Cuba beyond the Beach
Page 13
Is corruption in Cuba increasing or simply becoming more publicized? It’s difficult to know. In February 2014, over seventy paintings disappeared from storage in the Museo de Bellas Artes (Fine Art museum) in Old Havana and began turning up in the circles of Miami art dealers.25 A year earlier, the Instituto de Farmacia y Alimentos (Institute of Pharmacy and Food), a branch of the University of Havana, was the subject of a serious scandal when methyl alcohol acquired from employees and sold on the black market as cheap rum turned up on the streets of La Lisa, killing eleven people and injuring over one hundred.26 The Havana Psychiatric Hospital was rocked by scandal in 2010 when twenty-six patients met their death during a cold snap, a result of neglect and starvation. An investigation found that the hospital was receiving funds for over a thousand more patient meals than they were actually serving.27
In all of these cases the news was reported in a perfunctory way in the official media, and it circulated like wild-fire through Radio Bemba and social media on and off the island. In all cases, high-level officials (including, in the art theft, the Minister of Culture) either lost their jobs or were convicted of criminal offences or both. However, the consequences are no match for the level of popular alienation, mistrust, and horror such scandals have generated. I asked a group of friends at a dinner party in Havana for details on the alcohol poisoning scandal, which I had heard about but didn’t fully understand. My friends explained the mechanics of how alcohol travelled from the laboratories of research institutes to the bootlegger on the street, which is basically a story of bribery at multiple levels. There were three habaneros from different parts of the city and different walks of life gathered at a table that night with Ruth and me, who were visiting from Canada: Grettel, who is a dancer and teacher; Ruth’s boyfriend Crispin, a musician; and Emilia, who works in a clinic. Yet the prevailing sentiment from all three of them was the same: horror at the deaths, but also revulsion about what this revealed about the sanctity and professionalism of educational institutions. That laboratory doors at the country’s major post-secondary institution, the first university founded in the Americas, could be so cavalierly opened by bribery was embarrassing and unforgivable. The three fields touched by these recent scandals — education, culture, and health — remain the pillars of national achievement. So, corruption in any of these fields, let alone all of them within a few years of each other, is a triple blow that goes way beyond the criminal activities or greed of a handful of employees.
Esteban Morales is a recently retired University of Havana political scientist who has analyzed Cuban foreign relations for decades. He has also become increasingly outspoken about racism in Cuba, a topic not always easily addressed, especially by his generation. As an Afro-Cuban, he lived through the era when speaking of racism was tantamount to a betrayal because the revolution had “fixed all that” and the country needed unity. He has written dozens of books and articles on both foreign relations and on racism; he travels to universities and conferences all over the world; and he appears as an expert on media outlets inside and outside Cuba. But what got him kicked out of the Communist Party, of which he had been a long-time member, was a 2010 blog post he wrote condemning corruption at both high and low levels, which he warned was “the true counterrevolution.”28
That Morales chose the role of whistle-blower is not surprising. As he told a journalist after his ex-communication, “I was a revolutionary before I was a party activist,”29 a sentiment he repeated several times when he visited us in Canada in 2015 as part of our universities’ exchange agreement. He is a man of strong will and opinions. What is revealing to me about his story is that after a lifetime of outspokenness, the topic that clipped his wings, officially at least, was corruption.
A FEW STORIES ABOUT GARBAGE
Havana is a city of unfinished works, of the feeble, the asymmetrical and the abandoned. Since the time we were kids, we’ve been coming across tenement houses daily where cans are piling up and the garbage is becoming increasingly more worldly and diverse.
Alejo Carpentier, 1939
These lines, from one of Cuba’s best-known novelists, penned in 1939, caught my eye in 2014. They are quoted in a book about Havana’s history and architecture, written by a team of Cuban-and US-based architects and urban planners.30 I happened to reread the book recently, preparing to teach it, as I was witnessing some of the “worldly and diverse” garbage of La Nueva Cuba. I had been sitting on a Vedado balcony visiting a friend when I saw a crowd gathered on the street below, peering into the collective garbage container on the street. In Havana, you take your garbage from your house into the street and place it in large plastic or metal bins that sit on most street corners. It is not uncommon to see people rifle through the garbage bins. Usually they are tin collectors looking for cans they bang flat and recycle. Actually, beyond reggaetón or hip hop, the real soundtrack to Havana is the sound of metal cans being repeatedly hit by a hammer. The tin collectors have to practically enter the bins to search because no one separates garbage from recycling in Havana. I saw my first and only public recycling bin in Plaza Vieja in Old Havana in June 2015, which seemed to be obvious window-dressing for the increasing presence of foreign tourists in La Nueva Cuba. In fact, several years ago when a friend noticed I was keeping cans and garbage separate in my apartment, she laughed at me and called me a “true patriot of the revolution,” which for her was sort of an insult, like I was sucking up to the state by recycling. (Actually, I was thinking about trying to help the tin collector avoid a dip in the dumpster.)
The crowd I saw around the garbage bins in Vedado that day were not looking for discarded cans of Bucanero beer or Tukola; they had something more impressive in mind. In this neighbourhood there are several high-end stores that sell sporting goods and equipment. Clearly they had received a new shipment, because the bins were overflowing with plastic bubble wrap and oversized pieces of sturdy cardboard. Within minutes, a dozen people had swarmed the bin, grabbing up all the useful, worldly garbage they could get their hands on.
The only recycling bin in Havana: “Recycle for a better life”
Plaza Vieja, 2015
I think this was the same visit on which I noticed that something was not quite right with the bins. Usually trucks come by every couple of days to empty them. Occasionally, when the bins fill up, garbage starts to overflow or people place their full plastic bags outside the bins, but that doesn’t usually last too long. I started noticing around the neighbourhood that more and more bins were fuller and fuller for longer periods of time. I mentioned it to a neighbour who shrugged and said: “There’s more stuff. There’s more garbage.” There’s definitely more stuff in La Nueva Cuba, but there’s also less state — or at least a less functional state. In the fall of 2014, complaints about irregular garbage collection — some Havana neighbourhoods were waiting at least two weeks for truck pickups — finally resulted in state action. An investigation into the garbage problem revealed more corruption: fuel skimmed from trucks; payroll records faked; collection routes ignored; even uniforms were sometimes sold. Over sixty managers and employees were implicated.31 Meanwhile, the army and a handful of volunteers celebrated the anniversary of the revolution that year, on New Year’s Eve, by collecting mounting garbage from the streets of Central Havana.32
A few months after this, Arturo, who lives in the Havana neighbourhood of La Lisa, sent me a series of photos taken on his walk to the bus that gets him to work in Vedado. There in my e-mail inbox was a series of beautifully photographed images of garbage, piled on the street, no bin in sight. “And to make it worse, this is in front of a clinic,” Arturo wrote in the text of the e-mail. We are not in touch a great deal, Arturo and I — we are good colleagues and friends but he’s not a big e-mail correspondent between my visits. I think he was just fed up. Photographing the garbage, sending it almost randomly to his foreign friends, was his way of coping with his rage.
FOUR
CUBANS IN THE WORLD, THE WORLD IN CUBA
When Havana journalist and editor Xenia Reloba came to Canada in 2014 to speak to Queen’s University students in a communications studies classroom, she used an interesting phrase as a title for her presentation: “How we stay current in a country off-line.” The subject represented a remarkable feat of teaching, because it is so remote from the students’ experience. Yet she soon had the group — most of them toting cellphones and laptops worth more than a Cuban journalist earns in three years — listening in rapt attention. The various alternative communications strategies that Cubans use to connect with each other and with the world make for a compelling story.
According to its national stereotype, Cuba is a land of long-winded chatterboxes. So it’s ironic indeed that its communications system is such a mess. The International Telecommunications Union is a United Nations agency that monitors communications issues globally. It measures national levels of connectedness, using telephone and Internet communications as yardsticks. The agency evaluates 166 countries, of which 42 comprise its lowest category. What it terms the “Least Connected Countries” parallel almost completely another commonly known category, the “Least Developed Countries,” and most of them are in Africa. Cuba is the only country in the Americas in the bottom section. In Cuba only 18 percent of the population use cellphones, and 3 percent have home Internet access. Cuba’s computer access rates are also low, with seven computers for every one hundred people — the lowest in the Americas. Yet, ironically enough, Cuba receives a great score for the price of its fixed telephone service. ETECSA, one of the few state-owned telecommunications monopolies in the world, offers Cubans the second-cheapest phone rates for land lines globally.1
Land line service is indeed inexpensive, pennies a month — and functions reasonably well, for those lucky enough to have home phones. The problem comes in entering the system, because telephone lines are the property of the resident. When you move, you take your line with you, or, if you no longer need it, you sell it separately. To connect a new line to the system, the wait can be interminable, and some parts of Havana — Cerro, for example — offer no new lines at all. It costs between $700 and $1,000 to buy a phone line on the black market.
Unlike most of the rest of the world, land line service is valuable because it is so much cheaper than cell rates. Cellphone rates are 35 cents (CUC) a minute for domestic calls; not exactly conducive to long chats. Texts cost 9 cents, which makes them the preferred method of communication, but here too people are extremely frugal. Over time I have learned that people rarely acknowledge or confirm text messages unless it is absolutely necessary, and no one engages in North American teenage back and forth text chatter — just the facts. Cuban texts are more like an old-style telegram than a conversation. Those without land lines visit friends’ homes to catch up on their phone calls, or they ring once to indicate their desire to talk. There’s a great scene in the film Habana Blues in which neighbours share a telephone by keeping it in a basket on a clothesline that sails between two apartments. Several of my Cerro friends pay their neighbours to share land line access. When I call Mirta, I am likely to hear the voice of her neighbour telling me sternly to “repita su llamada.” If it rings twice in a row, the call is for Mirta.
Similar ingenuity and entrepreneurship exists around Internet usage — as when, for example, Vivian sends and receives e-mail by opening the window to her shared internal courtyard and yelling at her neighbour who has a home computer. Other neighbourhoods have commoditized this system, creating self-styled home Internet cafés where they rent their connection to neighbours in ten-minute increments. It used to be that $20 could buy you a bootleg Internet connection with a limited monthly allotment. Infomed, the Internet system created for people who work in the medical system, was a popular black-market site. I know several people with Infomed accounts (none of whom had anything to do with the medical system), but these sites are tightly regulated and inspectors often crack down on phoney doctors with home Internet. There are also plenty of people who know how to hack Havana’s hotel wireless sites and sell a hotel’s access code for an hourly rate much cheaper than the six or eight dollars an hour that hotels charge their patrons. Antonio, a University of Havana student, explained how he and his friends bring their phones or laptops (the few who have them) to streets close to the big Havana hotels in order to maximize the signal strength. One of the hacker programs that opens the locked tourist Wi Fi is called “Your Freedom,” which echoes the name of a program that technologically overwrought North Americans can use to lock themselves out of Google or Facebook temporarily.
In 2014, ETECSA began offering a new service called Nauta, which provides limited Internet access via cellphones. A Nauta connection is cheap, only a couple of dollars, and e-mail messages cost one cent to send or receive. In July 2015, a number of WiFi hotspots opened in central locations in Havana. At a price of two dollars an hour, this is the cheapest way to navigate the Internet in the country. It is a fraction of hotel WiFi rates. Yet two dollars an hour is still almost a day’s pay for a state employee and the service itself is slow and frustrating. When ETECSA opened its cellphone Internet service, its already strained infrastructure groaned almost audibly under this new weight of users. Dannys, who works in the arts and has a number of international associates with whom she needs to maintain contact, told me that since Nauta was created, she does all her e-mail business before 6 a.m. Otherwise the lines are hopelessly clogged and she can’t log in. When it rains, cellphone service goes wonky. Even the more reliable land line service is susceptible to strange things. I couldn’t reach Ines for a few days. She finally explained that her land line service got scrambled after fierce rains hit the city and did something to the phone service, even though she lives miles away from where flooding had occurred. That was in May, over Mother’s Day, and a neighbour three blocks away kept trudging over to her place to convey the many Mother’s Day greetings she received from friends and family all over the world that were somehow ringing in on his line.
The entrepreneurship of the poor that is evident in the kiosk capitalism of Havana’s streets is obvious too in the rocky communications system. Revolico.com is an on-line classified advertisement system that was started by students at Havana’s polytechnic university. The Craig’s List or Kijiji of Cuba, it features everything from real estate to lawn chairs.2 In Canada, a group of Cuban immigrants, working with friends still on the island, began a website called “Havana Street View.” It is a creative alternative to Google Maps — which as a US enterprise obviously does not exist in Cuba.3
But the mother of all technologically disobedient Cuban initiatives has to be el Paquete Semanal. The US media have referred to “the weekly package” as “the Google of Cuba,” but I think the designation by Cuban intellectual Victor Fowler — “the Internet of the poor”— is more accurate.4 It’s a mix of Google, Netflix, TV, and Kijiji, delivered to your door on flash drives. Pamela, a Canadian I know, happened to be visiting Havana friends at their home when el Paquete arrived. “It’s like Christmas comes, weekly,” she told me. For a dollar or two, el Paquete provides the latest international TV shows, films, and sports events. Some versions include newspapers and magazines. The source is largely US programming, though Latin American material is also available. Every el Paquete also includes local classifieds, such as apartment listings and restaurant ads. Distributors go door to door and download the package onto home computers or TVs, or, for an additional fee, they leave the drive, returning a few days later with a new supply. According to one of the inventors of the system, recently the subject of a laudatory interview in Forbes magazine, el Paquete has been successful not only because it fills a great demand, but because it relies on the enthusiasm of distributors who make money from sales or rentals. Elio Hector Lopez, one of el Paquete’s founders, explained to Forbes that some distributors are making more money than el Paquete’s creators, because they have expanded their customer base like wildfire; which,
he says, is fine with him.5
All of this technological creativity can be fairly awesome to behold, but as with other kinds of entrepreneurship, it is always wise to keep the limitations in view. When individual cellphones first became available they were permitted for foreigners only. Cubans got around this, as they did in the old days when only foreigners could buy in tourist shops, by asking friends for help. During one visit in 2008, I drove with Aldo and Vanessa to the grandly named Miramar Trade Center one afternoon to line up at the ETECSA office and buy myself a cellphone line. I uttered not a word during the exchange. Vanessa and the ETECSA clerk, in plain view of an office full of waiting Cubans, negotiated the whole thing. I showed my passport, signed where necessary, and handed over the cash (which Vanessa had given me in the car). We laughed about the ridiculousness of the situation on the way home, but at one point Vanessa got serious. “Look,” she said, “they put all this money into educating us so well, and then they treat us like children. How crazy is that?” I continue to watch my Canadian students consider how they might survive as students with the 150-megabyte monthly Internet allowance that their Cuban counterparts receive at the University of Havana. An hour on Facebook alone might swallow up almost a quarter of that. I observe Cuban colleagues when visiting Canada soak up the high-speed WiFi at my house or university office with the same intensity that Canadians soak up the Cuban sun in February. I see Cubans in Canada trying to stay in touch with their loved ones on the island with no Skype, little e-mail, and phone calls that can run two dollars a minute. Vanessa is correct: All of the education has led to a tremendous level of inventiveness, but it’s not solely technological. It relies on relationships and community. Imagine where else this ingenuity could go.