Cuba beyond the Beach

by Karen Dubinsky

  All this made the announcement of US/Cuban rapprochement that day even more of a surprise. I heard about what was unfolding as I was heading to the Miramar offices of CARE Canada, one of the few Canadian NGOS in Cuba. I had an appointment with Christina Polzot, their dynamic director in Cuba whom I had met briefly before. I wanted to invite her to speak to our students when we were next in Havana. As I approached their office, my cellphone rang. I saw it was Emilia calling, which was strange for several reasons. I was staying with her and had seen her at breakfast a couple of hours ago. And Cubans text, they rarely call, due to the crazy phone rates. I answered and her first words were, “Did you hear the news?” My first thought was “Fidel died,” which was immediately followed by, “No, Emilia sounds happy. She probably would not sound so thrilled to announce someone’s death.” Of course, she was calling to tell me that Cuba and the US were swapping political prisoners — Allan Gross, the American, for the so-called Cuban Five (who were now four as one had already been released) — and that Barack Obama and Raúl Castro were scheduled to make speeches shortly. I said something like, “Wow, this might be it,” and Emilia agreed, though I now wonder what we thought “it” was exactly.

  I continued to the CARE office and spoke to Christina. Our meeting was punctuated, however, by the constant sound of our cellphones receiving messages from friends in Canada and in Cuba about the unfolding events. Christina’s husband, Stephen Wickery, is a Canadian journalist who was extremely plugged in to the significance of the day. After my meeting, I continued with my day, which included a visit to a nearby Miramar shopping complex in search of a reading lamp for Emilia’s apartment. I spent the rest of the morning watching habaneros watch the news. The little furniture store I had been directed to in search of lamps (successfully, as it turned out) set up a TV and a few people were watching, but fewer than I would have expected. There was more going on in the bakery next door, where a radio was announcing Raul’s imminent speech and everyone was speaking happily about the release of the Five. Later that day I dropped by Casa de Las Américas, a venerable cultural centre housed in a beautiful Art Deco building at the foot of calle G, overlooking the Malecón. As I’d expected, it was abuzz. TV sets were set up everywhere and everyone was watching. My friends who work there greeted me with hugs and jokes. Gerardo held high his iPad — a prized possession, a gift from a US university colleague. “WiFi on the P1,” he declared, referencing a crowded popular bus route. The best Canadian translation for this fantasy scenario might be something like, “Free cocktails on the Spadina bus.”

  The pattern I saw that day was a mix of optimism and irony, sarcasm and good faith. Ines told me she heard people in her market that afternoon yelling out, “OK, where is the American rice?” As luck would have it, December 17, 2014, fell on a Wednesday, Interactivo’s day to perform at el Brecht. So, late that night I gathered there with a group of Cuban and visiting Canadian friends. The Havana Jazz Festival was on and the place was packed. At the table beside us, a group of English speakers, a jazz ensemble from Chicago, started asking us questions about what to expect from Interactivo. Of course, the conversation turned to the announcement that day. “Is this Obama building a legacy?” I asked one of them. “I think it’s Obama doing what we fucking elected him to do in the first place,” he replied. Then the music started up, and the flamboyant Francis del Rio came on stage with new lyrics to an old song:

  Ay Obama, Ay, Obama, vuélvete loco y ven pa’ La Habana.

  Hey Obama, drive yourself crazy, come to Havana.

  It was indeed a great day in Havana. I think the happiest person I spoke to that day was Emilia, a middle-aged woman who trained as an engineer in the Soviet Union — a member of the last Cuban generation to do that. She now works in a Havana clinic. She is a smart, well-educated professional. Some years ago she got to know people from the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA), a Washington-based NGO that lobbies for better relations between the US and Cuba. As part of its campaign to get the US government to lift the travel ban and the blockade, the centre basically tries to humanize Cuba for Americans raised on decades of Cold War fear-mongering. It regularly brings delegations of US opinion-makers such as Congress people and journalists to Havana to meet with a wide assortment of people. These visitors meet Havana luminaries such as Carlos Varela, who has for years welcomed a wide swath of American visitors: school children, musicians, and politicians alike. But the CDA also facilitates meetings with “ordinary Cubans” and that is where Emilia comes in. She’s become the poster child to show Americans that Cubans do not have horns. For several years, she has received regular invitations from the CDA to events that bring Cubans and visiting Americans together. Sometimes she e-mails me first to give me the list of Congress people whom she is going to meet. I look them up and jokingly recommend those she should avoid and those she should sit next to.

  Emilia is the very definition of the active, informed citizen. She cares passionately about her country but is not superficially ideological, and no doubt that’s why she keeps getting invited for dinner. A couple of years ago she contacted me with exciting news: instead of bringing Americans to Havana, CDA had invited a number of Cubans to visit Washington for a conference, and she was on the guest list. In order to show off the entrepreneurial spirit of La Nueva Cuba to skeptical Americans, they mostly invited cuentapropistas, such as the owners of one of Havana’s thriving, high-end restaurants and another who owns a car rental company. Emilia was the only state employee to be invited, of which she and her family were extremely proud. It was her first time in the US, and she was especially excited about a tiny window of opportunity afforded by this invitation. Her travel arrangements permitted her one free day before the conference started, and she wanted to spend it in New York, the city in the world she most wanted to visit. So, one grey November Saturday, Susan Lord and I raced from Kingston to Syracuse, New York, jumped on a train to Manhattan, and spent twenty-seven hours with Emilia in New York City. You can see a surprising amount of New York in twenty-seven hours, and every time we glimpsed an iconic American sight, Emilia peered, looked around, and declared, “I don’t see the enemy. Where is the enemy?”

  In academic work on foreign policy and international relations, there is a new recognition of what some call “foreign policy from below.” Relationships between countries are not made solely by men in business suits who conduct trade relations, declare war or peace, or open embassies. The activities of NGOs like the Center for Democracy in the Americas, and the enthusiastic willingness of people like Emilia or Carlos Varela to be active popular ambassadors, representing not their state but their families, neighbourhoods, and friends, are, I think, where foreign policy is really made. Emilia is no fool and like almost every Cuban I have spoken with, she is skeptical and anxious about what the new relationships with the US will yield. But she is also extremely happy to see her country finally emerge from the Cold War.

  A year or so after our whirlwind trip to New York, I was in an IKEA store in Canada and happened to see a huge, framed, black and white photograph, a bird’s eye view of Manhattan in the 1960s. I knew just the wall for it, Emilia’s apartment on calle Línea. But it took at least six months for me to imagine how I might transport it. It was a more formidable project than even a whole salmon had been. Finally I bought it, and brought it, along with thirty students, on my next Havana trip. It didn’t fit on the conveyer belt of the scanner at Pearson airport in Toronto, it almost didn’t fit on the airplane, and Havana customs agents looked at me like I was insane when I told them it was simply a photograph, not a huge flat screen TV (which it resembled). But they waved me through and, later that night after the students were settled in the hotel, Susan Lord and Emilia and I made our way down the hill on calle Paseo toward Línea, a little tipsy and laughing like idiots, carrying a huge oversize picture of Manhattan to a Havana apartment.

  CONCLUSION

  TODO SERÁ DISTINTO? OUR UNCERTAIN FUTURES

  The Havana air
port is often a frustrating place, but August 31, 2015, was a low point. I arrived accompanied by Zaira’s mother, Maria Teresa, who was returning home from a month-long visit to Canada, her first time out of the country and thus her second time on a plane. As we flew, we skirted around Hurricane Erika, which happily had decided to become Tropical Storm Erika. A nicer version to be sure, but it was a very turbulent flight, which Maria Teresa slept through as I controlled my breathing. As we entered Havana’s José Martí airport, already four hours late, it was clear that the bumpy ride was going to continue. It was stiflingly hot. The place overflowed with passengers waiting to claim their luggage. Two huge airplanes full of people were ahead of us, the luggage carousels were immobile, and the waiting passengers looked like zombies. They had obviously been there for a while.

  So we settled in. The place came alive about half an hour later as the carousels started up and began their rotation. The deplaned Iberia passengers cheered as though they were watching the winning goal in a World Cup. That woke everyone up a bit, even those of us who were far behind in the queue. Having arrived at this airport many times, I knew their tricks. Sometimes the luggage appeared as rapidly as one might hope for; other times suitcases trickled in as though from a bad faucet, drop by drop. It seemed pretty clear which phase they were in that night. One carousel would chug forward, another would suddenly stop, and on it went. I tried to amuse myself by people-watching, and was suddenly rewarded for this by the sight of Leonardo Padura among the crowd waiting for the Iberia luggage. Padura is Cuba’s foremost novelist, the winner of national and international awards (most recently Spain’s Asturias award). Oria, one of my Spanish teachers, had assigned me some of his writing as homework, in order to educate me about literary (rather than street) Spanish. This was a good sighting. He was just as tired and zombie-looking as the rest of us. I pointed him out to Maria Teresa, I exchanged funny texts with friends in Canada, and we all went back to waiting. Thirty minutes later, another tired passenger caught my eye. Could this be Descemer Bueno, Cuba’s superstar singer and composer? He’s a handsome man, whose signature is a fedora, a look that’s easy to imitate. Even though I’ve seen him perform and have all his CDs, I decided it had to be a look-alike. No one was paying him attention and my head was still running on North American cultural time; superstars don’t wait, unrecognized, for hours in inefficient airports for their luggage. I continued to watch as Leonardo Padura approached Descemer Bueno. They recognized each other and embraced. Finally Descemer’s luggage trickled out to the carousel, a pilot shook his hand, a few others smiled at him, and off he went. An hour later, so did I, frustrated but still marvelling at this moment of Cuba at its best and worst. One can buy oneself out of many everyday problems in Havana. But sometimes, when things screw up, as they still do very regularly, they screw up for everyone, literary and music stars alike.

  As Americans and Canadians — along with a good part of the rest of the world — discuss the possible end of the US blockade and travel ban, Cubans too are trying to wrap their mind around the impact of a potential flood of visitors. Mario Coyula, one of the country’s foremost historians of architecture and the author of one of the books I use to teach Canadian students about Havana’s history, was recently the subject of a lengthy Al Jazeera interview in which he expressed his grave reservations about how the city could cope with an influx of mass tourism. As someone who has dedicated his professional life to the study of Havana’s architecture, Coyula has palpable and understandable fears about the devastation that more tourism to the city could cause.1 The widely cited statistic offered by Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism is that post-US travel ban, Cuba’s tourist intake will more than double, from two million to over four million people. That’s a lot of suitcases trickling out one at a time.

  Yet, after the initial enthusiasm of December 17, 2014, I’d say Cubans have other things on their minds. More than the July 2015 visit of John Kerry to officially open the US embassy, more than the potential lifting of the US blockade and travel ban, what my friends are talking about these days is the weather. Every month of 2015 except one was record-breaking. The heat in Havana in the summer is legendary. Now, summer heat starts in April or May and continues until at least September. In 2015, Cuba, along with the rest of the Caribbean, suffered a drought. Agricultural production was damaged and at least a million Cubans were relying on trucked-in water for their daily intake. Cuba’s National Institute of Water Resources embarked on a public campaign for conservation measures, but the problem is also in the infrastructure. Figures vary but clearly at least some of the problem of scant water in Cuban reservoirs is because of leakage, which matters a lot more when there’s no rain.2 In the winter, the rains now come in intense downpours, causing extensive flooding in Havana and doing little to alleviate the effects of drought in the countryside.

  Uruguayan journalist Fernando Ravsburg was for many years the BBC’s Cuban correspondent. He still lives in Havana and publishes a regular blog. To my mind he’s well-informed, fair-minded, and always worth paying attention to. Like many people on the island, he is trying to put the brakes on wild-eyed predictions of prosperity and plenty that improved relations with the US might produce. Cuba, he says, has gone through two systems, capitalism and socialism, “and has failed at both.” Capitalism created wealth in Cuba, but did so “on the basis of brutal inequality,” particularly in the countryside. That socialism, too, failed to provide economic prosperity for all is perhaps less a message about the intrinsic goodness or badness of either economic system in the abstract and more an indication that political slogans or labels don’t an economy make.3

  Carlos Varela’s ability to put the complexities of economics and politics into poetry helps make sense of Cuba’s history, but it also helps me think about the future. “Todo Será Distinto” (Everything will be different) was recorded in 2009 but expresses the conundrum of post-December 17, 2014 Cuba:

  Maybe tomorrow the sun will come out

  And everything will be different

  The sad thing is that then

  We won’t be the same.

  Those who declare their intentions to visit Cuba now, “before the Americans wreck it,” need to take heed of the economic changes that have been occurring in the country for over a decade. American capitalism is hardly the only game in town. Cubans clearly want improvements in many aspects of their lives, above all in their living standards. But what kind of subtle changes in the culture and daily life of Havana are coming? What will become of the city’s sense of community and sense of humour, its self-reliance, self-respect, safety, and openness? Its soundtrack? Or the small, everyday acts of generosity, community, and reciprocity that I have come to love. Are these products of socialism, sociolismo, or something else? Are these deeply embedded in the culture of daily life, or will they be tossed aside with a “renovated” economic system? The bank I usually go to in Vedado at Linea and Paseo recently installed a screen that counts down numbers for waiting customers. This replaces the person-to-person ultimo system, the grassroots line-up that functions for pizza and buses and everything else. The screen-numbering system is modern, efficient, and understandable to everyone, foreigner and Cuban alike. And no one has to talk to anyone.

  During a recent visit, Lidice, the mother of two young girls, quizzed me about how my teenage son uses the Internet. She wasn’t engaging in Communist paranoia about the tricks of el enemigo. She’s a highly educated scientist who has studied abroad; she knows the riches the Internet offers. Her concerns were more about whether constant Internet access is isolating for Canadian kids. Does it keep them away from their friends? Does it contribute to or rupture social relations in the neighbourhood or in school? Do people with easy and fast access like me feel the need to control our children’s access?

  That same visit, the regular meeting of my gay Cerro trade union took place at my house. I prepared couscous that I had brought with me from Canada. I figured it would be considered by my friends to be an exotic
alternative to rice, which it was. Omar arrived with a small bag of potatoes for me. They weren’t meant as a contribution to dinner. It was more as one might bring a bottle of wine or flowers. He was also thanking me, I think, for the razors and Ibuprofen I brought for him. Potatoes — a prominent feature of the underground economy foreigners are invited into, furtively, in the markets — are a luxury. These days, the harvest has been better, so they are more available and affordable. But their status as a luxury, desired good remains, hence the multiple meanings of Omar’s gift. As an outsider — even an intimate one — Cuba’s future is not mine to shape. But I think I share the fears and the hopes, in equal measure, of my Cuban friends about what is going to come. I hope, at least, that Havana continues to be the kind of place where old friendships are cemented with potatoes.