Cuba libre
On Fidel's island fortress, dollar-fuelled hedonism and
communist austerity live side by side. As Castro
enters the twilight of his rule, Ed Vulliamy experiences
Stalinism beneath the palm trees, and meets a new
opposition leader whose quiet revolution aims to
topple the cigar-smoking dictator - by calling his bluff
Lazaro Vargas, for all his strength, has a smile like melting
honey. And with each crack behind him of horsehide against
ash, each connection between baseball and bat, the muscles in
his neck tighten as though it were some moment of impact
within his own body.
Baseball practice on the outskirts of Havana, under an
impenitent Sunday sun, is just as earnest as in the United
States. Only here the game is played for love and glory - by law
- not for money. And for something else, or so they say: for
Cuba. Vargas is one of the greatest players in the world, and the
one thing that all fans of the game know about him is that he's
the man who, as limousines prowled the streets of Atlanta
during the Olympic games picking up Cuba's stars, turned down
$6m to join the Braves baseball team. There is therefore one
question all those fans want to ask Vargas: Why? He smiles
that strong, sweet grin. 'It is a good feeling,' comes the reply
slowly, 'to walk down the street knowing that no one can buy
you.'
Baseball is a uniquely ascetic game. To master it, you need the
kind of inner peace Vargas exudes. It is, he says, 'a bit like Zen
Buddhism; a game of amor y concentracion' - love and
concentration. And: 'Yes, there is a connection between that
and playing it for no salary. I have been playing baseball since I
was my son's age,' he points to three-year-old Miguel Antonio,
in an oversized helmet carrying an even more outsized bat. 'Why
would I want to leave people who love me?'
Lazaro Vargas is the model of Cuba's official self-image. He is a
modern incarnation of the revolutionary hero, wearing sports kit
rather than military fatigues. But he is not Cuba. It seems cruel
that even such noble rhetoric should have a hollow ring in its
echo. For out in that city - beyond fourth base and the white line
in the dust - Havana is on the edge of Fin-de-Something... but
Fin-de-What, exactly? The answer is as mercurial as the city
itself and as ambivalent as Cuba's many faiths and faces. But
whatever it is, much more is crumbling in Havana than the
streets leading from the baseball stadium to the slums of the
city centre, past huge, stylised portraits of Che Guevara,
unsullied icon of a dream, and the purity of the dream that was.
The road leads past some of the most outrageously fine, now
crumbling, constructions of the Spanish colonial enterprise.
Every doorway, however, teems with human life; every window
frames a face or cluster of faces, every other hallway broadcasts
the libidinous pounding of salsa on to the street; a wall between
a home and the thoroughfare is porous in spirit as well as
literally. Outside flows an endless river of traffic: vintage
American cars, Ladas and creaking bicycles. Women carry their
loads, girls display their velvet skin; men gather on corners to
chat, boys strut their muscles; the bright fluorescent lights of
cafes and bars illuminate noisy card games. Here is Stalinism
beneath the palm trees - a crossroads of the senses leading in
all directions, towards both hedonism and the austerity of
communism; contradictions crashing into one another.
It takes only a short while for the quick-hit façade of sensual
exotica to peel along with the plasterwork. Punished by four
decades of embargo by the United States, Fidel Castro's island
fortress has always needed a patron. And when Cuba lost the
Soviet Union in 1991, Fidel Castro exchanged benefactors for
the emblem of his arch-enemy: the hated but revered United
States dollar. What he got in return was a Time Out guide and a
generation of tourists come to gawp and ghoul at Stalinism's
last, great exotic failure.
In the Barrio di Colon - the old red-light district in the days of the
deposed dictator Batista - a photo shoot is in progress by a
Dutch crew armed with lights and reflective shields. Some of the
pictures are of picturesque poor children peeping out from
cavernous windows, others feature a feline model wearing a
summer frock. Surveying this scene is a nuclear physicist called
William Rakib, blessed, he thinks, by many visits to the Soviet
Union and once charged with a managerial role in Cuba's
disastrous nuclear-power programme. 'Capitalism,' he grunts, 'is
more toxic than nuclear power'.
To save the quarters of its crumbling capital visible to this new
generation of visitors, the Cuban regime has paired up with
European governments to restore and rehabilitate buildings that
line the Malecon - the ocean promenade - and central
boulevards. The sound inside Lorenzo Hernandez's block is
therefore an optimistic hammering of nails and whirring of drills;
Hernandez, himself an electrician, lends a hand. The exterior of
the row of flaking mansions is criss-crossed with wooden
scaffolding; the cool, musky stone inside is being damp-proofed,
says Hernandez, 'paid for by the Italian government'. A couple of
blocks down the prom, however, Lazaro Perez is still waiting for
restoration to begin: 'People keep coming from this committee
or that, but nothing ever happens,' says Lazaro, who keeps a
cow skull on his wall. 'I keep it up there for protection', he
explains.
Walk awhile inland, to the once-stately, now ramshackle, San
Isidro district around Havana's railway terminus: here, talk of
restoration raises a hollow laugh from Mario Vidal, a
supermarket security guard who lives with his wife Joania, her
father, their six children and three cousins in a cramped
one-room flat with raised sleeping space and a small, dark
kitchen. Bare wires crawl up the high walls, naked bulbs
suspended; pots and pans, flotsam and jetsam, hang from
sturdy hooks. 'We eat in shifts,' explains Joania, preparing the
first one for her children, including seven-year-old Damien, who
suffers from a rare form of meningitis, requiring medicines that
can only be bought with dollars. Mario, however, does not like to
complain; he wears a smart shirt and pressed trousers, for all
the dilapidation around him. 'I've done it up a bit - here, we do
our own restoration,' he says. The only problem with living like
this, says Miriam Gonzalez downstairs where the dogs bark, 'is
privacy. You have to make love while the children are at school'.
As tangerine dawn fades the last stars in Havana's sky, a group
of children gather on the cobbles to play a game that enthralls
as much as it is simple. With lengths of string, they whip a
spinning top, making it dance from stone to stone. They do this,
with intensity, for an hour, as morning breaks around them.
The children, in pressed white shirts with red scarves tied neatly
round their necks, eventually scuttle off to the call of the bell at
Ruben Alvarez school - named, of course, after a revolutionary
hero. ' Sin educacion no hay revolucion posible ' declares the
sign at the entrance - Without education, revolution is not
possible - alongside pictures of Elian Gonzalez restored to his
father's loving arms. Head teacher Pilar Mejia explains that
curricula are taught in strict accordance with the latest directive
from the education ministry, and around five basic principles the
first of which stipulates that (she reads, dutifully): 'To love our
motherland should be the political goal of the educative process.'
On the wall of the school office, the names of the top and
bottom achievers are chalked up on a board. 'We use
competition,' says mathematics teacher Rafael More. 'We
believe that childhood should be preserved but rigorous; we don't
want to exchange what we have for your Nintendo or violent
computer games.' Mr More's class - a blend of severity and
innocence - bears him out, making most American or British
inner-city schools look a little frayed at the edges. Here, there is
neither the will nor luxury for relaxation.
This, says William Rakip, the nuclear physicist, is the wheel of
revolution that Cuba turns. He insists that 'you do not
understand how insurrection is not the same as revolution, it is
just a moment. Revolution is all the things that come
afterwards.' It's a highly ironic invocation of 'permanent revolution'
as advocated by Leon Trotsky, the man Castro's Soviet masters
murdered in Mexico City, where Castro and Guevara's
insurrection began. But, in Havana, revolution is beginning to
look more like stagnation, and the more it does so, the brighter
the shine of the glitter across the Straits.
The crusade against the influence of the US has become the
work of a network exalted in the folk history of Cuban
communism - the 'Committees for the Defence of the Revolution'
(or CDR). Hilda Betancourt was there, in 1960, at the giddy
moment they were born. She is now CDR co-ordinator for the
Dragones district, a lively bustle near the shopping thoroughfare
of the old regime; her daughter teaches a salsa class in the
adjacent room. 'There was a big meeting in the presidential
palace,' she recalls, 'and Fidel said a committee would be set
up on each block to defend the revolution. And it's the same
now.' The committees are responsible for dragging out the
masses for such spontaneous protestations of loyalty as those
over Elian Gonzalez, and ensuring that the Commander-in-Chief
never speaks to a piazza that is not heaving with crowds.
Afterwards, they might conduct a friendly follow-up check on
people failing to show up.
The CDR's unbending duty is what Ms Betancourt calls
'revolutionary vigilance. That,' she says, 'is our primary task. At
the beginning it was to convince and to watch - and it still is.'
Revolutionary vigilance, as one finds out further down the road,
means snooping and stalking; and occasionally going on the
attack. These are the informers, the political gossips, the eyes
and ears of the secret police, foot soldiers of Cuba's keystone
KGB, who work in exotica's shadow.
You can hear the drums from the street, starting around
sundown on a humid Tuesday, coming now from a building once
so grand the French used it as an embassy. The old creaking lift
arrives at the door to the top-floor apartment, upon which is
written: 'Whosoever enters does so in the spirit of God and
Jesus Christ. If not, do not enter.' Miriam Fuerte answers,
holding her cigar. There is pure mischief behind her smile; the
mischief of magic, for Jesus is not the only divinity present in
this place, despite the fact that Our Lady of Guadeloupe in
Mexico is looking down from a wall.
Miriam, confident with her wholesome hips, begins the Dance of
the Walking Dead, that of the Santeria God Babalaye. The
essence of Santeria is that it is the African religion of the slaves
upon which the Roman Catholic faith was superimposed: 'The
slaves were not allowed to celebrate their saints,' explains the
Santeria priestess, 'so they went to Catholic church and did so
under other names.' For this reason, each Santeria deity has a
second, Catholic, face. Babalaye's is that of Lazarus, raised by
Christ from the dead. 'He,' says Mercedes Veida, as she
prepares to join the dance, 'is the most important of them all.'
Mercedes intoxicates herself gradually with the rhythm of the
drums. Fumes of tobacco and sickly sweet aftershave fill the
room. Her eyes grow larger than should be possible as she
looks both inward and outward, now on the parquet, now up
again, possessed.
When it is over, Miriam blows a bonfire of cigar smoke and
beams a huge grin before admitting visitors into her consulting
room, her chapel, 'my fortress'. People come here 'from the
factories, streets and stores,' explains Miriam, 'for healing of
illness and tribulation'. The altar is a jumble of objects, charged
with meaning. Bowls of putrid water, a plastic toy kit of a Soviet
bomber, lamps, jars, candles, old bottles. Eleggua - 'He who
Opens and Closes the Roads' is a doll who controls destiny and
whose Catholic face is The Holy Child of Atocha. Especially
lovely is Ochun (here, a pineapple-shaped vase), goddess of
'love, sexuality and coquettishness' - to Cuban Catholics Our
Lady of Charity at Cobre.
Miriam used to work, she explains, for Che Guevara in the
Ministry of Industry. She has his portrait on her bedroom wall. 'It
has a positive force,' she says. 'I used to see him most
mornings in the office,' and for all his Marxist beliefs, 'I observed
and understood that he was a man of great light who, when he
died, gave much energy to the world.'
'Feeling dull but dutiful,' wrote the great journalist Martha
Gellhorn, 'I went to look at Alamar - a big housing estate with
rectangular factories for living spread over the green land off the
highway outside of Havana.' Why try to improve on Martha
Gellhorn? Alamar was also known as 'Little Russia', since it was
in part built for Soviet technicians, in a Lego-brick style that
would make them feel at home, a sort of tropical
Smolensk-sur-Mer.
Isadoria Castaneda's block, however, was built by her husband's
own hand under a deal whereby selected workers could
construct their habitation during what was called the 'Special
Period' of shortage and deprivation after the Soviets left. Mr
Castaneda sailed on an industrial factory-fishing ship before
building Edificio No 53, and Isadoria earns a pittance training as
medical technician. She is dumbstruck to have two people in her
home with connections to Liverpool: 'Wait till I tell my daughter
that people came here from the same city as the Beatles! She
won't believe it! I know all their songs - "Penny Lane",
"Submarino Amarillo".'
But then Isadoria performs some mental acrobatics between her
two great loves - the band and her government. 'If the
government banned the Beatles, I would still love them anyway.
But I would love the government, too. I don't see any
contradiction in that. The visiting Beatles fans do not
understand. 'Did your mother not make you do things?' retorts
Isadoria, 'Of course she did. And you still love her, don't you?'
Alamar's living factories get progressively tattier as they
approach the coast and the outdoor 'Playita' - Little Beach bar.
There is in fact no beach, but there is pleasantly chilled Cristal
beer served by pleasantly hospitable Joely Garcia, who does not
equate the Cuban government with her mother. Joely wants to
know about the attack against New York on 11 September. 'We
never hear about the American people, only about bad guys and
politics.' She wants to travel, 'but I can't even go to the tourist
hotels in my own country. I don't like to go to the crowded beach
and look through a fence at foreigners on theirs.' The system of
entitlement to food rations, which enables Cubans to eat,
provides for, says Joely 'eight eggs a month. That's four
omelettes. If you go to the dollar store for nice food, you spend a
month's salary on a single trip.'
Friday night is music night all over Havana, no matter which kind
you like. Salsa rules the night air, but traditional folk ' son '
remains. Rap makes inroads, and not without political
implications. But the one brand of music that has survived and
will always survive Cuba's changes, come what may, is jazz,
standing as it does, like Cuba, at the crossroads. 'This is where
all styles meet,' says Pedro Gonzalez Sanchez, who has been
playing the bass for nearly half a century. When Pedro was
eight he shined shoes in old Havana - American shoes, rich
Cuban shoes. His father was a drummer, his grandfather a
pianist. Pedro started to play, too, '10 to 12 hours a day, at
home; when I wasn't playing I was listening'. Revolution came,
and musicians adapted. ' C'est la vie, monsieur ,' he beams.
The principal advantage was a system of scholarships to the
music academies, 'which made jazz more sophisticated'. In
1981, Pedro played bass in the first Cuban band since the
communists took power to visit Britain - Pepin Voyante, as
proudly reported in the Morning Star .
But tonight it is Pedro's son, Omar, who takes the stage at the
Jazz Club downtown. Omar played piano in a band with his
father until interrupted by military service. But there was always
the military band, in which he was assigned the tuba. 'I used to
march up and down playing a nice bluesy sound on that tuba,'
he grins. Omar found his first bass, 'busted up', in a military
store; he helped himself, then taught himself. 'I practised while
everyone slept in the barracks; playing all night.'
In the new Cuban order, Pedro plays to matinee audiences
paying in pesos and evening ones who do so in dollars. Tonight
is his big opportunity - invited by saxophonist Javier Zalba
Suarez and pianist Gilberto Fonseca into the musical top
drawer. Suarez learnt his craft from the CIA - 'listening to John
Coltrane and Charlie Parker on Voice of America radio,' he says.
'But we used to add our own sound, "Cubop", with an
Afro-Cuban flavour. Here, we have no school of jazz, this is
God's own jazz country.'
If there is a trinity of clichés that brands Cuba, it is communism,
cigars and libido. This third is nothing new, but it, too, has
themes and variations. Sex walks the streets of Havana. Castro
promised to liberate Cuba from its role as America's brothel. But
by reintroducing the dollar, he has turned it into the boudoir for a
new generation of clients from Europe, Canada and South
America. Thousands of Havana's girls and women are for rent -
by the hour, day, even by the week.
Two in the morning, and the Parque Central is emptying out, but
Mileydis Padrino Diaz is still on her patch, escorted by two
gentlemen. One of them makes the approach, describing
himself as 'a lawyer'. Milyedis, with braided hair and jeans,
smiles bittersweetly. Ten dollars for the chica, plus another 10
for la casa - 12 quid the package.
Quickly down the street off the square and suddenly a dark
alleyway between two cliffs of stone - retailers, customer and
commodity. An old bucket gets knocked over, a cat objects;
knock-knock on a door, a woman beckons us in, shakes hands
like the hostess at cocktail party, takes the $20 and gestures
towards a ladder leading to an overhang beneath which she
watches television. Milyedis smiles again and follows up the
ladder. On the shelf is a bed; Milyedis draws the curtain and
starts to unpeel.
When motioned to stop, she asks, 'Are you timido ?' Milyedis
has been doing this for 'about two years. For my mother'. That's
Mama downstairs? 'Yes... father left for Miami, we've heard
nothing of him.' The audience laughs on the variety show
beneath. Milyedis has given up think ing too hard about her
work, but not about her corroded life. 'No, I don't hate the
customers any more. I did at first... hey, why ask these things?
I want to do something that makes me happy - maybe be a
model.' Time to go, and let Milyedis get on. Back down the
ladder, so soon, to Mother's bewilderment. 'Thank you, señor,'
says the woman, patting Mileydis on the head. 'She's only my
little baby.'
Where there is degradation, there is usually an attempt at
redemption. Those loyal to the Cuban regime, like the nuclear
physicist William Rakip, insist that there is no democratic
underground or opposition in Cuba. 'They just want to go to the
US Interest Section,' he says, 'and get a visa for Miami.' So
what about Elizardo Sanchez - the man who met with Spanish
Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez when he came to Havana for the
Hispanic Summit in 2000? 'He is an extreme right-winger,' says
Rakip, 'who just wants to go to Florida. He has no credibility.'
On the wall of Sanchez's front room hang photographs of him
shaking the hands of Gonzalez, Vaclav Havel, Jimmy Carter and
Teddy Kennedy - 'no credibility'. Sanchez, it turns out, was a
senior member of the Popular Socialist Party who fought with
the revolution. 'Maybe I made a mistake back then, but that's
the way I am,' he laughs, 'and it's too late to change now.'
Sanchez broke with Castro in 1967 to found the Left Opposition,
inspired by the Trotskyite ideas of Jacek Kuron and Karol
Modzelewski in Poland. In 1972, he was jailed for two years for
criticising the secret police, then again in 1980: this time an
eight-and-a-half-year term for possessing 'enemy propaganda' -
ie keeping Kuron's and Modzelewski's books in the library at
Havana University, where he was a professor of philosophy.
'Two days after I left prison I received two journalists at my
house and told them about what I saw in Cuban jails. For that I
was jailed again.' Sanchez now lives under unpleasant circum
stances in a pleasant street: 'This house has been ransacked
10 times; they throw stones; we can't have offices or a
photocopier, we have to work out of our houses - and it's hard for
our families.
'This is,' he says, 'a tropical model of totalitarianism - to a
degree like the Eastern European models, but here established
on the shoulders of a popular revolution, not by the tanks of the
Red Army.' The repression, he says, 'is not comparable to the
USSR, or Haiti or the mountains of Bolivia, but it denies freedom
of expression, association, of the press, of movement of the
right to form political parties or establish a business.'
Up until 1988, says Sanchez, 'the government didn't think the
dissident movement was worth noticing. But, silently, the human
rights movement grew. In the old days, we were a sapling in its
back garden, and now that we're a tree, the government cannot
pull us up by the roots. They've come to realise they cannot
keep control. There are no death squads or disappearances...'
he continues, with a scornful laugh, 'and so, instead, we have
become a country of prisons and prison camps - as many as
400 or 500 across the nation.'
Then Sanchez steers the conversation towards the conclusion
he sees fit: 'I am not the most dangerous man to this regime,' he
says. 'A real opposition leader is emerging and you must visit
him.' From the leafy streets, then, out into the working- class
suburb of Cerro, one of the poorest and most remarkable of
Havana. The crowds on the narrow streets are as thick as the
air.
Oswaldo Paya is late for our appointment at his home because
he has been called away on an emergency; a generator has
broken at the hospital and his skills as an electrician are
needed. So there's a wait, beneath his large picture of the
Sacred Heart. Finally he returns, apologising and out of breath.
What is it about people like this that mixes pride and humility,
which in turn itself humbles? How can they be so
simultaneously bold and timid? They have eyes full of both the
sorrow of experience and the hope of their convictions. They 'live
to the point of tears', as Albert Camus wrote, but then wipe them
away.
Paya has mounted potentially the most effective challenge to
the Cuban regime since its foundation, because he is calling its
bluff on its own terrain. He has devised a campaign called
'Proyecto Varela', a petition for democratic change collated
under Articles 63 and 88 of the Cuban constitution, which
guarantee that if 10,000 signatures are gathered in support of a
series of demands, its motion must be put to referendum. The
Proyecto Varela contains five such demands: 1. Freedom of
association, speech and the press; 2. Liberation of political
prisoners; 3. The right to sell labour freely and establish
businesses; 4. The right to present candidates for election; 5.
Free elections within a year if the referendum is successful. In
short, the end of Cuban communism.
'A lot of people speak for Cuba and the Cubans,' says Paya, 'but
the Cubans never get to speak for them selves. This is an
attempt to do this, through the ballot box. In December, we
passed the 10,000 mark easily, but discovered the Communist
party had entered forged names to discredit us. So now we're
going round each signatory to make sure this is them, and their
ID number on the sheet they signed. The authorities have
started to arrest some of our activists and seized some
signatures, but we still have 10,000 - this is what matters.'
Paya kneads his hands. He has a boyish face and a mop of
curly dark hair. 'Oh, all these tourists come here,' he reflects,
'but what do they see? They come here to enjoy themselves in a
place where the Cubans are discriminated against, a kind of
apartheid. We want them to see that this is a sick society,
where people have lost sense of who they are, and who have
lost faith.'
Mr Paya's faith gives him that extra notch of strength that one
recognises from people like Martin Luther King. He likens his
movement to that of the early revolutionary Christians. 'I grew up
during the period of religious persecution,' recalls Paya, 'when I
was 17 years old they sent me to a labour camp for three years,
breaking stones. 'So this is political,' says Paya of his
movement, 'but there's a human and spiritual dimension for me.
For me, this is about liberation - liberation from fear.'
Lazaro Vargas steps up to Home Plate. The game is a stroll
through the furnace of the night: at the top of the fifth inning,
Industriales are romping towards an 10-1 massacre. He drives a
lusty curveball past second base, for a single - for love, for glory,
for Cuba. On the concrete steps, the crowd dance and sing.
They love Lazaro Vardes with all their warm Cuban hearts. But
they do not share his love for the Cuban order of things. Here,
they are not intimidated by fear, nor are they charged by
Oswaldo Paya's faith so much as by carefree defiance.
'Fidel?' says Mamlene, an auto worker, 'he's too old to fuck now,
so he takes it out on us.' 'Fidel! Fidel!' shouts Manuel, holding
his palms aloft as though to hail the Commander-in-Chief at a
rally in the Plaza de la Revolucion, 'Oh, Fidel!' Then he whips the
left palm behind him and, with a puckish grin, oozing mischief,
makes to wipe his backside.