Havana is like Pompeii, and Castro is its Vesuvius. The lava of his words has poured over the city continuously for thirty years, preserving it from any form of change except decay. This magnificent city, the pearl of centuries of exploitation, is an inhabited ruin; the inhabitants are like a wandering tribe that has found the deserted metropolis of a superior but dead civilisation and decided to make it home.
Fortunately, very little has been built since that day in January 1959 when the barbudos, the bearded ones, entered the city in triumph after the flight of the dictator Batista. The little that has been built is not attractive. The holiest of the country’s shrines is now the boat in which eighty-two rebels, seventy of whom were soon to die, made their way from Mexican exile back to Cuba to start the revolution. Granma, the boat, is encased in a brutally angular glass case, a giant modernist reliquary of the communist mausoleum school. The little park that surrounds it is filled with lesser relics: the red delivery van from which rebels attacked Batista in the National Palace in Havana on March 13th, 1957, a home-made tank painted the colours of the July 26th Movement (red and black, the same anarchist colours as the Sandinista movement), a grey American sedan from the early fifties, a single-engined naval aircraft: all preserved from vandalism or worse by soldiers who exhibit a strange mixture of Latin insouciance and military preparedness, casually leaning against trees and smoking on duty while keeping an eye out, weapons at the ready, for those who approach with grenades in their pockets.
Before the park stands a low stone plinth with an inextinguishable gas flame and an inscription: Eternal glory to…
To whom exactly? After a very short time in Havana, one suspects the inscription should read ‘Eternal glory to Me’, the Me in question being one of the greatest Mes of the twentieth century, the Me without whom nothing moves in Cuba. Three days after my arrival, with little to do in the evening, I turned on the television – Tele Rebelde, Rebel TV, which, as one might expect from its name, purveys only the strictest orthodoxy – and there he was, Me, Fidel Castro Ruz, speaking to a congress of scientific workers. He had not expected to be called to speak, he said, with all the bashfulness of a diva who finds herself with repeated curtain calls for the 974th time in her career. And of course, he hesitated to speak to so august an assembly of scientific workers about the theory and practice of science…
An hour and forty minutes later, I switched him off in mid-platitude, unable to tolerate a moment more. He was saying that once a new and superior scientific technique had been developed, it should be put into practice at once, that not a single moment, not a second, should be wasted, so that the technique’s maximum potential should be realised in the construction of socialism. The Maximum Leader was dressed in his Sierra Maestra kit, a little better pressed and tailored perhaps, but still recognisable as the garb of his youth. His hair and beard, however, had turned nearly white, and he was now as much Old Testament prophet as student revolutionary. The tablets he brought down from the mountain were carved jointly by Marx and Lenin and Helen Steiner Rice. Do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that... At first, curiosity kept my eyes glued to the screen. Here was an undeniably great man speaking, if greatness in a man is measured by the vicissitudes he had endured and the effects he has wrought on the world. Castro spoke of the montón de cosas – the great pile of things – the Revolution had done, especially in the field of health. A vaccine against meningitis had been developed in Cuba and AIDS was under control, unlike in a country not so very far away. All this the Revolution had done…
Well, it was certainly true that the people in Cuba looked healthy enough, especially the children, who were well-fed and well-clothed. According to the statistics, Cubans now had a similar life expectancy to that of western Europeans. Yet there was something disturbing about the way the Comandante en jefe stressed the health services in Cuba, even if all he said about them were true. It was not only in this speech but on all other possible occasions that he returned to the subject, so that one grew weary of hearing it, even in a very short time. Man does not live by antibiotics alone.
One sensed that concern for the physical wellbeing of Cubans was not the only motive of Castro’s peculiar emphasis on medicine (after all, his disregard for the value of individual human life is by now sufficiently well-documented). Rather, he was hammering home an important lesson: the Revolution brought you health services, and if the Revolution is overthrown there will be no health services, just as there were none before it. And in this lesson there is a subtext, as literary critics might put it; or a hidden agenda, as conspiracy theorists might say. Castro is telling his people that, just as Mrs Gargery brought up Pip, he has brought them up by hand, and it would therefore be an act of the grossest ingratitude on their part if they were in the slightest to rebel. But if they entrust their lives to him, he will take care of them, and they will be saved even from the jaws of death…
Opinions about Cuba and its social services have become so ideologised – thanks in no small measure to Castro’s style of politics – that is not only difficult to disentangle truth from fiction or wishful thinking, but even to decide what constitutes a relevant fact. Those who admire Castro stress only the universal literacy and life expectancy of Cubans, unique in Latin America or very nearly so, and the gross injustices that existed under Batista; those who detest Castro emphasise only the economic prosperity of Cuba before the revolution, the complete lack of political and artistic freedom after it, and the vast economic subventions from the Soviet Union necessary to produce such improvements as there have been. The mean between two extremes does not always yield the truth, for truth is a tyrant that respects no niceties; but in this case, the mean does seem to me to approximate the truth of the matter.
There was widespread illiteracy in Batista’s Cuba, but 77 per cent of the population was literate, a high percentage for Latin America at the time (and still not reached by many countries). This implies there were at least some schools functioning in Cuba in those dark days. But there is incontestable evidence also that malnourishment existed among children before the Revolution. Yet the life expectancy, which has since improved by thirteen years, was second in Latin America only to Argentina’s. And it is necessary to view these figures not statically, but dynamically. There is scarcely a country in Latin America in which such indicators of social welfare have not substantially improved since 1959.
Hence it is fair to say there have been social improvements under Castro’s rule; but it is impossible to assert they occurred exclusively because of it, or that they could not have occurred without it. And it seems to me that the only real, if still only partial, justification for his dictatorial methods would be if such methods, and they alone, were capable of producing the improvements claimed for them. Costa Rica proves this is not so.
After an hour of the Maximum Leader, I began to wonder how it was that no one in the audience protested against this inhuman prolixity. The people in the audience were intelligent and educated, they did not need to be told that two and two made four, they did not necessarily know less than he just because they had never fought as guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. But he continued to tug at his beard, pull his ear, pass his hand over his forehead, and otherwise break the rules of oratory, while delivering himself painfully, as in childbirth, of truisms. Thirty years of sycophantic audiences had rendered him incapable of concision, of saying anything in two words when a hundred would express the same thought. His fascination with his own personality was such that his merest whim was law for him. I began to wonder also how it was that in those thirty years he himself had not become bored with revolving around the same ideas, the same hatreds, the same hopes, in seemingly interminable speeches. If disillusionment ever set in, I thought, it would do so suddenly, and he would undergo a conversion experience (such a man could not live without certainty), taking everyone with him. He had spoken at length recently about religion, and referred with sympathy to the Jesuit teachers of his youth. I distracted myself by imagining the sage of the Sierra Maestra returning in old age to the Jesuits. His new humility, of course, would be inverted pride; he would not be honouring God, God would be honouring him.
At least I could turn the television off. An important foreign visitor I met in Havana, who was a member of a delegation that had not long before had lunch with Fidel, was not so fortunate. Fidel had spoken at the lunch for seven hours, almost without stopping. He had his generals and cabinet ministers, including his brother Raúl, Number Two in Cuba, around him, but the only time they spoke was while Fidel was actually chewing his food, which was not for long because he is ascetic and eats lightly.
This, of course, proves that a true revolutionary does not speak with his mouth full.
By all accounts, however, Castro was a worried man, and occasionally it showed in a gesture or a sigh. The changes in Eastern Europe were not at all to his taste, they presaged no good for his absolute power, and he had not yet worked out how to present these changes to his compatriots. A plot, perhaps, by Enemies of the People? But Enemies of the People should be relatively few, at most counted in thousands, not millions, and certainly not the overwhelming majority of the population as in Romania. The trouble was that Cubans were too well-informed to believe so outright a lie.
The example of Romania was particularly worrying, of course, because, like Cuba, it was a family affair. A Czechoslovak journalist had recently achieved the distinction of being the first journalist from a Warsaw Pact country to be expelled from Cuba, precisely for having drawn an analogy between the Lider Máximo and the Conducator. The comparison was not quite apt: I never detected in Cuba the burning, all-consuming hatred for Castro that I detected in Romania for Ceausescu, even among those who otherwise had no good to say of him. He was no mere apparatchik with a Lady Macbeth for a wife; he had made a revolution himself, he retained his credentials as a nationalist, and he was still able to appeal to the visceral anti-Yankee feeling of many Cubans. Still, the comparison with Ceausescu was uncomfortable enough to warrant the expulsion of the man who made it.
Nor was this all Castro had to worry about. With the change in the Soviet Union, the supply ships were not arriving with their accustomed regularity and food stores, never exactly a cornucopia, were running short. Before I left Cuba, the prices of eggs and bread, both rationed, were raised by 50 per cent. (It was over a quarter of a century since Cubans were told that food rationing was a temporary measure.) In Santiago, a man invited me to his home next day for lunch, only to cancel because he had been unable to procure extra rations for me to eat. We went instead to a restaurant for Cubans in Cayo Granma, just outside the city, where they served the meal that I ate in every restaurant outside Havana: cristianos y moros, Christians and Moors, rice and beans, with the identical, centrally planned meat stew as relish – no vegetables or salad.
Every time I was served this less than delicious meal I regarded myself as extremely fortunate, first I had been permitted to enter the restaurant at all and second that I was actually served with something to eat (by no means synonymous in these circumstances with sitting at a table – my Cuban companion of the moment always making it clear to the waiter or waitress that it would be less trouble for him or her to serve us than not to serve us, obstreperousness being the first rule of behaviour in such restaurants, where those who do not make themselves objectionable tend to go hungry, and a new evolutionary principal is at work, the survival of the rudest).
Cuba’s citrus crop was rotting in the orchards for lack of transport and foreign customers. The country’s biggest source of hard currency was crude oil sold at a concessionary rate by the Soviet Union, refined in Cuba and re-sold on the world market; and the Soviet Union had cut the supply of crude the previous year by as much as a half. And the sugar agreement with the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991. Although not easy to estimate, it was generally considered that the price the Soviets had been paying for Cuban sugar was well above the world price, sometimes five or six times above it (though they paid mostly in goods unsaleable elsewhere). When the time came to negotiate a new agreement, the Soviet Union – which still needed the sugar – was in a position to impose a much lower price. Altogether, the economic prospects for Cuba were not good.
Castro reacted to the crisis in his usual way. He is a man who, early, in his life, overcame so many overwhelming difficulties that he does not believe there is any problem in the world he cannot solve, any situation he cannot master. When the bodies of the Cuban soldiers killed in Angola during the performance of their ‘internationalist duty’ were brought back to Cuba, Castro used the occasion to attack the desertion of Eastern Europe from the ranks of the righteous:
They are not exactly talking of the anti-imperialist struggle or the principles of internationalism in the majority of these countries. The words are not even mentioned in the press. The concepts have been virtually rubbed out of the political dictionary. By contrast, the values of capitalism are regaining unusual strength in these societies… The systematic destruction of socialist values, the sapping carried on by imperialism, combined with the mistakes committed, have accelerated the process of destabilisation of the Eastern European socialist countries… Imperialism and the capitalist powers cannot hide their euphoria at the events. They are convinced, not without reason, that the socialist camp has now almost ceased to exist. In some of these countries of Eastern Europe they now have complete teams of advisers of the US President, programming capitalist development…
This was before the destruction of the Ceausescu regime. Since then, he has remained silent on the subject. Presumably he considered ‘the mistakes committed’ a sufficient explanation of why millions of people took to the streets of Bucharest and other cities and, unarmed, faced machine guns.
In the same speech, he gave an indirect warning to the Soviet Union (if they were not careful, he would withdraw his seal of approval from it):
Devastating wars, that cost millions of lives and the destruction of the immense majority of the accumulated means of production, were unleashed against the first socialist state. Like a phoenix, it had more than once to rise from the ashes and lend services to humanity such as the defeat of fascism and the decisive support to liberation movements of still colonised countries. They like to forget this today.
It is repugnant that many in the Soviet Union itself dedicate themselves to denying or destroying the historic feats and extraordinary merits of this heroic people. This is not the way to rectify and overcome the un-questionable mistakes committed in a revolution born in the bowels of tsarist authoritarianism, in an immense, poor and backward country…
Therefore we have not hesitated to prevent the circulation of certain Soviet publications which are loaded with poison against the Soviet Union itself and socialism. One perceives behind them the hand of imperialism, reaction and counter-revolution. Already some of these publications have begun to demand the end of the type of equitable and just commercial relations that have been created between the USSR and Cuba…
Thus the publication in the Soviet Union of the discoveries of mass graves containing fifty, a hundred, two hundred thousand corpses, all people shot behind the ear, meant nothing to the Comandante en jefe, the defender of the poor and humble of the world, except a slight ideological embarrassment. The now-acknowledged murder of twenty million people is for him nothing but an ‘unquestionable mistake’, a mistake for which he grants his absolution.
What is the solution to the crisis? His speech gives a clue:
It has been said that socialism must perfect itself. No one can be opposed to this principle, which is inherent in and of constant application to all human work. But is it…by abandoning the most elementary principles of Marxism Leninism that one can perfect socialism? Why have the so-called reforms to go in a capitalist direction? If these ideas had a revolutionary character, as some claim, why have they received the unanimous and fervent support of the leaders of imperialism?
Never in history would a truly revolutionary idea have received the enthusiastic support of the most powerful, aggressive and voracious empire humanity has known…
In practice, all of the above can be reduced to a single word, at least by those accustomed to sifting his speeches for their true meaning as a clairvoyant gazes into tea leaves. And that word is not one to bring comfort to the hearts of many Cubans: belt-tightening.
Belt-tightening! The belts already seemed tight enough to me. Walking through the streets of Old Havana I came across a notice which signified how few notches there were to go. It informed the inhabitants of the city block to which it was affixed how they should apply for beer which, like everything else, was in desperately short supply. It was available only for weddings and the fifteenth birthday celebrations of daughters, one bottle per guest; the applicant should present his residence certificate, his marriage or birth certificate, and various other documents, to the appropriate official. Even a visit to a ministry was called for.
Of course, turning the purchase of beer into a complex bureaucratic procedure has its political advantages. It infantilises people, makes them beholden to an authority which they dare not offend for fear of losing small privileges. To humiliate people in this way makes them docile, apathetic – at least for a time, until collectively they lose their temper. An economy of shortages is better suited to the purposes of totalitarianism than one of abundance. Perpetual queuing for the bare necessities of life is the best guarantee against subversion.
What else does one see walking through Havana? Nothing can equal the melancholy beauty of the Malecón, the magnificent road that sweeps along beside the sea. On one side the deep blue waves crash against the low sea wall, forming a fine white spume; on the other, grand buildings crumble slowly into dust. I peered into these vestiges of former prosperity: their marble halls are now partitioned into living spaces by plywood, so many square metres per family unit. The entrances to the buildings are dark and neglected; great cracks have appeared in the walls, the paint has turned black, the plaster has flaked away, the marble is chipped, the wood rotten. The buildings belong to everyone: that is to say, to no one.
It is admitted officially that half the population of Havana (that is, a tenth of the population of Cuba) lives in substandard housing. And standards are not high.
At one end of the Malecón, which was made for pleasure but is now deserted except for a few idlers who move in and out of shadows with saurian lethargy, there are still some advertisements left over from pre-revolutionary days, for movies – Vivien Leigh and David Niven – and for soft drinks. A single painted sign for Coca Cola adorns the walls on the corner of the Calle Cárcel. I wondered whether these signs remained by oversight or policy. Throughout the city one finds the names of corporations that once had businesses in Cuba: Westinghouse, National City Bank, Philips, Western Union. Even where the metal lettering has been removed from their former offices, the names have remained visibly imprinted on the concrete or the stone below, like an ineradicable scar. One day, one suspects, these businesses or their successors will reclaim their property.
The streets of Havana were utterly bereft of commercial activity. Occasionally a queue would form and ice cream was for sale – any colour you liked, so long as it was white. The only itinerant salesmen were hawking newspapers, principally Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Party which, despite its somewhat eccentric title, sets new standards in journalistic tedium. (The headlines on my first two days in Cuba were: The Future, the Economy and the Health of the Country Depend on Science, and, the following day, At This Moment Science Can Become a Decisive Factor for the Country.) Also on sale were the trade union newspaper Trabajadores (Workers), the official organ of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Bastion, and Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), a title stunning in its mendacity, since it competes with the other newspapers only in the abjectness of its sycophancy and conformity to the government line of the moment.
Such shops as there were possessed little stock; they were called only by the products they sold, or would have sold had there been any: Shoes, Fish, Stationery. Clothes shops had dummies from the fifties in their dusty windows, wearing the drabbest garments imaginable. Once more I found this extinction of the aesthetic impulse profoundly depressing.
To compensate for the lack of goods there was a wealth of exhortatory slogans. Noticeboards on every block reminded people of an organisation called SUERC – El Sistema Único de la Exploración de la Republica de Cuba. Despite its name, this is an organisation devoted not to geographical research but to civil defence, counter-espionage and internal repression. One reports to SUERC if one has encountered an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or a neighbour carrying a suspicious parcel. The officers of SUERC are ready to receive denunciations at any time of the day or night. It must be admitted, however, that the notices concerning SUERC are faded and do not carry conviction, rather like those next to them extolling Che Guevara and his ideas.
Fidel, of course, is frequently quoted on walls:
There is no type of force, either internal or external, and no difficulty objective or subjective, that will be able to prevent our victorious and definitive march to the future.
The same, I suppose, can be said for us all, until a physicist invents a method for halting time’s arrow.
But Fidel, Maximum Leader as he may be, is not quoted nearly so much as the Heroe Nacional, the National Hero, a title bestowed on José Martí, poet, journalist, intriguer, founder of the Partido Cubano Revolucionario and, best of all from the point of view of his reputation, martyr in the cause of Cuban independence from Spain. He wrote so prolifically until his death in 1895 that Cuban politicians of every stripe mine his works to prove that they are more martiano than the next man. A bust of Martí stands before every school in Cuba, next to the flag; innumerable streets and squares have been named after him: there is an institute devoted to the study of his life and works, or rather to proving that the present government stands in apostolic succession to him; stores otherwise denuded of goods have an endless supply of miniature busts of him; every bookshop has his complete works, as well as anthologies and booklets by him; his words are everywhere; one soon grows sick of him, or of the use to which he is put.
Indeed, one rapidly falls prey to an ambition to throw stones at every icon of the National Hero that one sees – a dangerous proceeding, for in Cuba it would be considered akin to blasphemy. Coming as I did from a society that derides political idolatry, the cult of Martí seemed to me alternately absurd and sinister. The Argentinian writer Alberdi wrote: ‘The War of Independence endowed us with a ridiculous and disgraceful mania for the heroic.’ This is even more true of Cuba than of Argentina. How I came to hate those little quotations everywhere: To create is to be victorious in the post office, where the clerks behind the counter moved resentfully as though struggling through glue; Men come in two types, those who love and construct and those who hate and destroy on the crumbling walls of dilapidated buildings; Art is life itself, art knows nothing of death in the entrance to an art gallery so little visited that it had the atmosphere of a morgue.
Poor Martí, to be used thus! He really was a poet, he really was a hero (he was sentenced to hard labour at sixteen), and yet the visitor to Cuba soon begins to feel as a force-fed foie gras goose must feel. The cult would be funny if its intent were not so manifestly to preclude rational thought and to keep minds in thrall to a few slogans and visceral emotions. When I returned to Havana from my tour of the island I stayed at the Hotel Inglaterra, a splendidly restored grand hotel in whose brilliantly tiled dining room the great poet Rubén Darío once dined. In the square before the hotel, among the palm trees, stood a statue of the National Hero. On the 137th anniversary of his birth in 1853 I watched children of five and six lay wreaths at the statue; some of them had been coached to make piping, grandiloquent speeches at the Hero’s feet while others stood to attention beside him, bursting with pride that they had been thus selected. I could not long bear to watch or listen. It seemed to me that to foster ardent nationalism, which always involves both self-adulation and hatred of others, in minds so young, at the behest of a far from disinterested government, was nothing short of criminal. The children were well fed and clothed, as all children are in Cuba; their faces were full of innocent happiness, and their minds were being filled with convenient hatred.
Meanwhile, facing the statue, a platform was being erected for a fiesta the following day. And in the colonnade next to the hotel, students were painting a vast hoarding, some twenty feet high and fifty long, to adorn the building. It quoted the National Hero himself: ‘My sling is that of David.’ There are no doubts in Cuba about who is the local Goliath. The same day, the newspaper of the armed forces, Bastion, carried Martí’s words in bold print:
Two useful truths for Our America: the crude, unequal and decadent character of the United States, and the continued existence there of all the violence, discord, immorality and disorder of which the Spanish American people are accused.
Actually, Martí’s attitude to the Colossus of the North was considerably more nuanced than the above would suggest. He was too intelligent to suppose that the most vigorous and powerful country in the world (as it was even then) could be nothing but a sink of iniquity. But that is how it is now presented, ad nauseam, to the Cuban people.
The propaganda takes full advantage of the Latin American tradition of contrasting the material success but spiritual vacuity of Their (Anglo-Saxon) America with the material failure but spiritual grandeur of Our (Hispanic) America. This contrast is, of course, a common and comforting response by impotence to power, by backwardness to modernity. The Russians responded thus to western Europe; the Muslims to Christendom; and western Europe to America. But when such a response becomes part of an official and unquestionable philosophy, it does great harm, for it prevents proper enquiry as to the sources of power and powerlessness, and promotes instead an attitude both of resentment and self-congratulation, which is emotionally gratifying but worse than useless for stimulating practical improvement.
By the time I left Cuba I was tired of hearing about the crime, unemployment and drug addiction in the United States: never had I been so pro-American. My feeling was reinforced when I visited the Galería Centro Provincial de Arte, to see an exhibition of portraits of Martí by contemporary painters to celebrate his 137th birthday. The artists possessed more visual flair than in any other communist country I had visited, but this only made the intellectual content the more pitiful. One portrait was entitled Profecía en America, Prophecy in America, and it was a map with a picture of Martí growing out of the island of Cuba. South of the Río Grande all was verdant, happy jungle, punctuated by pretty little whitewashed and tiled villages, full of dancing villagers; north of the Río Grande, the land flared with the orange flames of Hell, over which flew an evil black bird of prey with the Stars and Stripes in its beak. I should have been less disturbed by this nonsense if the painter had been without talent: but talent in the service of centrally ordained lies is a terrible thing.
Worse still than this dishonesty was a small pen and ink drawing of the Hero attached to words allegedly written in her school exercise book by a ten-year-old child who, in the way that young girls in other parts of the world have visions of the Virgin, apparently heard Martí speaking:
…he was very happy and satisfied with what was happening in his country over the process of rectification and on the campaign to make more with less and over the response that our people have given to the world crisis of socialism, and he sent a greeting to all Cuban revolutionaries and especially to our commander in chief and finally he said socialism or death and that we should remain firm. That’s what he said.
On the night of the fiesta a small crowd gathered in the plaza and a rock band set itself up on the platform, The glittering foyer of the Hotel Inglaterra filled with more plain-clothes policemen than usual (there were always some around), to prevent unauthorised Cubans from entering that paradise. Walkie-talkie in hand, they demanded to see identification papers before letting anyone through. The newspaper had announced the day before that, to celebrate the revolutionary disappearance of all distinction between police and people in Cuba, many of the former would mingle joyfully with the latter at the fiesta.
From my balcony overlooking the plaza, I watched the arrival of a torchlit procession. At first I thought it was vast, half the population of Havana, but it turned out to be quite small, at most a few thousand people. As they arrived, floodlit streams of paper were released from the buildings surrounding the plaza, each little rectangle of paper printed with a slogan: I am an anti-imperialist, I am 100% Cuban, I am David. From the balcony next to mine, cameramen from Tele Rebelde filmed the scene.
I went down among the crowd. The torchlit procession had been greeted with a buzz of expectation, but it had died down by the time I reached the plaza and a strange indifference reigned. The music was loud and inescapable, but people had turned their backs on it. Some sat around the bases of palm trees, quietly chatting among themselves; others stared into the blackness beyond the floodlights. Yet others drifted away from the plaza down the Prado, where some of the residents were on their balconies, dancing to their own music. All along the Prado were stone benches; and there, night after tropical night, the local people sat, waiting patiently for time to pass. The night of the fiesta was no different for them.
The political speeches began. What they lacked in originality, they made up in emphasis. It was clear that there was a claque of enthusiasts near the platform, whose Vivas! were caught by the microphones and magnified into a simulacrum of popular enthusiasm. In the suburbs of the crowd, however, boredom was all too evident. They did not applaud, they did not echo the slogans, I suspect they did not even hear the speeches.
I had been asked by the Daily Telegraph to write one of a series of short articles about second-hand bookshops. I was given £25 to buy three books, which I was to review in 250 words. I thought it would be interesting to find such a bookshop in Havana.
On the corner of the calles Obispo and Bernaza I found the Librería Cervantes. Its stock was not large, and that part of it which did not consist of somewhat dated textbooks of technical subjects was divided into two main categories: books in English left over from the library of the pre- and no doubt anti-revolutionary Havana Women’s Club and slightly soiled political paperbacks in Spanish from the Castro era. Among the latter were some volumes that will one day, perhaps, become collector’s items, though most of them were still available as new books, at no extra cost, in the Nueva Poesía (New Poetry) bookshop across the road: The Memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev, The Speeches of Konstantin Chernenko, The Speeches of Todor Zhivkov. There was also an anthology, Bulgarian Journalists on the Path of Leninism, and a special study of the development of an exemplar of the New Man, El joven Erich, the Young Erich, Erich being Honecker, of course. Most touching of all was a children’s book, Felix significa feliz, Felix Means Happy, Felix being none other than Dzherzhinsky, the first chief of the Soviet secret police, of whom the Poles ask why he was the greatest Pole who ever lived, to which the answer is that he killed more Russians than any other. A nice bedtime story for children.
The volumes from the Women’s Club filled me with a different kind of gloom. First they had suffered the physical deterioration that books generally suffer in the tropics, unless especially cared for: mould in the bindings and the nibbling of creatures from several phyla, from arthropods to reptiles and mammals, and the deposition of squashed and mummified insects and the excrement of geckos, leaving dark brown stains upon the pages. Second, they were either impossibly earnest, the diversion of embittered wives with intellectual aspirations – The Comparative Archaeology of Early Mesopotamia – or they sank to the level of magazine gossip – Group Captain Peter Townsend, the Real Story. Somewhat incongruously, I discovered among them a Soviet manual of boxing, which, like the two previous books, I declined to review. After much thought, I alighted on three books, which cost in total $3.60 or 60 cents, depending on whether one converted at the official or black market rate of exchange.
Of the books in Spanish I chose Guantanamo Bay, by Rigoberto Cruz Diaz. This was a series of interviews by the author with people from a village, Caimanera, near the United States naval base, in which they recounted their experiences of life before the revolution. Naturally, they had not a good word to say for the Americans (or if they had, it was edited out), whom they sometimes described as animals, and whose language they derided as being no more than the roaring or barking of beasts. Indeed, the hatred was so intemperate, with so many racial slurs, that I doubt such a volume could have been published in the liberal democracies that proclaim the virtues of freedom of speech. Many of the interviewed were formerly prostitutes, saved from vice by the revolution. I should have found the indignation over prostitution more convincing had I not been approached quite so many times in Old Havana by young men who knew a young morena who was willing…if I bought the young men a pair of shoes at the foreign currency shop. This, I thought, was an even less dignified transaction than prostitution normally is, insofar as it implied an insult to the national currency.
Of the books from the Women’s Club, I selected The Great Mistake by John Knox and The Battle of Basinghall Street by E. Phillips Oppenheim. The great mistake was Herbert Hoover, exposed by the author in 1930 – too late. E. Phillips Oppenheim is a name known to all habitués of cheap second-hand bookshops. He was once the most popular of English novelists, the Jeffrey Archer of his day. Published in 1935, The Battle of Basinghall Street concerns the struggle between Lord Marsom, a clever, ruthless Jewish financier who is chairman of Woolito Limited (Woolito being a patented synthetic wool of gorgeous colour), and Lord Sandbrook, a handsome English aristocrat who rides well and spends his time attending the social events of the season. The struggle between sordid commercial professionalism and languid aristocratic amateurishness is unequal: amateurishness wins all the way.
I detected a strange convergence between the values expressed in this fictional pabulum and those of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Like Lord Sandbrook, they had never earnt their living in any conventional way; they disdained to do it. Like Lord Sandbrook, their approach to life was moralising and aesthetic. If people had to work, it should not be for personal gain, for filthy lucre, but only for beauty or justice. Commerce was sordid, untouchable, defiling. Lord Sandbrook, indeed, was a Man of the New Type, whose thoughts never descended to securing personal advantage. And like Lord Sandbrook, Castro and Che were aristocrats: from the first moment of their self-consciousness they knew they were not as other men were, they would not melt anonymously into no crowd, their destinies were great. It was the middle classes they hated, despised and feared.
Che, the perfect gentle knight of socialism, exemplifies more clearly than almost any other twentieth century revolutionary the unstable alloy of abnegation and arrogance that is the hallmark of the breed. The son of a freewheeling Argentine businessman with radical political ideas and a mother who espoused Marxism early, his childhood was unconventional. He was encouraged to roam and find his own way in the world. His severe asthma soon put iron in his soul: becoming a sportsman against considerable odds, he learnt the value of willpower. He succeeded academically despite the irregularities of his upbringing.
After qualifying as a doctor, he wandered throughout Latin America, seeing and experiencing for himself the hardships of the majority of the people. He met Castro for the first time in 1955, parting from him ten years later, by which time he had become a world figure. He gave up his high positions in the revolutionary government to resume the life of a guerrilla, and he died – wretchedly – in the Bolivian jungles in 1967, attempting to bring to Bolivia what he had helped bring to Cuba.
No one has ever suggested that Guevara pursued his idiosyncratic course in life for personal gain – as personal gain is usually understood. He did not die a rich man, nor did he live a life of opulence once he reached power (even though the simple food he favoured – steak, lettuce and tomato salad, Spanish cognac – has been rendered luxurious by the economic system he created). He dressed simply, too, and worked extremely hard; he was by all accounts rather shy in personal relations. None of this prevented him from having an ego of immeasurable proportions. His opinions, which he formed very early in his life and upon which he acted, were of quite staggering arrogance.
In his arrogance he was a true follower of Marx and Lenin. He considered that until Lenin’s revolution in Russia, men had never acted fully consciously, were still in the realm of prehistory, and were not therefore to be considered human in the full sense.
With revolution of October 1917…man acquired a new consciousness. The men of the French revolution, who told humanity so many beautiful things…were nevertheless simple instruments of history.
Until Fidel and Che came along, with their superior, indeed total, understanding, Cubans were but the blind and unconscious instruments of history, mere feathers on the wind of economic circumstance. Their ideas, their aspirations, their likes and dislikes were the automatic reflection of the (rotten) society in which they lived.
Consequently, according to Guevara, the New Man had to be built – yes, built, a word he used many times in this connection. ‘A socialist economy without communist morals does not interest me,’ Guevara once said, revealing in that short sentence the depth of his lust for power. ‘One of the fundamental aims of Marxism is to eliminate material interest, the factor of “individual self-interest” and profit from man’s psychological motivations.’ He might have added, ‘The world must become like me.’
He was not, however, being unorthodox from a Marxist perspective. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary…not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
You, reader, your children, your parents, your friends, virtually everyone you know or have ever met, I, the author of this book, are full of the muck of ages, muck from which we must be liberated – by force, of course – before we achieve true humanity. Not Mozart or Michelangelo, not Shakespeare or Dickens, not Galileo or Pasteur, achieved this grandeur: only Che and Fidel, Stalin and Vyshinsky, Ulbricht and Ceausescu. What respect for human rights might one expect from anyone who believed such a thing?
But Guevara was capable of believing nonsense even more arrant, the kind of nonsense to which only intelligent people can give their assent, since it requires a vast and intricate intellectual edifice to do so. To him, Marx’s description of the world after the revolution was as real as Father Christmas to a credulous child:
In a higher phase of communist society – wrote Marx – when the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; when labour has become not only a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly…
I repeat, one queues for an hour to buy an ice cream in Havana in the evening.
Guevara hated the market with a passionate hatred. In part, this could be ascribed to the poverty and misery he saw on his wanderings through South America which, not surprisingly, he ascribed to the reigning economic system. But the real wellsprings of his hatred were quite other: an infinite distrust of human beings as they are (covered up by strenuous protestations of faith in their glorious future), and an insensate urge to control the lives of others. He detested the possibility – no, the certainty – that, given a choice, people would fail to choose what he considered ‘socially rational’, that they might prefer marzipan pigs to a balanced diet, beer and football to vitamins and higher mathematics. Democracy had for him no connection with choice; he saw nothing democratic about the marketplace. And, alleged deep thinker and theoretician as his admirers would have us believe him, it never occurred to him that his ideal of a fully computerised, centralised economy with only a handful of bureaucrats to run it was a blueprint for the most abject and unreformable of dictatorships – or if it did occur to him, he did not mind, since he was going to be the dictator in question.
Both Guevara and Castro were adolescents denied the opportunity to mature by their early success against a corrupt and brutal dictatorship, a success which fixated their personalities once and for all. Surrounded thereafter by admirers and sycophants, they never had to learn that the world was bigger even than their egos.
But the market, like the whirligig of time, brings in its revenges. I am not thinking of the markets I saw in provincial towns in Cuba – more wretched, less lively, than any I have seen anywhere else in the world except in famine conditions, selling only cabbages with blackened leaves or a few tiny carrots or spring onions, for the sake of which people were obliged to jostle and push as though fleeing before an advancing plague. No, I am thinking rather of the foreign currency shops, whose role in Cuban life belies their calm and hidden exteriors. Many were the Cubans who asked me to buy something for them in these stores, usually entrusting me with their few crumpled dollars which they have stashed away against the day they find a foreigner willing to make illegal purchases for them. For they are not allowed themselves to enter these temples of delight, lest they be corrupted by what they see there, nor are they allowed to possess dollars in the first place: possessing dollars in Cuba is like possessing cocaine in Miami, normal but forbidden.
‘Do not buy anything with a Cuban label,’ they say with an urgency worthy of true revolutionaries. ‘Make sure what you buy is foreign. Spend everything, every dollar, every cent.’
The foreign currency stores are found in the hotels where foreigners stay, and at certain other locations. They advertise themselves as offering ‘easy shopping’; otherwise, shopping in Cuba is an activity fraught with difficulties and bureaucratic complications. Cubans dare not approach such stores in the company of foreigners: they are always under close surveillance by secret police. One parts company from Cubans at some distance from their doors; even taxis (other than the special, dollar-charging ones for tourists) dare not approach the hotels.
Focus as they are for so much longing, these stores are disorganised and ill-stocked, their staff indifferent and their goods not infrequently shop-soiled. The clothes are imported from Panama, and of such poor quality that no European or Canadian tourist would buy them for themselves. It is obvious that they are intended for diversion on to the home market, to satisfy a demand that otherwise could not be met, and to mop up the dollars that find their way into private hands. And since such trade is illegal, it also has the advantage of giving the police an instrument of blackmail, as in Romania: for almost everyone in Cuba, at least in the towns, has taken advantage of the trade and wears at least one item of imported clothing.
Cuba’s relations with Panama were somewhat murky. The American invasion in 1989 to depose General Noriega had brought forth a rash of posters, already fading or peeling from the walls: Yankee Claws Off Panama! and Panama, We Are With You. The flow of cheap consumer goods had been interrupted, temporarily at least. And Castro had found himself in the uncomfortable position of defending a man who was an acknowledged CIA agent and a drug-trafficking thug, on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Perhaps there was more to it than that. Rumours were rife that Castro was deeply implicated in Noriega’s drug dealings. In 1989, General Ochoa, the commander-in-chief of the Cuban forces in Angola and hitherto a national hero, was shot after a summary military trial for having allowed Cuba to be used as a staging post for cocaine en route for Florida. Castro protested his innocence, of course, but the episode came as a shock and few people seemed to believe the official version. At the very least they believed Castro knew more about Ochoa’s activities than he admitted. ‘After all,’ said a young man to me, ‘he knows about everything else that goes on in Cuba. How did he not know about Ochoa?’
I heard another rumour from a man who claimed to have been a member of the revolutionary army in Escambray and once to have met Castro personally. In the early days he had believed Castro’s promises – Castro spoke then with what seemed like burning sincerity – but he had long since realised that the Maximum Leader’s most important characteristic was a pathological inability to tell the truth (so convinced was he of this that I had great difficulty in persuading him that some of what Castro said about the rest of Latin America – that there was hunger and poverty there, for instance – was indeed the truth). Ochoa, he said, had been a popular commander, and therefore the Castros, Raúl and Fidel, feared him. And the economy of Cuba was in such a mess that a military coup seemed the only answer. Therefore, to discredit Ochoa and to give them the excuse to rid themselves of him, they ordered him to start drug-running operations. It was a trap: they had him tried and shot.
There was no good evidence in favour of his interpretation of events, though given Castro’s long history of violent political intrigue it did not seem to me intrinsically impossible; my informant spoke as we drove past the huge Boniato prison, on whose sinister barracks we looked down from the hills outside Santiago de Cuba (Castro was held prisoner there for two and a half months when he was captured after the attack on the Moncada barracks, but the experience did not make him any less inclined to imprison others). My companion claimed to have been an inmate of Boniato in which 5000 prisoners, mainly political, were held, in conditions that defied description. I asked him whether he had read Armando Valladares’s book (I can’t imagine how I thought he would have got hold of a copy in Cuba). He had not read it, but he said that every detail in it was true. This struck me as a rather cavalier attitude to truth, but hatred is not the midwife of caution or accuracy. Several times he lifted the bottom of his trouser leg to show me he had no socks. No socks! Even under Batista there had been socks!
In Cienfuegos, a port city the stucco of whose once grandiloquent buildings was crumbling like the icing of a stale Christmas cake, I met on a Saturday morning three young black carpenters. They were sitting on the pavement with their feet in the gutter; they had nothing to do and when I said I was on my way to Playa Giron, the scene of the defeat of the Cuban counter-revolutionary expedition of 1961, they asked to come with me.
It is a delight to drive in Cuba because, as in all communist countries, there is no traffic. The roads in the cities are less busy than those of the countryside in Europe. Outside the cities, the roads are empty, except for very occasional lumbering fifties American saloons, bright red or sky blue, with enormous tail fins and acres of chromium plating, or Soviet-made trucks whose gears seem permanently clashing. Effectively, there is no speed limit: the warm air rushes in at the open window and the salsa music from the radio urges the foot to press down on the accelerator. What joy – hard currency joy!
I asked the three carpenters why they wanted to go to Playa Giron. They didn’t, particularly; there was nothing for them to do there, they said, there was no easy means of returning home to Cienfuegos, and the journey was not without its dangers from the police. But they were tired of the pavement and gutter where they spent most of their leisure time; a journey to nowhere was preferable. A metaphor for life in general, I asked myself? Certainly I was glad there was so much wrong with the world to write about, or else I should have had to face the essential meaninglessness of existence.
I turned to Radio Martí, the anti-Castro station beamed from Florida and paid for by the US government. It was sometimes said that the adoption of Martí’s name was what really infuriated the Cuban government about it. I do not believe it. The Cuban government – that is to say, Castro – is infuriated by any contradiction, especially from a source that cannot be silenced. But on the south side of the island, coming through the electromagnetic equivalent of a fog, Radio Martí was indistinct. I asked my companions whether they ever listened to it.
‘Sometimes,’ they said, with no very great enthusiasm.
And did they want one day to visit the United States?
To my surprise they said no; there was too much crime there, too much racial feeling, too much violence. France was their beacon, their acme of civilisation.
Their answer impressed me. Though not highly educated – perhaps because they were not highly educated – they had retained their independence of mind and had formed their own judgment of things. Knowing most of what they were told to be lies, they had not come to the easy and obvious conclusion that the exact opposite must be the truth. Only one of them had ever been to Havana, none had been as far away as Santiago. Their opinions were the result of slight information and common sense reflection, but were not therefore shallow. They were not socialists, yet they knew the reintroduction of capitalism in Cuba would not be without its problems, and that such as they might suffer from it. I do not think I could easily have had a similar conversation with three young carpenters in England or the United States.
They were disaffected, but not violently so. They did not like the Castros – especially the General del Ejército, General of the Army, Raúl Castro – but their detestation fell far short of that excited by Ceausescu in Romania. Like everyone else, they assumed los dirigentes – the leaders, the bureaucrats, the generals – were living off the fat of the land, eating not beans and rice but lobster mayonnaise. And they were fully conversant with some of the less attractive aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Castro is pleased to call his rule. For example, whenever they held parties the police would arrive at midnight to break them up, using truncheons and even dogs. They were subjected to arbitrary police checks; and as for elections, they were simply non-existent in Cuba. They spoke of the absence of elections with a bitterness I found surprising, considering how often in Cuban history elections had been fraudulent: but even fraudulent elections of the old type were an acknowledgement of what should happen, a bow in the direction of popular sovereignty – and furthermore a diversion from the daily round, a factor not to be under-estimated where boredom is as crushing as in Cuba.
We reached Playa Giron, near the Bay of Pigs. The coastline was flat, the bush dense with shrubs that thrived in saline soil. The settlement itself consisted of neat cabins and a large hotel. Well before we reached the hotel, where I intended to have lunch, my three companions asked me to set them down. They were not allowed inside even if I were prepared to pay for their meal in dollars. The policemen at the door of the hotel would prevent any infringement of the rules. My companions said they would wait for me a few hundred yards away, in shadows. Before alighting from the car, they looked around to check that no one was watching.
To my surprise, the hotel was full of Cubans, who paid in otherwise valueless pesos. On a platform by the swimming pool were four leggy blacks in swimsuits, performing what was obviously supposed to be a folk dance to the beat of a drum. Their expressions were eloquent of a boredom more profound, transcendental, than that of a schoolboy parsing Latin words. They performed the dance perfunctorily, as though it had been laid down in a five year plan. No one watched them, there was no applause between dances.
In the dining hall there was a buffet, spread with delicacies such as tinned fish, lettuce and tomatoes. Here was luxury! I did not enjoy it, however, because of my three companions who were waiting for me outside, segregated from the vanguard of the proletariat within.
Before leaving Playa Giron, I decided to visit the commemorative museum there. Outside was a Sea Fury, a naval aircraft of British manufacture that blew up the Río Escondido, the invaders’ main supply ship, and thus played an important part in their defeat. My companions did not want to come to the museum, either because they were bored with the whole story, which they had already heard time out of number, or because it was not safe to be seen in my company. At any rate, I was the only visitor to the museum that afternoon.
Cuban museums are like speeches by Castro: over-inclusive, rhetorical, self- justifying. Concision, evidently, is not a Cuban gift, even when it comes to selecting photographs. Nevertheless, the small possessions of those who died in the fighting (on the revolution’s side) were eloquent testimony to bravery and belief. The cause of the counter-revolutionaries was not noble; some of the participants were extremely unsavoury, psychopathic murderers from Batista’s time, who were to be given the task in the new government of dealing with the opposition. Those who claim to fight for freedom are not infrequently fighting for power, which is a rather different matter.
It was during the Bay of Pigs invasion that Castro first announced that the revolution was socialist. ‘This is the Socialist and Democratic Revolution,’ he said, ‘of the humble, with the humble, for the humble…’
My three carpenters were waiting for me, but they gave no sign of recognising me. Before they got into the car they checked again that no one was looking. We were on our way to Playa Larga, from which it would be even more difficult for them to return, and where there was nothing for them to do. Boredom, however, has its imperatives, and they came.
The coast was unspoilt, not much different from when Columbus landed, except for the road. There is definitely something to be said against economic development and mass tourism. All thoughts of primeval innocence were dispelled, however, as we reached Playa Larga. A policeman on a motorcycle stopped us and spoke sharply to the three carpenters. Where were they going, why were they with me? They mumbled something about a lift and the policeman looked at me, the naive tourist, debating whether to carry the matter further. Deciding against doing so, he bestowed a last hostile glare on the three traitors and rode away on his motorcycle. As soon as he was out of sight, the three young carpenters scurried off into the bush and I did not see them again.
Playa Larga is little more than a hotel on a long, tranquil tropical beach. Tourism is the great white hope of the Cuban economy, for Cuba has an equable climate, a beautiful coast, historical monuments of great interest, and an agreeable people. Indeed, there are very few economic hopes beside: its agriculture is as dominated by sugar, a crop without an export future except to countries that cannot pay for it, as ever it was, and its industry is inefficient and likely to remain so. In short, Cuba faces the inherent problems which can only be overcome by agile pragmatism, not adolescent dogmatism. Dogmatism, however, claims to settle all problems in advance, and is therefore more attractive to egocentric young intellectuals than is slow and piecemeal improvement.
Tourism, of course, would destroy the very beauty it intended to exploit. There is a coastline west of Santiago, where the Sierra Maestra comes down to the sea, of such stunning beauty – long, deserted black sand beaches, palm fringed shores, and an azure sea – that only communism could have preserved it from the tombstone slab hotels that ruin coasts the world over. But preservation from ruination is not a positive achievement of regimes such as Castro’s, the result of solicitude for the glories of nature. On the contrary, there is no pollution in the world like communist pollution; there are factories in the communist world that seem to produce nothing else. The very iconography of communism extols pollution: splendid landscapes never appear in its posters without a factory belching smoke in the background, smoke itself having become a symbol of progress.
There is tourism in Cuba, however, and very unattractive it is. I spent a night in a resort a few miles from Cienfuegos, where parties of holidaymakers from Canada stayed. They had come to Cuba for the sea, the sun and the sand. They were not interested in the country itself, and it did not worry them that they were carefully segregated from Cuban reality, that there were policemen at the door of their hotel to ensure it did not enter. On the contrary, they were too busy escaping their own reality to be concerned with anyone else’s. And who could blame them? Not I, who had almost forgotten the rigours of routine, whose work consisted of doing whatever caught my interest.
But still I found Cuban tourism disturbing, as I had once found Haitian tourism disturbing. It was not just that many of the tourists appeared like beached whales, or that ladies who would have been regarded as plump even by Rubens squeezed their puckered, ageing flesh into exiguous lime-green vests and tight lemon yellow shorts (after all, had they not a right to do so if they so chose?). Rather it was that I sensed a hysteria in their laughter, as if they were laughing not because something was funny, but to persuade themselves and others that they were enjoying themselves. And as they gathered in the bar and restaurant, their Cuban guides, exuding bonhomie as gigolos exude charm, moved among them explaining what was on the programme for tomorrow, and what entertainments there were for the rest of this evening, as though to leave them for a moment to their own devices were to court disaster. They had to be kept amused, like children, not only for their own sakes, but also to prevent them from developing any idle curiosity about Cuba.
Tourism is unlikely to develop in Cuba, however, while waiters treat customers as class enemies and the food is so wretched. As in most communist countries, waiters are kings, they can give or withhold, permit or deny; their jobs are amongst the most desirable in the land, for they work where sometimes there are onions and tomatoes. These aristocrats of the lettuce leaf, however, find it difficult to enter imaginatively into the world of their foreign clients, where waiters are not demigods or tyrants of the tables, but ordinary men and women doing a job of no extraordinary status. And one day, if ever tourism is to develop in Cuba, receptionists, shop assistants, porters, waiters and the rest will have to lose that extraordinary habit of theirs, common to their brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe, of ignoring someone even though he is right in front of their face and there is nobody else in sight and they have nothing whatever to do. This disregard is not just discourtesy such as may be encountered in almost any society; rather, the rudeness is ontological, it speaks of a hatred of the world as it is. In private life perhaps they are charming, passionate lovers, devoted parents, reciters of lyric verse; but the face they turn to the world is of granite chilled by cold winds.
At Playa Larga there was a power cut just as I was about to order a drink (no beer, only rum, take it or leave it). The barman closed the bar with indecent haste. He guessed, I suppose, there was to be no more power that night; and though I am certain this power cut was not the first the hotel had ever suffered, there were neither candles nor oil lamps to substitute for electricity. Even in Zairean villages in the jungle I had found candles.
I visited several more of the holy places of the revolution (I never found a church open in Cuba, but I was told that the Cubans were the least Catholic of Latin American nations, even before the revolution). The tiny hamlet of La Plata was the site of the first successful military action by the July 26th Movement – so called after the date of Castro’s quixotic attack on the barracks in Santiago. La Plata is on the fringes of the Sierra Maestra. On the way there, I noticed a propaganda hoarding that obviously had long remained unfinished. The slogan read: Sólo trabajando y – Only by working and… And what? Only by working and by struggling against the imperialists can we complete this hoarding, perhaps?
One day in 1957, Castro’s men descended on La Plata’s little garrison of sixteen soldiers and killed several of them (Che Guevara’s account is a little vague on this point). Unimportant in itself from a purely military point of view, the Battle of La Plata – in Latin America, clashes between sixteen men on the one hand and twelve on the other are frequently dignified as ‘battles’ – announced to the world that the rebels were still alive after Batista had pronounced them dead and increased their morale. They also doubled their supply of ammunition and two of the captured soldiers joined their little army. Later, after taking power, Castro returned there to sign a land reform decree, thus demonstrating his flair for publicity.
At La Plata there is a little museum. I had seen most of the photographs it contained several times before (indeed, ad nauseam), but with the mountains of the Sierra Maestra looming up behind, the pictures of Castro and his few followers took on a new meaning. One cannot deny grandeur to a man who, giving up the chance of a luxurious life and a successful conventional career, took to the hills and an existence of the utmost discomfort, to say nothing of danger, with little to propel him but his faith in his own future.
Beyond La Plata we reached a settlement along a dusty, uneven road (I was with a Cuban who had bribed his boss at his place of work to mark him down as present while he spent the day with me). We were lost and asked the way back to La Plata of an old peasant who was sitting by his hut, round which a small black pig rooted and chickens pecked for sustenance. Apart from the fact that there was now an electricity line to his hut, I doubted whether much had changed for him in the two or three decades. His wife, bent by age and toil, brought us low, rough-hewn chairs to sit on with the simple courtesy typical of peasants. They apologised for having nothing to give us.
It emerged that the old man had been one of the first to aid the rebels. (Was this, though, not a claim that everyone in the district might think it prudent to make?) He remembered Castro then, a simple man who spoke clearly. The peasant was shrivelled, almost desiccated, but he had never been tall, and I wondered whether Castro’s height – more than six feet – had not impressed him almost as much as his words. At any rate, some of the peasants gave him and his followers food and information about the movement of the rurales, the brutal armed force in the pocket of the landowners. This was a dangerous thing to do, and a brave one since victory was by no means certain; and once the rurales suspected the old man was on the rebels’ side, he had had to flee into the mountains.
He spoke of the past with neither bitterness nor enthusiasm. What had happened had happened. He did not say whether it was for the good or the bad: perhaps the habitually powerless eventually cease to think in moral categories. In any case, he had lived all his life in conditions in which to express an opinion was dangerous, possibly deadly, and one does not lose the caution of a lifetime just because a stranger comes along and would like to ask a few questions. But when my companion offered to buy his pig, he refused very firmly indeed. What value was money to him, what could he buy with it? The answer, of course, was nothing: he was living in a demonetarised society. There was a drought, there was no seed to plant, no fertiliser, he said. The pig was all he had. Things were bad. Again, he blamed no one – disaster was like the weather, unavoidable.
My companion asked him about Castro. Had he ever returned to visit his former helpers in the Sierra? No, the old man replied; obviously he was too busy as president. But he had once seen Raúl drive by in a convoy of vehicles. Raúl had not stopped. The old peasant related this with a face drained of expression, as though everything had been as he expected.
The peasants, I was told by a resident of Havana, were Castro’s reserve of support. The life of a peasant in Cuba was preferable to that of a peasant elsewhere in Latin America. And certainly one does not see the destitution in the countryside there that one sees elsewhere; the children are all healthy and well-fed, and they go to school, not to the hillsides miles from their home to gather bundles of firewood or to pick coffee under whose weight they return bent double.
I was not long enough in Cuba to form even the slightest estimate of Castro’s popularity among the peasants. I gave lifts to many, but they were callado – tight-lipped. Only one spoke expansively, and he was drunk. I picked him up in the hills above Trinidad, an old colonial town of great charm. The hills were forested, and suddenly, unexpectedly, there was a clearing with a large brown modern building without anything to indicate what it was, no sign or notice to the public. In the surrounding forest I saw people walking or jogging, all in the same wine-coloured tracksuits. The building, apparently, was a sanatorium, perhaps an excellent institution: but the atmosphere was sinister, a scene from a novel by a tropical Kafka.
The drunken peasant insisted I have some of his rum. He put his arm round me as I was negotiating a hairpin bend and swore eternal friendship. I have received many such protestations before, all round the world, and try not to show that I find them tiresome, or how much I dislike the stale warm fumes of alcohol breathed into my face point blank, least of all on hairpin bends.
‘How do you like Cuba?’ he asked.
‘Very pretty,’ I replied.
‘Aren’t we freer than you?’ he asked.
‘No, on the contrary.’
He was puzzled. My words worked slowly through his alcohol befuddled brain. Perhaps the only foreigners he had met before were internationalists, the diminishing band of camp followers from Europe and America, who only praised and flattered.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘We are free, completely free… Not like before.’
‘I can come to Cuba,’ I said. ‘But can you come to my country?’
My question bothered him. I doubt he was much in the habit of abstract argument.
‘Yes,’ he said, choosing the lie as a method of extracting himself from an awkward situation. ‘This year you come to Cuba, next year I go to London.’
I decided against pursuing the point further. There was a silence, which he broke.
‘How are the police in your country?’ he asked.
‘How are they in yours?’ I retorted.
‘No problem,’ he replied. ‘We have no problem with the police.’
Swallowing my not inconsiderable reservations about our own force, I said that in our country the police carried no arms.
‘What?’ asked my passenger.
‘Our police are not armed,’ I repeated.
My passenger uttered what sounded like a cry of pain.
‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand!’
I could not explain further. What was there to explain, what had he failed to understand? The difference between what I had said and what he had been told about the rest of the world? Was his concept of himself as a free man so fragile, so brittle, that the faintest contradiction threatened to shatter it? If this was not so, why his expression of pain?
It has been said that no man is as unfree as the slave who imagines himself at liberty. Here was a man, too young to remember the Batista years, who was free neither to buy nor sell, to travel, to speak, to read, to think, and yet considered himself free. What was this concept of liberty, I wondered?
It was sad that his untruth about the police in Cuba, whether intentional or not, had called forth from me less than the whole truth about the police in my own country. But if I had given him a truer, more complex account, what would he have remembered but those things that confirmed what he already thought he knew? Here is the logic of wars of propaganda, of half-truths in the service of higher Truth.
It is remarkable what such logic can do. It can obscure the most obvious truths. In the New Poetry bookshop in Havana I bought a slim volume entitled Delitos contra la seguridad del estado – Crimes Against the Security of the State. It was written by Abel Enrique Hart Santamaría, son of the Minister of Culture, Armando Hart, a man of a somewhat opportunistic ideological trajectory (believing at one time that the Communist Party should not be allowed to function legally after the revolution), and Haydée Santamaría, an early follower of Castro who took part in the assault on the Moncada barracks and whose brother, Abel Santamaría was tortured to death in captivity afterwards, as was her then boyfriend, Boris Santa Coloma.
Thus Abel Enrique (named Enrique either after his paternal grandfather who was the first post-revolutionary chief justice of the Supreme Court of Cuba, or after his paternal uncle, who was killed while manufacturing a bomb during the revolution, or after both) is decidedly an aristocrat – of the new, revolutionary kind. He dedicated his slim volume to (among others) ‘all the revolutionaries of the world who have suffered the torment of political imprisonment, which was for Martí more real and painful than Dante’s Hell.’ A man of sensibility, then, who sympathises deeply with the plight of those incarcerated for their beliefs…
Alas, no. His no doubt peculiar upbringing endowed him with the soul of a lackey, and with a mind less suited to explaining phenomena than to explaining them away. The main conclusion of his book, which is based on his graduation thesis at the faculty of law of Havana University, is the following:
The fundamental cause of political crime is the existence of the exploitation of man by man. This cause disappears with the growth of the Socialist state, and with the disappearance of political crime there is the appearance of the counter-revolutionary crime…
In other words, if there is no political crime, there can be no political prisoners. This is doubtless what Castro means when he says there are no political prisoners in Cuba.
In this peculiar conception, political prisoners are those who are imprisoned in the course of trying to bring about superior, more ‘progressive’, social and political arrangements. Anyone who indulges in oppositional activity under socialism is clearly trying to bring about a reversion to a backward condition. ‘Counter-revolutionary crime,’ writes Abel Enrique, ‘arises from the logical resistance of the over-thrown classes who try to recover their former privileges.’ They should be locked up.
I drove to Santa Clara, the city east of Havana where one of the last battles of the revolutionary war took place. Batista sent the flower of his remaining army in an armoured train towards the Sierra Maestra, a last desperate throw. The train was ambushed and derailed by Che Guevara, who had led his column of men 420 miles from Oriente province, during which march they had eaten only fifteen times, or once every twenty-eight miles. Three hundred men – some of the officers were scarcely more than boys – defeated 3,000. The war was over.
Some of the armoured trucks of the train now form a monument, repainted and cleaned up, but perched at angles on the rails to denote their derailment. I went in the company of a schoolteacher who took me also to his school, a styleless modern building which, though completed only the previous year, had the atmosphere of terminal tropical decay about it. His school was attended by many pupils from Angola and Mozambique, who came to it after several years on the Isle of Youth (formerly the Isle of Pines). He introduced me to a Mozambican who had been in Cuba since the age of ten, and whose main interest was in dealing in goods from the foreign currency shops. He was learning to be a mechanic at the school, which was vocational rather than academic: he told me his father owned several fishing vessels in Maputo. From this and his prolonged residence in Cuba, I concluded that his father was a man of considerable importance in FRELIMO.
In Santa Clara there is a large monument to Che, brightly floodlit at night, so that it glows over the otherwise dully illuminated city. The statue of Guevara is of craggy black metal and gives the impression he was slightly malformed. He appears to be stooping like a hunchback, and his shoulders are too broad for his height. In front of the statue is a reviewing stand of whitish stone and a large parade ground of the same material, all floodlit. That there was more light in this eerily deserted place than in the rest of the city put together seemed to me unsurprising.
The most important of the revolutionary shrines I visited was the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was here that in 1953 Castro and about 130 followers, some of whom were allegedly under the impression they were going for target practise, attacked the second largest barracks in the country. The assault came at five-thirty am on the morning following the night of carnival, when many of the soldiers and officers were expected to be suffering from hangovers and thus to be incapable of resistance. The purpose of the assault was not really clear; perhaps it was to spark an uprising in Santiago, perhaps it was merely propaganda of the deed (the flag of the movement was in the colours of the anarchists, black and red).
A debate rages about the nature of Castro’s ideas in 1953 – whether he was already a communist or not – but one thing is clear, that he was hell-bent on power and he wanted to achieve it by violence. His unquiet spirit, which manifested itself early in his life, could always find some pretext for violence. Though his published political programme was radical, it was not unprecedentedly so; he later claimed that it did not represent his true beliefs, but was moderated in order to draw as many people into his movement as possible. In other words, he claimed that even in 1953 he deceived his followers in order to bend them to his will. Such is the moral milieu in which he has lived his entire adult life that he is actually proud of his dissimulation; he is incapable of seeing that there is anything distasteful about it, and would no doubt dismiss such scruples as contemptible weakness.
Sixteen soldiers were killed in the assault on Moncada, including the officer of the day. They of course are not memorialised anywhere – into the dustbin of history with them. But the assault was badly planned and executed, and it failed. Many of those captured immediately afterwards were brutally tortured and killed, initially for the sake of revenge (unsurprising in the circumstances), but later as a matter of policy. The brutality of the response to the assault turned the Cuban public against Batista and obscured the dubious nature of Castro’s enterprise. The participants who were captured later – including Castro himself – were treated more leniently. Sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, Castro actually served less than two: not an excessive punishment for having occasioned the deaths of sixteen men. That they were in the service of a dictatorship seems to me to make little difference: Castro had displayed a taste for the genre of violence even while Cuba was still a democracy (however imperfect). One of the lessons he drew from the whole experience was never to show mercy to opponents. Mercy can rebound on those who show it.
Moncada is a long, low building painted yellow. Most of it has since been converted into a school, an intelligent if cynical piece of propaganda, implying that the revolution has beaten swords into ploughshares. There are more schools, it is true; but there are also more guns, and certainly less butter, than ever there were before.
The bullet holes in the stucco facade have been carefully preserved (they are floodlit at night), and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find peasants approaching them to touch them reverently and pray for the recovery of their sick pig. There is a museum in the barracks whose entrance is in the most pockmarked part of the wall, and there is a plaque calling eternal glory down on to the martyrs of Moncada (eternal glory having long since been incorporated into the panoply of Marxist-Leninist concepts). The contents of the museum were drearily familiar, the incarnation of half-truth and distortion in the service of lies. One does not read, for example, of the long co-operation between Batista and the communists, or of the latter’s rejection of the assault on Moncada:
We repudiate the Putschist methods, peculiar to bourgeois factions, of the action in Santiago de Cuba…an adventurist attempt to capture…military headquarters. The heroism displayed by the participants in this action is false and sterile…
On the contrary, the view of history presented in the museum is that presented in a book called As We See Moncada, a compilation of paintings by children between the ages of four and twelve, with text also by them, published by the New People publishing house in 1975. The first chapter is called Martí, intellectual author. The first picture is by a nine-year-old called Isaura Costas. It is of a simple yellow house with three blue windows and a red door – the house in which Martí was born. The caption reads:
Martí was born on Paula Street on January 28. His parents were people of modest means. He was very fond of children, and he wrote a book for us called La Edad de Oro; for us he is the apostle, and also the intellectual author of Moncada.
Next comes a portrait of Martí, drawn with a purple face and a pink shirt by Drago Stoyanovich, aged twelve. The caption reads:
When we say poet, journalist and revolutionary intellectual, we think of José Martí who, by his meritorious example, helped the Cubans to figth [sic] for freedom.
Three pages on, little Jorge Cazola aged ten has painted the barracks blue, and in the red background are the flags of Cuba and of the July 26th Movement, and a portrait of Martí, also in blue. The caption reads:
We say that Martí was the intellectual author of Moncada because, based on his revolutionary ideas, he was determined to free Cuba from Yankee imperialism – to bring her the liberty she has today.
There follows an account in pictures of the escapade, then the triumph of the revolution, and finally the conversion of Moncada into a school. The last picture, by Idelka Pedroso aged six, shows the barracks (also painted blue) flying the Cuban and July 26th Movement flags and a schoolgirl, taller than the building itself, standing beside it. The caption reads:
The former Moncada garrison is a school now and like the other garrisons, has been transformed into a school by the Revolution because we don’t want to have any sign of illiteracy in Cuba, and because we want all the children to have schools, and to put an end to the past, when the schools were only for the children of rich people. The Revolution let us put an end to this injustice.
To put an end to the past: to begin again, the dream of adolescent revolutionaries everywhere. When I read of such aspirations, I think of Goya’s picture of Saturn devouring his children.
How does one escape in Cuba from the world of slogans demanding Socialism or Death, Marxism-Leninism or Death? I found solace in the Academy of Sciences, in the Calle Amargura. It contains a museum dedicated to Carlos J. Finlay, the Cuban who in 1881 demonstrated the transmission of yellow fever by mosquito. His father was a Scotsman, his mother a white Trinidadian; he studied in Paris, Madrid and Philadelphia, and was fluent in four languages. His house still stands along the Prado, a commemorative plaque affixed to its crumbling walls. Inside, the rooms have been partitioned with plywood or cardboard: the Revolution considers the rooms too large to remain in use as they were built.
The Academy of Sciences has a splendid, dark, and restful if somewhat grandiloquent interior, full of busts and paintings of historic moments in science, bookcases with leather-bound volumes, marble halls, and a lecture theatre that contains the very lectern from which Finlay first communicated his truly great discovery to the world. How civilised the Academy seemed, uninvaded by the intellectual brutalism of the world outside. The charming lady who showed me round did not mention politics or ideology once. Nevertheless, it transpired I had chosen a bad time to come and my visit was regretfully cut short: it was Martí’s birthday and the Academy was soon to close so that the staff could attend a meeting in homage to him.
What would Finlay, Cuba’s greatest scientist, have made of all this? Perhaps he would have laughed. Somewhat embarrassingly for the official, state-propagated historiography, Finlay never supported the nationalists against the Spanish, though he lived through all three wars of independence. Science and medicine, not politics, were his métier; and one cannot help feeling he was the better man for it.
Nevertheless, a nationalist use has been found for Finlay, over and above the understandable pride in his discovery (what a fine leap of the imagination to conceive that an insect might through its bite spread the invisible agent of disease, and what intelligent dedication to prove it!). I found a book entitled Alas amarillas – Yellow Wings, by Sergio Amaro Mendez – devoted to the discovery and its persistent denial by the Americans, who believe to this day that their man, Walter Reed, after whom the great army hospital in Washington is named, discovered the transmission of yellow fever by mosquito. (For example, the two volume work, Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, by Mandell, Douglas and Bennett, published in 1979, states that ‘The Yellow Fever Commission under Dr. Walter Reed, proved that the mosquito was the vector of yellow fever.’) This refusal to recognise Finlay at his true worth is taken as just one more example of the arrogant depreciation of anything Latin American by the anglosajones, and much as I detest strident nationalism, whosever it might be, I admit that as I read of Reed’s dishonest treatment of Finlay, my blood began to boil on behalf of the Cubans.
Reed treated Finlay in Cuba very much as Best treated Paulescu in Romania. Both Reed and Best were hard on the heels of a great discovery, but failed to make it themselves; both therefore denigrated, misread or underestimated the work of their predecessors, either consciously or unconsciously, in order to claim priority for their own work; both probably believed that no truly important discoveries could emanate from such scientifically backward insignificant countries as Romania and Cuba.
It is humiliating enough to belong to a nation dominated politically by its neighbours; but when its culture, art and scientific achievements are also despised, the insult is complete. Imagine, then, the rage of having the greatest scientific discovery of one’s nation unscrupulously appropriated by foreigners who are already replete with every kind of glory! Yes, nationalism in these circumstances is understandable; but still it is an evil, and men manipulate it for evil ends.
There are still a few foreign philo-Fidelistas living in Cuba, though their number is almost certainly dwindling. I visited one of them, an Englishwoman whose name I had been given in England, who lived in El Vedado, a section of the Harana where the former bourgeoisie built their villas with engaging rodomontade, the architectural equivalent of a Castro speech, grand Corinthian or Ionic columns (sometimes both) adorning even the most modest of constructions. They knew how to build for the climate, however: high ceilings, stone floors, verandahs, tall shuttered windows to admit the breeze or exclude the glare. They planted trees for shade and altogether succeeded in creating one of the least dispiriting suburbs I have seen anywhere in the world.
Of course, the Corinthian columns are crumbling now and perhaps one day they will collapse altogether, bringing down their porte cochères with them. It won’t matter, of course; who needs a porte cochère in the new Cuba? And I must admit once more that decay has its charms, and Vedado would not have been the same for me without its atmosphere of an era irrevocably past.
The Englishwoman lived in a grand house which, however, had suffered the fate of grand houses unmaintained for thirty years. The appliances in the bathroom, for example, did not work any longer, water being distributed from a red plastic bucket. The house was dark and cool, and in a state of terminal dinginess. Personally, I shouldn’t have minded living there.
When two English meet they listen carefully to the way the other speaks. They do this whether they want to or not, whether consciously or not; they would do it even if they were two survivors in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. The presence or absence of the glottal stop is enough to establish friendship or antagonism. Some adopt the glottal stop for political reasons: it means they identify with the under- privileged of the world. Though of humble origin, my speech contains no such stops, which makes me suspect in the eyes, or should I say the ears, of many of my fellow countrymen.
The Englishwoman was the daughter of diplomats, and thus not a daughter of the proletariat. She had come to Cuba to visit them fifteen years ago and had stayed ever since. She worked as a translator and lived in what had been the servants’ quarters, surprisingly well-built and comfortable. The basic mistrust between us prevented me from asking any of the interesting questions that naturally occurred to me. Still, it was clear enough she was a sympathiser, and described in glowing terms the new type of family doctors who not only cured but visited their elderly patients once a week to ensure they were not doing anything unhealthy. This filled me with as much gloom as it filled her with enthusiasm: the prospect of reaching 75 years of age to be hectored by young doctors was sufficient to make me wish for early death. It was Dostoyevsky who remarked that even if authority were constituted solely for our own good, we should wish to disobey it, just to assert our personalities. He was right.
She spoke, too, of the enduring enthusiasm of the crowds for Fidel. Could it be that she had failed to notice the dissolution in Cuba of the distinction between what was voluntary and what was compulsory, one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian dictatorship? Or was I merely assuming that my distaste for such regimes must be shared by a majority of Cubans?
In my hotel I met two British newspaper correspondents. They were sitting at a table for two in the restaurant and I joined them, bringing my chair over to their table. One of them, who knew Cuba well, said that the transfer of customers from one table to another was generally not allowed in Cuban restaurants, and called down the anathema of the waiters on anyone who tried it. This time, however, it passed off peacefully.
The one who knew Cuba well had just written a story about the Pan-American Games, which were due to be held in Cuba the following year. The bowling event had been cancelled because of the United States’ embargo on sales to Cuba. In his article he had called the sport nine-pin bowling, and his editor had questioned whether it should not have been the ten-pin variety. He had thus spent the morning trying to find out whether the cancelled event was nine- or ten-pin bowling. The correspondent’s life seems a glamorous one, but like any other it has its drudgery.
We talked of Cuba, and of how long Castro would last. They said that the lot of the Cuban peasant was better than that, say, of the Mexican peasant. In Cuba, the existence of a malnourished child would be news. Yes, I remarked, but one would have been able to say the same thing ten years ago, and if Castro survived, one might be able to say the same thing ten years hence (though even this was doubtful). The achievements of the revolution were at best static, its drawbacks growing by the hour. Cuba’s problem was that it had been steered up a blind alley without a reverse gear.
Many had predicted, they said, that Cuba would have difficulty reintegrating the 50,000 soldiers brought home from the African wars where they had defended the Marxist regimes of Angola and Ethiopia. It had been predicted there would be unemployment and social unrest on a large scale. But this only showed a fundamental lack of understanding of how societies such as Cuba’s functioned. There being no market in labour, there was simply no imperative for a job to correspond to any work that actually had to be done. Thus, instead of unemployment, Cuba had low wages; instead of inflation, a shortage of goods and a black market; instead of a housing shortage, universal decay. Whether this was preferable, said the correspondents, was a matter of fine judgment.
I pointed out two things. First that the system involved state supervision of and interference in the details of everyday life, and also the most absolute censorship, such as the two correspondents would not tolerate for a moment in their own lives; second, that when refugees from other countries of the continent voted with their feet or their boats, they never voted for Cuba. This the correspondents did not deny.
We talked of racism in Cuba. Racism is claimed by Marxists to be a disease of capitalism, a form of false consciousness that it generates among its disadvantaged classes to prevent them from seeing where their true interests lie. Did racism still exist in Cuba? Yes, but in a muted fashion. Certainly the United States and other countries had no right to tax it on this score. But it was significant that most blacks believed they had been sent in disproportionate numbers to the African wars. (There might, of course, have been a good military reason for doing this.) But was their belief true, I asked? One said it was impossible to tell, but the mere fact that this belief existed among black Cubans proved they still felt disadvantaged in Cuba. The other replied that he wouldn’t say there had been discrimination against the blacks, exactly. It was not that more blacks had been chosen for military service; rather it was that more whites had been exempted from it.
This was the kind of mental contortion that Cuba exacted from free men of good will striving to be fair; what must it have exacted from the people who lived there? (Incidentally, when we talked of racism, we did not mention the destruction of Havana’s Chinatown, because the Chinese are no longer deemed a victim race.) I left Cuba with an almost physical disgust for politics, and I resolved never to write on a political subject again. I resolved to write about Nature or Art instead, if I wrote at all. But it was a resolution I knew from the start which I should find it difficult to keep.
On the aircraft back to Canada, I read a Saturday edition of Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth). In its middle pages were the first instalments of accounts by two Cuban journalists of a journey through Mexico to the United States border, obviously intended to be a crescendo of horror as the Monster (as Martí once called the United States) grew nearer. The articles were well-written, and I thought it was a clever idea to let readers see the same journey through the eyes of two different people (though my suspicious mind also thought of other reasons why the journalists should have travelled as a pair – to spy on one another).
Here were two talented young men, who had lived all their lives in Cuba and for whom the Cuban system was as natural as the free market system was to a native, say, of Chicago, suddenly plunged into a world where the rules were different, where everything they had learnt about how to survive in everyday life was irrelevant. In a way, then, they were making my journey in reverse, and I found myself wondering whether my reactions to what I had seen were not as predetermined as theirs. For in Mexico, they saw and felt all that Castro would have wished them to see and feel:
No, no thank you – I say to a child with a squalid body who offers me a magazine. He looks at me with his Indian’s eyes and continues imperturbably with his work.
This time, I thought, no one is going to swindle me. In the days before I received my training as a traveller in realities so different from ours, I’d fallen into more than one trap. Images flashed in my memory: in the metro a vendor of peppermints almost succeeded in filling my pockets with them merely because I had paid attention to his sales talk; in the Xochimilco Gardens I was caught in the crossfire between two women, each offering cooked dishes with an eternal litany. Without realising it, I found myself seated at a table with a menu with special prices… Another time, at the Hidalgo station, I nearly found myself with an armful of native dolls because I didn’t know how to ignore the salesman and wanted to be friendly. Now, only a moment before while getting on to a bus, I had what I swore would be my last setback: a woman with an ageless face offered me a little pillow that I thought was included in the price of the ticket. But it wasn’t free…
Here is Castro’s aristocratic idea of commerce as theft, as intrinsically ignoble and demeaning. Cubans were supposed, no doubt, to be appalled at the vulgarity of what was described. More likely, they would ask their elders what peppermints were.
Later, taking a train to Hermosillo with a Mexican intellectual, the author of the article reverts to an old and familiar Latin American theme:
[Our] conversation…has only one subject, finance… Feeling a mistaken shame…I mention the poor state of my purse. Afterwards I learnt, in conversations begun in the editorial offices of newspapers and finished in bars …that this lack of money was a problem common to all the journalists of the continent. Very few were the journalists of the area who had sufficient income to pay for an investigation into a foreign country. Only the gringos and Europeans – alleged a respected colleague – had enough money to travel through our countries to write about realities they didn’t understand. With us, talent is synonymous with little money.
The words realities they didn’t understand echoed in my brain. Could it be that I had got everything wrong, that I had failed to understand Cuba? Did the slogan ‘Defence for production, production for defence’ not signify what it appeared to signify? Did the notice in a Havana workshop to the effect that lack of respect for one’s superior at work was counter-revolutionary mean other than what I took it to mean? Did the empty shops, the crumbling buildings, the lack of entertainment, the queues, the fear, the uniformity of stated opinion, the lack of elections, the domination of one man over ten million, the universal surveillance, not mean what I took them to mean? Did medical care and a bare sufficiency of rice and beans render freedom superfluous? Was I wrong to conclude from the fact that no refugees ever sought asylum in Cuba that whatever its achievements Cuban socialism was not what anybody wanted if offered a choice? I tried to doubt my own judgment, but in the end I couldn’t.