Cuba beyond the Beach Read online

  For decades, a steady stream of radical visitors, such as Susan Sontag, C. Wright Mills, Amiri Baraka, and Angela Davis, saw in revolutionary Cuba, to quote student radical Todd Gitlin, “everything that the US was not.” Cuba was the site of what Susan Lord has termed “decolonized cosmopolitanism,” in the 1960s especially, and this history of Cuba as a centre for global left-wing cultural and intellectual life is still visible all over town.19 There are statues, plaques, and monuments to an array of important counterculture or leftist figures. The statue of John Lennon in the eponymously named park is well-known, but there are plenty of others. My son used to play in a park with friends in Nuevo Vedado that featured a statue of Ho Chi Minh. There is a statue of Yasser Arafat in Miramar, a plaque to Irish martyr Bobby Sands in a park in Vedado, and my favourite, a monument to the US martyrs Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that I encountered by accident one day walking toward the National Library.

  “For peace, bread and roses, we face the executioner.” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Murdered June 19, 1953, at the corner of 27 and Paseo streets

  Cuba was a place to admire, to be sure, but also a place to project one’s political fantasies. Today, for many outsiders the fantasy runs in reverse. Cuba is not the utopian future but rather the world we have lost. As US art critic Rachel Weiss puts it, instead of imagining Cuba as they did in the 1960s as “a place where history is being made,” now for many visitors it’s “the place that time forgot — Cuba as time capsule, pointed backward rather than ahead.”20

  There has been considerable genuflecting from outsiders visiting Havana over the years, just as there has been considerable condemnation. It is not just the left that sees the Cuba it wants to see; the right wing also projects their fantasies. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, broke ranks with his party to support Obama’s new Cuba policy. As he explained to the New York Times: “We’ve got a museum of socialism 90 miles from our shore.” According to him, that’s something conservatives should want Americans to see.21

  It is so easy to stereotype: socialist utopia or communist hell. Xenia Reloba, a writer with whom I have worked in Havana, laughs that I have been “trapped in the spider web that is our everyday reality.” The spider web metaphor is more than her rhetorical flourish. I think she understands that what traps me are the infinite complex strands that hold it all in place. So rather than promising the truth, in this book I offer ambiguity, because Cuba is the most contradictory place I know.

  I bring to this book the things I love and the things I hate about Havana, in the hopes that by sharing my perspective on a complicated place, visitors might, as I have, come away a little bit changed and a lot less certain. First World visitors in particular need not be blinded by ideology or guilt, which is perhaps one of the most significant things my time in Havana has taught me. I’ve been inspired by some beautiful writing by people who move between North America and their countries of origin in the global south: writers such as Teju Cole, Dany Laferrière, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Francisco Goldman, for example. That’s not my story, but I identify with their near-permanent sense of dislocation. North Americans who undertake volunteer or solidarity work in the developing world have also influenced me. That’s not my experience either, but people such as Canada’s long-time African development activist, Molly Kane, have taught me plenty about the folly of believing that, as she puts it, “those who have more to give also know more.”22 In many First World/Third World encounters, it seems to me, people grapple with the same questions: what kinds of human relationships are possible in dramatically unequal circumstances? What does reciprocity mean across such formidable borders? Does money ever not matter? Perhaps my biggest intellectual inspiration in trying to figure out what I’ve learned from Cuba has come from Leela Gandhi, a theorist of post-colonial studies. She asks provocative questions about how minor but significant moments of human connection, things I describe in this book, are produced. When do small acts of friendship triumph over the overwhelming logic of global inequalities? What makes it possible to avoid the temptations of superiority that seem to arise inevitably when people are raised with plenty? I take more comfort from the possibilities I see in friendship than I do from abstract or formulaic ideology. Cuba taught me that.

  There’s an old joke I heard in 2004 when I spent my first extended time in Havana. It’s dated and I don’t think it still circulates. I recently asked my friends from whom I originally heard it to remind me of the exact wording and they had no memory of it. But for me it was a helpful introduction to Cuban complexities. A CIA agent has been in Havana for twenty years and has yet to file a report to his supervisors. They are constantly nagging him for information; finally he sends his report:

  I will never understand this country.

  There is no food in the shops, but everyone is well fed.

  There is occasionally chicken in the markets but there are never any eggs.

  The clothes in the stores are horrible but the people are beautifully dressed.

  They never finish any construction project, but no one is living on the street.

  Everyone complains about the revolution, but everyone loves Fidel.

  That’s why I can’t write a report about this country.

  The perfect bookend to that joke is this comment I heard ten years later, when filmmaker Marilyn Solaya came to speak to our students in Havana. Solaya is a brave and talented feminist filmmaker who has made documentaries about topics like Havana’s public masturbators (who, I’m sorry to inform you, you will hear more about in this book). She also just made a feature film Vestido de Novia (His Wedding Dress — a word play), which is about transgender issues. It won a slew of awards during the Havana film festival of 2014 and is winning awards in Europe and North America as well. Solaya is only the third woman in Cuban history to have made a feature film, and she is an unflinching critic of hypocrisy and patriarchy. When she spoke to our students she explained herself like this: “I have a conflict because I live in three countries: The country they say I live in, the country that some people live in, and the country that most people live in.”

  As an outsider — albeit an intimate one — in Cuba I am a part of Solaya’s “the country that some people live in,” the emerging dollar-and-passport-wielding middle class whom we’ll hear about in this book. Solaya’s “country they say I live in” is easy to spot on billboards and official media — the fantasy Cuba of slogans and pumped up ideology. It’s the “country that most people live in” that I’m trying to keep in sight, and how the three countries coexist in one little island.

  A CITY OF STORIES

  The Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has said that if he lived in Havana, he would simply plant a camera on a street corner and make a new film every day. This book is like Almodóvar’s imaginary camera, picking up the chaotic, everyday texture of life in a confusing and wonderful place.

  Havana is full of curves and alleys, and even a few dead ends, and the best stories to come out of the city, in my experience at least, are just as idiosyncratic as that human geography. On any stroll through Havana you encounter some fundamental facts and rhythms of life: The hour the little girls pour out onto the streets to head to dance class; Or when everyone heads out, grocery bags in hand, toward the bakery at virtually the same moment every day; The women and men flirting or fighting on the Malecón, Havana’s living room sea wall; Apparently chaotic crowds at markets or bus stops who are actually observing a well-coordinated line-up system.

  Gente de Zona is the name of a huge Cuban musical group. If you have turned on a radio in the last couple of years anywhere in the world you have probably heard them, along with Enrique Iglesias and Descemer Bueno, singing the infectiously upbeat “Bailando.” Gente de zona translates as “people in the neighbourhood,” and I think their popularity stems not only from their danceable music but also their celebration of Havana’s strong neighbourhood loyalties and the range of neighbourhood characters. We’ll meet a few of them here
.

  The sidewalks and streets of Havana are uneven and broken, as any skateboarder, wheelchair user, or baby carriage pusher can tell you. It can be a workout for the legs and feet, but when you move around Havana, you also use your ears. Those Who Dream with Their Ears is the name of a magazine Cuban music writer Joaquín Borges-Triana edited some years ago. (It’s a bit of an inside joke, as Joaquín is blind.) He is one of the people who taught me that the sound of Havana is the key to understanding just about everything: Cuban dreams, to be sure, but also politics, history, and daily life.

  Havana is changing — “renovating” in official parlance — and offering up plenty of new stories as it does. What to make of “La Nueva Cuba”— the new Cuba of restaurants, real estate, and market opportunities that fill the pages of North American newspapers, particularly since the Cuba/US normalization? From the streets of Havana the “New Cuba” story is contradictory and also a great deal less “new.” Cubans, in their manner, have been entrepreneurial for a long time. As we’ll see, the various political and economic crises of the past fifty years made Cuba an incubator for ingenuity long before the current move toward a free market.

  For all the insularity of a blockaded island, Cubans do, sometimes, move around the world, virtually and otherwise. The best thing about the course I co-teach in Havana is that it is part of a reciprocal agreement: we bring students to Havana and we host Cuban academics in Canada. As a host, I have seen, up close, that Cuban journeys off the island have never been easy. But Cuban inventiveness can have a global reach and has adapted to the Internet and many other material scarcities. It also, arguably, helped to end the Cold War.

  ONE

  GENTE DE ZONA: PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

  The centre of my social world in Havana is a seventy-five-year-old lady. I met Vivian over a decade ago through mutual friends, when I was first looking for a place to live with my family for an extended sabbatical. Long before the Cuban government began encouraging cuentapropismo (self-employment), Vivian was supplementing her meagre pension from the Cuban Ministry of Finance by working as an apartment finder for foreigners. She has impeccable credentials for this position: she is a life-long Vedado resident who knows every block of the neighbourhood. Vedado isn’t a tourist magnet like colonial Old Havana. But it is the centre of Cuban intellectual and cultural life: home of the University of Havana and a dozen cinemas, concert halls, and other venues. When Cubans want to describe someone with a culturally or intellectually privileged background, they refer to them as a true “hijo de Vedado”— a son or daughter of Vedado. It isn’t the most economically fancy neighbourhood; it’s not where you find the old wealth of neighbouring Miramar or even the lower density and newer dwellings of its younger sibling, Nuevo Vedado (New Vedado). But culturally, Vedado is Havana’s hub. Like much of the city, Vedado’s housing stock includes aging colonial elegance, 1950s modernism, and near bombed-out deterioration within the same block. Vivian’s knowledge of Vedado’s landlords and their housing stock was indispensable when I arrived there in 2003.

  A COUNTRY OF OLD LADIES

  Vivian is a trim, energetic woman, with short-cropped silver hair and an easy smile. She was raised a middle-class Havana girl and so learned English in her pre-revolution Catholic private school. Unlike others of her class, her family decided to wait out the revolution, curious to see what would happen. Actually, her parents wanted to leave; Vivian convinced them to stay. She fell in love, crossing class lines, as was then the fashion, with a tobacco worker. She married the tobacco worker, the first of several husbands who came and went. A few years ago I arrived to big Vedado gossip: Vivian had a new boyfriend, though she told me recently that theirs is more of a phone relationship. Vivian loves to talk. She regularly regales me, and now my students, with stories of lining the streets of Havana to watch Fidel and company come to town in 1959. She has great tales of working at the finance ministry when Che Guevara was minister, riding the elevator with him, attending meetings with an icon my students can barely imagine as flesh and blood.

  The first time we met we walked the streets of Vedado all afternoon looking at apartments together. It became legal to rent apartments to foreigners in 1993. But when I began looking ten years later, the process was still new enough that an intermediary like Vivian, an English-speaking neighbourhood lady, could carve out a little entrepreneurial niche for herself. Vivian was like an ambulatory Airbnb. She earned one dollar a day from the landlord for every client she placed. Now this niche market has been replaced by the Internet as well as an expanding Havana rental market. But that afternoon in 2003 Vivian and I went from one leafy Vedado street to another, looking at beautiful places that then cost around $25 daily. I was still learning the ropes, and was worried about whether we should be telling potential landlords that my “Canadian family” she kept referring to (to make me sound respectable, I supposed) consisted of two women and a Guatemalan adopted child, then four years old. Not so wholesomely Canadian, I feared. What would potential landlords make of same-sex parents with a kid? “Don’t worry,” she told me, “you aren’t sex tourists who are going to fill their apartment with prostitutes. That’s your trump card.”

  Even though nowadays the bottom has fallen out of the personal apartment-matching network, Vivian survives, although how she manages to do that is not exactly clear. She does not have family overseas who send remittances. She owns a decent, central Vedado apartment that she shares with her son and daughter-in-law. Utility charges for Havana apartments are negligible. Water and electricity are charged based on consumption, in the MN (peso) economy, and amount to pennies a month (though luxuries like air conditioners, which few have, drive the electricity bill up). Vivian and her family have fixed their apartment up to provide an unusual amount of privacy for themselves. She made a deal with a cafeteria downstairs to provide her with dinner. She doesn’t have a computer or an Internet connection, but her neighbour does. So she sends and receives e-mail by simply opening her window. She teaches English classes to Cuban students, teaches Spanish to Canadian visitors — of whom she has a steady stream, and maintains a voracious interest in the world around her. We occasionally go to the movies together in December during the Havana International Film Festival. Recently we saw a documentary about the great Argentinean singer Mercedes Sosa, who lived a complicated, tumultuous life. A few days later, Vivian told me she’d heard the filmmaker, an Argentinean in town for the Havana Film Festival, interviewed on Cuban radio. There were a few points he didn’t address in the on-air interview, so Vivian called him up at the radio station and chatted on the phone with him for half an hour.

  This is the Vivian I adore. She feels herself to be a citizen of the world who has a perfect right to track down a visiting filmmaker at a radio station and quiz him by telephone about the finer points of his movie. (And to his credit, he responded.) She would say the revolution helped nurture this sense of intellectual curiosity, and gave her the tools to pursue her varied interests. I would say it’s thanks to Vivian and the women of her generation that this place keeps hobbling along as it does. To me, she’s emblematic of her generation of old Fidelista ladies, who have propped up this revolution — for good and for ill — for over fifty years. When Obama made his December 17, 2014, speech advocating closer US-Cuban ties, Vivian was as excited and sceptical as any Cuban I spoke to that day. “I don’t trust US politicians, but really want to stay alive now,” she said. She’s still curious to see what will happen next.

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

  There’s a very old joke that circulates both inside and outside Cuba which goes like this: What are the three successes of the Cuban revolution? Education, health care, and culture. What are the three failures? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One only has to spend a bit of time trying to feed oneself outside the tourist restaurant world to understand the truth of that joke.

  For visitors, there are two kinds of grocery shopping in Ha
vana: the market and “The Shopping.” Vedado is comparatively well served by both. It houses two of the handful of supermarkets that everyone calls “The Shopping” in the city. One is located in the Galleria at Paseo, a two-storey shopping mall at the west end of Vedado, which includes a store that sells nothing but plastic flowers, several stores that sell high-end perfume and lotions, and a forlorn-looking toy store. The other Vedado supermarket is located in the FOSCSA building. This Vedado high rise, the tallest building in Cuba, looks as though it might have been a product of Soviet-era architectural brutality, but it was actually constructed a few years before the 1959 revolution. It opened its doors in 1956 as the offices of a Cuban broadcasting network, but several years later was reinvented almost completely as housing for the flood of Soviet managers and advisors who moved to Cuba in the early 1960s. The ground floor supermarket was once reserved solely for foreigners, which in those days meant mostly Soviets. Now the supermarkets are open for everyone, but the goods are sold in CUC (Cuban Convertible Pesos), equivalent to the US dollar, which few Cubans earn.