The rock stars and the professors: Carlos Varela, X Alfonso, the author, and Susan Lord, a Queen’s University student, visit to the Fábrica, 2014. Photo by Nicholas Smith
So despite appearances, the Fábrica de Arte Cubano is not Havana’s late entry into the generic hip urban club scene. In fact, it is not a private club at all; it is housed under the Ministry of Culture, like many theatre and music venues in Havana. Freddy Monasterio Barsó, a Cuban studying in Canada, is doing doctoral research on the Fábrica and other semi-independent musical productions and venues that are popping up in today’s Havana. As Monasterio Barsó sees it, the blunt censorship of previous eras is giving way to a host of quasi-independent performance spaces, including bricks and mortar buildings like the Fábrica, and more ephemeral but regular music festivals that feature a huge array of musical styles and mix Cuban with other international musicians. This is a new level of state-sanctioned cosmopolitanism, and no one knows how far it is going to go. As the chant-like chorus of one of X Alfonso’s signature songs, “Revoluxcion,” goes, “Don’t stop the train, don’t stop the train.”26
THREE
LA NUEVA CUBA: LIFE IN THE NEW ECONOMY
CHOPPED VEGETABLES, RESTAURANTS, AND OTHER SIGNS OF A NEW MIDDLE CLASS
The official indication that something was changing in the Cuban economic system started, as things often do, with Fidel Castro. In a conversation with visiting US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, he quipped — inadvertently after a glass of wine at lunch, or deliberately, who can say — “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”1 This jokey reflection in September 2010 was just a hint of things to come. In November of the same year, the government of President Raúl Castro released a document, “Proposed Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy,” which contained 291 articles that diagnosed and proposed solutions for Cuba’s vast economic problems. The guidelines circulated and were discussed in workplaces and schools, and formally approved in April 2011. The process of what the government called “renovating” or “updating” the Cuban economy was officially under way.
According to University of Havana economics professor Jorge Mario Sánchez, the changes mark “a decisive transformation in the relationship between the state and society.” They do so primarily by making the private or non-state sector a permanent fixture (as opposed to, as previously, a persecuted underground phantom or a barely tolerated necessary evil).2 The government eliminated some restrictions on the size and growth potential of private businesses, it dropped some of the most punitive taxes and regulations, it actively sought foreign direct investment, and it began to nudge employment from the state to the non-state sector. Before 2010, about 15 percent of Cubans were employed in the non-state sector; by the end of 2012 it was 23 percent, by 2016 it is predicted that the figure could be 40 percent. Self-employment, or cuentapropismo, was legalized, with over 200 new categories of employment created — even if the vast majority were things Cubans were already doing in the underground economy.3 It became legal to buy and sell real estate as well as automobiles.
These changes are ongoing and controversial and there is no end of debate, inside and outside Cuba, about how important they are and what the effects will be. This is particularly so in light of the changes which will be brought into being post-December 17, 2014, and the potential of US capital and enterprises to intervene in the Cuban economy. There is only one thing that everyone could agree upon now: a visible, thriving, domestic Cuban middle class has come out of the closet.
When we lived in Havana in 2004, we sometimes struggled to entertain a five-year-old in a city with almost no children’s consumer culture. Cuban children amuse themselves within family or neighbourhood networks. We were often a part of friends’ family lives, but not always. So, we occasionally found ourselves, especially on cloudy or wet weekends (or when we felt we couldn’t afford the $25 round trip cab fare to Playas del Este, the beach twenty minutes from the city), at Havana’s aquarium. It isn’t, in my view, a particularly good aquarium, though the dolphins dancing to salsa music is a nice touch. It is also not easy to get to, as it’s located in the western-most part of Miramar. On one particularly cloudy day, we headed out by tourist taxi, the only option for foreigners in those years. We got caught in a driving downpour on the way back — a big, dramatic tropical rain. Everyone leaving the aquarium huddled together under a canopy at the entrance and I watched the assembled people turn from a mass of families with small children coping with tremendous rain into two distinguishable groups: tourists with money to pay for a taxi, and Cubans who had to wait for the storm to end in order to walk to a nearby bus stop. Watching myself among the (mostly) white people, scurrying for each new cab as it rolled up, was a defining moment for me back in 2004, but it would not have played out the same way a decade later. Not only would Cubans be among the taxi-takers, but some of them would now have cars.
After the economic “renovations” were announced the underground black-market economy was able to lift its head a little bit, and the city looked like it had rained kiosks. In 2011, it seemed every block included a front yard stand selling something — some blocks more than one. There had been, and still are, small food stands scattered throughout Havana neighbourhoods, increasing in density around the university. Usually they are only open at breakfast and lunch, and they sell an array of food such as pizzas, ham and cheese sandwiches, fruit drinks, batidos (milkshakes), and the ubiquitous rice and beans. They exist in the MN economy. Individual pizzas, for example, cost around the equivalent of fifty cents, and thus they are an economical and usually tasty way to have something on the go. Generally there are no tables or chairs. You just stand around to eat and maybe they have a few pieces of paper to slide your pizza on to; takeout containers don’t exist. One drinks juice or coffee from a glass that is quickly washed and re-used. Most of these stands have been around for a while, and they clearly aren’t easy to open. We shared a running joke with our landlord, Aldo, about our next-door neighbour, who some years ago decided to turn his little ice cream stand into a larger and more elaborate kiosk for takeout food. We watched his progress for a couple of years, seemingly brick by brick, each time we visited. “Any day now, by your next visit for sure, he’ll be open,” Aldo would predict, knowing that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t.
Since then the kiosk economy has taken wings and soared. There are now a huge number of food options and plenty of other buying and selling possibilities on the city’s streets. It was discombobulating to understand at first, especially as I realized that what was for sale, beyond food, were basically two types of things: discs, either DVDS or CDS, and brightly painted papier-mâché crafts and tourist souvenirs. In Canada, I live in Kingston, Ontario, in a mixed middle- and working-class downtown neighbourhood, where every summer people turn their yards into permanent lawn sales. The wares are, generally, neither decorative nor useful; one half of the poor of the north end sells their junk to the other half. Those early kiosks in Havana reminded me of the same thing: the entrepreneurship of the poor, who have no access to credit, and no ability to take financial risks. Who was this for? Who was buying? Who was benefitting?
I still don’t fully know the answers to these questions, but it is obvious that at least a few people are profiting. I’ve heard several habaneros tell me they know Cubans who now send remittances to family in Florida; this sounds like a line, but people swear it’s true. Disposable income is on the rise, and those early kiosks have become quite a bit sturdier and up-market. One of the first studies of cuentapropistas was a report published by the US think-tank Brookings Institute in 2013. US-based Cuban scholar Richard Feinberg interviewed a number of first-generation cuentapropistas and compiled some initial data on the extent to which non-state employment has penetrated into the Cuban economy and psyche.4
The options for cuentapropistas are, as we have seen, controlled by the state. Professionals, for example, are not included; there is no such thing as a private medical or legal pract
ice. But within the 200 state-authorized categories, the most popular choices of self-employment are in food services (including street vendors), accommodations, transportation (taxis and trucks), construction, musical sales (the ubiquitous CD vendors, a relatively easy gig in copyright-less Cuba), and appliance repair. The average investment necessary to start a business ranged from $7,000 CUC in the retail sales field to $36,000 CUC to renovate a dwelling for tourist accommodation. Half of Feinberg’s sample of twenty-five cuentapropistas got their start-up money from relatives abroad, the other half from personal savings or selling a property. No one relied on a bank (which offers little in the way of loans or investment assistance). Like self-employed people the world over, no one speaks much about their earnings. Taxes, if they are paid, are steep: a monthly license fee and a revenue tax (paid monthly) of 50 percent (after the first 50,000 pesos or $2,000 CUC).5 This tax rate is not, however, out of line with the rest of the developing world.
This picture of what Feinberg calls a “dynamic independent private sector” is visible every day on the street. I’ve heard it said that Cubans are the most brand-conscious people in the world — a consequence, perhaps, of being shut out of the enormous shopping mall that is the US for all these years. Designer logos have always decorated Cuban clothing but now they might not be knock-offs. So too the cars, which Cuban men care for with the loving attention one might expect to see showered on a baby. Now, as well as the famous vintage US cars and still functioning Ladas, one can see Peugeots, Jeeps, BMWs, and Toyotas, all at absurdly high prices. In 2010, I noticed the supply at the licorera (liquor store) beside the Melia Cohiba Hotel in Vedado had exploded: as well as the customary wide range of rums, their wine offerings suddenly went way past the typical domestic and Spanish selections and began to include wine from other Latin American countries, France, and Italy, at a wider range of prices. Packaged, chopped pineapple and other fruits and vegetables started appearing at the markets.
I was happy enough to see a wider range of wine, though I had already “resolved,” as Cubans say, my wine issues when Emilia introduced me to La Tienda de Los Rusos, the Russians’ store, located in an old Vedado mansion behind an imposing iron gate. It is a holdover from the days when Soviet technicians thronged Havana’s streets and were privileged, like diplomats, to frequent their own better-stocked stores. Why La Tienda de Los Rusos still exists decades after the end of the official Russian presence in Cuba I don’t know, but I do know that if you remember where it is (it is unmarked), anyone can walk in and purchase decent Chilean wine there for $8, a dollar less than most liquor stores. The wine sits alongside an assortment of Russian canned goods and chocolates, used clothes, and, once, a large stack of car tires, all sold by unfriendly Eastern European women. So I was not as thrilled as I might have been at the sight of $9 Chilean wine at the liquor store, but I was overjoyed when I saw packages of peeled, chopped garlic at the markets. Cuban garlic is tasty but tiny, and extremely frustrating to peel and chop; worth paying extra for someone else’s labour, in my accounting.
With each visit I now see a jaw-dropping array of what many North Americans would consider foodie necessities. An artisanal pasta store opened near the Galleria de Paseo, which sells artful nests of pasta made from beets, and ravioli stuffed with dried fruit. Emilia found jars of pesto in a small store attached to a gas station on Línea. Telmary introduced me to a bakery in Miramar that makes aromatic loaves of garlic bread. Each of these is a rarity seldom, if ever, seen on the streets of Havana. And then there are the restaurants. Perhaps the most obvious signs of a cash-spending middle class anywhere in the world are bars and restaurants. There are at least two phone apps on the market now for visitors to locate and review Havana restaurants. You can now make reservations for some of the higher-end places in Havana from the comfort (and speed) of the Internet in Miami (or wherever else) before you visit. Other Havana restaurants have banded together to offer on-line gift cards that can be purchased in the US and provided to friends or family in Cuba. The economist Jorge Mario Sánchez told our students that official figures claim over 400 new restaurants have opened in Havana since 2014, although plenty closed as well. The new Cuban restaurant directory A la mesa lists almost 500 in Havana alone.
Restaurants, both state-owned and private paladars, some good, some bad, have existed in Havana for some time. But the scale of the restaurant explosion would have been impossible to imagine even a few years ago. Most of the time while I lived with my family in Havana in 2004 and 2008, we frequented precisely one restaurant, one of only two or three within a thirty-minute walk from my (centrally located) apartment. It still exists: La Fuente, on calle 13 between F and G. It is seedy in a friendly way, with repetitive food (usually only one menu item: pork steak), but it had cold beer and a huge fountain (fuente) in the courtyard filled with fish, which my son liked to play with. We were oddly excited to learn, during our six-month stay in 2004, about a restaurant in Old Havana on Prado, where a salad with arugula and Parmesan cheese had been spotted. Some years later there was a small farm outside Havana growing arugula specifically for the high-end restaurant market.6
You can find a little bit of everything in Havana now, including sushi and Indian and Middle Eastern food. There are a handful of glossy new lifestyle magazines published inside and outside Cuba that cover the opening of new bars and restaurants as though they were Paris fashion shows. The days of salivating about a possible Parmesan cheese sighting are long over. In fact, I made a rare visit to a new high-end Havana restaurant, El Litoral, for lunch as I was interviewing someone for this book. There on the salad buffet table I saw the largest wheel of Parmesan I had ever seen, scooped out and filled with grated cheese — as though it were normal, as though it had always been there. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
I haven’t made a study of the restaurant scene in La Nueva Cuba and indeed even the pairing of “restaurant scene” and “Cuba” still does not roll easily off my keyboard. But one of my favourite aspects of the restaurant boom is that it provides another opportunity for Cuban audacity. At the busy corner of 23 and G, there’s a little hamburger joint called Las PePe, which uses a stylized inverted double letter “P” in yellow as its logo. It looks very much like the McDonald’s “M.” Another burger kiosk owner near the Galleria in Vedado is even cheekier: Super Burger mimics exactly the Burger King graphic. But surely the award for most creative disregard for copyright goes to the proprietors of StarBien, a high-end restaurant that evokes the Starbucks logo, right down to the tone of green, in its sign. Spanish-speakers will see the double joke, as the name is also a word play on “Estar bien”— to be well. StarBien is owned by Jose Colome. His father, General Abelardo Colome, is Cuba’s Minister of the Interior, one of the architects of Cuba’s intelligence network and a member of Raúl Castro’s inner circle.7
There is a funky new tapas bar, Café Madrigal, located a few blocks from where our students stay, on calle 17 near Paseo. My fellow teacher Susan Lord and I decided to check it out when it just opened, as a possible place our students might like to know about. We walked up a narrow staircase and entered a room with tremendous character: high ceilings, huge film posters, and original art on the walls: bohemian urban, but not generically hip. It’s named for a popular Cuban film, owned by a Cuban film director, and the prices are reasonable (for Canadian dollar earners). It’s a nice place, but we debated, jokingly, trying to hide it from our students solely because they would think it was completely normal that a little bar/restaurant like this should exist. You should have to work up to a place like this in Havana; you don’t just get to start here.
Super Burger StarBien Restaurant
A city of 500 restaurants, where the Parmesan cheese flows, the wine lists are long, and the surroundings — at their best — are like perfectly preserved museums, ranging from restored colonial or 1950s modernism to contemporary South Beach. “The entrepreneurial spirit is alive,” declared Thomas J. Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of
Commerce when he visited Havana in the summer of 2014. He declared support for Cuba’s economic changes from a podium at the University of Havana’s Grand Lecture Hall, a place of some gravitas.8 Is this what Raúl Castro had in mind when he announced the economic “renovations” were designed for the “preservation of socialism by strengthening it and making it truly irrevocable”?9 The best way to answer this question, perhaps, is to consider La Nueva Cuba as it exists in the daily lives of its inhabitants.
TECHNOLOGICAL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP OF THE POOR
What does it mean for habaneros to live in an economy in transition? It would be superficial indeed to seek a heavy contrast between ruthless “capitalist values” ushered in by recent economic changes and impending US tourism, and the cozy “socialist values” of before. Even if we were certain of what those conflicting values were, and could relate them directly to economic systems (as distinct from, for example, the values that come from families or cultures or religions), Cuba has had a much too complicated history to simply divide it into pre-2010 socialism and post-2011 neo-liberalism.
These days it would be confusing to look to the Cuban government directly for an indication of how citizens are to understand their place in the new economy. Raúl Castro himself can occasionally sound like just one more poor-bashing North American politician, chastising Cubans who “confuse socialism with freebies and subsidies.” Complaints about Cuban pichones (referencing little birds with their mouths open) have begun to come up in my conversations with Cubans in recent years. Some say the repeated complaints about pichones refer not to the poor but to the lazy, and in Cuba those categories are not seen as interchangeable, as they are by the right wing in North America. There is a widely shared joke (with roots in the Soviet Union) that brings the problem back to the low wages of state employees: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Given the tremendous barriers that the Cuban government has erected over the past fifty years to preserve the state as the sole source of wealth, initiative, and creativity, this change from the language of citizen entitlements to “freebies and subsidies” seems a tad duplicitous.
Cuba beyond the Beach Page 10