| | |  Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
The End of the End of the Revolution - 3
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
go to original
LEALTAD (LOYALTY) STREET runs from the Malecón down through the densely populated district called Centro Habana. I first went there at night. The city is dimly lighted, but one of Fidel’s achievements, along with an impressive education system and universal health care, is security. It might be said that’s because there is very little to steal, but that would be uncharitable. The revolution, anything but puritanical, has nonetheless instilled a certain ethical rigor.
A residential street, Lealtad beckoned me with its silhouettes lurking in doorways, its clatter of dominoes being banged on tables, its glimpses through grated windows of lush interior courtyards, its old men playing cards in high-ceilinged living rooms of brocaded furniture and sagging upholstery, its melancholy. As I wandered, I stumbled on a bar called Las Alegrías — Joys. What I saw struck me with the force of a vision. Under harsh fluorescent lights, drinking shots of rum, were a white man with a bulbous red nose pickled by drink, a black man with unfocused eyes and a black woman with head bowed, all of them at a distance from one another and seemingly inhabiting an Edward Hopper painting where each lonely element etched another detail of despair. The feeling of being transported is very Cuban: Hopper’s “Nighthawks” was painted in 1942.
I resolved to return to Lealtad in an attempt to understand the despair at Joys, but also in the conviction that the secret lexicon of 50-year dictatorships can be read only in the details of daily life. Secrecy and obfuscation are the lifeblood of such regimes. They alone preserve the mysticism that absolute leadership requires, allowing an aging man with severe intestinal problems to remain Zeus on Olympus. It’s not for nothing that the whereabouts of Fidel, who has not been seen in public since he fell ill in July 2006, are an official secret.
The next day I came back and, dodging boys playing baseball with a ball made from tightly rolled paper, stopped at a chicken-egg-fish store with nothing in it. Antonio Rodríguez, 50, the affable, bald Afro-Cuban running it, explained to me the mechanics of rationing, in which he is an often-immobile cog. Every month, each Cuban is allocated 10 eggs (the first five at 0.15 pesos each, the second five at 0.90 pesos); a pound of chicken at 0.70 pesos; a pound of fish with its head at 0.35 pesos (or 11 ounces without the head); and half a pound of an ersatz mince at 0.35 pesos a pound. It’s hardly worth converting these sums; they’re trifling. Suffice to say that, at 25 pesos to the dollar, you get the whole lot for no more than 25 cents.
That may sound like a steal, but there are catches. Rodríguez, after 17 years at the store, where the broken cash register is of prerevolutionary vintage and the antique refrigerator of Soviet provenance, earns $15.40 a month. The average monthly salary is about $20. I asked him when some chicken or eggs might arrive. Beats me, he said. As many as 15 days a month, he’s idle, waiting for something to be delivered so he can announce it on the blackboard behind him and get to work crossing off “sales” in his clients’ frayed ration books. Rodríguez pointed to a man outside. “That guy standing on the corner, and me working, there’s no real difference,” he said. “We get paid almost nothing to spend the day talking.”
Luiz Jorrin, the man in question, approached. “This is all due to the U.S. blockade,” he said, pointing a finger at me and using the exaggerated term that Cubans favor for the embargo. “Look at your financial crisis! Maybe you’ll get over it with time. Well, we’ll get over this with time. I don’t believe in capitalism. Look what it did in Africa and Latin America. It’s destructive.”
This was too much for Javier Aguirre, a slim fellow who helps Rodríguez. “We’re wrecked, and after three hurricanes, we’re even more wrecked,” he said. “I just don’t believe in the system. Give me Switzerland! Of all the Cubans who have gone to the United States, how many want to come back?”
The question prompted a silence. Aguirre, it transpired, tried twice to escape, only to be caught, once by the Cubans and once by the U.S. Coast Guard. Under the current “wet foot, dry foot” policy, most Cubans who reach U.S. soil are allowed to stay, while most intercepted at sea are repatriated. Go figure.
Now 29, Aguirre, an aspiring artist, is waiting. Cubans are used to waiting. Along with baseball and quiet desperation, it’s the national sport. They talk; they joke at the Beckett play that is their lives; they tap their fingers to the beat of drums and maracas. They lament the billions of dollars of damage caused in recent months by Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma; an offer of U.S. assistance was rebuffed. At least, they laugh, there’s no traffic problem.
The little storefront exchange was typical, I found, in its surprising openness, in its mention of the U.S. embargo as the source of misery and in its vindicating reference to the global economy’s collapse. Cuba, it has to be said, is one of the very few places the Dow’s meltdown has scarcely touched. But tumbling oil prices may affect Venezuelan and Russian largess over time, and slumping European economies may hit tourism. Meanwhile, Cubans go on trying to make sense of the senseless.
“Obama should ask Congress to lift the blockade for 90 days after the hurricanes,” Rodríguez suggested.
“We’re always asking for the kindness of strangers,” Aguirre retorted. “This is not communism or capitalism, it’s a Cuban mess.”
The more I learned of the centralized Cuban economy, the more that seemed a fair summary. Cuba has two currencies, one for communism and one for a limited, state-dominated capitalism. The pesos that people get their salaries in are essentially good for nothing but rationed or undesirable items. By contrast, the convertible dollar-pegged pesos known as “CUCs” (pronounced “kooks”) are good for international products. Pass a dimly lighted peso store and you might see a bicycle tire, a yellowing brassiere and a set of plastic spoons. Pass a convertible-peso store and you will see cellphones, Jameson whiskey and Heineken in a bright, air-conditioned environment.
As a result, many Cubans spend their lives scrambling to get in on the convertible-peso economy, which largely depends on getting access to foreign visitors. A highly qualified electrical engineer opts to work in a cigar factory so he can hawk Havana cigars to tourists. Others offer to be their guides. Whatever goods can be sneaked out of state-run businesses are good for black-market sale. Cellphones — recently permitted in what was portrayed as a liberalizing measure by Raúl — cost about $110. That is half a year’s salary for most Cubans. A gallon of gas goes for about $6, or nearly a third of an average monthly salary. No wonder Cubans see access to the CUC universe of tourists as salvation.
A kind of economic apartheid exists. People are stuck in a regulation-ridden halfway house. They want to escape the socialist world of Rodríguez’s store for the capitalist world of the mini-Cancún on the Varadero peninsula east of Havana, a hotel-littered ghetto of white sand and whiter Scandinavians snapping up Che Guevara T-shirts without worrying too much about what Che wrought on Lealtad Street.
|
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us