Cuba beyond the Beach Read online

  “Cuba beyond the Beach is one of those books that should be devoured by everyone interested in that mysterious island, and anyone else who simply enjoys a great read.”

  MARGARET RANDALL, AUTHOR OF CHE ON MY MIND AND ONLY THE ROAD/SOLO EL CAMINO: EIGHT DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY

  “Cuba beyond the Beach goes beyond boundaries: it’s a carefully composed mixture of travel book, city memoir, and stimulating reflections on a changing Cuba. Dubinsky succeeds in weaving together her astute observations on daily life in Havana with insights from Cuban studies, politics, and culture. This blend succeeds in explaining the bizarre realities of a complicated country in a refreshing way. By bringing Cuban approaches to social problems, such as crime, income inequality, and housing, into dialogue with outside solutions Dubinsky puts things into perspective and evades the all-too-common praise or vilification of socialist Cuba. She shows us that Cuba is neither socialist utopia nor communist hell, but an incubator for ingenuity. I recommend this book to anyone who seeks to better understand this awfully charming country and its people — and actually learn something from them.”

  RAINER SCHULTZ, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

  DIRECTOR OF THE CONSORTIUM FOR ADVANCED STUDIES

  ABROAD, CUBA DIVISION, IN HAVANA

  “In Cuba beyond the Beach Karen Dubinsky has captured the ethos of Cuba and Cubans. This work is a tour de force.”

  DR. ALTHEA PRINCE, SOCIOLOGIST, AUTHOR OF BEING BLACK AND THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN’S HAIR

  “Karen Dubinsky’s portraits of life in Cuba are indeed beyond the beach and other worn caricatures. Her observations provide an immensely satisfying read and still whet the appetite for more. From the first chapter, she brings the reader into an encounter with Cuba that is fascinating, intriguing, and pulsing with the beauty of life in all its complexity.”

  MOLLY KANE, RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE, UQAM -CIRDIS

  “Cuba beyond the Beach is the perfect introduction to Cuba for travellers truly interested in seeing the island beyond the beach and beyond the clichés. Even those who have visited before will learn more about the history and present of the fascinating, vibrant, and perplexing city that is Havana.”

  HOPE BASTIAN, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

  “By cutting away at the debilitating romance, clichés, and dense propaganda that often characterizes narratives about Cuba, this wonderfully rich book provides the reader with a rare glimpse into a Cuba that continues to capture our imaginations, even as we somewhat nervously witness its dramatic history unfold.”

  DAVID AUSTIN, AUTHOR OF FEAR OF A BLACK NATION

  Cuba beyond the Beach

  © 2016 Karen Dubinsky

  First published in 2016 by

  Between the Lines

  401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277

  Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada

  1-800-718-7201

  www.btlbooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Dubinsky, Karen, author

  Cuba beyond the beach: stories of life in Havana / Karen Dubinsky.

  Includes index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77113-269-5 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77113-270-1 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77113-271-8 (pdf) 1. Dubinsky, Karen--Travel--Cuba--Havana. 2. Havana (Cuba)--Description and travel. 3. Havana (Cuba)--Biography. 1. Havana (Cuba)--Social life and customs. I. Title.

  F1675.3.D82 2016972.9›2307C2016-901831-8

  C2016-901832-6

  Cover photo by Ivan Soca Pascual

  Cover and text design by Ingrid Paulson

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: MORE THAN A BEACH, MORE THAN A REVOLUTION

  CUBANS, CANADIANS, AND AMERICANS: A PECULIAR TRIANGLE

  TELLING “THE TRUTH” ABOUT CUBA

  A CITY OF STORIES

  ONE: GENTE DE ZONA: PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

  A COUNTRY OF OLD LADIES

  “THERE’S BEER AT THE HOSPITAL, BUT WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE EGGS?” OUR DAILY BREAD

  BICYCLES AND BEAUTIFUL CAKES

  PÁNFILO: THE JAMA JAMA GUY AS COLD WAR SUPERSTAR

  PREGONEROS: THE MUSICAL THEATRE OF THE STREET

  CERRO AND MY GAY TRADE UNION

  WOMEN, MEN, AND THE EVERYDAY BATTLES OF THE STREET

  THE FUTUROS COMMUNISTAS DAYCARE CENTRE AND OTHER ANOMALIES OF CUBAN CHILDHOOD

  TWO: THOSE WHO DREAM WITH THEIR EARS: THE SOUND OF HAVANA

  WALKING OUT INTO THE NIGHT MUSIC: RANDOM HORNS AND EVERYDAY REGGAETÓN

  HOW CUBAN MUSIC MADE ME A BETTER HISTORIAN

  INTERACTIVO AND EL BRECHT ON WEDNESDAYS

  MOURNING SANTIAGO

  “MUSIC IS MY WEAPON” TELMARY DÍAZ AND ROCHY AMENEIRO: TWO POWERFUL WOMEN OF SOUND

  FÁBRICA DE ARTE CUBANO

  THREE: LA NUEVA CUBA: LIFE IN THE NEW ECONOMY

  CHOPPED VEGETABLES, RESTAURANTS, AND OTHER SIGNS OF A NEW MIDDLE CLASS

  TECHNOLOGICAL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP OF THE POOR

  REAL ESTATE AS MAGIC REALISM

  TAXI! WHY I DON’T TALK IN CUBAN TAXIS

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

  A FEW STORIES ABOUT GARBAGE

  FOUR: CUBANS IN THE WORLD, THE WORLD IN CUBA

  LIFE WITHOUT THE INTERNET

  THE DRAMA OF THE SUITCASES: HOW TO SMUGGLE A SALMON INTO HAVANA

  TAKING CUBANS TO COSTCO

  THE THERMOMETER THAT STRUCK UP MY MOST UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP

  LOOKING FOR THE ENEMY IN MANHATTAN: HOW MY FRIEND EMILIA ENDED THE COLD WAR

  CONCLUSION: TODO SERÁ DISTINTO? OUR UNCERTAIN FUTURES

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Just about everyone I know in Havana made a contribution to this book, so my first thank you is to just about everyone I know in Havana. You are all in this book, and in my heart, in one way or another. Friends and family in Canada also made enormous contributions. Susan Belyea and Jordi Belyea Dubinsky lived many of these experiences with me. I am doubly blessed to share a first and a second home with such fine company. Susan Lord, my co-teacher, once remarked that Havana is just too big for one instructor. Both Queen’s University in Canada and the city of Havana are rewarding workplaces (especially Havana), and I am happy to share them with her. Zaira Zarza and Freddy Monasterio helped me cross the Cuba-Canadian border, literally and imaginatively, more times than any of us can count and they remain inspiring examples of how to keep oneself in two worlds at once.

  Several people read all or part of this manuscript and offered me valuable advice, reminded me of cool Havana moments I had forgotten, caught my errors, and pushed me to express myself clearly. Many thanks to Susan Belyea, Emilia Fernandez, Sean Mills, Freddy Monasterio, Susan Prentice, Xenia Reloba, Scott Ru
therford, Shadi Shahkhalili, Pamela Simon, and Ruth Warner. Michael Riordan provided some much needed encouragement at a crucial moment.

  I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with Between the Lines. The continued existence of an independent, opinionated, Canadian publishing house is a near miracle. Long may you continue. Thanks especially to Amanda Crocker, Marg Anne Morrison, and Robert Clarke for their keen editorial eyes. Thanks also to the tremendous production and promotion team: Renée Knapp, Matthew Adams, and Jennifer Tiberio.

  Havana photographer Ivan Soca Pascual gave me access to his considerable archives for the front cover image. It is an honour to share his work with a broader audience. Thanks to Ingrid Paulson for her beautiful design.

  I wrote this book in Canada and in Cuba. When I was in Canada, I would e-mail friends in Havana (those with functioning Internet connections) to confirm a detail or a street name or a translation. When I was in Havana, I was usually without easy Internet access, so I would text friends in Canada to google something for me. In this makeshift way I managed to be as accurate as possible, but if I got it wrong, it is definitely my bad.

  A note about the people in this book: Some of the names are pseudonyms. Most are real. I asked permission to cite all private conversations. A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to the Queen’s Overseas Student Travel Fund–The Sonia Enjamio Award, which helps Cuban students study in Canada and Canadian students study in Cuba.

  CUBA BEYOND

  THE BEACH

  INTRODUCTION

  MORE THAN A BEACH, MORE THAN A REVOLUTION

  Over a million Canadians travel to Cuba every year. Most of them go to the beach.

  Who can argue with that? Canadian winters are harsh, Cuban beaches beautiful. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it seemed no one was getting on airplanes, Cuban tourist officials worried about what would become of their industry. That fall, a leading Canadian-Cuban expert reassured a group of tourist industry leaders: “Don’t worry. They’ll be here,” he told them. “Canadians are more afraid of winter than they are of terrorists.”1

  Over a decade later the Cuban tourist industry is booming and visitors are increasing. Canada tops the list of tourist-sending nations in Cuba, followed by Germany, the UK, France, and Italy.2 But when, on December 17, 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro made their surprising declaration that they would like to try to behave normally toward each other, many tourists must have begun to wonder about how this warming trend would alter their attachment to Cuba. A cartoon in the Globe and Mail summed it up perfectly: David Parkins drew a Canadian enjoying an empty beach, while just behind him a tsunami of Americans was poised to overtake the uncluttered paradise. “Better make it a double,” the Canadian says to the Cuban beachside waiter. The image is a great blend of friendship, arrogance, and insecurity. In Cuba, unlike almost anywhere else, northerners outside the United States can fantasize that these are our mojitos, waiters, and beaches.

  Representatives of the US Chamber of Commerce, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and tens of thousands of US college students passed through Havana long before Obama’s surprise announcement. And shortly after “D17” (as it is now known in Cuba), everyone from Netflix to Conan O’Brien to Airbnb arrived to see (and benefit from) just what was so forbidden for fifty years. As the Americans re-assess their animosity toward Cuba since the 1959 revolution, it’s a good time for others to also look again at their relationship with the place we think we know. Countless visitors have had over fifty years of person-to-person experience in and with Cuba that Americans have generally missed. It’s one of the few places in the world where First World tourists can rub shoulders with each other without also bumping into (much less being swamped by) Americans. That’s unusual and sometimes uncanny. It’s also why people from around the world began a stampede to Cuba after December 17, 2014, to see it “before the Americans wreck it,” as I have heard many declare. Americans have definitely made their absence felt in the past fifty years and that is changing. But what do the rest of us actually know about the place beyond the beach?

  Globe and Mail cartoon, December 18, 2014. Courtesy of David Parkins

  Cuba beyond the Beach is one part travel book, one part city memoir, and large part reflection on a changing Havana in a changing Cuba. Havana, the “Paris of the Caribbean” as it was dubbed a century ago, is the nation’s soul and beating heart. It is a complicated, contradictory place, a combination of capitalism, communism, Third World, First World, and Other World, all at the same time.

  It’s a beautiful, wounded city. It bears many scars, a good number of them from the past fifty years of battle mode. The prominent seaside building that has functioned as a US embassy since official diplomatic relations were severed in 1961 — and reopened with much fanfare in August 2015 — is a great example. The area around the building has often been a constantly moving Cold War tableau, ringed with rival flags, statues, plaques, and billboards. In the George W. Bush era, this was a site of political theatre at its Cold War/War on Terror finest. Across the street Cubans erected billboards featuring the iconic Abu Ghraib torture victim, linking him — visually at least — to Miami-based, anti-Cuban terrorism. The US responded with an electronic billboard on the top floor of their building that broadcast nasty things about Cuba. Cuban authorities tried to block this with huge flags commemorating victims of US wars. Over it all presides a statue of the venerable Cuban national hero José Martí, holding a child, pointing an accusing finger at the US. Irreverent Cubans call this area, officially known as the “Anti-Imperialist Tribunal,” the protestodromo.

  All over the city signs and billboards proclaim revolutionary slogans, Che’s portrait is ubiquitous, and daycare centres have names like Futuro Communistas. If all a visitor did was read the billboards or scan the official daily paper, Granma, she or he would certainly have the impression of Cuba as a country of single-minded, ideologically over-stimulated zealots. Ideology is indeed everywhere, and at first glance, Cuba seems to exist only in shades of black and white. But first impressions can be deceiving, and ideologies are lived by people, not billboards. This book is shaped by my experiences with a wide range of Cuban people.

  Former US diplomat Wayne Smith says that Cuba is to US policy makers “as the full moon is to the werewolf,” and US historian Louis Pérez terms Cuba the US’s “obsessive compulsive disorder.”3 Maybe it’s easier for non-Americans to avoid these Cold War stereotypes, to see beneath the surface. There is nothing thrilling, illicit, or even weird about a Canadian, for example, being in Cuba, because we’ve never considered it enemy territory. I’ve marvelled over the years as US colleagues — professors, usually fairly smart people — treat my frequent research and teaching visits to Cuba as something almost unbelievable, akin to visiting the moon or North Korea. “But how do you get there?” I am frequently asked by Americans who are completely oblivious that they are the only people who don’t get there. As relations between the two countries open up, US visitors are excitedly placing their toes in water other visitors have been experiencing for a very long time.

  Yet Canadians ought not to be too cocky about our own understanding of the place. A Cuban tour guide once confided in me that he far prefers German tourists to Canadians because Germans are generally more interested in Cuban culture; they want to visit museums and art galleries. Canadians, he said, just want to go to the beach. Canadian airline advertisements and websites often refer to their flights to the Caribbean not by cities but as “Sun Destinations,” as though the nations are interchangeable and the purpose of all travel is tourism. Canadian pilots on flights to Havana almost always tell passengers to “have a great vacation” when they land, oblivious to the presence of business people, workers, Cubans returning home, students, and plenty of others among the tourists. Yet my experience in Havana has taught me that visitors, from Canada as elsewhere, have plenty of other interests in Cuba — histories, friendships, loves, ambitions, dealings both shady and legit — beyond the beach.
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  I started visiting Cuba in 1978, and have visited frequently since 2004, usually twice or three times a year. I also spent two six-month research periods living in Havana with my family. I had the good fortune to be there to witness the day normalization with the US began, December 17 2014. I come to Cuba as a visitor, but I am also a researcher, a teacher, and a friend of many Cubans. By training I am a Canadian historian, but in recent years I have done research in Cuba. I’ve written one book about Cuban child migration conflicts and another about one of Cuba’s most beloved musicians. That one has given me a great view of Havana’s contemporary music scene. In the midst of the US economic blockade, I would often arrive from Canada with auto parts for my landlord’s car, toner for a University of Havana printer, and vitamins, medicine, chocolate, and Canadian cheddar for everyone I know (including the musicians). Once I arrived with a whole fresh salmon to share with friends for New Year’s dinner. My partner Susan Belyea and I have watched our son Jordi grow up there, from barely reaching the wall of the seaside Malecón, to walking on top of it, to skateboarding beside it. He’s grown up climbing sculptures in the plazas of Old Havana as though they were playground equipment, befriending lizards, and collecting stray bits of cable and wire from the street to fashion into art. Most memorable of all, we hovered over him in his hospital bed after he fell out of a tree in a park (onto cement) near our Vedado apartment, breaking both wrists. It gave us all a crash course in the much heralded Cuban medical system, but also in a system of neighbourliness I didn’t know the extent of until we needed it.

  For almost ten years I’ve brought several hundred Canadian university students along with me to learn about Cuban economic and cultural development. My co-teachers and I take them to art galleries, film schools, and medical schools, and they hear lectures from professors, curators, journalists, musicians, and filmmakers. In class they ask their Cuban teachers difficult questions and they generally receive thoughtful answers. After class, they roam around the city pretty much on their own, making new friends at the university, the seafront Malecón, and the vegetable markets. Havana permits a freedom of movement unimaginable in any other Latin American city. They discover things I don’t know, like where to get seriously cheap drinks and what the local skateboarders are up to.