Posted on 03/17/2002 5:41:48 AM PST by Luis Gonzalez
HAVANA, CUBA -- The man behind the wheel of the pirate taxi was tall, good-looking and nicely dressed -- blue eyes, touch of gray at the temples, clean plaid shirt, slacks, windbreaker.
Nights get cool in Havana in winter, and I envied him the windbreaker. But that was all I envied.
As we drove into a remote suburb in this sprawling city of 2 million, he talked about what is sabotaging Cuba's famous revolution: He talked about how complicated life there has become -- not that it was ever easy.
"A family of four -- like mine -- can live well in Havana on $150 a month," he said. But they couldn't live well on his government salary. Trained as a medical technician, he earned about $15 a month.
So he quit and was now driving tourists around, on the sly, in his Russian-built car. Before the night was over, he would earn $25 from my fare alone -- a good deal for us both, considering that the round trip took an hour.
Cuba has changed
This was my third visit to Cuba in less than three years. I've gone so often because there is still no place in the world quite like it.
Cuba is going to change (or at least change hands) whenever Fidel Castro dies, and I wanted to get to know it before that happens. I'm not sure I'll go back until then, because this last trip tugged so much at my heartstrings.
American writers tend to describe Cuba as frozen in time, a place where nothing has changed since Castro's revolutionaries drove out a corrupt dictator in 1959, where even the cars on the streets are 40 years old, and men still plow their fields with oxen.
But Cuba has changed. It just hasn't Americanized. And that's a huge difference.
There are no McDonald's in Havana and darned little neon. There is Coca-Cola, but it comes in from Mexico, because our country won't trade with Communist Cuba. And there are tourists, lots of them -- they're just not us.
So while the island nation is 90 miles from Florida, and just about everybody seems to have a relative in the States, Cuba might as well be half way around the world -- like China, a Communist country we do trade with.
Economic crossroads
Over the years, I've heard dozens of stories like my taxi driver's, all involving tourism and the mighty U.S. dollar, which are colluding to create a parallel economy -- with the Cuban government's tacit permission.
The result is a weird common-law marriage between communism and capitalism, where taxistas and hotel bellhops earn more than doctors and college professors.
It's happening because most Cubans have government jobs, whose salaries are set in pesos, each worth about four U.S. cents. Tourists, regardless of where they come from, pay in U.S. dollars. They pay much higher prices, and they also tip big -- again, in dollars.
As tourism grows -- Cuba expects more than $2 billion in tourism revenues this year -- the economic gulf widens between those who can get tourist tips and those who can't.
This means that Cuba's revolution is being corrupted from the bottom up, with greenbacks gnawing at it from underneath, the way warmer water helps soften ice on a Minnesota lake in spring.
Saint in a shoe box
The elderly have it hardest. Their pensions are minuscule, and they can't compete for tourist greenbacks.
The old men are too frail to schlep luggage at hotels. And the old women can't seductively sidle up to foreign men and whisper enticements in their ears -- something you can see on any busy street, any day or night, in Old Havana.
Some old people still try to work. They stand on street corners in touristed neighborhoods, hawking the dull English version of Granma, Cuba's official newspaper, or offering old Cuban money as souvenirs.
"Che Guevara," they urge hopefully, pointing to the revolutionary hero's image on the tarnished coins.
Other old people pick up a few dollars by begging around Havana's exquisitely restored historic buildings, like those on the Plaza de Armas and the Plaza Viejo.
There seemed to be more elderly beggars this winter than I had seen on earlier visits. Or perhaps it was just that I finally saw past the novelty of being in Cuba and noticed what was there all along.
Even if the 40-year-old U.S. embargo were lifted tomorrow, and American tourists and investors flooded in, I can't see how the economic situation would improve in time to help those aged beggars. They're too close to the ends of their lives. Two in particular keep gnawing at me:
The ancient woman on Oficios St. who puts on a Chiquita banana hat, dresses her dog in a clown suit and spends her days posing for tourist snapshots.
And the bent old man with a chipped plaster statuette of a saint in a shoe box, who offers blessings in return for coins, outside the dollars-only department store on O'Reilly St.
Inside, jars of mayonnaise and bottles of ketchup are laid out in glass display cases like pieces of jewelry. The goods are imported from Mexico and Europe, and the prices are higher than at home.
Beggars insist
Havana's beggars were gentle and polite compared to the ones in Santiago de Cuba, at the eastern end of the island. It's Cuba's second-largest city, so full of antique buildings that it has been named a UNESCO world heritage site.
"Give me soap," one middle-age woman demanded as I entered a notions shop in the center of town. I said I didn't carry soap around with me.
She followed me in. "Buy me that soap," she said aggressively, pointing to a display. "No, señora," I said.
She followed me back outside and hit up another tourist: "Give me your shoes," she said. "No," the tourist said.
"Then give me your shirt." "No."
She turned back to me: "Soap?"
Her questions date from even needier times -- the early 1990s, after the Iron Curtain and the world price of sugar -- Cuba's main crop -- had both collapsed, and Cuba's economy had unraveled.
People were literally hungry then. On average, I'd read, Cubans' caloric intake dropped by nearly half.
Manufactured goods -- even things as ordinary as soap -- were also impossible to come by, unless you could cadge them off tourists, and there weren't many of those then, either.
"It's too bad we didn't have a war with your country," one younger man said wistfully, during a conversation about such hardships. "Vietnam is doing pretty well."
An afternoon ballet
Beggars aside, a tourist runs into examples of the corrupting power of dollars literally every day and in unexpected places.
One afternoon in Havana, I stopped by the National Theater, as lovely a 19th-century space as any in Europe, from its gilded ceiling and crystal chandelier to the bright red velvet armchairs in the boxes.
I happened to get there 15 minutes after the curtain rose on the National Ballet's final performance of "Rompenueces." It took me a second to recognize that as Tchaikovsky's familiar "Nutcracker." I was delighted.
"May I still buy a ticket?" I asked an usher. "Yes," she said, "wait over there." I waited.
She whispered something to a second usher, who passed the word to a third -- a dignified woman in her 50s, apparently their boss -- who led me up the grand marble staircase and into a second-tier box, kicked out three people who'd sneaked in from less choice seats and sat me down in one of those red velvet chairs.
"When do I pay?" I whispered. "Later," she whispered back.
At intermission, the usher surreptitiously reappeared and asked for $10 in cash -- the posted ticket price for foreign tourists. (Cubans around me said they'd paid five pesos -- about 20 cents.)
Since we never went near the box office, I am certain the usher kept the money, probably splitting it with her two underlings. In her shoes, I'd have done the same thing.
The dancing, by the way, was superb.
Gift of reading
Whatever criticisms can be leveled at the Cuban government, it's hard to fault it on what it does deliver. Topping the list: free health care and free education through college. A recent international survey, in fact, rated Cuba's primary schools the best in Latin America.
That commitment showed early. The revolution was barely a year old when Cuba began an amazing country-wide literacy campaign. Almost 1 million illiterates were taught to read in about 10 months by 10,000 volunteers, most of them teenagers. A newly opened Havana museum commemorates their effort, describing it in battle terms; there was even a catchy little marching song.
A uniformed guide led me through every exhibit, making sure I read the letters from former analfabetizados (literally "people without the alphabet"), thanking Fidel Castro for the gift of reading.
At the end, she even sang me the literacy song -- half a dozen lilting verses including one about vanquishing imperialism, a reference to us Yanquis. The instant she finished, the guide assured me that the song referred to the American government, not the American people, something I heard constantly in Cuba.
It must have been harder to make the distinction the year that the literacy campaign succeeded. That was 1961, the same year as the U.S.-supported invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Several of the volunteer teachers died in the fighting; the museum displays their bloodied uniforms.
Evenings in the park
If they chose to, Cubans could boast about something else. I saw it most clearly in the early evenings in Parque Cespedes, the main square of Santiago.
Families gathered there every night after supper -- parents and grandparents holding the hands of one or two beautifully groomed children. Education and health care typically combine to lower birth rates all over the world, but those achievements weren't what struck me most.
It was how peaceable everyone was together.
Every night, a teenage boy patiently pedaled a little truck full of toddlers around and around the square. Older youngsters rode battered bicycles and trikes among the crowd. Parents towed little ones back and forth in a couple of miniature 1950s-style convertibles -- battered replicas of the big ones still clanking around the streets.
At first I thought the families owned those bikes and toy cars. But the kids riding them kept changing. I turned to a young mother nearby. No, she said, you pay -- it's just one peso.
Sure enough, in a shadowy corner of the square, children and parents were waiting their turns -- patiently, without whining, without crying, without scolding. It wasn't exactly an American scene.
Cloister of shanties
Rents and utility bills are minimal in Cuba, I knew, and basic foodstuffs such as bread and cooking oil are government-subsidized, so there's a level below which people can't sink. But it's a long way down.
One afternoon in Old Havana, I learned how far. I'd taken an unfamiliar street on which stood a disheveled old convent. I peered in at its dark doorway.
"Go ahead, you can go in," an old man called from across the street. When I hesitated, he came over and led me inside. "Be careful," he said. I didn't need the warning.
The remains of a wooden banister sprawled across the wide stone staircase. Rocks had fallen out of the walls and lay in heaps on steps and landings. A skinny dog devoured garbage in a corner.
At the level of my head, skeins of raw electrical wires sagged down from the ceilings. I tried to dodge them.
"Don't worry," my guide said, touching one of the wires. "Most of them are dead."
I have been in slums before, plenty of them -- slums in Haiti, in India, in the United States. And I have been in my share of ruins. But I had never been in such a building: It was both.
All the halls of the old cloisters were full of shanties, little more than aggregations of plywood and worn bedsheets. Idle men lounged in the archways or peered out of what served for rooms; women paused from stirring pots or hanging laundry to stare. It would have been sinister, except that many people smiled or said hello.
How many families live here, I asked, when I'd gotten over the shock.
Fifty one, the man said. Fifty one families stacked on two floors in a quarter of a block.
Privately, I wondered how they could face getting up every morning in such a place. Let alone bedding down in it at night. I didn't think I could stand it. But people put up with what they have to. People go on.
"They say they are going to restore it," the man said, as we gazed into a crumbling courtyard.
So everybody will lose their housing? I asked.
No, they would be given other housing: "In Cuba," he said, "nobody loses."
There was weariness in his voice but not a trace of sarcasm.
I don't know where to begin.
I guess the only one not to blame for the complete failure of Cuba's economy, is the man running the show for over 40 years.
When we traded openly with Cuba, it was called exploitaion, when we do not trade with Cuba, it's deemed to be oppresive.
I challenge each and every one of you to do the same. Just a short note taking this political editorial by a travel editor apart.
Luis
Barf! This writer is a fool and a tool for Castro. If anyone can stomach more of this rot, check this from the Boston Globe.
Cuba's lessons on caring for children--Let's hope it can and that as more Americans visit Cuba's shores, we can learn something from the Cubans - about how to raise our kids here, how to instill in them self-respect and cultural pride, and how to give all of them a chance to be happy, creative, and productive adults.
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So while the island nation is 90 miles from Florida, and just about everybody seems to have a relative in the States, Cuba might as well be half way around the world like China, a Communist country we do trade with.
This writer needs to read the posts to this: Why is China OK, but Cuba 'enemy'?
After Castro dies, if the new regime even hints at better relations with the U.S., Cuba will
probably get all the McDonald's and Walmart's they can stand.
Said Churchill: "Utopian dreamers...and socialist nightmares"
I won't give my money to any of those countries anymore. Five trips to many different countries, including a honeymoon, and I've yet to find one where they like Americans. For the most part, almost all of their economies are in the toilet despite their living under capitalism. The poverty throughout the Carribbean is staggering.
As a friend of mine put it, "Go to Hawaii. It's a prettier version of the Carribbean where they won't all hate you."
Cubans will have their freedom, no small deal, but their lifestyles will change little, if at all.
Alrighty then, let's get MickyDee's into Cuba. Pronto!
As soon as Cuba becomes free, many will leave for America. The rest will live under the same conditions as the rest of the Carribbean. After we help them they will hate us.
See the rest of the world for reference purposes.
Cuba is only 90 miles from the Florida Keys. They are our neighbors as much as Mexico and Canada. Once that tinpot dictator is gone and his machine-gun toting goons are disbanded, the United States and Cuba will become very close. I'm not saying that the transition from communism to capitalism will not be without some turmoil. But once the trade embargos are lifted, U.S. dollars and resources will pour into Cuba incredibly fast. You will see one of the biggest construction booms of all time. The vast majority of the 11 million+ people that live there do not support Castro and will be overjoyed to see his imposed communist regime collapse. Those people have put up with a lot crap these past 40 years. Fortunately better days are just around the corner.
Let me ask you, what do you base them on? A crystal ball?
Let's base the predictions of the future of Cuba based on the past conditions (pre-Castro) and the present.
Pre-Castro, Cuba was second only to the US in economic status in the hemisphere, and among the top ten countries in the world in per-capita income. Castro's (and the New York Time's) claims of abject poverty were overblown propaganda. Cuba had more television and radio sets per capita than every country IN THE WORLD with the exception of the US.
Cuba had the most newspapers per capita in the world.
Cuba enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with the US which made it the prefered vacation destination for Norteamericanos..
Presently, the Americans of Cuban descent residing in the US are quite possibly the wealthiest immigrant group here, having acheived that status in less than 45 years, and billions of dollars are earmarked for investment and development in Cuba once the island is free.
Last but not least, Fidel Castro himself has admitted that nearly 25% of the population of Cuba has shown a desire to migrate to the US, tens of thousands have died trying to do just that. Bizarre behavior for people who "hate the US", wouldn't you say?
As I said, you know very little about Cuba.
Even if the 40-year-old U.S. embargo were lifted tomorrow, and American tourists and investors flooded in, I can't see how the economic situation would improve in time to help those aged beggars.
No, Ms. Watson, the US embargo it's not the cause of poverty in Cuba but their own corrupt, oppressive and tyrannical government. Cuba deals with most countries in the world. And as you indicate they get paid in dollars from tourists all over the world yet they live in poverty. What makes you think American tourists would have a different effect in Cuba than that of tourists from other countries have had to this day?
And there are tourists, lots of them -- they're just not us.
Right!! Has that helped Cubans get out of poverty? Hmmm, do you think the Cuban government has something to do with this pesky little fact? Isn't it true that all those dollars -- fairs and tips-- end up in the hands of the Cuban government since they are the ones who are in charge of the goods and their prices?
As tourism grows -- Cuba expects more than $2 billion in tourism revenues this year -- the economic gulf widens between those who can get tourist tips and those who can't.
Expect no change at all in Cuba, Ms Watson. No improvement whatsoever over the life of its people.
This means that Cuba's revolution is being corrupted from the bottom up, with greenbacks gnawing at it from underneath, the way warmer water helps soften ice on a Minnesota lake in spring.
Ms. Watson you just told us that Cuba expects more than $2billion in tourism revenues this year. It's not that the revolution that is being corrupted from the bottom up, it's the revolution which is a corruptive enterprise.
Whatever criticisms can be leveled at the Cuban government, it's hard to fault it on what it does deliver. Topping the list: free health care and free education through college. A recent international survey, in fact, rated Cuba's primary schools the best in Latin America.
LOL! Don't you just love it Luis when the socialists give us their usual cliché "free health care and free education?" Well, free health care doesn't matter if they don't have medicine available, even though the US sends medicine and food and other countries do the same. It doesn't matter if they can read when all they read is communist propaganda. As Mark Twain said, "The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can't read them."
That's just about where I stopped reading, and started skimming.
And if this moron believes Cuba has free health care, she's living in a fanatasy. Cuba has free health care like I have free gold nuggets in a box outside my house. Whoever wants one can take one, but the catch is that there are never any in the box, but they are still free.
I have an uncle who is a Lt. Col. in the Cuban secret police. He still extols the revolution (in his monthly requests to his Miami relatives for all sorts of medicines).
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