Cuba beyond the Beach

by Karen Dubinsky

  After seeing this film, I found that the only thing making me optimistic about what is going to change for poor habaneros is the resolve and determination of some of the protagonists. I watched it at a special screening at Casa de Las Américas, a Havana cultural centre. Ramírez Anderson was present and so was Silvio, alongside a number of participants in the documentary. After the screening, they spoke movingly and eloquently about their lives and their feelings about the film. Maybe the film’s power derives at least in part from the Cubanidad, the intense Cubanness of the story. The trust that the director was able to establish with his subjects speaks to the lack of distance or social hierarchy between a middle-class, educated filmmaker and his poverty-stricken “subjects.” Plenty of the people interviewed in the film explain that they have university degrees and work in professional or technical fields.

  When some of the streets of Havana flooded after heavy rains in May 2015, I noticed a similar angry resolve on the part of residents speaking to TV cameras, explaining the damage the rising waters had caused, and especially venting their fury about their neighbourhoods’ neglect by municipal or other government authorities. A US political scientist observed decades ago that despite authoritarian political systems, “Silence is not the pervading theme in contemporary Cuba; Cubans have never been silent.”16 But speaking angrily about the government to a camera, this is kicking it up a notch. Making their way around the real estate boom is going to require all the resources they can muster. Centro Havana, the high-density neighbourhood that lies between Vedado and Old Havana has some of the worst housing conditions in the city; it is not an exaggeration to say that buildings come down in a strong rain. Some 230 of them did in 2013, according to official figures.17 The housing stock of neighbouring Old Havana is also in bad condition (except for the increasing numbers of streets and squares that have been renovated for the tourist’s eye). Yet it is rarer to hear of entire buildings collapsing in Old Havana. In July 2015, however, an Old Havana building fell, just off Obispo Street, a central, well-travelled commercial street filled with stores, bars, and restaurants. This time the main-floor apartment gave way, and four people who lived on the second floor were killed, including an older woman, two teenagers, and a three-year-old. Within hours the word was out: the main floor had been gutted and was in the process of renovations to become a restaurant. Interior supporting walls had been removed; one of the upstairs residents had just complained about the cracks in the floor that resulted. A neighbour spoke to a Cuban independent journalist on camera and explained that two “Yumas” (Americans) and a Cuban woman had just purchased it.18 This may or may not be true, just as the investigation into the cause of the disaster may or may not become public. Another similar building collapse in Centro Havana in 2012 killed several teenagers who had gathered together in a friend’s apartment to study for their exams. It was reported on tersely and then disappeared from the news. One of the dead went to school with my landlord’s son, who was devastated, and the story spooked us all. A friend who knew the neighbourhood took me by the site of the collapse a month later in order to show me what had happened. In a city filled with rubble and stalled construction projects, there sat a pristine, empty lot, cleared of any sign that a building had ever been there. This was a cleanup of record speed. Said my friend, “They don’t want us to remember that these things happen.”

  TAXI! WHY I DON’T TALK IN CUBAN TAXIS

  What is it about taxi drivers? Everyone has a story. A few years ago a story circulated in The Nation magazine. It was called “Travels by Taxi,” and was written by Elio Prieto, a Cuban writer. He began with his experience in taxis from New York to Madrid, and about what happened when the drivers learned he was Cuban. “Ah, Cuba, Fidel Castro! He gave it to the Americans,” was the general response. He wrote a book trying to figure out the tremendous popularity of the Cuban revolution among the taxi drivers of the world.

  I think I could write a whole book about what the world looks like from the perspective of a Cuban taxi. Once, I used the formal Spanish pronoun “usted” rather than the informal “tu” to a young driver who was taking me to the airport. He was so delighted to be addressed formally by a middle-aged foreign lady, he offered me a piece of the pie he was carrying around for his lunch. And I took it (by hand). Another driver burst my initial illusions of what the newly elected Barack Obama might do to end the Cold War. Immediately after Obama’s 2008 election, I noticed from a taxi that the billboards on the Malecón across from the US Interests Section were down. No one was screaming anti-imperialist slogans; surely this was a sign that a thaw was coming? I tried to imagine the conversations among Cuban authorities that led to the voluntary withdrawal of visual invective. The taxi driver’s response when I made my excited observation that their removal must mean something important? “Maybe, but actually I think they came down in the hurricane.”

  But my best taxi moment was when I realized something profound about La Nueva Cuba. There are as many different kinds of taxis in Cuba as there are different kinds of cars: everything from new air-conditioned Toyotas to beautifully refurbished US models from the 1950s to the ubiquitous Ladas to others of indeterminate origin which look like they would not survive the next strong rain. But basically, there used to be two types of taxis, whatever the model: taxis and Cuban taxis. Cuban taxis are generally huge old American cars, but not the kind that are repainted and reupholstered in beautiful pastels. Cuban taxis are giant diesel-belching machines — literally called maquinas in Spanish — into which are crammed huge numbers of peso-paying Cubans. They drive rapid-fire down the main streets, stopping when you yell at them to stop. And you have to yell because they are usually blaring reggaetón. They don’t provide door-to-door service, but they cost a fraction of the hard currency taxis.

  And for years they were licensed only to pick up Cubans, a rule that was, as far as I could see, observed faithfully. In the early 2000s, I needed to interview someone in a relatively remote neighbourhood, far outside the central core of the city. Caridad, a Cuban colleague, accompanied me. We had been driven there by a workmate of hers and, as we were ready to leave, I realized we were unlikely to find a tourist taxi to make the return trip to the city centre. We waited as half a dozen Cuban taxis sped by. Finally Caridad said, “OK, screw it. Just don’t open your mouth.” She hailed a Cuban taxi that quickly stopped for us. I spent the ride eyes downcast, trying to let my hair fall over my face to hide myself as much as I could. I must have looked both ridiculous and foreign.

  I remembered that image, and the feeling that I was doing something both daring and foolish, ten years later when I hailed another maquina, this time on my own in Old Havana. The rules about who could ride in which taxis have relaxed, although the Cuban taxis themselves are still formidable. But I have learned the tricks travelling with Cuban friends, such as how to understand the routes and where in the city to wait for which route. (I have yet to master the hand signals, however, whereby the driver indicates while driving, with the flick of a wrist or finger, the exact route he’s taking. This way he doesn’t have to even slow down.) I was thrilled at the idea of paying about 50 cents for a ride from Old Havana to Vedado that would cost between $5 and $10 in a tourist taxi. As the taxi quickly filled and we screeched away along Neptuno, I saw that my fellow passengers were all foreigners: two Brazilian men, five young Chinese women, and me. The only Cuban in the car was the driver, pumping up the reggaetón. He obviously couldn’t care less who his passengers were.

  There are at least two ways to see this taxi story. It could be told as a parable of openness. The fog of a bureaucratic, centrally planned economy has lifted, and as it rises, old xenophobic fears and petty rules fall away. Yet, at the same time there’s something missing in a too-celebratory telling of this story. For surely each of us foreigners riding the Cuban taxi that day could afford the $5 fare for a private taxi. Where in the (First) world would we expect an urban taxi ride, even a bumpy, loud, dangerous one, for less than 50 cents? As th
e cheap taxis fill up with hard currency-earning foreigners, where does that leave the peso-earning Cubans? I spoke about my taxi story with Gerardo, a Cuban colleague who lives in La Lisa, a Havana suburb. La Lisa is two 10 peso taxi fares from Old Havana; if your ride traverses Vedado and Miramar, you have crossed into another zone and the fare goes up another 10 pesos. So when Gerardo and his wife want to go to Old Havana for a Saturday, it costs them 80 pesos in total, which seems a steal at around $4. But that’s about a quarter of his wife’s monthly salary.

  So, I take Cuban taxis with mixed feelings. I continue to follow my friend’s instructions of a decade ago: I don’t open my mouth, even if I’m riding with people I know. It’s my way, silly as it is, of preserving something that still seems to me to be Cuban space.

  THE HAVANA YOU DON’T KNOW: STREET CRIME, CORRUPTION, AND SOCIOLISMO

  I think I have walked every street in Havana, at least in the central neighbourhoods I know best: Vedado, Centro, Old Havana, and Cerro. The only danger I have encountered is the shoes I have worn out. This truth applies as long as the sun is up. At night, what hip hop artist Papá Humbertico calls ‘‘the Havana you don’t know’’ comes out. Humbertico’s song is directed, disparagingly, at tourists.

  “This is my Havana, the Havana you don’t know,

  The Cuban capital after midnight.

  Enjoy it if you’re foreign, struggle if you’re from here.

  How I love my Havana, what would I do without you?”19

  Tourists are obvious targets, for envy, ridicule, and also crime. Mirta, who is nothing if not plain-speaking, told me once, “Every time you leave your house here, you scream ‘I have money.’ It doesn’t matter how you dress.” But, despite the obvious fact that tourists usually have more to steal, habaneros have the same complaints about crime; they too try to avoid “the Havana you don’t know.” Of course, in this old adage — the streets are different at night — Havana is no different from any place else in the world. What is more remarkable, what makes Havana different from almost every place in the world, is its relative safety during the day. Most of the Havana crime stories I know are some variant of a purse snatching, which occurs when people (myself included) are walking darkened streets at night. Some involved wallet snatching in crowded buses. Most, but not all, involved no violence, no weapons, and relatively minimal losses. But it’s in that “but not all” that the “Havana that you don’t know” resides.

  This is a Havana that almost no one knows. I’ve mentioned already that Havana doesn’t visually resemble other fortress-like cities in the Third World. There are few visual cues, like razor wire or armed guards outside every place of business, to indicate heavy crime fears. Accurate crime statistics are difficult to come by in Havana; they are secrets guarded as closely as Fidel Castro’s residential address. The newspapers are almost silent on the topic, the opposite of the “yellow press” of other Latin American countries, which tend to report crime in lurid and expansive detail. (Of course, they have a lot to work with.) A rare 2013 report released by the national police in Cuba confirmed that crimes of violence were increasing, with the vast majority being the result of personal conflicts inspired by alcohol.20 There is little crime in the newspapers but there is plenty that travels through Radio Bemba (lips) or gossip networks. It was educational to see the reaction when a small group of our students were once robbed at gunpoint outside a Vedado club. It was terrifying for them, even though their material losses were minimal. The police took it extremely seriously and the culprit was eventually apprehended and charged. The fellow had a gun in his possession. But most habaneros who learned of the story believed that was impossible — that the gun must have been a toy aimed at silly Canadians who couldn’t tell the difference. As with almost everything in today’s Havana, there was a generational difference. Younger Cubans had almost no trouble believing the gun was real; in fact, they had stories of their own about people they knew who had experienced armed robberies. One University of Havana student told me it was possible to rent guns by the hour in Havana. Cuentapropismo is a many-headed beast.

  Without crime statistics or open media commentary, it is also difficult to get a grip on changes or patterns in crime. Plenty of Cubans say that theft, of various degrees, is endemic in the system. It is basically impossible to live without recourse to the black market, or the vast underground economy that flourishes even after the legalization of cuentapropismo. I’m fond of the title of an article about illegality in Cuba by the US writer Dick Cluster: “To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest.” Referencing the song by Bob Dylan (a.k.a. the Carlos Varela of the United States) is the perfect way to communicate the ubiquity of illegality and the porous boundary between legal and extra-legal. Cluster has a concise list of common illegal practices which are widely employed as survival strategies: people sell and buy black-market groceries or cigars or rum or other such goods lifted from state stores or factories; they use state resources (such as vehicles) for their own businesses; they steal equipment of various sorts from their workplaces for resale; they offer bribes or gifts to state employees (to jump queues, or turn a blind eye to infractions); and they sell things that are not to be sold (everything from lobster to charging extra money for professional services). I’ve seen examples of every one of these categories. Cluster quotes a Cuban friend who explains it simply: “The Special Period will be over for me when I can feed myself and my child just on the income from my official state job.”21

  There is a great deal of moralizing advice in official political discourse about the decline in values on the part of ordinary Cubans, as they constantly straddle the legal and illegal realms in their daily lives. Corruption has obvious deleterious effects on the economy as a whole, but is the informal economy a gateway to serious criminality? As always, the more candid public debate about crime takes place not in the newspapers but in culture. As early as 1991, Carlos Varela recorded “Todo se roban” (Everybody Steals), which linked, as a criminologist might, everyday crime to larger social and political structures of power in Cuba:

  “They stole your father’s car radio.

  You’ll steal his cigarettes when he comes on Saturday.

  And they steal from you when you are watching TV,

  They steal your desire, they steal your desire for love.

  They robbed your neighbour’s clothes from the patio.

  He robbed money from the cash register where he worked.

  And they rob you when you are at the counter,

  They steal your desire, they steal your desire for love.

  They robbed parts of your father’s car.

  He bought them, at a surcharge, from the same guy who robbed him.

  And from you they rob the doormen and the rent collector.

  They steal your desire, they steal your desire for love.

  There are robbers that hide inside your room,

  And they hide themselves in books, in the newspapers and in the television.

  They rob your head and your heart,

  And this is how they steal your desire, they steal your desire for love.”

  Crime in the form of bribery and corruption can be well-balanced and strangely functional, a reciprocal system of debts and favours reminiscent of the world of Tony Soprano, without the guns. As a Cuban journalist put it, “Just as we have two currencies in Cuba we have two types of time. Urgency and despair cost money.”22 Those who can afford to jump the queue — at the doctor’s office, the market, the telephone company — can do so either by offering small gifts to the right gatekeeper or hiring someone to stand in line on their behalf. When I first entered the Havana apartment world, I learned quickly to keep my store of rum well-stocked, as landlords always needed it to offer a drink to the apartment inspector who visited monthly. As well as my rum (which I started considering part of the rent), in one place I lived the landlord explained quite openly that he paid the inspector twenty dollars a visit to ignore the fact that he was renting us the entire apartme
nt, not a room, which was initially the law. When I shook my head in exasperation to my landlord Ignacio, he took the inspector’s side. “Well,” he said, “he needs to make his CUCs too,” recognizing that the inspector’s state employee salary was a fraction of Ignacio’s own hard currency earnings from my rent. This is the best example of sociolismo (reciprocity among associates) over socialism I have encountered. I think of it as socialism in spite of the state.

  Sociolismo accounts for countless examples of petty infractions and violations of the rules. It is how Cubans live. But there are also indications that levels of both crime and corruption are reaching new heights. In both 2013 and 2014, teachers were caught selling the answers to university entrance exams, required by all high school students. After the 2014 incident, six teachers and one employee of the company that printed the exams were arrested and sentenced to jail time, ranging from one to eight years.23 This scandal was widely reported in Cuba. No one knows the number of students involved, but authorities decided the cheating was so widespread that they also took the unprecedented step of making all students repeat a new version of the mathematics entrance exam. An unreported number of students who were caught buying the exam have been forbidden from attaining university education for life. Daniel attends one of the schools whose teachers were charged, the Vedado Pre-Universitario, a well-thought-of institution attended by plenty of “Hijos de Vedado,” culturally elite Vedado kids. He told me that perhaps fifty of his four hundred classmates who sat the exam had bought the answers, for prices ranging from eighty to one hundred CUC (more than two months of the average state employees salary). Ironically enough, at about the same time, the US was coping with a similar problem, as the largest education corruption scandal unfolded in Atlanta, Georgia. Eleven teachers and administrators were ultimately convicted of racketeering for inflating the results of standardized tests in the state.24 Obviously, corruption is hardly solely a Cuban problem, but the scale is giving many people cause for alarm.