On we push, through the low pastures and scrub. Horses gallop away from us along forest paths; the bells of goats chime in the distance. The sun blazes down on us now, and after an hour we’ve consumed most of our liquids and the crows have begun to laugh at us.
A few years before the revolution, Celia Sánchez, one of Castro’s original confidantes, hiked up Turquino with her liberal-minded father to install a bust of José Martí, the father of Cuban independence. They dreamed that one day his spirit would inspire Cuban patriots to fight the shameful injustices that plagued the nation. If Martí was Cuba’s George Washington, few people outside the country were willing to grant that Fidel Castro was its Abraham Lincoln, but there he was anyway, by 1957 in control of an ever-expanding area in the sierra the guerrillas called the “Free Territory.” In April of that same year, Celia Sánchez guided a CBS News crew up Pico Turquino to film an interview with Castro in front of the bust. Though he lived in the sierra, Castro had never climbed El Pico, and Che Guevara recalled later that Fidel took a pocket altimeter with him and checked it on the summit to verify that the peak was as high as the maps indicated. The point being, wrote Tad Szulc, that Castro never trusted anybody or anything. I, on the other hand, am willing to believe that the motivation that brought us three Americans to this mountain had something vaguely to do with trust. Then again, maybe this is a misguided and naive notion, maybe this is why we are doomed not to make it to the top, although our parched throats, our hunger, our late start, and the cold rain that has transformed the footpath into a river have contributed to our failure as well. After five hours of rugged climbing, we’re above 4,000 feet and tuckered out, sucking raindrops off broad jungle leaves. Ahead of us we can see a faint indentation in the tree line on the mountain’s flank, implying a path that cuts a merciless diagonal through woodlands as dense as Borneo’s. And beyond, still impacted in clouds and still higher, looms the summit and the bust of José Martí.
It is time to turn back, we all agree, to head down to repose with rebel daiquiris in our hand and make our pal Roberto Cuba’s first Martyr of Tourism.
Back in Santiago we walk toward the plaza through a gauntlet of hospitality, deciding to have our dinner on the terrace of the Hotel Casa Grande, an establishment so magnificent in its squalor that it seems born out of an opium smoker’s vision, real only by virtue of a technicality. It will soon be closed for renovation.
A guy at the door checks credentials, but the cream of the Cuban crop circulates at will, and we take the last table among a noisy scene of TV crews, politicians, poets, musicians, foreigners, and apparatchiks. Roberto and Eric, delayed by the quest for gasoline, aren’t here yet. Again, as before, Cubans initiate the conversations. Here is a trumpet player who has toured the United States but isn’t interested in defecting; here is a baseball player who says he snubbed a lucrative invitation to head north to the Show. Here is a twenty-four-year-old black woman who says with passion: “Where is the sugar of Cuba? Where is the rice of Cuba? My feelings are not political, but economic. I ask myself, what is the problem with my country? Why is it so much worse off than other countries? And my answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know, but things must change before we can go on.”
And here is a young black man dressed up in snappy suspenders and wire-rimmed glasses who informs us that the lyric by Grand Funk Railroad—“I don’t need a whole lot of money, I just need someone to love”—is an anthem for Cuba’s youth. A teenager tells us of a growing split between the people who made the revolution—Eric’s generation—and those born into it—Roberto’s generation.
Caputo and the Professor, in wonderland, are having an epiphany. The photographer has never before been in a country where it is so easy to take pictures of the people. “It’s like they’re pleased,” he marvels.
“That doesn’t happen in an unhappy culture,” replies the Professor. Which seems true enough. Other than the scarcity of material goods and the thinning effectiveness of services, the everyday culture, away from the resorts, has none of the earmarks of a totalitarian system. No one hesitates to talk with us about any subject. There’s an astonishing lack of visible military presence throughout the land. “When the colossus to the north has its heel over your head,” the Professor opines, “and the people are this way, you have to say the problems are out of the people’s control.”
I record the conversation in my notebook, and when Roberto arrives with Eric at the table, I show it to them. “You damn American guys are trying to make me cry,” says Roberto, his throat constricting. We all draw deep, sorrow-filled breaths. I excuse myself to the bathroom, where I would have, on principle and out of outrage over the tragedy of US-Cuban relations, kicked everything apart, but everything is already broken.
All that’s left is to get the bottle of whiskey back to Gregorio in Cojimar, because he trusted the word of a friend, because some rituals are worth keeping alive, and because, after all, we are neighbors.
(1991)
In Deepest Gringolandia
Gringolandia isn’t on a map, but a cultural compass and a little glossy media hype will lead you right to its bamboo or stucco gates. Gringolandia is where we North Americans are more and more spending our vacations. What I’m talking about is the network of fun-in-the-sun destinations, the honeyed cash traps, the Otherly fantasylands erected up the mountains and down the coasts of what we call the Third World or the developing world or the postcolonial world—the hot, dark-skinned nations that still bear the shape of Empire’s boots across their sweaty backsides. Now, where the Kiplings and Conrads once poked around, hundreds of millions of white people spend billions of dollars each year for the exotic tickle of the five-day, four-night excursion into the mythological but much diluted, faraway but perfectly scrubbed heart of darkness.
There’s much about this trend that I find difficult to reconcile with my own point of view as a traveler. When it comes to gallivanting on foreign turf, I crave not the prepackaged but the authentic. I don’t care to see familiar faces tainting the view; don’t want hideaways intruded upon by “civilization.”
But who do I think I’m kidding? Not myself, not much. Bourgeois touring and maverick traveling both spring from the gringo lap of luxury. Even as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-’70s, I had the unpleasant feeling that I was little more than the latest style of Roman centurion. And today, as a writer in search of narratives in the islands and hot countries, find me, say, at a military checkpoint along a highway in Haiti and I’m glad to join the hordes and pass myself off as a sun-and-fun-seeking tourist.
Semantics and scale—perhaps these are the only honest differences between the mob that stuffs its madras shorts with credit cards and the bus-riding, backpacking dilettantes, the earnest make-believe anthropologists, and the writers like me. North Americans, boarding their planes, take North America with them—in varying degrees, yes, ugly or beautiful, but North America nevertheless.
Gringolandia. It’s global—as far from us as Thailand, as near as our neighbor to the south, Mexico. Mexico, in fact, can be thought of as the model, the original Gringolandia. No one in Mexico seems abashed to say it, despite the fact that it summons all the paradoxical truths that define the postrevolutionary state of the Mexican nation. For the Mexicans, Gringolandia describes the consolidation of ironies large and small that have transformed the country into something akin to a behemoth theme park.
Two generations ago, the expression merely referred to Acapulco, the first installment in a resort-development epic meant to sustain and nurture the economic optimism of a Mexico invigorated by the business of world war. That was then; this is now: Today, tourism may be Mexico’s last best hope. Burdened by a decaying industrial base, an unrelenting population explosion, a catastrophic oil bust, multiple currency devaluations, years of raging inflation, and a $104 billion debt, Mexico now looks to Gringolandia for economic salvation. Willfully, carefully, the government has designed and constr
ucted an archipelago of artificial paradises along the country’s vast impoverished coastlines. What might rescue Mexico, at least from the stigma of its incessantly predicted collapse? Not crude oil but tanning oil.
The ruling party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), now invites an invasion from the north. Mexico’s doors have been flung open, the welcome mat’s brand-new, its cerveza es muy fria, its water has been purified, and the putting greens have a nap as diligently tended as a baron’s beard. You get the picture—head south, spend money, relax, party, shake your bottom until the pesos rain out of your pockets.
Late last winter I decided I wanted to visit Mexico’s sprawling gringo playland—not to revel in it but to see it all, at one remove, for what it is: a policy, an industry, the new “upriver” world. I booked a flight to Mexico City and there, under Malcolm Lowry’s smog-hidden volcano, rented a car and headed for the Pacific coast, for Acapulco, the bright shining hub of Gringolandia. I then ventured south hundreds of miles to the newest, most spectacular chamber of the system’s heart—Huatulco. Huatulco, as yet unfinished but already fabled. A story.
The clogged boulevards of the capital led me to the toll road that climbed up into blue sky and what little remained of the pine forests, smelling like a Colorado summertime, that once rimmed the central plateau. Past Cuernavaca, I picked up the “superhighway,” constructed in the late 1940s during the administration of President Miguel Alemán Valdes. The route, which reduced the previously rugged ten-hour drive to the coast by half, twists out of dense mountains into a pulsing urban jungle, the heights of Acapulco chaotic, the sidewalks made virtually impassable by the city’s million citizens, and only a flash of ocean on the horizon to tease me onward. Finally, I found a road that arrowed down to the bay, its shoreline fenced with high-rise hotels. I checked into the Acapulco Ritz, dead center on the crescent of the bay.
Quickly I made my way to the beach beyond the poolside patio and sat among a tribe of white, affluent foreigners under palm-thatch umbrellas in the Ritz’s roped-off rectangle of sand—audience to the sun, the glorious sea, and the sales pitch. Here at the Ritz, on the beach in Acapulco, cacophony ruled, the audio assault masquerading as cross-cultural experience. A mariachi band alternately crooned and yapped into microphones. The pulverizing whine of blenders produced an endless freezing river of margaritas. Unbroken clots of traffic gunned from light to light along the four-lane coastal boulevard behind the towering hotels. Boom boxes hollered out Spanish in six-eight time; revving speedboats sliced rooster tails a stone’s throw from shore. But none of this din penetrated as deeply as the collective voice of the vendedores, the merchant infantry of hucksters straggling past the Ritz’s tiny triangle of sandy exclusivity.
Each beachfront hotel has staked an area like this for its guests to lounge, and the hucksters trudge miles over the hot federal sand from one to another. Stations of the Cross for Mexico’s underclass practicing the religion of commerce. They line up on the perimeters of an alien yet venerated wealth, whether its incarnations are middle-class chilangos from Mexico City, honeymooners from Houston, or undergraduates from UCLA on spring break. (The jet-setters have abdicated the central playas for more secluded villas and five-star pamper factories.)
From a stack he has dropped at his feet, a mestizo unfolds a Oaxacan blanket and spreads it over his chest, his arms raised and his ribs pulled as though he has bravely visualized my particular stable of gringos as a firing squad. For too long he stands just this way, waiting, and when he lowers the blanket to our indifference—how many dozens of blankets have we seen already this afternoon?—there is no mistaking the look of betrayal in his eyes. What I want to know, but can only ask myself, is this: Is the man’s expression a professional ploy or a window onto his soul? Such are tourism’s questions.
Chiclets, leopard-skin pantsuits, melons, silly hats, garish towels . . . the litany of bargain merchandise is recited in waves, packed cycles, the wares identical although the stream of faces vie for individuality. Some people thrive on the escalated clip of the hustle, but this many? an entire city of marching boutiques and ambulating gift shops? The youngest huckster I meet is five, the oldest a stooped great-grandfather hawking sunglasses. The majority are indios—the bottom of Mexico’s racial and economic barrels, flat-faced and stoic. Except for baseball caps, they dress as if they never left their ejido, or communal lands, in the campo.
A sixteen-year-old Nahuatl girl carries a nursling on her hip, selling fruit and peanuts. The mother is happy, humming; the baby chirrups. I ask the girl if she gets tired toting the kid around. She laughs shyly and tells me no, it’s nothing she ever thinks about, and on the beach she can stop and play with the baby whenever she wishes. A matron from Dallas leans across the rope to buy a banana from her, and nearby I hear a middle-aged sun worshipper congratulate himself: “Six days, and I don’t know who won the mayor’s primary in Chicago, and I don’t give a shit.”
Which problems are my own, which are Mexico’s? Who, if anyone, is to blame? Acapulco is seedy, polluted, overpopulated, homogenized, overbuilt, money-crazed, exhausted. Acapulco is one of the world’s foremost glamour spots (now overrun by anonymous charters of the you’s and me’s and our mothers). Acapulco’s panorama is breathtaking. Its transactions employ hundreds of thousands; its facilities are modern and comfortable; its opportunities provide a catalyst for democratization. Choose.
We know that the decadence of Batista’s Havana—its casinos, prostitutes, and narcotics luring a vulgar class of tourists from around the planet—played no small part in the rationale of Castro’s mobilization against the status quo. Yet what does it mean, thirty years later, that Castro is reinventing Cuba as a tourist destination? A year before the insurrection the island attracted 350,000 tourists—by 1991 it expects 600,000 visitors annually, who will leave behind an estimated $500 million. What sort of dynamic will develop between faddish, well-heeled guests and their Marxist-Leninist hosts? The advantage to Cuba is a simple one: foreign exchange, money. But what are the complex risks to myth and symbology of the revolutionary state? “Exploit the sun,” says Fidel. Now, really, if I’m deluded about my self-image as an anti-tourist, what could Castro possibly be thinking in his new job as recreational director?
On the beach at the Ritz in Acapulco, I applied my sun-daunted energies to these questions. But time and again I was distracted by the suffusive presence of the vendedores, perpetually tugging my mental sleeve. Of all the hucksters that ever approached me in my travels south, the only ones I remember making a genuine connection with were two preschool boys on the beach at Sosúa, in the Dominican Republic, who sat down cross-legged in front of me and sang a vigorous merengue for a coin, which they accepted with adult dignity. Now the memory is brought back to me, Acapulco-style. Two waifs, neither more than ten years old—a boy with a drum, a girl with a perforated sheet-metal scrapper—make a primitive percussive music, while an even younger girl dances the shimmy, lifting her soiled T-shirt to roll her prepubescent belly. The performance is obscene, and not only for its sexual innuendo; a pallid, sun-blotched man gives the girl money with a frown, paying the troupe not for their performance, which had no worth, no virtue, no conceivable rate of exchange, but paying them to go away.
What’s important to keep in mind, I think, is that tourism in the Third World is not some haphazard vestige of colonialism. Acapulco, for instance, was never an unfortunate, accidental yoking of the haves and have-nots, but has always been precisely what it was calculated to be by the Mexican government—an economic detonator at the nucleus of the nonarable, poverty-stricken state of Guerrero, not only a magnet for foreign currency but an alternative destination for landless migrants flooding urban centers, especially Mexico City. Moreover, and no less significantly, Acapulco was envisioned as a proving ground for Mexico’s emerging class of managers and entrepreneurs in the late 1940s and ’50s, a showcase for their capabilities.
Forgoing the choice b
etween Acapulco’s glitzy, overpriced restaurants and the fast-food franchises—Denny’s, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried—I walked my first night in town to a supermarket. From a row of steaming caldrons, I bought a fat man’s portion of chicken mole, had it packed in a take-out container, and went back to my room high up in the Ritz to read the government’s own account of the modern history of Acapulco.
This story really begins during World War II, when millions of just plain stay-at-home gringos were funneled into geographies and cultures not their own. Wherever the troops had been stationed, tourists followed, flown by the new commercial airlines. Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and other nearby warm, “exotic” places became tourist meccas.
Mexico took note of the burgeoning wanderlust of the giant to the north. War in Europe had generated a foreign-trade surplus south of the Rio Grande, an advantage it had no chance of holding on to during peacetime. Confronted with a decline in exports and a faltering industrial base, government economists introduced the premise that tourism could take up the slack. By the end of 1945, the PRI had opened tourist offices in four US cities. Public funds were allocated to match private-sector promotional expenses. Almost effortlessly, $35.9 million flowed south and crossed the border—a sum as frustrating as it was encouraging. No infrastructure existed to milk the market for more.
The Alemán government began in the late ’40s to build highways and airports and to open new air routes between Mexico and the States. Cash handouts subsidized the construction of restaurants and hotels. Most important, perhaps, Alemán focused on the serene, modest port town of Acapulco, since the 1920s a popular getaway for the better-off of Mexico City. He made the decision to convert the old harbor into a world-class luxury resort (after secretly buying up land for himself). His engineers installed basic city services, laid out streets and housing developments, moved the airport inland. Hotels multiplied along the curving beaches. Bingo! Foreign-exchange earnings from tourism tripled by 1950. Alemán left office having persuaded the PRI that tourism was “the most important economic mechanism for shoring up the areas of national development that were lagging behind the most.”
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