with the regime—and she definitely did, she said, it was indefensible at this point, fifty years of the same family!—her parents had managed to eke out some sort of privilege in Havana. They had a nice house, even if it was in a far-off suburb; her stepdad had a subterranean construction business that the administration tacitly blessed by allowing it to grow; she was studying her first-choice career, journalism. Hypocrisy had long since become a way of life, she said. She had been active in the Union of Young Communists for a while, even. Besides, the regime wasn’t quite indefensible—the health-care system was still a success. Even Guillermo Fariñas, one of four men who had also declared hunger strikes after Zapata’s death, was in a hospital on intravenous support right now.

  Another friend jumped into the debate; the three of us now walked at the head of a column of ten people scattered down the center of Vedado streets. That posture was exactly what ensured that eventually things would change. Everyone under the age of, say, forty, even the people who were in the UJC, even the people who had done what was necessary and kissed the asses in front of them to get power in Cuba, they knew what had to happen to pull the country out of the dire situation it had been stuck in ever since the U.S.S.R. had crumpled. They’d wait until the generals died off and then they’d slowly start introducing changes.

  “But that could take years and years and years,” I exclaimed. “Every one of us here could have UJC-aged kids by the time that happens.”

  “I never said it would be short-term.”

  The journalist nodded. Even her revolutionary aunt, who had been someone in politics, who had loved the Revolution enough to donate a collection of valuable René Portocarrero paintings to the country and then seen only the minor ones in the museum, because the major paintings hung over the mantles of generals—even her Communist aunt said she respected the dissident, dying in protest of his captivity as a common criminal.

  They wouldn’t eat, the hunger strikers said, until the government recognized them as what they were: prisoners of conscience. They were traitors, spat state media. They, like the other fifty-eight dissidents in jail, were independent journalists or librarians, all men, most detained in accordance with one of three legal articles that penalized “dangerousness” or cooperation with the U.S. government. The hunger strikers were two or three people who had been sadly manipulated by capitalist forces, by agents like that American in prison. They were trying to hijack history, and the fact was, the majority of the people of Cuba were not in agreement with them. After all, it had been government agents who had pulled that dissident blogger away from the citizens who were driven to violence by his lies.

  But this wasn’t what we discussed in the Reyes kitchen. What we did discuss was the agriculture congress. A quarter-million small farmers and private co-op owners had just met with the Cuban vice president to discuss production shortfalls. Initial government claims that it was the international economic crisis and the U.S. embargo that stunted the agricultural sector’s growth were scoffed away. Conversation had, by all accounts, been frank; increased privatization of the industry was necessary to speed progress. Such measures were devised. “The bureaucracy holds back the production of pork in the capital,” agreed a Granma headline a few days later. Rather than focusing on linguistic abstractions, reformist zeal would be better used to push for something with tangible consequences for all. Verbiage was negotiable when it came to pork or lettuce—but not politics.

  /// It’s easy to forget in the winter, when the shadows of buildings harbor cool air and it’s warm but crisp in the sun, just how hot Havana gets in the summer. And then summer begins in April and you resent the air for not being water and think only thirsty amphibious thoughts until you are either in water or drinking water beneath a fan.

  There were good reasons why I hadn’t seen Sandra in a while: The rains made the trip to San Miguel del Padrón cumbersome and expensive; she had run out of phone minutes and didn’t call back when I left messages at her aunt’s—too busy, said the aunt, with baby Mia; I was interviewing other people a
nd pretended that I didn’t wonder constantly how she, Aboo, and Mia were. One afternoon I set out for San Miguel uninvited, bringing a Christmas gift that I’d forgotten to give her the last time I saw her, a sparkly wallet someone had given me that I knew I’d never use. I envisioned it poking out of her black faux–patent leather purse. My máquina dropped me at the main road and I headed straight for a convenience store cabin, small CUC dispensaries open only through chest-high eight-inch horizontal slits through which the attendant passed whatever goods had been purchased. I stood on the street to buy a bottle of cold water and bent my head down low to feel the air conditioning. The lines were long for the Frozzen machines, though the watery soft-serve started to melt into its airy crunchy cone as soon as its buyer walked down the street. I walked slowly to Sandra’s.

  A woman in legging jeans and an orange halter top that stopped three inches above her bellybutton waltzed toward me, equidistant from each sidewalk, framed by the skimpy palm trees. Her breasts looked tenuously contained. Six-inch silver heels with Lucite platforms pushed her hips out and to the side in dramatic sways and her shoulders followed.

  “Hooooolia!” Sandra exclaimed as we drew closer. “What are you doing here?”

  “To see you,” I responded quickly, and just as quickly, she turned around, wrapped her hand around my elbow, and guided me toward her house.

  “You’ve got to see how much the baby’s grown. I was just going to get Yessica to head downtown but you’ve got to see the baby first.”

  The baby, whose fuzzy cap of black hair thoroughly covered her head and ears, was no longer a baby but moving toward toddler-hood. As we sat in the living room, Yessica peeked her head in. They were heading to Vedado first to see about anyone on Paseo and malecón, and if there were no quick takers, they’d go to a club in Miramar. I could join if I paid for taxis and their cover charges. They’d negotiate the prices down.