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.