Cuba beyond the Beach Read online

  There are plenty of guidebooks that explain the Havana tourist route and detail the latest restaurants. These are useful, but this book is for those who want to understand how people in Havana live and what visitors might learn from that. Along the way, it is also about the potential and limitations of relationships across the multiple boundaries that separate the First and Third worlds. How habaneros (inhabitants of Havana) live, what they eat, where they go, what they listen to, and what they think. These are difficult to get at because people in Cuba, just like people everywhere, don’t speak with one voice. (This was always one of the fallacies of US-government Cuban policy.) Foreigners shouldn’t take the slogans on the billboards or the headlines in the newspapers any more seriously than many Cubans take them, which is not very. I am persuaded by those Cubans who characterize their daily reality as more sociolismo than socialismo — more a reciprocal network of favours among friends (socios) than an abstract state ideology (socialism). It’s a system that is fascinating to see in practice.

  Cubans have been formed by a society given to revolutionary hyperbole and polemical speeches. The most powerful country in the world labelled them “terrorists” and prior to that, a few decades ago, they were blamed (via the erroneously named “Cuban missile crisis”) for almost blowing us all to smithereens. What does all this political drama mean in daily life?

  The years I have spent in Havana have been momentous. When I lived there in 2004 Cubans were still digging themselves out from the collapse of their main trading partner, the Soviet Union, a period of extreme deprivation euphemistically named the “Special Period” that began in 1990. The crises began the slow process of economic transformation that continues today: the state is relaxing exclusive control over certain sectors of the economy, most notably in the agricultural and tourist sectors. A parallel dollar economy had been introduced in 1993, legalizing access to hard currency. In 2004, the US dollar was withdrawn from circulation and slapped with a 10 percent surcharge, and Cuba entered a period of dual official currencies. Moneda nacional or Cuban pesos (hereafter referred to as MN) are what most people earn, and are roughly worth one-twenty-fourth of the Cuban controvertible peso (hereafter referred to as CUC), which is pegged to the US dollar. Incentives for international tourism were also introduced, including the legalization of private restaurants and apartments (both initially under extremely strict conditions.) These reforms pulled Cuba out of the post-Soviet free fall, but they also exacerbated inequalities (especially by race) that were obvious in 2004 and inescapable now. In 2006, Fidel Castro announced he was temporarily stepping down in favour of his brother Raúl. In 2008, Raúl took power officially. That same year, the country suffered three hurricanes that hit the agricultural sector especially hard, the damage from which cost the country an estimated US$10 billion, or nearly one-fifth of its annual GDP.4 In 2010, Raúl Castro announced sweeping economic reforms. The state took a further step away from being the sole player in economic life, and new opportunities for self-employment (cuentapropismo) and foreign investment have been created. In 2011, a private real estate market was legalized. And the mother of all surprise announcements came in December 2014 — that the US and Cuba would normalize their relations and work toward ending the US economic blockade and travel ban.

  How have these and other big changes over the past decade played out on the streets and in the parks and neighbourhoods of Havana? The wisdom here is a compendium of what I’ve learned from Cuban people rather than Cuban politicians. I listen to music more than speeches; I watch more films than TV news. The conversations Cubans have with each other, their art, their music and other cultural forms, are intense, challenging, and smart. Opinions abound in Technicolor. The people in my Havana neighbourhood are old Communist ladies and their sceptical offspring, rock stars and peanut vendors, world famous street people, crabby store clerks, Spanish teachers, history professors, journalists, filmmakers, butchers, illegal seafood vendors, tour guides, and taxi drivers. All of them have lived this curious Cold War fault line in ways that are more complicated, subtle, funny, intelligent, poetic, tragic, and beautiful than any slogan could capture. As Cuba experiences some dramatic changes, there is much to appreciate and learn from in the unlikely world they have collectively built for themselves.

  Over the past fifty years Cuba has been both isolated and cosmopolitan. It’s been closed to Americans but wide open for European tourists, African medical students, and Latin American political exiles, to take just a few examples. Zaira is a Cuban graduate student in Canada who translates for our course in Havana. She learned to speak English because her high school was located on the outskirts of Havana, next door to a farm where people came from all over the world to help with the harvest. A steady stream of solidarity visitors from Ireland, Norway, Japan, and South Africa helped perfect her English conversational skills, not to mention shape an excellent accent. The intensity of the US/Cuba relationship sometimes overshadows the multiple ties between Cuba and other parts of the world.

  CUBANS, CANADIANS, AND AMERICANS: A PECULIAR TRIANGLE

  I’m a Canadian, and as such I have a particular relationship to the place. Canadians and Cubans have crossed paths with each other regularly over the centuries. William Van Horne, for example, a former president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a familiar figure in Canada’s past. He was present at the famous driving of the last spike that completed Canada’s railway in 1885. (In the famous photo he’s the one with the top hat who looks like a Monopoly game caricature of a capitalist.) Few know that Van Horne went on to help finance and run the Cuban Railroad Company, which connected Havana to the eastern provinces and the city of Santiago de Cuba in 1901. His observations of widespread rural poverty prompted him to offer some advice — ironic in hindsight — to the US military consul who ran Cuba when he was there in 1899. Van Horne tried to convince the US military government to enact land reform, taking untilled land away from absentee landlords and parcelling it out to Cubans. As Van Horne saw it, if more Cubans owned their own land, future social upheavals might be avoided. “In countries where the percentage of individuals holding real estate is greatest,” he wrote, “conservatism prevails and insurrections are unknown.”5

  Canadian tycoon Max Aitkin (a.k.a. Lord Beaverbrook, one of the finest, or at least richest, sons of New Brunswick) also held investments in Cuban railway and banking interests. While touring the island in 1906, he encountered a number of other visiting Canadian capitalists who all, according to him, “seemed to be inclined to criticize and make fun of anything Cuban.” He did not feel the same way; he was actually very fond of the place. This is how he put it: “Cuba compares favourably with Canada in every respect barring morals.”6 A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, but it set a kind of ambivalent, two-sided tone for Canadian feelings about Cuba for decades to come.

  In 1945, Cuba was the first Caribbean country with which Canada established diplomatic ties. We’ve maintained those official ties ever since. In 1953, when Cuba’s major opposition parties needed to meet safely, outside the country, to plan their strategy to topple the heavy-handed dictator Fulgencio Batista, they chose to meet at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal.7 We reprised this discreet role in the negotiations between Cuba and the US leading up to December 17, 2014, hosting both parties, secretly, in Ottawa and Toronto. Unlike almost every other country in this hemisphere, we kept talking to each other after the 1959 Cuban revolution. (Only Mexico also retained ties with Cuba.) Despite the Cold War, we didn’t see Cuba as the enemy. We didn’t join the American economic blockade. If Cuba is America’s wayward child, perhaps for ever-obedient Canadians, Cuba is that one bad friend you had in high school — the one you kept company with just to annoy your parents. Yet like all good children, we know our rebellion has limits. When Washington closed their embassy in 1961, they asked us to take their place spying on the Cubans and so we did. Former Canadian diplomat John W. Graham recalls that he outfitted himself in what he imagined to be “Soviet
technician” attire at a Zellers store in Ottawa before he left for his posting in Havana in the early 1960s. The idea was to appear as Russian as possible once in Havana, in order to photograph Soviet trucks, tanks, and other military hardware, which were then sent via diplomatic courier to Washington.8

  Some Canadians with sympathies toward the revolution made it their business to funnel information praising Castro’s social reforms to their counterparts in the US through the 1960s. Material that couldn’t be mailed directly to the US from Cuba was sent through Canada to various “Fair Play for Cuba” groups in the US. Ironically enough, at the same time, the Canadian embassy was sending Cuban periodicals they collected in Havana to Washington.9 Prime Minister Diefenbaker rejected John F. Kennedy’s demand that Canada fall into line with the US during the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Most famous, perhaps, was the 1976 visit of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau to Havana, the first visit of a NATO nation leader since Castro took power. It was a true bromance: Trudeau and Castro went fishing together. Fidel couldn’t take his eyes off Margaret, and neither could most other Cubans. A Cuban friend who now lives in Canada remembers this visit, which took place during his Havana boyhood, as an inspirational moment: “All those old military men who run Cuba drooling over the charming young Canadian prime minister’s wife. We loved it. It made me want to see Canada.”

  There are plenty of Canadian-Cuban economic ties as well. Economic trade between Canada and Cuba runs at a rate of about $1 billion annually. Sherritt International accounts for a huge amount of that; it is Cuba’s second largest foreign investor. Sherritt operates an enormous nickel mine in Moa, on the remote northeastern shore. Sherritt, whose former CEO Ian Delany is dubbed “Castro’s Favourite Capitalist” in the Canadian media, also has oil and gas interests near Varadero, and their presence in Cuba was recently renewed until 2028. As one of Cuba’s largest foreign investors in the world, Sherritt has come under fire from the US government, and Delany himself is forbidden entry to the US.10 Cuba’s most popular beer labels, Cristal and Bucanero, are manufactured by a joint venture owned by the Cuban government and Labatt. Canada exports machinery, auto parts, electronics, and grain, and in return Cuba sends (in addition to nickel) coffee, seafood, and, of course, cigars.

  As well as political ties, investment, and trade relations, Canadians have shown interest in Cuba in countless other ways. Canadian universities helped educate a new generation of Cuban engineers through a CIDA-funded exchange program that sent Canadian professors to teach in engineering schools in Havana in the early 1970s, and also brought Cuban students to Canada for graduate training. Thousands of professionals had left the country after the revolution, so international programs like this were crucial. There are currently over twenty Canadian universities with active research or teaching ties in Cuba, and at least as many have had shared research projects with Cuban institutions in the past.11

  Bank of Nova Scotia building, the corner of O’Reilly and Cuba streets

  Cubans are among the few people outside Canada who know who Terry Fox is.12 Cubans started a Terry Fox run in 1998, and it is now the largest such event outside Canada. There are plenty of other famous Canadians whom Cubans admire — Céline Dion and Justin Bieber being two celebrities Cubans seemingly can’t hear enough from. One tie we’d perhaps all rather forget about is the story of James McTurk. He was convicted in Canada in 2013 of sexual crimes against children during his dozens of visits. He claimed he supported the families of his sexual partners in Cuba financially. He’s the first Canadian to be convicted of child sex crimes in Cuba.

  One of my favourite books about Cuban history is On Becoming Cuban, by the US historian Louis Pérez. It’s a huge compendium of how Cuba absorbed US cultural influences for a century before the rupture of 1959. He examines everything from hairstyles to baseball to movies in order to illustrate just how saturated in things American Cuba had become prior to the 1959 revolution. Signs of Cuban/Canadian relationships are nowhere near as visible. But if you look, you can see Canada in some odd corners of Havana. Cubans dress themselves in T-shirts and ball caps from Canadian universities, sports teams, and coffee chains. I recently picked up Havana music scholar Joaquín Borges-Triana at the Toronto airport. He arrived wearing a ball cap bearing the logo of Steam Whistle, a Toronto brewery (which he had no idea was Canadian, incidentally). You can still see the chiselled name of the Bank of Nova Scotia in its old location on O’Reilly Street in Old Havana, as well as the ornate remains of the Royal Bank in Santiago de Cuba. Their buildings were quite beautiful, but Cubans didn’t like Canadian banks any more than many Canadians do. Angry peasants stoned the Santiago branch in 1934, shattering its plate glass window, upset about its role in evicting five-thousand families from their homes on a sugar plantation. Over a decade later, in 1948, armed rebels trying to topple Batista assaulted the Royal Bank’s Havana headquarters.13 Despite such a mixed legacy, Canadian symbols persist. Flags and decals are ubiquitous in Havana taxis. I’ve watched in amazement as habaneros cart their groceries in reusable bags I barely notice in Canada: Metro, Loblaws, Canadian Tire. I once recognized a distinctive shopping bag decorated with red and white maple leaves coming toward me as I was walking along busy calle Línea in Vedado, and I was so absorbed by the sight of the bag I didn’t notice the person carrying it was smiling broadly at me. She was the sister of a Cuban friend to whom I had given it a year earlier. So I have contributed my share to the symbolic Canadianization of Havana, but it works both ways. I almost benefitted directly from the generosity visiting Canadians show Cubans. In an amusing case of mistaken identity, a family of Canadian tourists, identifiable by their sunburns and Vancouver T-shirts, approached my Guatemalan-born son as we were on our way to a park in our Vedado neighbourhood. Without words, they pressed a bag of school supplies on him. We continued, confused, for a few steps until we realized they thought they were giving a donation to a Cuban kid.

  TELLING “THE TRUTH” ABOUT CUBA

  Cuba looms large in the imagination and fantasies of people all over the world, and getting beyond stereotypes can be a challenge. Pronouncements and photo opportunities of presidents and prime ministers are one thing; but small moments of encounter between Cubans and non-Cubans are where the relationships really reside. The Cuban diaspora in Canada numbers about 20,000, 7,000 of whom live in Toronto. I’ve seen the distinctive black and orange packages of Cubita coffee in grocery stores in small town New Brunswick and at cigar stores in small town Ontario. There’s a Cuban art gallery in Thunder Bay and Toronto now boasts a store that sells supplies for practitioners of Santaria, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion.14 Yet we are nowhere near equal in mobility — in our access to passports, visas, or plane tickets. Owing to the lop-sided circumstances of what Eduardo Galeano calls “our upside down world,” most Canadian/Cuban encounters take place on their soil. A million or so times a year.

  I arrived in Cuba for the first time, along with 400 other young Canadians, for an international youth festival in 1978. I didn’t know much about the place, but what twenty-one-year-old who wants to change the world could resist an opportunity to visit? The World Festival of Youth and Students invited us to celebrate, with tens of thousands of like-minded young people from around the world, “anti-imperialist solidarity, peace, and friendship.” I was very young, I believed in almost everything. I was also very Canadian. It was August and I’d never experienced such heat. We spent ten heady days moving around the city from meeting to concert to art exhibition, always with too much speechifying, always on ridiculously slow buses. “Youth of the World, Cuba is Your Home” was the slogan we saw on huge billboards throughout the city. “Youth of the World, Our Buses are Your Home” was our ironic response. Despite the heat and the interminable delays, the experience was unforgettable. Another memorable billboard lined the road on the way to the airport the day of our return home. “We will never forget you, dear and beloved friends,” said huge images of Fidel Castro to thousands of impressionable young visitors.
I took him at his word, and tried to make Cuba my second home. Years later, I learned that in order to make Havana more welcoming for foreigners like me, Cuban authorities had rounded up all the gay people to get them out of town for the duration. Not unlike what other governments do about other nuisances, such as poor people, during events like the Olympics. That’s the Havana I’ve come to know: the place that embraces me even as it occasionally slaps me in the face.

  X Alfonso, a popular contemporary Cuban musician, has a powerful song that lists a number of the things he hopes will change in a future Cuba. One of them is the “importance of selling an image of paradise outside.”15 He isn’t just speaking of tourism. You can’t blame visitors alone for acquiring superficial understandings of Cuba. Images of paradise, “sex, sun and socialism” as Jennifer Hosek terms it, have been packaged, both through tourism and political solidarity networks, to entice Europeans and North Americans for decades.16

  Tourists are always easy to mock, and it is perhaps even easier to laugh at the naiveté of the left or liberal First World visitor in Cuba who, like me when I was twenty-one, arrives in search of a political dream. Iván de la Nuez, a Cuban writer now resident in Spain, used an image of one of Cuba’s first famous leftist visitors, Jean-Paul Sartre, meeting with Che Guevera in Havana in 1960, as the cover of his book Fantasía Rojo. (The cover photo, like much of real life, cuts Sartre’s partner Simone de Beauvoir from the photo; all you see is her foot.) Red Fantasy explores the Western left intelligentsia’s prolonged fascination with Cuba. Both Sartre and Che are sitting, but Che looms over Sartre; his boots alone, in the foreground of the photo, are enormous. Sartre, furthermore, appears at first glance to be bowing his head. Che is actually lighting Sartre’s cigar, but as de la Nuez says, “there is genuflection in Sartre’s posture.”17 The dynamics of this scene — First World visitor glorifying the Cuban Revolution — have been re-enacted constantly, in some manner or other, over the past fifty years. I saw echoes of it in the T-shirt I noticed one day, worn by a visitor (blond, perhaps Canadian or maybe German) sipping a cocktail on the beautiful grounds of the Hotel Nacional, which announced “I (Heart) Fidel.” That image itself evoked a line from the 2007 song “Tercer Mundo” (Third World) by Cuban pop group Moneda Dura. The song mocks the “proletariado de los hoteles lujosos” (proletariat of the luxury hotels) who visit Cuba with their “cameras and solidarity dollars.”18