Cuba beyond the Beach

by Karen Dubinsky

  During one recent visit my students had an especially hard time coping with all of this. It doesn’t take fluent Spanish to understand the difference between an admiring “que linda” (how beautiful) and a snarling “que puta” (what a slut), which they were hearing repeatedly. So a bunch of them decided to escape into pure, anonymous tourism, and went off to the beach in Varadero during their free Sunday. I understood, but was disappointed that they were missing a tranquil Havana Sunday. Even more so when I realized it was Mother’s Day. I experienced a whole other side of patriarchal Havana street culture that day, because on Mother’s Day men in Havana greet women who look like they might be mothers (that is, just about any adult woman) with a smiling, respectful “felicidades” (congratulations). The same thing happens on March 8, International Women’s Day. In North America, the occasion barely registers, except among feminist activists. In Cuba it’s another opportunity to greet women on the street but, in my experience at least, with no underlying hostility. One year when I happened to be there on March 8, my landlord made a point of coming by to give me a rose.

  Cuban street culture is as different from my own as it is possible to be. The other figure that attracts a huge amount of attention from strangers on the street is the baby or young child. When my son was young he would be touched, cuddled, even picked up by strangers, usually women, cooing “que lindo.” Among adults as well, Cubans can be extraordinarily affectionate. Plenty of tourists have complaints about the on-again, off-again service culture in hotels and restaurants. I too have seen plenty of rude, unfriendly store clerks or waiters. But I’ve also seen, particularly in places less frequented by visitors, such as vegetable markets, how commercial transactions are regularly punctuated with endearments: mi vida, mi amor, mi cielo, mi corazon, querida, papi, mami — my life, my love, my heaven, my heart, my dear. You can get a great deal of affection just in buying tomatoes. On the other hand, sometimes strangers scold, like the time a vegetable vendor freaked out at the sight of my four-year-old boy with nail polish on, telling him (and me) sternly, “In Cuba, boys don’t do that.” I’ve had museum guards take my son off my hands so I could concentrate on touring the museum, and women in restaurants invite him to sit with them and finish their pizza. Such things are supposed to panic me, and him, in Canada, but in Cuba “don’t talk to strangers” just doesn’t register.

  But to me the best example of how Cuban personal interactions are different from those of most Canadians is the way they line up. And they do, a lot. Approaching a bus stop or a pizza kiosk, the untrained eye might see just a random group of people milling about. That’s the ultimo system. Each person approaches the group and asks for el ultimo: who is the last one here? The last person acknowledges him or herself. And so the new person remains el ultimo until the next person comes along and takes on the responsibility themselves. Once you are thus inserted into the lineup you are free to wander a bit, find a patch of shade perhaps, secure in the knowledge that your place in the order of things is safe. It’s a good metaphor for the country as a whole actually. It looks like a disorganized, random mess, but it functions because people still talk to each other.

  THE FUTUROS COMMUNISTAS DAYCARE CENTRE AND OTHER ANOMALIES OF CUBAN CHILDHOOD

  My first extended time in Havana was in 2004, when I spent almost six months there researching the curious tale of Operation Peter Pan. This was something that began right after the Revolution, in 1960, and involved over 14,000 Cuban children leaving Havana for Miami. They travelled alone, unaccompanied by their parents. In Miami, those who did not have family awaiting them went into the care of the Catholic Welfare Bureau, whose director had been given the unprecedented power by the US government to waive visa requirements for arriving Cuban children. This mass migration took place because of the fears of jittery middle-class Cuban parents about what might become of their children when Fidel Castro came to power. The months after the revolution were certainly tumultuous; but such fears were, at least in part, flamed by an assortment of CIA-sponsored rumours. US-funded radio stations and printing presses worked overtime, circulating stories that Castro was about to nationalize children and send them to the Soviet Union for indoctrination. Another variant was that the new daycares springing up in the early years of the revolution were going to be used as permanent dormitories in which to lodge children. When Cuban-American relations ruptured completely after the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, thousands of Cuban children were essentially stuck in the US, separated from their parents for many years, some permanently. In a story full of tragic ironies, one remains glaring: parental custody rights were indeed abrogated, but not by the Cubans. As US academic Ramón de la Campa, a former Peter Pan child, has put it, “We ended up in camps after all. We were saved from Prague but were sent instead to naval bases in Opa-Locka, orphanages in Toledo, camps in Jacksonville.”13

  I learned about Operation Peter Pan through the story of another famous globetrotting Cuban child, when I joined much of North America following the saga of Elián González in 1999. He was the six-year-old child who left Cuba on a rickety boat with his mother, her boyfriend, and several others to make the short but dangerous journey to Miami. The boat capsized and only Elián survived. He was taken in by his uncle and other family members in Miami, despite the request of his father in Cuba that he be returned. The ensuing standoff between both branches of the González family became just one more high-profile American TV saga of the pre-social media era. US media avidly followed Elián’s Miami family as they immersed him in American childhood, as though each toy truck and trip to Disneyworld would cleanse or rebirth him. For their part, Cubans, viewing the story as a kidnapping, organized huge mass rallies in Havana demanding his return. A typical image that circulated in Cuban media in that era was Mickey Mouse ears hitched to a ball and chain. Finally the two governments brokered a deal which saw the child taken at gunpoint from his recalcitrant Miami relatives (who had exhausted their legal appeals to keep the boy against the wishes of his father) and returned to Cuba.

  It was a dramatic, captivating story. It was yet another example of Cuba’s position as ground zero in an ongoing Cold War, but it also showed how even small children can figure centrally in international political conflicts. Because of the intense family pain that this story exposed, I had ambivalent feelings about gawking, even through the remoteness of my TV screen. But my interest was piqued because I was already thinking about children crossing borders and what this tells us about global inequalities and conflicts. Elián’s story mirrored, almost exactly, the timeline of the adoption of my son from Guatemala. He was born in November 1999, the same month that Elián was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Miami. Elián left for Cuba with his father in June 2000, just a couple of weeks after we returned from Guatemala to Canada with six-month-old Jordi.

  In 2004 I lived with my family, Susan Belyea and Jordi, in Havana for six months to research Operation Peter Pan. It seemed a perfect example to add to my study of how child migration stories can produce powerful national and international political tensions. There were many reasons Elián struck such a chord among Cubans — wherever they lived — but surely one of them was that a generation earlier over 14,000 young Cubans had some of the same painful experiences. With that history, it is easy to see why Cuba is a gold mine for people who study children and international politics. When I got there in 2004, Elián himself had faded from the news in both countries, though he re-emerges occasionally in Cuba. Throughout his childhood he popped up in the Cuban media, accompanying Fidel Castro at various events such as International Children’s Day. He also circulates in Cuba’s underground world of humour. Like this joke I first heard in 2004:

  It’s the year 2020 and a man is running along the Malecón yelling, “Return Elián! Return Elián!” “Comrade,” says another man to him, “the Americans returned Elián to Cuba years ago.” “I know,” says the yelling man, “I’m Elián.”

  Living with a Guatemalan-born child when I was re
searching childhood in Havana, with the popular memory of both Elián and his Peter Pan predecessors still very much alive — all this gave me a great deal to think about. And it was more than an academic exercise; I had skin in the game. So what was it like for a four-year-old English-speaking Guatemalan-Canadian to spend his tender years in Havana? We quickly realized that fighting the formidable Cuban bureaucracy to try to enroll him in daycare was not likely to be an easy battle, and the option of enrolling him in the English-language school for diplomats’ children defeated one of our reasons for being there: to speak Spanish. Instead, Vanessa, the female half of the couple from whom we rented our apartment, did double duty as part-time childminder. At the end of our first six-month stint in Havana, Jordi had developed an impressive Spanish vocabulary, an awesome Cuban accent, and a heavy sugar dependency. “Do all Canadians think sugar is bad for children or just you two?” Vanessa asked us one day. We all developed a fondness for Cuban TV cartoons, which replay endlessly around five o’clock, at the end of the long workday. To this day, singer Liuba María Hevia’s beautiful video cartoon about Estela, the dreadlock-wearing granito de canela (little speck of cinnamon) who didn’t want to fall into the pot, makes me tear up, perhaps because I saw it daily for months on end. I think of this tiny bit of cross-cultural infantile nostalgia as my version of what Cubans of my generation have plenty of: a huge fondness for the Soviet-era cartoons they grew up with on Cuban TV.

  So, I don’t have direct institutional knowledge about how Havana daycares or schools care for children, but I learned plenty about the rest of the village. I’ve already described the easy intimacy with children on the part of Cuban people, and this affection includes foreign children. A visiting Canadian friend began joking that Cubans must think his infant son was named “Lindo” because everywhere they went he heard murmurs of “que lindo” (how cute). Of course, plenty of other cultures express the same easy conviviality toward other people’s children, a trait notably lacking in much of North America. This isn’t especially Cuban, though a Havana friend once explained the obviously child-worshipping ways of his culture in pointedly political terms. The deprivations of the Special Period still resonate, and those who grew up or parented in the early 1990s now lavish as much as they can on children, as though to exorcise the memories of sending children to school (or being sent themselves) after a breakfast of nothing more than sugar water and fried mango skin.

  Growing up part-time in Havana gave my son many things, including a healthy attitude about people he doesn’t know: he neither fears nor is suspicious of strangers. The most telling lesson I think I learned while raising a child in Havana occurred every time we passed one of our local Vedado daycare centres, the name of which was announced on a brightly painted sign: Futuros Communistas. There are a wide variety of perspectives about childhood in the world, and especially their relationship to politics.

  A national system of childcare was one of several sweeping social welfare reforms ushered in by the revolutionary government in 1959. The first Circulos Infantiles (Infant Circles or daycare centres), thirty-seven in total, were opened in 1961, and expanded rapidly thereafter. By the mid-1960s, Cuba was spending more on childcare per capita than any country in the world.14 In 1970 there were over 600 centres. They were created, administered, and staffed by the newly formed Cuban Federation of Women (FMC), a new national organization, itself a product of the revolution. Like all achievements in health and social welfare, the circulos suffered during the Special Period. However, none closed. Indeed, the country had expanded the number of childcare centres by the end of the 1990s, and today they number approximately 1,156.15 Strong government support for the circulos in the 1960s reflected the convergence of two trends: increased demand for female participation in the labour force and the elevation of children and youth as political, indeed revolutionary, subjects. To see the latter claim, you just have to read the signs.

  Circulo Infantil Futuros Communistas

  Circulo Infantil Los Compañeritos (Little Comrades)

  Circulo Infantil Vanuardia de América (Vanguard of America)

  Circulo Infantil Blanca Nieves (Snow White)

  The array of names and images that grace the circulos is an integral part of Havana’s streetscapes. In a city that is famous for looking so different from other parts of the world — old cars, old buildings, no recognizable North American brand signs — the circulos, though more discreet than revolutionary billboards, contribute to this kaleidoscope of visual difference. Turn a corner and you receive an instant lesson in history and politics. Daycares are named after an array of Cuban and global revolutionary figures (Celia Sánchez, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevera, Rosa Luxemburg, Simón Bolivar, and José Martí, to name a few); they offer faint reminders of bygone solidarities (“Heroic Vietnam,” “Little Friends of Poland,” “Beautiful Chile”), as well as what were once the hopeful dreams for the future (“The Little Comrades,” “The Little Proletariat,” “The Vanguard of America,” “Future Combatants”). Occasionally, they represent a version of childhood that might be cloyingly recognizable to North Americans (“Snow White,” “Little Champions,” “Happy Little Cubans”). But more often, signs such as “Proletarian Gentlemen,” “Little Internationalists,” and, of course, “Future Communists” offer a very different way of thinking about childhood.

  In the 1960s, the revolutionary names selected for childcare centres were not just leftist whimsy; they were an indication of something profound. The social reforms in the Cuba of the early 1960s were nothing if not ambitious and utopian, and this held for children as much as anyone else, perhaps more so. From the newly designed collective playpens, to the celebration of group birthdays, to a completely innovative curriculum, the circulos in the 1960s were the first steps in the new society and new personality that the Cuban Revolution sought to create, from the bottom up. The circulos were just one part of a vast new education system that was going to change everything. The children of “The Little Proletariat” daycare centre might continue on to primary and secondary schools with a curriculum that was both rigorous and didactic. In high school they might have spent time in residential country schools where they cut sugar cane or sewed gym clothes part-time for their keep. If they were really smart (and/or politically connected) they might have attended the Centro Vocacional de Lenin, “La Lenin,” as it’s known, the most elite and desirable of Havana’s residential high schools. I have heard adult Cubans toss around their “La Lenin” credentials in exactly the same snobby manner as Americans drop their Harvard or Yale creds — oblivious, seemingly, to the biting irony — to my North American ear — of trying to cash in on that particular name. All of this education, including university, remains free.

  Today, this vision of sentimentalized children and revolutionary nostalgia is repeated constantly outside the daycare centres of every neighbourhood in the city. I think the names both prove and disprove “The Dreams of Che” (Los Sueños del Che), and indeed all of the dreams of the 1960s. One day when I was visiting Mirta in Cerro I started musing about the weirdness of the Future Communist daycare I passed daily in Vedado. Were all the daycares in Havana named like this, I asked her? Does it seem weird to you that daycares have names like “Little Proletariat?” Mirta walked over to a drawer, retrieved her Havana telephone book, thumbed through it, and wordlessly ripped out a few pages. She handed me the names and addresses of the hundreds of Havana circulos and said, “Go find out.” So, shortly after I asked one of my few friends with a car in Havana to drive me around the city and the suburbs in order to take photos of daycare centres and their intriguing signs. Aldo humoured me, as he always does, and we spent a day driving around and taking photos. If daycare employees looked at me and my camera disapprovingly, he would reassure them, “Don’t worry, she’s from Pastors for Peace,” a trusted US NGO that brings medical and educational supplies to Cuba. Another time he announced I was from the New York Times. But when Aldo caught sight of the wretched condition of the build
ing that housed “The Constructors of the Future” daycare, he’d had enough infantile optimism. “If these are the Constructors of the Future,” he muttered to me, “we’re fucked.”

  Cuban daycare centres have suffered as the Cuban government retrenches its social service spending. Like many state-owned facilities in poor repair, plenty stay closed for years waiting for repairs. In 2015, the state press reported enthusiastically that eleven had been reopened in Havana after closures that had lasted up to seven years.16 Yet over fifty centres remain closed, awaiting repairs or personnel in various municipalities throughout the country.17 Childcare workers in Cuba, like childcare workers the world over, are among the lowest-paid workers in their country ($340 MN, $13 CUC); they are at the bottom of the Cuban pay scale.18 While the vast majority of authorized cuentapropismo (self-employment) is in the restaurants and service industries, private daycares are becoming increasingly common. Now middle-class parents have the option of paying monthly fees that range from $40–$120 CUC for private daycare, instead of the equivalent of less than $2 monthly in the state-run circulos. Not surprisingly, private centres offer better food, supplies, and child/teacher ratios. But with all things Cuban, a little perspective goes a long way. Recent research tells us that UNICEF’s minimum standards for childcare are met by only one First World country.19 That this iconography — as retro as it is — graces a functioning (barely, but functioning) national system of subsidized childcare in a poor Third World country is perhaps the greatest anomaly of all.