That night, after Roberto had been sufficiently tipped, I went to a bar on the east side of Havana harbor with a European reporter who’s lived for years in Cuba. He thought economic reform was over. He said the authorities were “still emphasizing that outside investment is ‘not vital,’” and that they “still think the state sector can be made ‘more efficient.’” He quoted a Canadian diplomat: “The pace of economic reform in Cuba is determined by the learning curve in economics of Fidel Castro. And he’s a slow learner.”
As we talked, a young Cuban woman came out on the terrace. She ignored us in a very unprostitutional way, chose a chair just within earshot, and began avidly appreciating the city skyline. “I’d buy it if she were a tourist,” whispered the reporter, “but Cubans do not go to dollar bars for the view.”
There is one vibrant, exciting, and highly efficient sector of the official Cuban economy: the police. I was driving through the Vedado neighborhood in western Havana absolutely desperate to turn left. Finally, I just went and did so. Almost a mile away, in an entirely different section of town, a policeman walked out into the street, flagged me down, and wrote me a ticket for the transgression. There’s a space provided for this on the rental-car papers, and the fine comes out of the deposit.
The traffic-cop omniscience was creepy enough, but I happened to be on my way to visit a dissident couple. Well, “dissident couple” is a little dramatic. They hadn’t actually dissented about anything. They just wanted to leave Cuba. They went to Sweden and applied for asylum. But the generous Swedish refugee policy does not extend to refugees from progressive, socialist countries to which Sweden gives millions of dollars in foreign aid. They were sent back. And now they were in permanent hot water.
They lived in a shabby tower block with a ravaged elevator, piss stink in the stairwells, bulbs filched from the lobby light fixtures, and even the glass stolen from the hallway windows. And in Havana, this was a good place to live. The apartment had been inherited from a parent, a parent who had been an official in the revolutionary government. “Come on Friday,” the couple had said. “We don’t have power outages then.”
There were five rooms—small rooms (you couldn’t flip a pancake in the kitchen without standing in the hall), but five rooms nonetheless—and a bathroom (when the water was running). And not too many of the louvers in the jalousie windows were broken. Carlos and Donna—not their real names of course—come from families that had been prosperous (families that now, incidentally, won’t speak to them). The low, narrow-walled living room was filled with too much big, dark furniture from a more expansive age, like a Thanksgiving dinner for twelve put in the microwave. I felt claustrophobic although I was five stories in the air and could see the ocean shining in the distance.
Carlos and Donna are not allowed to hold jobs, but they each speak four languages and so are able to get work as guides and translators with the various groups of academics, philanthropists, conference delegates, and film-festival attendees who are forever traipsing through Cuba looking for international understanding and a tan.
“You have to earn dollars anyway here,” said Carlos. “‘Dollars or Death’ is what everyone says.” He showed me their ration books, which have categories for everything from tobacco to clothing. So far in 1996, only one liter of cooking oil per family had been available. Eggs were plentiful at the moment—fourteen a month for the two of them. Carlos and Donna also got two bars of soap a month, some months. There was virtually no meat, and it was inedible, besides. “All red meat has been nationalized,” said Carlos by way of explanation. Cuban nationalization does to goods and services what divorce does to male parents—suddenly they’re absent most of the time and useless the rest. Cubans can’t even get real coffee from the ration stores. They get coffee beans mixed with the kind of beans you get in tortillas. This tastes the way it sounds like it would and gives everyone stomach cramps.
The few legitimate delights of Cuba—coffee, rum, cigars—require not just dollars but lots of dollars. And even this doesn’t always work. The Monte Cristo coronas I bought in a government shop had the flavor and draw of smoldering felt-tip pens.
Carlos and Donna had had one other brush with the law. Besides committing the heinous crime of trying to move, they were also caught with dollars. Until mid-1993 it was illegal for Cubans to own dollars. Given what the peso was worth, that meant it was illegal for Cubans to have money. Carlos and Donna found sixty dollars tucked in a book they’d inherited. They dressed in their best clothes and, being fluent in French, tried to pass themselves off as foreigners at a beachfront hotel. “To get a decent cup of coffee,” said Donna. But the hotel waiter wasn’t fooled. Perhaps the two bars of soap a month was the giveaway, this being more than most French tourists use. As Carlos and Donna walked home, they were arrested.
They escaped any serious jail time, maybe because of their foreign-diplomat connections. But they were threatened with six- or seven-years imprisonment. And a year later the block captain—the government snitch who resides on every Cuban street—called them in and threatened them with imprisonment again. “When dollars became legal,” said Carlos, “everyone was happy. I wasn’t so happy thinking about all those people who were locked up for years sometimes, just for having one or two dollars.
“Still, I don’t have any hatred against the system,” he said. “But this is just for myself, for my own sake—I don’t want hatred to destroy me.”
“When we couldn’t leave,” said Donna, “we were in despair for a while. Then we became involved in the charity work of the church, in their hospitals. This created new meaning.”
“We’re happy now,” said Carlos.
But they don’t have children. They felt too cut off from Cuban society for that. Carlos doesn’t even know if his parents are still alive. And Cuba isn’t exactly the future most of us have planned for our kids. Unless we’re really mad at the little buggers.
“The revolution brought some benefits,” said Carlos, “at least at first. There was better housing, but it was gotten by giving away what had been stolen from others. The health care is free—and worth it. I can go to the doctor, but he can do nothing for me. This is why the Catholic Church must have its own hospitals. The education is free, too. But it’s indoctrination. This is not a real education. Then they make the students work on the sugar harvest. Of course, the students wreck the agriculture. They don’t care. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Carlos and Donna thought it was important that people know what a disastrous and terrifying place Cuba is. “Not for the sake of future revenge,” said Donna, “but because of the frailty of memory. People will forget how bad it was, the way they’re already forgetting in Russia. But more important, they’ll forget why it became that way.”
It will take a lot of forgetting. Socialism has had a nasty reign in Cuba. Hundreds of low-level supporters of the ousted Batista regime were executed, and thousands were jailed. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with AIDS antibodies have been sent to concentration camps. Critics of the government are forced into internal exile or confined in mental hospitals. The Americas Watch human-rights group has said that Cuba holds “more political prisoners as a percentage of population than any other country in the world.” Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization whose board of trustees is an ideological gamut running from Jeane Kirkpatrick to Andrew Young, says, “There is continued evidence of torture and killings in prison and in psychiatric institutions…. Local human-rights activists say that more than 100 prisons and prison camps hold between 60,000 and 100,000 prisoners of all categories.” (This is about twice America’s generous rate of per-capita incarceration.) How many of those categories are political? Well, from a socialist point of view, all of them. And any normal Cuban is probably going to wind up in jail sooner or later anyway, because, according to Amnesty International, serious offenses in Cuba include “illegal association,” “disrespect,” “dangerousness,” “illegal printing,” and “res
istance.” Castro himself was in jail for a while under the previous administration and in a 1954 letter from his cell he wrote: “We need many Robespierres in Cuba.”
I knew that the potential for disaster lurked in socialism, but what had caused this potential to be realized in Cuba and not in Sweden? I asked Carlos and Donna, Was there something fundamentally different about Cuba’s socialist ideology? Or had evil people simply taken control of socialism in Cuba?
“Neither,” said Carlos. “It’s because of power. They have total power. Think what you yourself would do if you had total power over everyone.”
Not a pretty picture, I admit. And I’m not even a socialist. Socialists think of society as a giant, sticky wad. And no part of that gum ball—no intimate detail of your private life, for instance—can be pulled free from the purview of socialism. Witness Sweden’s Minister for Consumer, Religious, Youth and Sport Affairs. Socialism is inherently totalitarian in philosophy.
The Swedish socialists have exercised some degree of self-restraint. The Cuban socialists haven’t bothered to. In Cuba, the authorities have a Ken Starr grand-jury-like right to poke into every aspect of existence, no matter how trivial. Imagine applying marxist theory to rock and roll, this being what the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, or UNEAC, the official labor organization for creative types, is supposed to do. Karl Marx said in Das Kapital, “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.” Roll over Beethoven, and how.
Professor Dr. Jose Loyola, who was, according to his business card, “Compositor y Musicologo” and “Vice Presidente Primero” of UNEAC, talked to me about utility. Specifically, he talked about trying to get Cuban elements into rock and roll to offset imperialist U.S. influences. Sex, drugs, and cha-cha-cha? Professor Dr. Loyola’s office was in a splendid nineteenth-century town house, the kind of digs that should belong to a rock star. Although I had visited an actual Cuban rock star, Santiago Feliu (who I assume is a major genius because I couldn’t find any of his cassettes or CDs, and the good things are always missing from the shops in Cuba). Anyway, Feliu lived in what looked like a graduate student’s off-campus apartment.
The UNEAC town house had been spoiled by the cheap partitions and wobbly chrome-leg chairs loved by bureaucracies everywhere, and by photographs of Fidel where art used to hang. While we sat in the part of the former dining room that was now the professor-doctor’s stuffy office, the power went out repeatedly.
I asked how musicians got into this union. They submit an application with curriculum vitae listing their important concerts, the rewards and prizes they’ve won, and the recordings they’ve made. Then a commission made up of three or four “prestigious musicians” meets and decides upon acceptance or rejection. Which is just the way people get into the business everywhere.
LEAD GUITAR WITH BAND, “THE DRIVEWAYS”
PLAYED: STEPMOM’S REC ROOM; OPEN-MIKE NIGHT, THE PATHETIC BEARD COFFEE SHOP
MANY CITATIONS, MOSTLY FROM SEATTLE POLICE
ATTACHED: INDIE DEMO CUT, “LIFE SMELLS”
Mick? Elton? Do we let him in?
I asked what UNEAC did for its members. “The prestige of the organization opens many doors,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “It promotes the work of the artists and takes care of some of their, ah, material problems.” In other words, you starve if you aren’t in UNEAC.
“What if you aren’t a member?” I asked.
“Oh, most artists aren’t members,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “There are fourteen thousand professional artists in Cuba. Only four thousand are members. The other ten thousand have the government’s Ministry of Culture to promote their work.” The way our government’s National Public Radio plays “Life Smells” by The Driveways on All Things Considered.
“What kind of problems do musicians face in Cuba?” I asked.
“Material problems.”
“Material problems?”
“Maybe,” said the professor doctor, “if we had stores where they could buy their instruments, it would be better.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Some people get musical instruments from the Ministry of Culture,” he ventured and changed the subject. “Before, there were many empirical musicians in Cuba. Now they have formal training. Now there is a kind of upgrading school for empirical musicians.” And what a shame this wasn’t the practice in America’s rural South during the time of Huddie Ledbetter and Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins. They wouldn’t have been so “downbeat” if they’d been able to get work in the New York Philharmonic orchestra.
“What does UNEAC do,” I asked, “if an artist gets in trouble with the government?”
“If he is right, we will help him out. And if he is not right, we will help orient him in the correct direction,” said Professor Dr. Loyola with a perfectly straight face.
Since 1959 the Cuban government has been “orienting” everybody in “the correct direction,” thereby making a total mess of the Cuban economy. And one of the things that’s so messy about it is that there’s no way to measure how messy it is.
There are simply no reliable Cuban economic statistics. Perhaps one of the things that keeps Sweden from turning into Cuba is that, when it comes to publishing honest reports about everything government is doing, the Swedes can’t stop themselves. The Cubans have resisted this temptation. The Cuban government realizes that it has no motive to tell the truth about economic conditions, even to itself. And as for measuring Cuba’s black-market economy, criminals don’t issue annual reports.
Everybody, Cuban officialdom included, agrees that Cuba’s economy has shrunk by at least a third since the 1980s. But a third of what? Cuba’s per-capita gross domestic product for the year 1995, for example, has been calculated at $2,058 by dissident Cuban economists, $2,902 by the Cuban government, $3,245 by wishful-thinking pinko American academics and—the highest estimate of all—$3,652 by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Now the per-capita GDP in Cuba is about $1,200, according to the National Bank of Cuba, or $1,480, if you believe the CIA, while the Columbia Journal of World Business thinks the figure may be as low as $900. Nobody knows. Just as nobody knows what the peso is worth.
The official exchange rate for the peso is the same as that for the new peso convertible: one peso equals one dollar. Not even the Cuban government pretends to believe this. The black-market rate in March 1996 was 21 pesos per dollar. But there was something wrong with that also. Just two years before, the rate was 150 pesos per dollar. And dollars hadn’t gotten any less necessary or much more available. Latin-American scholar Douglas W. Payne thinks the Cuban secret police took over the black market. Or maybe the Cuban government was using the convertible peso—which, though printed in bright tropical hues, is essentially counterfeit U.S. money—to flood the currency exchanges. Odd things can happen when the government is more corrupt than you are. The real answer to the exchange-rate conundrum may be that there is no exchange rate. Only a lunatic would trade a U.S. dollar for anything the Cuban government prints, except exit visas. “There will arrive the day when money will have no value,” Fidel Castro once said in a fit of marxist utopianism. But apparently he meant it.
More was to be gleaned by looking around in Cuba than by trying to do imaginary math. I went into the Ministry of Trade’s product showroom, and there, offered for wholesale export to the world, were coconut shells painted to look like turtles, baskets that seemed to have been woven by people wearing catcher’s mitts, posters for obscure brands of rum, pictures of Che Guevara, and Aunt Jemima rag dolls in half a dozen sizes.
The Cubans may not be good with their hands, but they’re very skillful with blame. They blame the Soviet Union. And not without reason. When the Soviet bloc collapsed, the Cubans lost somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion a year in grants, subsidies, and trade concessions. Taking the low figure, that’s a dollar per person per day for everyone in the
country. You can live for less than that in Cuba, and almost everyone has to.
Of course, the Soviets got something in return for this aid. They got sugar and cobalt and nickel. Which is why it was always easy to get a plate of sugared cobalt and nickel at Moscow restaurants in the 1980s. Plus, the Soviets got to be a huge pain in the ass to the United States. But what the Cuban government got was the luxury of perfect shiftlessness. The Castro government took boatloads of money from the Soviet Union and took all the businesses, industries, and land in Cuba, too. Sweden may be borrowing prosperity, but Cuba tried to beg and steal it.
So the Soviet Union is to blame for Cuban poverty because the Soviet Union fell apart, which means that everything is really America’s fault. Everything usually is. Cubans have been blaming their troubles on the United States at least since independence in 1902 and probably since Columbus set course too far south and missed becoming an American citizen. Even as José Marti was leading the struggle for freedom from Spain, he was denouncing the United States as a “monster.” And he was living in the United States at the time.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics Page 12