The End of the End of the Revolution - 6
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
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WHEN I RETURNED to Lealtad Street, I found a flurry of activity: the chicken had arrived! Rodríguez, in his green overalls, had the news up on his blackboard. He was unpacking frozen chicken legs and thighs. Chicken breast is available only on the convertible-peso market. He held up the box with a big smile. It said, “Made in U.S.A.”
Since 2000, when Congress bowed to the farm lobby, it has been legal to sell food and agricultural products to Cuba. That means everything from chicken legs to telephone poles. At the Miami airport I had run into Randal Wilson, who was just back from Havana, where he was trying to sell Alabaman wine. “They seem to prefer my blueberry wine, just loved that,” he told me. “You know, Alabama is very big on trade with Cuba.”
In fact, the United States is now the largest exporter of food to Cuba, earning upward of $600 million this year. It’s among Cuba’s five biggest trading partners. (The others are Venezuela, China, Spain and Canada.) So much for the embargo; it’s as arbitrary as the wet-foot, dry-foot policy toward Cubans trying to escape. While America took in hundreds of millions of dollars from Cuba, it sent back 2,086 sea-borne refugees in fiscal 2008. Principle has nothing to do with current Cuban policy. It’s just an incoherent mess.
I asked Aguirre, the young would-be escapee working with Rodríguez, if he understood U.S. policy. “It’s like the situation here, you have to understand it because it is what it is,” he said. “I try not to think too much, I just talk about girls, baseball, whatever.”
I looked down the street, at the kids playing, a guy selling lighter fluid, the carved doors, the extraordinary baroque flourishes on the three- and four-story buildings. A gentleness inhabits Cuba, the island that Columbus, landing in 1492, called “the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.” It is the gentleness of time passing very slowly.
The absence of visual clutter — no ads, no brands, no neon signs — leaves the mind at peace. Fidel’s colossal stubbornness has delivered a singular aesthetic, striking in the age of globalized malls. I found myself thinking of a phrase of Pico Iyer’s in the excellent “Reader’s Companion to Cuba,” edited by Alan Ryan: “Cuba catches my heart and then makes me count the cost of that enchantment.”
That cost is high. Fifty yards down the street, I talked to Felix Morales, 43, who runs another chicken-egg-fish store. I asked if there was any rivalry with Rodríguez. Morales laughed. “How can there be rivalry if we both receive and hand out the same thing?” he said. “The only difference is he’s black and I’m white!”
Morales told me everyone was aching for some improvement. He said he would like to work and see the fruit of his labors. He was wearing a T-shirt saying “Canada.” Did he want to go there? Two women in the store burst out laughing. Of course Morales wanted to, of course they wanted to, who wouldn’t?
Not Jorge Martinez, who runs the community health center near Morales’s store, a place where doctors treat everything from alcoholism to depression. “Fidel is the man of the century,” he told me.
I walked into a little restaurant called Asahi, one of the so-called paladares, independent, family-run enterprises, usually with three or four tables. José Marticorena, its owner, told me he acquired his state license a dozen years ago, but now it’s difficult to obtain such a license. His father, Miguel, fought alongside Fidel and was rewarded after 1959 with this house. Later he worked in the merchant marine. A freezer he brought back from Japan had “Asahi” inscribed on it, after the Japanese beer: hence the name.
Marticorena can charge what he wants for food, but his capacity is set at 12 people, and he pays various taxes. “We have a lot of dysfunctional things,” he told me, “but nobody’s dying of hunger or wanting for basic medical help. I was able to do something, and I feel fulfilled by it. My wife is a dentist, she loves to cook. We have two kids. We place a lot of hope in Obama, we believe he will free things up.”
With that, he took out a little digital camera, set it to video and started filming.
“What do you think of the food?” he asked.
“Very good,” I said.
“And whom do you work for?”
“The New York Times.”
Even on Lealtad, a half-century after the revolution, capitalist public-relations instincts are not far below the surface.
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Vallarta Weddings
Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
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