¨We don't tell the people to believe; we tell them to read.¨ Fidel
Castro
Using the phone in the neighborhood office of the CDR, the Committee in Defense of the Revolution, I am surprised to see a photo of my own neice staring up from among photos of local kids, birthday parties and Revolutionary quotations written on scraps of paper. I'm so surprised it takes me a second to recognize her. It makes me mildly uneasy to see her there, only because I know Ana, who is a secretary here, also put the quotations under the fiberglass desktop, and I happen to know firsthand she believes very few of them. Don't believe, read?! Yeah, right. She puts these quotations in because that's what Cubans are supposed to do: demonstrate support of the Revolution. And they do it terribly well.
The CDR, first designed to ferret out couter revolutionaries plotting violence against the state, is the organization that has caused people to claim that the walls have ears for almost 50 years. In actuality, the CDR does a lot of good in many neighborhoods in Cuba; when someone's out of work, they help find work. When someone's refridgerator reaches a state of no repair and she has no resources to replace it, they step in to help. They give summer classes to keep local kids busy, and they provide an avenue for local complaints and demands, a forum for local discussions. But they also convince Cubans to rat each other out; perhaps the intention remains protection of the state and the neighborhood, but the effect hurts every community's solidarity and creates a climate of constant fear. And this makes it more or less impossible to know what Cubans really think. About anything.
Cubans have a name for the problem of truth: they call it ¨la doble moral -- the double moral.¨ What they mean is that what a Cuban claims as his opinion will depend entirely on his audience, not on what he really thinks. He will give one truth to a friend, and another, more officially accepted truth to those not in confidence. On a formal level, this means there are serious limitations to freedom of the press because the press will print few criticisms--and even the most critical printed go after social problems and issues in daily life, not after the system or government itself. The press has to watch its back, obviously, but the press itself is state-run, and as one journalist pointed out to me, the press manipulates the news to the advantage of those in power the world over. She said the Cuban press doesn't lie--it just omits (and she seemed markedly proud of that distinction). But on a more informal and personal level, Cubans write few truly polemic articles to begin with. Fear of repercussions makes Cubans censor themselves, which is even more damaging, both individually and collectively. Clearly, Fidel's claim that they aren't forcing thought but encouraging exploration of ideas is untrue even if Cuba does have the highest literacy rate in the world.
Cubans have grown up without a culture of debate and discourse; especially those born just before or during the Revolution have little sense of the shades of grey to every issue, little capacity for pluralism. Everything is painted in black and white here. There is one ¨Round Table¨ program on TV, but most Cubans change the channel or go to the bathroom during it--and again, it only debates social problems, not the system. Classroom teachers and textbooks tell Cubans what to think and do not encourage critical thinking. The heroes of the Revolution are painted as perfect, flawless individuals, when any human has his flaws. The Revolution is presented as a perfect approach and socialism as an ideal system--yet as one professor of French pointed out to me, the fall of the Soviet Union makes it quite clear that socialism has defects that need to be analyzed. Similarly, young people in Cuba think the world outside Cuba is perfect, that one arrives in Miami and manna falls from heaven. It's not all that different from what my own great grandparents thought, true. But Cubans haven't been taught to listen and consider alternate perspectives, and according to this French professor, the country will only improve once Cubans are able to analyze socialism's flaws directly and honestly instead of blaming everything wrong on the U.S. embargo, an easy scapegoat. A friend told me yesterday that Cubans will even blame bad weather on the Embargo--and no system can improve if people are unable to look at it for what it is instead of blaming an easy culprit.
For me, this double moral is an endless frustration. I've met only one dissident willing to talk at all, and I've only managed to film a VERY small number of interviews because people are scared to death they'll end up in trouble with the state, even in jail. How often that really happens, no one seems to know, but the fear that it could happen is intense. I was thrilled when Caridad said she could be honest on film because if she was being honest, she'd defend her perspective to the end. But that's a lot easier for her to say as an 81-year-old woman who generally supports the Revolution--people who don't are in a very different situation. A transvestite friend said she didn't feel comfortable being interviewed this trip because she'd recently been included in a documentary on social problems in Cuba, which was aired by a Spanish-language network in the U.S. She wasn't the center of the program, but she's had nothing but problems with the state since, and the fact that she has illegal breast implants and now can't hide herself at all means she sleeps all day, only going out at night anymore. Even a very pro-Revolutionary university professor I've known for seven years refused to be filmed--and when I asked why, he skirted the question, saying that this was ¨a very delicate time¨ in Cuba's relationship with the world. Cubans are terrified to say what they think, and I've had dozens of people refuse interviews until their associations or unions give them permission. Others will talk, but get nervous the minute I ask for names and birthdates, begging me not to include any personal details in my work.
All of this has to mean that people don't agree with the system, or they'd be openly pro-Revolution, which is totally safe. But that means I can't even tell if Revolutionaries are really Revolutionaries--they could easily be saying they support the system and love Fidel and Raul because they know they're supposed to. One man told me that what Cubans do best is applaud--they're taken in trucks to rallies where they applaud on command and shout ¨Patria o muerte, venceremos -- Country or death, we'll overcome¨ as they're taught to do in kindergarten (yes, I've seen five-year-olds claim they'd die for their country--there's obviously something wrong there).
The French professor, who I'm not naming for obvious reasons, told me he doesn't want to see socialism traded for capitalism, saying no Cuban wants to change one collar for another. But he also said that the system needs to improve significantly, that Cubans need to learn from what went wrong in the former Soviet Union so the same doesn't happen here. Without the financial muscle Venezuela has, Cuba needs to find an economic middle ground that encourages and rewards hard work. Marx's idea that each should earn according to his capacity and work hasn't been followed here, and Raul Castro even recongnized this in his speech to the country on July 26th, 2007. Key liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of the press also need to be developed so that critical dialogue can begin. But these freedoms will be even harder to achieve after 50 years of debateless education, and real relativism could take decades to develop again.
I feel terribly lucky today to live where I do, to have the right to recognize and express what I consider unjust. Ana and I add two more pictures of Ella to the collage on the CDR reception desk, one with me in it, and I think about the education she'll receive, filled with all of the paradoxes, contradictions and flaws of real human experience across the world. Sometimes it saddens me that she'll have to confront the truth about the ugly underbelly of human nature, the real grit of those who only live to survive, but at least she'll know the truth when she sees it, and she'll be allowed to criticize it. Ana points to a Che quotation, laughing--¨This one I believe,¨ she tells me, and I know it's a real truth: ¨Behind every extremist is an opportunist.¨
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Trembling with Indignation
In a letter to a woman in Spain who shared his last name, 1964: "I don't think you and I are very closely related, but if you are capable of trembling with indignation each time an injustice is committed in the world, we are comrades, which is more important."
--Ernesto "Che" Guevara
For days now, I've been searching for words, the words I need to capture a feeling so ugly it comes out wordless, rising like bile and lingering in my head as though it's trapped there. In an attempt to show a new friend the "real" Cuba, I came up against the kind of contrast that makes my heart ache: the difference between the way Cuba is presented for tourists, and the way it really is. Most tourists think that by staying in "casas particulares," or private homes, they see the real Cuba; I've heard it said too many times by too many travelers. But any Cuba with a big enough house to rent even one room is already ahead of most--add to that an income in "divisa," the convertible peso tourists use, and these Cubans have FAR more luxuries even with the huge fees they pay the state for the right to rent (and complain about constantly). My friend was immediately able to see the difference, the HUGE economic and social gap which exists between Cubans still.
Entering Ana's home, everything is different: the fan that only works at one angle and has no face, the blender missing most of its buttons, the shower curtain that rips slightly every time I move it--almost nothing in her house is newer than 20 years old. Cubans fix everything; her refrigerator has to be 40 years old, and I've even seen professional mattress stuffers come into homes here to open up and mend the bumps, covering broken springs with wood chips. I pointed to Ana's walls,
painted three years ago because of money I sent, at the relatively new tile work in the bathroom completed with money I sent--without my foreign income, this home would be in even worse disrepair. My friend sat at Ana's table on a chair barely held together, which I pulled apart by pulling it back to sit just this morning. Now imagine the Cuban who has no foreign friends or family sending money from abroad, and who really has no right to spend time among tourists.
These class disparities come from an economic system that simply doesn't work. Cubans are paid in Cuban pesos, which have a value of about 25 to $1 U.S. dollar. "Divisa," or convertible pesos, are about comparable to a dollar--though American dollars themselves are heavily tariffed on exchange to discourage their use. In its original intention, the idea was fine: charge Cubans in national currency and tourists in one with far more value, and tourist money will keep the economy alive. When we went dancing the other night, for example, my friend and I spend $5 divisa each to enter, while Ana and Micha each spent 20 Cuban pesos. It seemed fair, and in certain respects the system seemed to work. In the 1970s and '80s, Cubans bought subsidized goods with their Cuban pesos, and everything else was provided via ration cards. Rent and utilities barely cost Cubans anything. But with the fall of the former Soviet Union, imported goods disappeared from state rations and suddenly cost much more; as a result, most stores had to switch over to divisa prices. Today, this means that a Cuban who makes 300 Cuban pesos a month can still pay his gas, electricity and water bills, as well as any rent he might owe the state, for around 25 pesos a month (yes, that's a dollar), but will pay a minimum of $20 divisa for the cheapest electric fan he can find (that's 500 Cuban pesos, almost twice his whole month's salary).
All of this means that anyone in tourism who can earn at least part of his salary in divisa is FAR better off than those who can't. And the system is further divided to keep Cubans and tourists apart, to keep those who don't already work in tourism away from foreigners. The laws governing this were enacted largely to protect tourists after several were killed in counter-revolutionary acts, but the effect is that a Cuban can't even enter a hotel in his own country if he doesn't work there or enter with a foreign friend. This takes the problem beyond economics and into psychology; Cubans begin to feel they have no right to be among foreigners, yet are desperate for the kind of income we represent and even carry on us every day. As Micha pointed out, most Cubans feel they have to ask permission to enter any place that deals with tourists, which suggests that they have internalized the laws and more or less believe they have no right to be there.
To show my friend all these contrasts, Micha and I took him into the Hotel Nacional. I knew before going in that Micha would be watched because I've seen it before (Ana walks into these places with me defiantly, chin in the air, so we've seen it a million times). The doormen opened the door politely for me and my friend, but scowled at Micha like he didn't belong there at all. The five-star hotel glittered and gleamed, all glass and chandeliers and perfect, smooth surfaces, trying to recreate a different time in Cuban history, from the "golden era" of casinos and Hollywood stars honeymooning on its beaches. But that era wasn't golden at all for most Cubans, and the hotel recreates this uglier part of Cuba's past, too. Cuban workers at the Hotel Nacional were dressed up in sharp starched uniforms which made them look all the more like peons to imperialist money, like an image out of the American South during slavery, with the black man dressed up like a butler in oversized shoes and an outfit that didn't hang right on him. Tourists of all ages and colors cavorted on the perfectly-trimmed lawns, completely oblivious to the legal slavery going on around them or the life being lived by Cubans just blocks away from their fantasy land.
In the "Room of Fame," the walls were covered with faces of the most famous people to stay in the hotel, from Fred Astaire to Winston Churchill, from the heads of the Italian Mafia to Johnny Depp. Micha stopped before a poster covered in photos of "Cuban Centenarios," Cubans who'd lived to be 100 or older. At the top, a slogan read "Cuba: A Place to Live." Beneath were photos of housewives, farmers and laborers; the oldest was a farmer who had lived to be 124. Micha stood there a long time, eventually pulling me over to ask me what I thought the slogan meant. "That people live a long time here," I said hopefully, "but obviously it's not all that nice to live 100 years as a factory laborer in a crushing economy." Micha nodded. "Ask the 124-year-old farmer if he'd like to leave Cuba, and he'd say yes immediately," Micha told me.
We left the hotel feeling uncomfortable, my friend and I, and Micha looked truly pissed. He kept saying that Cuba is painted as this paradise of equality and solidarity, "a place to live," yet Cubans themselves CAN'T live decently unless they throw themselves at the feet of those with divisa to spend. They end up trying to wrangle money out of tourists and even take constant advantage of each other; Micha has endless stories about jobs in which he was promised one salary initially but was paid far less at the end of the job. The response to his complaints, from Cubans who live under the system just as he does? Go find a better salary somewhere else, then. Yes, I've seen moments of total generosity among Cubans, have seen people step in to help a sick neighbor or help an old woman up the stairs, but what kind of solidarity does a Cuban doorman demonstrate when he eyes Micha like he's a jinetero, a cheat or a scam artist to be walking among foreigners?
Sometimes it hurts too much to be here. I feel blessed to be invited into reality, lucky to see the country from the inside as it really is, the dirty, ugly life boiling beneath the cheerful, colorful surface offered to outsiders, but that reality is painful. Even the old 1950s Chevys the tourists love to see are used as common taxis, usually stuffed with as many Cubans as they can hold because of the transportation crunch here. The cars are bare and dirty inside, kept up on the outside for appearance's sake. And they may look lovely, but any Cuban would take a newer car in their place, a car that runs well and doesn't burn straight through gas as its doors fall off the hinges. The contradictions pull the air out of my lungs, fill me with guilt for the life I'll return to so soon, and the paradoxes and contrasts leave me wordless, voiceless. My language comes out haltingly, as thought the ugliness has thickened my tongue and muddled the Spanish in my brain. Micha tells me that it makes the bones ache to live here with no way out, and I feel guilty that the accident of birth worked in my favor. And I stumble, mumble incomprehensibly, and my hands won't stop trembling with indignation.
--Ernesto "Che" Guevara
For days now, I've been searching for words, the words I need to capture a feeling so ugly it comes out wordless, rising like bile and lingering in my head as though it's trapped there. In an attempt to show a new friend the "real" Cuba, I came up against the kind of contrast that makes my heart ache: the difference between the way Cuba is presented for tourists, and the way it really is. Most tourists think that by staying in "casas particulares," or private homes, they see the real Cuba; I've heard it said too many times by too many travelers. But any Cuba with a big enough house to rent even one room is already ahead of most--add to that an income in "divisa," the convertible peso tourists use, and these Cubans have FAR more luxuries even with the huge fees they pay the state for the right to rent (and complain about constantly). My friend was immediately able to see the difference, the HUGE economic and social gap which exists between Cubans still.
Entering Ana's home, everything is different: the fan that only works at one angle and has no face, the blender missing most of its buttons, the shower curtain that rips slightly every time I move it--almost nothing in her house is newer than 20 years old. Cubans fix everything; her refrigerator has to be 40 years old, and I've even seen professional mattress stuffers come into homes here to open up and mend the bumps, covering broken springs with wood chips. I pointed to Ana's walls,
painted three years ago because of money I sent, at the relatively new tile work in the bathroom completed with money I sent--without my foreign income, this home would be in even worse disrepair. My friend sat at Ana's table on a chair barely held together, which I pulled apart by pulling it back to sit just this morning. Now imagine the Cuban who has no foreign friends or family sending money from abroad, and who really has no right to spend time among tourists.
These class disparities come from an economic system that simply doesn't work. Cubans are paid in Cuban pesos, which have a value of about 25 to $1 U.S. dollar. "Divisa," or convertible pesos, are about comparable to a dollar--though American dollars themselves are heavily tariffed on exchange to discourage their use. In its original intention, the idea was fine: charge Cubans in national currency and tourists in one with far more value, and tourist money will keep the economy alive. When we went dancing the other night, for example, my friend and I spend $5 divisa each to enter, while Ana and Micha each spent 20 Cuban pesos. It seemed fair, and in certain respects the system seemed to work. In the 1970s and '80s, Cubans bought subsidized goods with their Cuban pesos, and everything else was provided via ration cards. Rent and utilities barely cost Cubans anything. But with the fall of the former Soviet Union, imported goods disappeared from state rations and suddenly cost much more; as a result, most stores had to switch over to divisa prices. Today, this means that a Cuban who makes 300 Cuban pesos a month can still pay his gas, electricity and water bills, as well as any rent he might owe the state, for around 25 pesos a month (yes, that's a dollar), but will pay a minimum of $20 divisa for the cheapest electric fan he can find (that's 500 Cuban pesos, almost twice his whole month's salary).
All of this means that anyone in tourism who can earn at least part of his salary in divisa is FAR better off than those who can't. And the system is further divided to keep Cubans and tourists apart, to keep those who don't already work in tourism away from foreigners. The laws governing this were enacted largely to protect tourists after several were killed in counter-revolutionary acts, but the effect is that a Cuban can't even enter a hotel in his own country if he doesn't work there or enter with a foreign friend. This takes the problem beyond economics and into psychology; Cubans begin to feel they have no right to be among foreigners, yet are desperate for the kind of income we represent and even carry on us every day. As Micha pointed out, most Cubans feel they have to ask permission to enter any place that deals with tourists, which suggests that they have internalized the laws and more or less believe they have no right to be there.
To show my friend all these contrasts, Micha and I took him into the Hotel Nacional. I knew before going in that Micha would be watched because I've seen it before (Ana walks into these places with me defiantly, chin in the air, so we've seen it a million times). The doormen opened the door politely for me and my friend, but scowled at Micha like he didn't belong there at all. The five-star hotel glittered and gleamed, all glass and chandeliers and perfect, smooth surfaces, trying to recreate a different time in Cuban history, from the "golden era" of casinos and Hollywood stars honeymooning on its beaches. But that era wasn't golden at all for most Cubans, and the hotel recreates this uglier part of Cuba's past, too. Cuban workers at the Hotel Nacional were dressed up in sharp starched uniforms which made them look all the more like peons to imperialist money, like an image out of the American South during slavery, with the black man dressed up like a butler in oversized shoes and an outfit that didn't hang right on him. Tourists of all ages and colors cavorted on the perfectly-trimmed lawns, completely oblivious to the legal slavery going on around them or the life being lived by Cubans just blocks away from their fantasy land.
In the "Room of Fame," the walls were covered with faces of the most famous people to stay in the hotel, from Fred Astaire to Winston Churchill, from the heads of the Italian Mafia to Johnny Depp. Micha stopped before a poster covered in photos of "Cuban Centenarios," Cubans who'd lived to be 100 or older. At the top, a slogan read "Cuba: A Place to Live." Beneath were photos of housewives, farmers and laborers; the oldest was a farmer who had lived to be 124. Micha stood there a long time, eventually pulling me over to ask me what I thought the slogan meant. "That people live a long time here," I said hopefully, "but obviously it's not all that nice to live 100 years as a factory laborer in a crushing economy." Micha nodded. "Ask the 124-year-old farmer if he'd like to leave Cuba, and he'd say yes immediately," Micha told me.
We left the hotel feeling uncomfortable, my friend and I, and Micha looked truly pissed. He kept saying that Cuba is painted as this paradise of equality and solidarity, "a place to live," yet Cubans themselves CAN'T live decently unless they throw themselves at the feet of those with divisa to spend. They end up trying to wrangle money out of tourists and even take constant advantage of each other; Micha has endless stories about jobs in which he was promised one salary initially but was paid far less at the end of the job. The response to his complaints, from Cubans who live under the system just as he does? Go find a better salary somewhere else, then. Yes, I've seen moments of total generosity among Cubans, have seen people step in to help a sick neighbor or help an old woman up the stairs, but what kind of solidarity does a Cuban doorman demonstrate when he eyes Micha like he's a jinetero, a cheat or a scam artist to be walking among foreigners?
Sometimes it hurts too much to be here. I feel blessed to be invited into reality, lucky to see the country from the inside as it really is, the dirty, ugly life boiling beneath the cheerful, colorful surface offered to outsiders, but that reality is painful. Even the old 1950s Chevys the tourists love to see are used as common taxis, usually stuffed with as many Cubans as they can hold because of the transportation crunch here. The cars are bare and dirty inside, kept up on the outside for appearance's sake. And they may look lovely, but any Cuban would take a newer car in their place, a car that runs well and doesn't burn straight through gas as its doors fall off the hinges. The contradictions pull the air out of my lungs, fill me with guilt for the life I'll return to so soon, and the paradoxes and contrasts leave me wordless, voiceless. My language comes out haltingly, as thought the ugliness has thickened my tongue and muddled the Spanish in my brain. Micha tells me that it makes the bones ache to live here with no way out, and I feel guilty that the accident of birth worked in my favor. And I stumble, mumble incomprehensibly, and my hands won't stop trembling with indignation.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Reflections on Friendship
I sit in a small painter's workshop on a rickety old chair, sipping sweet coffee that burns my fingers through the thin plastic cup and struggling to understand the answers to my questions. Don Eliades swallows half his consonants as most Cubans do, and the early-century recordings blaring from an old dial radio on his cluttered desk don't help. He has one small fan, and I'm grateful to escape the overbearing heat even briefly--anyone who calls Caribbean cultures slow or lazy has obviously never tried to live in this kind of heat and humidity. Little gets accomplished; his paints go soft and runny, the candles I bought this morning bend to the touch, and all I ever want to do is sleep. Maybe it's the heat, but it feels like I've gone back in time.
Baracoa is considered the most remote spot in Cuba, only accessible by boat or plane before the Revolution created La Farola, a narrow road that winds through the mountains, today bringing around 30 tourists a day to this sleepy town everyone keeps comparing to García Márquez's Macondo in "100 Years of Solitude" (I don't argue it, but there are no banana plantations here and Baracoa is on the sea... the comparison seems odd). Baracoans say the mesa Columbus described on his very first sighting of Cuba was theirs, El Yunque, although farther north the same claim is made of similar formations along the coast. But you don't argue with Baracoans about this, nor about the wooden cross kept in a glass case in a church barely standing in its disrepair. A Belgian university carbon dated the cross and found it was 500 years old, and Baracoans have always claimed it was one of the crosses brought from the old world by Columbus himself, the only one still left and now protected from the whittlings of pilgrims by sterling silver adornments and a dusty glass case. According to my guide book, a Spanish university later discovered that though it was 500 years old, the cross was made of a local hardwood endemic to Cuba, and that it couldn't have come across with Columbus. But it doesn't say that on the faded sign inside the church, and it's not smart to argue it with the locals, who are very defensive about their cultural patrimony.
I ask Eliades about his artistic education in such a remote town, about the specialized art institute he was sent to in Santiago after the Revolution removed all the fine arts from regular educational programs. Like my friend Caridad in Havana, Eliades sees both sides. Removing the arts from regular education did a LOT to advance the arts in Cuba because specialized art schools took techniques further much faster than they'd have developed as a small part of a larger academic curriculum, and this is obvious in everything from Cuban music and film to painting and "artes plásticas." But like Cari, Eliades also feels the times have changed--at the start of the Revolution, priorities needed to shift, and problems like intellectual brain drain meant regular education had to put fields like history and philosophy before art so a new society of thinkers could be developed. Today, however, young people still have almost no artistic education within the regular schools and only study fine arts if they're identified as talented and sent off to special institutes. The growth of artistic appreciation happens only informally in Cuba, outside the classroom walls, ironic considering how artistically advanced the arts themselves are.
It's only when I put down my notebook and thank Eliades that he asks what he's probably wanted to know the whole time, the question that likely made him willing to be interviewed at all. He wants to know about the shootings at Virginia Tech, how we could have such a problem with youth violence in the U.S. I got the same question almost constantly when I was here in 2000, just after the Colombine shootings. I don't really have a satisfying answer to give; I try to explain U.S. gun laws and why they exist, but Eliades can tell it doesn't even make sense to me--as he said, it's one thing to have guns and another thing entirely to USE them on other human beings. "Something's broken in our society," I finally say. "I think it started around 9/11." I look down at Eliades' gnarled, paint-covered hands, searching for an explanation. "Ten years ago, I had a few depressed students; today, it's more like a third of the class."Eliades sips at his coffee, thinking. "We offered help after 9/11," he tells me. "Every U.S. tragedy has been met with Cuban solidarity, from Hurricane Katrina to Virginia Tech. But our help is always refused." He goes on--he tells me of Cuban doctors, teachers and laborers who had their bags packed and their paperwork stamped and ready, to come help after 9/11 and then again after Katrina, to help us rebuild our schools, homes and lives, and who instead were sent to Malasia so they could at least be of service somewhere. "It was a chance at a new start, a new friendship, the chance for solidarity between our countries," he says. He looks sad, and I don't have the heart to tell him that the American press paints these Cuban solidarity trips as attempts to sell socialism to the world and create unrest, spread the Revolution. I remember a billboard I saw in Havana last week: "The Bush Plan: No Friendship, No Humanity." We can't even take care of our own people in the U.S., yet we criticize Cuba for trying to take care of the world.
Sometimes I have trouble understanding how Cubans can be so taken with "El Pueblo Norteamericano," given such ample evidence of our hypocrisies. But everywhere I go, Cubans tell me that the U.S. people are just and honest, noble and good, that our personality as a culture is marred only by the actions of our most powerful classes, but that our society was built on all the right humanistic principles. They mourn the death of our children in Iraq, are proud of our mothers for rising up against the war. Cubans consistently distinguish between the U.S. government and the U.S. people, and they GET the difference between a just pueblo and the monster that governs them. And each time a Cuban tells me this, I'm left wondering why we can't do the same, why our government and press won't let us see Cubans as they are, as people who are just, kind and generous for the right reasons: because they believe in helping others and in confronting injustice when they see it. There is nothing more powerful than to feel the respect they have for us, in spite of our jailing their most honest men and letting their worst counter-terrorist go free, in spite of our creating inhumane laws that sqeeze them half to death and then reward suicidal attempts to cross to our shores when we won't give them citizenship without risking their lives. We just keep building walls, while Cuba just keeps trying to break them down.
At least individuals can escape the idiocy, and we try. Eliades wraps up a small painting for me, insisting that I take it without payment. "To remember me," he says. I raise my plastic coffee cup and smile weakly at him. "To friendship and solidarity," I say. And we click our cups together with a quiet plastic thud.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Cuban Jineteras--the Sexiest Place on Earth
Another unattractive foreigner walks by with a lovely Cuban on his arm--she couldn't be more than 17 years old by my estimation. She has the gorgeous look of a Cuban mulata, but her face looks sour even as she leans against him and lets him take her hand. This is a jinetera, a Cuban willing to marry any foreigner for the chance to leave the country legally. Once she gets to wherever he's from, it's anybody's guess how long "true love" will last. Maybe he cares, maybe he doesn't. Maybe he never dreamed he could land such a beauty, no matter how long it lasts.
The Cuban Revolution did away with prostitution in the very first year, 1960. Pimps were forced into exile and Cuban prostitutes were taught trades and how to respect themselves, to sell what they could create or do rather than selling themselves to foreigners. A great stride for women, the experiment failed utterly. No, you don't see legal prostitution in Cuba because it's against the law now, and yes those retrained women became seamstresses and found a new life, but the bars here are packed with an informal kind of prostitution the state can't control, one that rises up out of human nature and need in young women and their male counterparts.
On the one hand, I've never felt sexier than in Cuba. Every block I'm greeted with "piropos" from Cuban men of all ages, compliments meant to seduce and enamor. "What a lovely little body you have," a man told me in passing the just this morning. Once I get past the American instinct to turn away or become offended, these comments can be quite a stroke to the ego. Ana and family took me dancing in Habana last week, and I attracted jineteros like flies; I danced for almost three solid hours, nearly all of that in the arms of beautiful young Cuban men. "How pretty you are," they told me; "I like you," they said, and they didn't care when I claimd to have a boyfriend, be uninterested. Everyone cheats here--if I have a boyfriend, that's no obstacle.
On the ohter hand, it's hard to know a real friend when you see one, hard to know if someone really likes and finds you attractive when there are so many potential motives hidden behind their flirtacious smiles. I'm in the south of Cuba now, and in Santiago I met a kind Italian man with cerebral palsey who married a Cuban the day I arrived. It was painful to watch; she was clearly running the show, and I couldn't decide whether she had any real affection for him or just saw him as a meal ticket and a way out of Cuba. She was playful and there was a touch of something real in her eye, but I couldn't stop feeling like the poor man was being taken serious advantage of.
But then, who am I to judge the human instinct to improve one's life by any means necessary? Ana's son Micha, who'd lik nothing more than to marry an American even with his lovely woman and new child in Cuba, pointed out that I'd never really understand his perspective. I was trying to conince him that a difficult life among family and friends was better than a differently difficult life without them, and he said that was an easy position to take when one wasn't wondering where the next meal might come from, when one wasn't wondering how to make sure one's children had what they needed. "You've never gone hungry or spent a month's salary on one pair of flip flops," he told me. "I know you've had your share of difficulties, Jennifer, but if you haven't known what it's like to be trapped and desperate for a better life, even in a country you love with all your heart, you can't understand why I'd be willing to choose a loveless marriage and even spend the rest of my life flipping hamburgers at McDonalds to find it."
The Cuban Revolution did away with prostitution in the very first year, 1960. Pimps were forced into exile and Cuban prostitutes were taught trades and how to respect themselves, to sell what they could create or do rather than selling themselves to foreigners. A great stride for women, the experiment failed utterly. No, you don't see legal prostitution in Cuba because it's against the law now, and yes those retrained women became seamstresses and found a new life, but the bars here are packed with an informal kind of prostitution the state can't control, one that rises up out of human nature and need in young women and their male counterparts.
On the one hand, I've never felt sexier than in Cuba. Every block I'm greeted with "piropos" from Cuban men of all ages, compliments meant to seduce and enamor. "What a lovely little body you have," a man told me in passing the just this morning. Once I get past the American instinct to turn away or become offended, these comments can be quite a stroke to the ego. Ana and family took me dancing in Habana last week, and I attracted jineteros like flies; I danced for almost three solid hours, nearly all of that in the arms of beautiful young Cuban men. "How pretty you are," they told me; "I like you," they said, and they didn't care when I claimd to have a boyfriend, be uninterested. Everyone cheats here--if I have a boyfriend, that's no obstacle.
On the ohter hand, it's hard to know a real friend when you see one, hard to know if someone really likes and finds you attractive when there are so many potential motives hidden behind their flirtacious smiles. I'm in the south of Cuba now, and in Santiago I met a kind Italian man with cerebral palsey who married a Cuban the day I arrived. It was painful to watch; she was clearly running the show, and I couldn't decide whether she had any real affection for him or just saw him as a meal ticket and a way out of Cuba. She was playful and there was a touch of something real in her eye, but I couldn't stop feeling like the poor man was being taken serious advantage of.
But then, who am I to judge the human instinct to improve one's life by any means necessary? Ana's son Micha, who'd lik nothing more than to marry an American even with his lovely woman and new child in Cuba, pointed out that I'd never really understand his perspective. I was trying to conince him that a difficult life among family and friends was better than a differently difficult life without them, and he said that was an easy position to take when one wasn't wondering where the next meal might come from, when one wasn't wondering how to make sure one's children had what they needed. "You've never gone hungry or spent a month's salary on one pair of flip flops," he told me. "I know you've had your share of difficulties, Jennifer, but if you haven't known what it's like to be trapped and desperate for a better life, even in a country you love with all your heart, you can't understand why I'd be willing to choose a loveless marriage and even spend the rest of my life flipping hamburgers at McDonalds to find it."
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
El Problema de la Vivienda, The Housing Problem in Cuba
"No hay patria en que pueda tener el hombre más orgullo que en nuestras dolorosas repúblicas americanas. -- There is no homeland in which a man can have more pride than in our pain-ridden American republics." --José Marti
My room is like a tree house. Steep outdoor steps snake up the back of an old mansion, probably first constructed to connect servants' quarters, and they give me such overwhelming vertigo that I have to hold on and remember to breathe at every move. They are narrow, broken and rounded steps only a foot and a half wide, with a rusted railing that I doubt would break a fall. I climb the backside of the building amid open apartment windows and laundry lines, the criss cross of other stairways like mine on neighboring buildings making this place seem like a hidden city in itself. I get barked at by a dog on the third floor and keep climbing, looking in paneless windows at dinner tables and children playing marbles on the floor beside old fans that are never turned off. Should I need to pee at 3 am, it's a flight down in the dark to a tiny converted closet under my room with another set of locks to struggle through. God help me if it rains--the steps will be all the more treacherous. But most of my climb I'm greeted by the classic Cuban warmth I've come to love: "Es la Jennifer!" they shout, as if my name has become a noun, as if I am not just any Jennifer but THE Jennifer, their Jennifer, their neighbor and friend. If "la migra" shows up in this neighborhood, no one will give me away to immigration officers--they know they'll all benefit from the donations I brought Ana, who becomes like a local drugstore now, bestowing free Pepto Bismol and Ibuprofen on her jealous neighbors. No one will give away the secret of the gringa living in an illegal room on the fourth floor because everyone knows I'm part of the family now--not just part of Ana's family, but the family that is my community here in Vedado, our district of Havana.
After the Revolution triumphed in 1959, all private property became state property. As the rich fled the island to the U.S., Mexico and Europe, their homes were split into parcels and apartments just as massive farms were parcelled out to farmers in the countryside. Gigantic, gorgeous homes that once held one small family became apartments for 10-15 families. One can still see all the vestiges of a rich past in these homes, with their faded but beautiful tile work and ornate chandeliers. The few panes of glass in ceiling-high windows hold the X of masking tape that marks this as a region prone to hurricanes, and old stained glass windows hold only a few touches of color today.
Most important was the philosophical shift--housing became a RIGHT in Cuba with the Revolution, not a priviledge. According to Fidel, ALL Cubans could count on a roof over their heads--and today this remains the rule. There are no homeless in Cuba--they have truly made housing a right, just as the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights suggested should be done across the globe in 1946. Ironically, I've seen the worst homelessness in the most developed countries--people may not have glass windows and the lights and water may go off without warning, but you won't find Cubans living under bridges or in old cars as the poor so often have to in the U.S.
In spite of Castro's good intentions, housing becomes a bigger problem every day as the younger generations grow up and start needing their own spaces for new families. Life expectancy here hovers around 90 years, as the slow pace of life combined with free medical services keeps people alive longer than in most countries. As my friend Caridad said, you can't exactly kick out or euthanize the elderly to make room for the young, and Cuba's weak economy hasn't allowed enough new homes to be built in the last twenty years. The former Soviet Union did build thousands of hideous cinder-block apartment buildings here in the 1970s and '80s, but since 1990 there has been no Mother Russia to help build more as the population continues to grow. It's not uncommon to see three generations of families stuffed into tiny homes--my friend Ana continues to live in an airless, lightless basement apartment with a man she divorced over 15 years ago because there's nowhere else for him to go. Conflict breeds like mold in a home like that, where everyone has a different opinion on how to run a household or raise a child. A few people have good luck--Ana's son Micha now shares a huge 3-bedroom apartment with only his wife and new baby because his wife's family dispersed into other homes as they married. But these cases are rare. And so every corner is used, every closet turned into a bathroom, every storage room now a tiny, nearly airless apartment.
Ana's younger son Raymer takes me a flight higher to meet the woman who lives above my room, and the rooftops of Havana spread out around us. I hear voices from all directions: a child crying, a father soothing, a mother shouting obscenities. The smell of onion and garlic wafts in from all directions. This is the heart of La Habana, the guts of a city I love for all its crumbling majesty and tight quarters, for neighbors who stop to kiss me hello and admire Ana's first grandchild, for its tiny little treehouse rooms, tucked up high in the back of faded mansions. It's hotter than hell up here, but there's nowhere else I'd rather be than living here among these friends, my Cuban family. I just hope it doesn't rain before I need to pee again.
My room is like a tree house. Steep outdoor steps snake up the back of an old mansion, probably first constructed to connect servants' quarters, and they give me such overwhelming vertigo that I have to hold on and remember to breathe at every move. They are narrow, broken and rounded steps only a foot and a half wide, with a rusted railing that I doubt would break a fall. I climb the backside of the building amid open apartment windows and laundry lines, the criss cross of other stairways like mine on neighboring buildings making this place seem like a hidden city in itself. I get barked at by a dog on the third floor and keep climbing, looking in paneless windows at dinner tables and children playing marbles on the floor beside old fans that are never turned off. Should I need to pee at 3 am, it's a flight down in the dark to a tiny converted closet under my room with another set of locks to struggle through. God help me if it rains--the steps will be all the more treacherous. But most of my climb I'm greeted by the classic Cuban warmth I've come to love: "Es la Jennifer!" they shout, as if my name has become a noun, as if I am not just any Jennifer but THE Jennifer, their Jennifer, their neighbor and friend. If "la migra" shows up in this neighborhood, no one will give me away to immigration officers--they know they'll all benefit from the donations I brought Ana, who becomes like a local drugstore now, bestowing free Pepto Bismol and Ibuprofen on her jealous neighbors. No one will give away the secret of the gringa living in an illegal room on the fourth floor because everyone knows I'm part of the family now--not just part of Ana's family, but the family that is my community here in Vedado, our district of Havana.
After the Revolution triumphed in 1959, all private property became state property. As the rich fled the island to the U.S., Mexico and Europe, their homes were split into parcels and apartments just as massive farms were parcelled out to farmers in the countryside. Gigantic, gorgeous homes that once held one small family became apartments for 10-15 families. One can still see all the vestiges of a rich past in these homes, with their faded but beautiful tile work and ornate chandeliers. The few panes of glass in ceiling-high windows hold the X of masking tape that marks this as a region prone to hurricanes, and old stained glass windows hold only a few touches of color today.
Most important was the philosophical shift--housing became a RIGHT in Cuba with the Revolution, not a priviledge. According to Fidel, ALL Cubans could count on a roof over their heads--and today this remains the rule. There are no homeless in Cuba--they have truly made housing a right, just as the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights suggested should be done across the globe in 1946. Ironically, I've seen the worst homelessness in the most developed countries--people may not have glass windows and the lights and water may go off without warning, but you won't find Cubans living under bridges or in old cars as the poor so often have to in the U.S.
In spite of Castro's good intentions, housing becomes a bigger problem every day as the younger generations grow up and start needing their own spaces for new families. Life expectancy here hovers around 90 years, as the slow pace of life combined with free medical services keeps people alive longer than in most countries. As my friend Caridad said, you can't exactly kick out or euthanize the elderly to make room for the young, and Cuba's weak economy hasn't allowed enough new homes to be built in the last twenty years. The former Soviet Union did build thousands of hideous cinder-block apartment buildings here in the 1970s and '80s, but since 1990 there has been no Mother Russia to help build more as the population continues to grow. It's not uncommon to see three generations of families stuffed into tiny homes--my friend Ana continues to live in an airless, lightless basement apartment with a man she divorced over 15 years ago because there's nowhere else for him to go. Conflict breeds like mold in a home like that, where everyone has a different opinion on how to run a household or raise a child. A few people have good luck--Ana's son Micha now shares a huge 3-bedroom apartment with only his wife and new baby because his wife's family dispersed into other homes as they married. But these cases are rare. And so every corner is used, every closet turned into a bathroom, every storage room now a tiny, nearly airless apartment.
Ana's younger son Raymer takes me a flight higher to meet the woman who lives above my room, and the rooftops of Havana spread out around us. I hear voices from all directions: a child crying, a father soothing, a mother shouting obscenities. The smell of onion and garlic wafts in from all directions. This is the heart of La Habana, the guts of a city I love for all its crumbling majesty and tight quarters, for neighbors who stop to kiss me hello and admire Ana's first grandchild, for its tiny little treehouse rooms, tucked up high in the back of faded mansions. It's hotter than hell up here, but there's nowhere else I'd rather be than living here among these friends, my Cuban family. I just hope it doesn't rain before I need to pee again.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Back in the Trenches
"Trincheras de ideas valen mas que trincheras de piedra / Trenches filled with ideas have more value than trenches filled with stones." --Jose Marti, Cuban Poet and National Hero
It's always fascinating to travel with Cubans; I watched them drag hundreds of pounds of check-in bags to the counter in the Bahamas, grumbling loudly as they wrapped their belongings in blue plastic to protect them. Those who want to take more than the legal 44 lb limit imposed by the Cuban government (to control people bringing in too much) just take the back door and don't bother with the legal red tape in the U.S. Taking the back door means being able to take home DVD players, televisions... I even saw a huge box that held a backyard pool. They're charged high tariffs for everything they bring in, but doing it this way still means being able to bring in what their families need. I stuck to the weight limits, made my face as innocent as I can get it, and smiled at every question. In the rickety plane, seats torn and the whole thing rattling like it was held together by rubber bands and duct tape, the Cubans surrounding me chatted loudly and enthusiastically, ignoring all safety instructions and shouting to each other from one end of the plane to another. Only here and in Israel have I seen people applaud so loudly as the plane touches the ground, and amid shouts about their "madre patria" I clapped as well. Minutes later inside Jose Marti airport, those same Cubans were grumbling their way through customs searches as I breezed by to a pleasant "Welcome to Cuba" after a few questions about my research here. It must be hard to love your country so much and hate it so much at the same time, and I feel mildly guilty that it's so easy for me to pass through; that must be what Carolyn Forche meant when she said we Americans never really leave our country at all when we travel.
My friend Ana told me she hasn't seen beef in three years, as she prepared yet another dish of scrambled eggs for me this morning. Last night we ate cow hearts, the closest you can get to beef here. Anything she can find is worth trying; sometimes it's fish taken straight out of the Havana bay, a filthy, industrial mess. Cubans line the famous Malecon, the Havana seawall, to fish from it at night when no one's controlling the area. One can only imagine the long-range impact of polluted fish as a primary source of protein. The only thing I can always count on here is coffee, sweetened until it tastes more like candy than coffee. Sugar is cheaper than water, and in every home I'm welcomed with strong coffee so sweet it makes my teeth ache.
I visited one of my favorite couples yesterday, artist and history/philosophy professor Caridad Regina and her intellectual husband Alberto. Her painting of Chango, the saint/orisha who governs happiness, hangs over my desk in Denver. All Alberto ever wants to do is talk politics, and of course George W. was the first order of business. Totally incredulous, they asked me again and again how he could have won a second time, that time NOT by mistake, and I shook my head and said I'd answer it if I could. But I can't. At least Cubans understand when I say that few of us agree with Bush; having lived their whole lives under a system that rarely takes their needs into consideration, they've come to understand the difference between citizens and the monster that governs them. "El pueblo norteamericano" isn't the problem, just like Cubans themselves aren't the problem here, either. And again I find myself marvelling: how can Cubans be so accepting of North Americans when our government has done so much to hurt them? And how is it that we haven't learned to do the same in return? Alberto pounded the table--"You need another Carter," he told me, and Cari chimed in--"No one will take any of you seriously until you find a president who actually cares about humans."
Ana took me to see my new goddaughter, who they call a "bon bon de chocolate" with her lovely brown skin and plump arms. Getting into the taxi, Ana lifted a silencing finger to her lips: this means don't speak, not a word. Common taxis are much cheaper than official ones; most are old cars driven as full as they can be packed, and the drivers can lose both car and license for taking foreigners. Even with my fluency, the accent gives me away. I've played many roles to be able to ride in these taxis, always someone's aunt or cousin or neice, here visiting from Miami or something so the accent seems reasonable; once I was even asked to duck down low when we passed a control spot in Santiago de Cuba in 2000. All of this comes from Castro's initial laws governing tourism; after several tourists were killed on a highway by counter-revolutionaries in the 1980s, he changed the system to keep tourists as isolated as possible from Cubans. The intention was obviously to protect tourists and make Cuba a safe travel destination in the eyes of the world, but the effect is that Ana can't even enter my rented room without the permission of the landlady, not always easy to come by. She can't go beyond the lobby in any of the big hotels, and when one of my students visited here in December, Ana's younger son was constantly harassed when he was walking with her. My only advantage is how well my coloring lets me blend, but even so it really takes cheating the system to be able to mix with Cubans. And transportation remains a mess; people wait for hours to shove themselves into packed "wa-was," buses that are also nicknamed "camellos" because they have a high section in the middle that looks like a camel's back. There's no such thing as being on time for anything here, and it can take Cubans days to reach destinations I can reach in hours on tourist buses.
But none of this matters as we enter the home of my new goddaughter, Ana's first grandchild. Baby in arms, her father Micha shows her off proudly, and Veronica wails at me in welcome. Everyone is smiling, and no one seems to care that it's so hot and stifling and that none of us will eat meat for dinner. Vero tries to focus her grey, undeveloped eyes on me and grabs at my finger. Nothing else matters. Even in the worst of moments, a beautiful new child unites any community, any family in the world.
It's always fascinating to travel with Cubans; I watched them drag hundreds of pounds of check-in bags to the counter in the Bahamas, grumbling loudly as they wrapped their belongings in blue plastic to protect them. Those who want to take more than the legal 44 lb limit imposed by the Cuban government (to control people bringing in too much) just take the back door and don't bother with the legal red tape in the U.S. Taking the back door means being able to take home DVD players, televisions... I even saw a huge box that held a backyard pool. They're charged high tariffs for everything they bring in, but doing it this way still means being able to bring in what their families need. I stuck to the weight limits, made my face as innocent as I can get it, and smiled at every question. In the rickety plane, seats torn and the whole thing rattling like it was held together by rubber bands and duct tape, the Cubans surrounding me chatted loudly and enthusiastically, ignoring all safety instructions and shouting to each other from one end of the plane to another. Only here and in Israel have I seen people applaud so loudly as the plane touches the ground, and amid shouts about their "madre patria" I clapped as well. Minutes later inside Jose Marti airport, those same Cubans were grumbling their way through customs searches as I breezed by to a pleasant "Welcome to Cuba" after a few questions about my research here. It must be hard to love your country so much and hate it so much at the same time, and I feel mildly guilty that it's so easy for me to pass through; that must be what Carolyn Forche meant when she said we Americans never really leave our country at all when we travel.
My friend Ana told me she hasn't seen beef in three years, as she prepared yet another dish of scrambled eggs for me this morning. Last night we ate cow hearts, the closest you can get to beef here. Anything she can find is worth trying; sometimes it's fish taken straight out of the Havana bay, a filthy, industrial mess. Cubans line the famous Malecon, the Havana seawall, to fish from it at night when no one's controlling the area. One can only imagine the long-range impact of polluted fish as a primary source of protein. The only thing I can always count on here is coffee, sweetened until it tastes more like candy than coffee. Sugar is cheaper than water, and in every home I'm welcomed with strong coffee so sweet it makes my teeth ache.
I visited one of my favorite couples yesterday, artist and history/philosophy professor Caridad Regina and her intellectual husband Alberto. Her painting of Chango, the saint/orisha who governs happiness, hangs over my desk in Denver. All Alberto ever wants to do is talk politics, and of course George W. was the first order of business. Totally incredulous, they asked me again and again how he could have won a second time, that time NOT by mistake, and I shook my head and said I'd answer it if I could. But I can't. At least Cubans understand when I say that few of us agree with Bush; having lived their whole lives under a system that rarely takes their needs into consideration, they've come to understand the difference between citizens and the monster that governs them. "El pueblo norteamericano" isn't the problem, just like Cubans themselves aren't the problem here, either. And again I find myself marvelling: how can Cubans be so accepting of North Americans when our government has done so much to hurt them? And how is it that we haven't learned to do the same in return? Alberto pounded the table--"You need another Carter," he told me, and Cari chimed in--"No one will take any of you seriously until you find a president who actually cares about humans."
Ana took me to see my new goddaughter, who they call a "bon bon de chocolate" with her lovely brown skin and plump arms. Getting into the taxi, Ana lifted a silencing finger to her lips: this means don't speak, not a word. Common taxis are much cheaper than official ones; most are old cars driven as full as they can be packed, and the drivers can lose both car and license for taking foreigners. Even with my fluency, the accent gives me away. I've played many roles to be able to ride in these taxis, always someone's aunt or cousin or neice, here visiting from Miami or something so the accent seems reasonable; once I was even asked to duck down low when we passed a control spot in Santiago de Cuba in 2000. All of this comes from Castro's initial laws governing tourism; after several tourists were killed on a highway by counter-revolutionaries in the 1980s, he changed the system to keep tourists as isolated as possible from Cubans. The intention was obviously to protect tourists and make Cuba a safe travel destination in the eyes of the world, but the effect is that Ana can't even enter my rented room without the permission of the landlady, not always easy to come by. She can't go beyond the lobby in any of the big hotels, and when one of my students visited here in December, Ana's younger son was constantly harassed when he was walking with her. My only advantage is how well my coloring lets me blend, but even so it really takes cheating the system to be able to mix with Cubans. And transportation remains a mess; people wait for hours to shove themselves into packed "wa-was," buses that are also nicknamed "camellos" because they have a high section in the middle that looks like a camel's back. There's no such thing as being on time for anything here, and it can take Cubans days to reach destinations I can reach in hours on tourist buses.
But none of this matters as we enter the home of my new goddaughter, Ana's first grandchild. Baby in arms, her father Micha shows her off proudly, and Veronica wails at me in welcome. Everyone is smiling, and no one seems to care that it's so hot and stifling and that none of us will eat meat for dinner. Vero tries to focus her grey, undeveloped eyes on me and grabs at my finger. Nothing else matters. Even in the worst of moments, a beautiful new child unites any community, any family in the world.
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