Cuba: A touching beauty

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are trying to get here precisely because Castro is there. You and I both know this. You have agreed with my assessment that when Castro is gone, many more will want to come here at the beginning. One of the interesting things will be whether Cubans who have left under Castro will return as many claim they will. My guess is that the vast majority will not.

Once the initial influx is over, Cuba will be become another country with both a very rich and very poor class. Obviously this is just my opinion, just as you have yours.

American hotels will spring up in Cuba and American tourists will come. There will still be abject poverty in much of Cuba.

Certainly Cuba will be much better over all than it is under Castro but to think it will fare any differently than the rest of the region seems to be unrealistic to me. What is it to you that disinguishes Cuba from the rest of the Carribbean?

Relatively few foreigners hate America. You need to distinguish between their media and political elite and the "masses".

Aside from the blatantly obvious Arab world there are some others. In the majority of Carribbean countries I've been to they look at us as people who bring them some money yet they do not treat us very well. Most who hate America do so because they live in poverty and are jealous of what they perceive as all of us being rich.

America is by far the most hated and loved country in the world.

Money, lots of money.

I formulate my opinion on past history, and facts that I have readily available to me.

The fact that Cubans pre-Castro built a solid economy, and the fact that post-Castro they created tremendous wealth as immigrants, is sufficient basis to believe that what was done once there, and once here, will be done there once again. There is no need to migrate back to Cuba to accomplish this, it will be done from here.

The sugar families of Cuba are still in the sugar business today here in the US, and they will return to grow cane there. They will introduce 40 years of modernization and return the island to its rightful place among the sugar giants in the world.

"America is by far the most hated and loved country in the world."

I agree with this, but other countries are not on peoples radar screens, for the most part. I do agree most Arabs and Muslims hate us, but the % of people who hate us in Europe and S America is pretty small.

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