The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  German Catholic missionaries are also active. They use as their headquarters an otherwise empty lot in the center of Kaliningrad where a priest and a dozen lay volunteers live in a few large metal boxes and prefabricated huts. Hans Schmidt, a layman from Wuppertal in West Germany, told me that they do social work in the city’s hospitals. Several times a week they hold services in the villages and hear confessions in three languages, Russian, Lithuanian, and German. Tens of thousands of Russians who are ethnically German live in Kaliningrad, he said. More were arriving daily from Kazakhstan, where they had been deported from their historic villages on the Volga River by Stalin during the war. They hope that Kaliningrad will soon be restored to Germany or become an autonomous region.

  “We are here to reconcile Germans and Russians through Jesus Christ,” said Mr. Schmidt. “If the industry of the Germans doesn’t make them arrogant and if the Russians’ naiveté—they are like children—doesn’t lead them into mistakes, the love of God will cause the establishment here of an independent state. It will be modeled on the ancient Order of Teutonic Knights—not because the Knights were German but because, like us now, they spread the word of God in the pagan darkness of Königsberg.”

  The new magic words in Kaliningrad are Königsberg and Immanuel Kant. There are recurring calls for a referendum on going back to the city’s former name. “We are all of us Kant’s Landsmänner,” Ivanov said. He spoke Russian through a translator but he used the word Landsmänner in German. One of the first things a tourist sees upon landing at Kaliningrad’s newly opened international airport is a big sign “Welcome to Kant’s City.”2 At the tomb outside the ruined cathedral Kant is now venerated as a local saint. Newlywed couples go directly from the municipal Marriage Palace to the tomb to pose for photographs. (In the past, the preferred site had been the bust of Karl Marx in a nearby park.) A new monument to Kant, the copy of an original that was demolished after the war, was solemnly inaugurated last summer in the former Paradeplatz by the heads of the city and regional government and a plane-load of distinguished West Germans. There was some talk of renaming the city Kantgrad and I saw a T-shirt inscribed “I Kant.” Königsberg and Kant are, of course, also code names for German money. German power, German influence; Yeltsin’s conservative opponents in the city, many of them Russian nationalists, know this. That is why N.A. Medvedev, the university rector, who says he sided with the instigators of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, is against Kantgrad as a possible new name. “It’s not pleasant to the ear,” he says. Medvedev prefers a Slavic name that does not hark back to the German past, perhaps Baltijsk.

  “Young people here don’t know who they are,” said Yuri Zabugin, the architect and a native of the city. “Or they want to be someone else. So would you,” he told me, “if you had grown up under communism in this awful place.” Zabugin is restoring old churches in the city with German money. He is also the curator of an exhibition on the history of Königsberg-Kaliningrad in the local museum. Put together by local arts and crafts students, it is the first independently conceived show in a museum that used to specialize in glorifying the Soviet petroleum or shoe industry. Its title is simply the number “236000,” the city’s zip-code. “It defines the city’s existence,” said Zabugin. In the catalog he described the city as a “spot on the map. Its historical name is not forgotten nor is it still valid. The new name is irrelevant and immaterial.… Who are we?”

  The regional Kaliningrad government issues warnings that Russia’s sovereignty over Kaliningrad must not be questioned, but it is leading the efforts to form cultural and economic links with Germany. It wants Germany to open a consulate and a Goethe Institute in Kaliningrad, and is soliciting German public and private funds to finance industries, tourism, mining, and transportation. It has turned, among others, to Friedrich Christians, the chairman of the powerful Deutsche Bank and the most prominent German financier currently negotiating with the Kaliningrad authorities. A German diplomat in Bonn jokingly calls Christians the Heimweh-banker. Christians’s connections with Königsberg go back to 1945 when, as a young German soldier, he saw the Red Army’s final assault on the city. If Königsberg is rebuilt, he said recently, it “would no longer be a monument to cruel destruction. Rebuilt, it will reflect the hope for peace and reconciliation in Europe.”

  Mr. Christians has also put forward the idea of making Kaliningrad a free economic zone between East and West, a European Hong Kong or Singapore. The Russian Federation parliament has approved the idea in principle, but arrangements for abolishing customs duties remain to be worked out. The conservative bureaucracy opposes the scheme and the conservatives make up a majority in the regional Kaliningrad parliament. Some of them accuse Vladimir Matutshkin, the head of the regional administration who favors a free-trade zone, of being a “German agent.” One of them told a local journalist recently: “If we are not careful we’ll soon be governed by old SS men and Japanese samurai.” The police chief, Viktor Shoshnikov, recently published an article in Kaliningradskaya Pravda claiming that the free-trade zone would only bring in more criminals and drugs.

  The military, on the other hand, favors the free-trade zone, since, as Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, the officer commanding the Russian fleet in the Baltic, told me, “the free-trade zone will supply good jobs for retired officers.” Few joint ventures with foreigners have been agreed upon. The most serious so far is the rebuilding of Hitler’s old Autobahn connecting Königsberg with Berlin. (The Poles are unhappy about this project. Work has begun so far only north of the Polish border.) On the day I met the admiral, ceremonies were taking place on Russian ships in the Baltic celebrating the reintroduction of the old tsarist banner as the official flag of the Russian navy. “Everyone in Kaliningrad is looking forward to the free-trade zone,” the admiral said. “Everyone looks forward to big bizness.”

  —May 13, 1993

  1 Until 1918 the castle was one of the Kaiser’s official residences. Wilhelm II is said to have stayed in it more than fifty times. In an often quoted speech he delivered there on May 5, 1902, he referred to the Marienburg as Germany’s “old bastion in the East … a monument that testifies to Germany’s task [there]: Once again Polish insolence offends Germany and I am constrained to call upon the nation to safeguard its national inheritance.” Quoted in Der Letzte Kaiser, catalog of an exhibition at the Historical Museum, Berlin (Berlin: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1991), p. 314.

  2. Another philosopher from a local family was Hannah Arendt, who grew up in Königsberg. No one I talked to had heard of her, including Vitaly V. Shipov, mayor of Kaliningrad, and Yuri Ivanov.

  16

  Love and Misery in Cuba

  Alma Guillermoprieto

  So much hope was invested in Cuba, by people all over the world. Cuba was the romantic face of revolution. Handsome men in battle fatigues had fought against decadent despots who had turned their poor country into a giant brothel for rich capitalist gringos. They fought successfully and chased the despots out. And they promised self-respect, dignity, equality. They did not promise instant riches, but even a poor man can have his dignity.

  But they turned out to be despots too, who chose to forget that there can be no self-respect without democratic rights. And when the money ran out with the collapse of their Soviet patrons, Cubans were forced to fall back on the old ways that once helped to spark the revolution. Once more Cuba is becoming a giant brothel, for tourists from richer countries who can afford to live like kings for a week.

  And so the old promises have been betrayed. The best people have been silenced, or rot in jails. And women sell their bodies for a bowl of rice and beans.

  —I.B.

  FOR MANY OF the long years that the Revolution has been in power in Cuba much of it was off-limits to the potentially unfriendly gaze. Not only were all sorts of facts and procedures kept secret; all foreigners were barred from access to large portions of Cuba’s territory and even Cubans were told where they could travel, and therefore where they could look. Th
e reason stated for so much secrecy was the imperative of the cold war, but another reason was not given, and perhaps those who established the limits never formulated it clearly to themselves—it was simply understood that the way the Revolution was seen was critical to its survival. Its failures were hardly a secret but it was important that they not be visible.

  So it comes as a double shock to arrive in Cuba as a tourist and see so much of it open to one’s foreign stare, and to see also how brutal in many cases the new stare of the foreign visitor is. On a tour bus, the modest and articulate young woman who is our guide attempts to explain the currency system, but she is interrupted by a hefty middleaged Mexican of some means who has been looking frankly at her body. “You’re very good-looking, Cubanita,” he says. “I like your hair.” She thanks him less than graciously for the compliment, but he is unfazed. He makes a few comments about the pitiful state of the economy, and a short while later interrupts again. “Where can we see some table-dancing?” he wants to know.

  Airports and airplanes, natural collection points for foreigners, are in other parts of the world centers of regimented behavior: no smoking, fasten your seat belts, step up to the counter. At the brand new international departures lounge in Havana these rules don’t hold: hundreds of young men on charter tours—Mexican, Italian, and Spanish, on this occasion—sprawl on the floor, spill beer on the just-polished marble and throw the cans at each other, boast openly about their diminished supply of condoms after an Easter weekend sex holiday in sunny Havana, and blow cigar smoke in the face of the women at the check-in counter.

  In the old days guerrilla apprentices from Brazil and Uruguay and El Salvador came here and treated each brick laid by the Revolution with reverence, and nevertheless were kept within strict boundaries during their stay. With an ordinary tourist visa provided with any charter tour package, however, the new type of foreigner can rent a car or buy a domestic plane ticket and travel just about anywhere he pleases in Cuba. On a decrepit plane that miraculously survives its daily run from Havana to Santiago and back, two Italians join the other tourists and Cubans who have already fastened their seat belts. They are late, it would seem, because they are less than coherent, or more than a little drunk. Convulsed with giggles, they make their way up the aisle, and then one of them decides that the jokey thing to do is to sit himself heavily in the lap of another traveler—a Cuban. “I’m sorry,” the Italian slurs in deliberate English. He does not look at all repentant, and his friend is howling with laughter. Gently, the stewardess tugs the offender away from his victim and pushes him toward an empty seat.

  To say that Cuba has opened itself up to tourism in this context has connotations that are unfortunately true: the island has become an established part of the world sex tour circuit. Of all the ways the Revolution could have looked for emergency money following the collapse of the Soviet Union, none was less predictable than this, and not only because the eradication of prostitution was one of Cuban socialism’s proudest achievements—in the rhetoric, at least. Personified by Fidel Castro, the Revolution has craved nothing so much as respect, but prostitutes, who have given up the right to choose who they are possessed by, are generally not respected. They can be stared at by anyone, as if the stare itself were the equivalent of sexual commerce. Indeed, in Latin cultures the way a man looks at a woman—or at another man, for that matter—can be cause for conflict. A penetrating stare in the wrong direction may lead a man to feel that he needs to defend his honor. And yet in Cuba the brazen stare has replaced the old obsession with the respectful gaze.

  Although there does not appear to be any official reference to the phenomenon in any government speech to date, the decision to tolerate, and even encourage, prostitution appears to have been deliberate. After all, once it was decided that only tourism could provide the emergency currency needed to keep the country afloat, how could Havana hope to compete with the likes of Martinique, Santo Domingo, Curaçao, or Cancún? Not on the basis of its shabby hotels, limited food supply, and terrible flight connections, certainly.

  Five dollars, the young Mexicans standing with me at the departure line boast at the end of their sexual holiday, was enough to buy “a spectacular mulata” for the evening. They are happy. So was the businessman who checked in to my hotel on the same day I arrived. I had come to see what had changed in Cuba in the wake of John Paul II’s January visit—how the euphoria of those days had carried over into everyday life during the Easter holidays.1 Soon I was trying to solve the problems of my room—a fog of mosquitoes, the fact that if the windows were kept closed nothing could be seen of the outdoors, because for incomprehensible reasons the glazing had been varnished black—but the businessman had other concerns. Less than an hour after our joint arrival, I stepped into the hotel elevator and ran into him again. He had changed into tropical gear, and was now in the company of a woman who could, indeed, only be described as spectacular: lithe, with skin the color of bitter chocolate, and dressed only in high heels and an electric-blue bodystocking.

  Later that evening I saw him escorting the electric-blue woman and another marvelously beautiful woman into a taxi. The following morning he appeared at breakfast and rose to greet a different woman altogether. That evening he had changed partners again. The last time I saw him the woman in the bodystocking was back. He looked throughout earnest and busy, like someone with many important appointments to fit into an already crowded schedule.

  At Twenty-third and Linea, Havana’s central crossroads, young girls gathered from early in the morning in front of the Habana Libre hotel, dressed and painted for display. Passing them, I tried to convince myself that they were over sixteen. I was on the way to a weekly conference for foreign journalists that is held nearby, and I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be no attempt to zone prostitution, to restrict it to certain types of hotels or certain neighborhoods or otherwise hide it from view.

  The press conference, attended by some fifty journalists, was different. There, nothing could be shown, no information could be revealed. To give the press officials credit, they seemed utterly relaxed about the fact that I was there as a reporter without the right kind of visa, and that, as I told them, I planned to look at what had become of the dissidents who were released from jail in February, following an appeal by the Pope. They were willing to let me look, but providing straightforward answers to the questions put to them by the gathered press corps was a different matter.

  Was it true that a certain aged Colombian guerrilla leader had died not in Colombia last February, as was initially stated, but in a hospital in Havana, as a guerrilla defector was now claiming? The answer, compounded of careful evasions, was not even an explicit denial. Was it true that an important promoter of US investment on the island has been denied a visa? Again, the circumlocutions made nothing clear. The session ended without a sentence of real information being exchanged. The day’s issue of Granma, the official newspaper, was again a model of obfuscation. None of the topics raised in the press conference were covered in the day’s stories.

  It is hard to understand just who is being protected by this censorship. True revolutionaries have presumably had time throughout these nearly forty years to develop an immunity to counterrevolutionary versions of the truth. The regime may have thought that it should protect from foreign influences the poor Cubans it described as “lumpen” and “scum” because they refused to accept revolutionary austerity. But as it happens, this is the group of people now most heavily engaged in prostitution and related black-market activities. They are, therefore, the very Cubans who are most in contact with the new type of foreigners, and who have the greatest access to the foreigners’ contrasting versions of reality. Because they are also likely to be the significant breadwinners in some of the poorest Cuban households, their influence is probably great. And because these households are so poor, the effect of their commerce with foreigners is likely to be subversive. Under these circumstances the distinction between what the governmen
t does not wish to see and what it does not want others to look at seems, at the very least, arbitrary.

  Perhaps it is nothing more than fear of the foreign gaze that is behind Cuba’s perceived need to fill its jails with dissidents. Many who were in past years allowed to voice their unfavorable opinion of the socialist regime and wander the streets unsupervised were hustled into prison once they shared these opinions with a foreign journalist. Elisardo Sánchez, for example, founder of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, spent two and a half years in prison after talking to Julia Preston, then a reporter with the Washington Post. Sánchez claimed that the relatives of prisoners who were executed in a notorious military trial in 1989 were not allowed to take the bodies home for burial. That the government brief against Sánchez virtually admitted this fact did not affect Sánchez’s four-year sentence. José Angel Carrasco, founder of a movement whose acronym, AMOR, reveals a certain wistful romanticism rather than any violent impulse to take up arms against Fidel Castro, was sentenced to seven years after he gave an interview to Le Monde’s Bertrand de la Grange. (De la Grange was subsequently beaten and arrested before he left the island.)

  One of the most striking cases is that of Dessi Mendoza Rivero, a doctor in Santiago, capital of Oriente province, who founded the College of Independent Physicians in 1994. Over the next three years he was called in regularly to the local State Security offices for questioning and scolding, and often spent a night in jail for good measure, but it was not until June of last year that he was arrested and charged with the crime of “enemy propaganda.” The previous month he had held a few phone conversations with an assortment of foreign correspondents based in Havana. His statements were, if anything, moderate and cautious. Despite the best efforts of the government health authorities, he said, an epidemic of dengue fever was devastating his city. The first outbreak of the epidemic had been detected in January, and by May Dr. Mendoza’s estimate was that between fifteen and thirty people had died. In addition, he thought that thousands of santiagueros had already been affected by the virus, which can turn lethal if the patient has suffered from dengue before or is undernourished or otherwise immune-deficient.