My tour guide Roberto told me that the explosion of the battleship Maine was just an “American pretext to get into the Cuba-Spain war.” No matter that’s how Cuba won.
On the other hand, the United States has been less than an ideal next-door neighbor. “Just at the moment I’m so angry with that infernal little Cuban Republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” said Teddy Roosevelt in 1906. American armed forces occupied Cuba from 1899 to 1902, and from 1906 to 1909. There was further military intervention in 1912 and threats of plenty more, plus an invasion by proxy at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. And a U.S. trade embargo, in force since that year, certainly looks to the Cubans like a “wipe its people off the face of the earth” gesture.
The Cubans estimated that as of 1996, this embargo had cost them between $38 billion and $40 billion. That happens to be much less than they’d received from the Soviets for doing the things that got them embargoed. But no quibbles. We’re talking politics here, not sense. Then in 1996 came the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, or Helms-Burton Act, as it’s called, after its respective sponsors in the U.S. Senate and House. This passed by whopping majorities because Cuba had just shot down two private planes carrying anti-Castro exiles who had a habit of dropping leaflets on Havana. Probably the leaflets contained dangerous information about the price of mattresses in Miami. Helms-Burton tightened the embargo by imposing sanctions not only on those who trade with Cuba but on those who trade with those who trade with Cuba and those who date them and their friends and pets. Or something like that. It’s harsh.
And the Cubans were steamed. All over Havana, walls had been painted with six-foot cartoons depicting Senator Jesse Helms as Hitler and Uncle Sam as Hitler, and Jesse Helms as Hitler again. The Cubans didn’t seem to know what Rep. Dan Burton looked like. Come to think of it, I don’t, either.
Of course the embargo is stupid. It gives Castro an excuse for everything that’s wrong with his rat-bag society. And free enterprise is supposed to be the antidote for socialism. We shouldn’t forbid American companies from doing business in Cuba, we should force them to do so. Bring them ashore with Marines if necessary. Although I guess we’ve tried that.
And the Cubans are stupid for rising to the bait. There’s another little island next to a gigantic, powerful country that threatens to invade and enforced an embargo for decades. And Taiwan has done okay.
I went with two American newspaper reporters to interview a Cuban economist, Hiram Marquetti, a professor at the University of Havana and an industrial-planning consultant to various state companies and government agencies. I wanted to see what it was like talking to an “expert” who wasn’t allowed to tell me the facts and maybe wasn’t allowed to know them.
Marquetti, looking grave, said the U.S. embargo had cost Cuba $42 billion, upping the amount a couple of billion dollars from what Cuban Foreign Ministry advisor Pedro Prada said in his book, Island Under Siege (available in English in hotel gift shops and complete with an appendix: “Opponents of the Blockade,” listing Danny Glover, Cindy Lauper, and Cheech Marin).
Marquetti, looking graver, admitted things were lousy. Malnutrition was evident in some sectors of the population. During the last few years, he said, the average Cuban’s intake of vitamin A was down 35 percent, iron down 40 percent, and vitamin C down 15 percent. The last item is interesting in a country where citrus trees are basically weeds. Marquetti, looking graver yet, said, “The highest percentage of disposable income goes to food, usually more than 50 percent. We need the free market to complete the supply.” But he also said that this free market and the dollars that make it work “do not necessarily have to do with the opening of the economy.” He claimed that “dollarization” was about Cuba acquiring “new technology, expertise in company management, and access to new markets.” It was not about any actual Cubans acquiring any actual money.
“Total foreign investment, including contracts, has been $2 billion since 1992,” said Marquetti, now looking proud. Though my European journalist friend thought only about $750 million had ever really been spent, and a New York Law Journal article cited estimates as low as $500 million. “Nickel mining provides $50 million a year in salaries alone, though such figures are not usually released, for security reasons,” said Marquetti, looking sly and confidential.
The newspaper reporters were getting bored. “What effect is dollarization having on families and society?” asked one of them. Said Marquetti, looking bureaucratically oblivious, “Number one: foreign investment. Two: intensive development of tourism. Three: opening to foreign trade.” Sis has been out hitchhiking and someone made a foreign investment in her. It’s all part of Cuba’s intensive development of tourism. And, boy, is she open to foreign trade.
“What about the prostitutes?” said the other reporter, more or less reading my mind. “There are rumors that the government turns a blind eye because of the dollars they bring in.”
All at once, Marquetti looked human and, indeed, rather enthusiastic. “They are very inexpensive,” he said. “They are very educated. They are very young and very pretty. Cuba is a country that attracts tourism for cheap sex,” he said, stopping just short of a wink. Marquetti tried to look grave again. “Since the crisis there has been a negative social impact, but you can’t eliminate it through repressive means.” It’s not like these girls are scattering mattress-price leaflets. “We have to look for other solutions, such as education.” But he’d just said they were educated. “Some sectors of Cuban youth, they view prostitution as a solution to their economic problems.”
As for Hiram Marquetti himself, he was selling his report on the Cuban economy—five dollars per copy.
Before the revolution, annual per-capita income in Cuba was $374; that’s about $1,978 in current dollars. So Cuba is poorer than it used to be, although the poverty is spread around a little more. Castro’s government is as dishonest as the prerevolutionary government was. The modern corruption involves more greed for power than passion for lucre, but that’s actually worse. And the depraved sex is still available if you can sneak the whores past the elevator operators.
Getting more people to sneak whores past elevator operators was, so far, the best the Cuban government had been able to do in terms of a plan to improve the economy. Tourism was supposed to be the salvation now that Soviet aid had vaporized and sugar was selling for less per pound than garden loam. About 700,000 tourists a year were visiting Cuba, an increase of more than 100 percent since 1990. The Cuban government expected foreign companies to invest an additional $2.4 billion in tourist facilities by the year 2000. This would double the number of hotel rooms on the island. And every one of those rooms will be occupied, I predict, by somebody as ticked off as I was.
Because Cuba does not quite have the tourism thing figured. When I checked into the Hotel Nacional, I was given the manager’s room, in which he was living. I was given another room. The key card didn’t work. The bellhop went to get another key card. Then the safe didn’t work—no small matter since Americans can’t use credit cards in Cuba and have to conduct all business in cash, an awkward lump of which I was carrying.
When I returned from the hotel bar bloated with mojitos, the key card didn’t work again. I went down to get another. The elevator took ten minutes to arrive. The new key card didn’t work. I went back. The elevator took another ten minutes. That key card didn’t work, either. The maid let me in.
I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a series of chirpy phone calls from the government tourism service in the downstairs lobby. CubaTrot or Havan-a-Vacation or whatever it was called had a driver and a translator and a guide and something else, maybe a circus elephant, waiting for me, bright and early, ready and willing, all set to take me anywhere I wanted to go, except back to bed. None of which stuff I had ordered.
At dawn on the second morning the operator called saying I “must go to reception immediately.” When I went downstairs the desk clerk said, “It was nothin
g.” When I went upstairs the key card didn’t work. At dawn on the third morning it was a wrong number. On the fourth morning it was someone jabbering expressively in French.
At least I was always awake in time for breakfast. Every day I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and I never got the same thing twice. I traveled to a beach resort in Trinidad on the Caribbean coast, and at dawn the phone rang—a hang-up. I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and got coffee, orange juice, and a cheese sandwich with ketchup on it. The next morning at about 7, a room-service waiter arrived at my door, unbidden, with a plate of dinner buns. As I was checking out, there was an irked Canadian couple at the front desk saying, “We got a message. You told us, ‘Call from Toronto,’ nothing else, eh? We’re thinking there’s maybe something wrong at home. So we try and we try, and we get through, eh? And it costs us fifty dollars. And nobody’s called us at all.”
I had driven to Trinidad on the autopista, which is a six-lane…a four-lane…sometimes a two-lane…. The Russians never got around to finishing it. And it’s not like there are any divider lines painted on it anyway. The autopista runs from Havana southeast through the middle of the island. There was so little traffic that cows grazed on weeds coming up in the pavement cracks. I had stumbled into a radical ecologist’s daydream. Or so it appeared until I’d pass some East German tractor trailer spewing a mile-long cloud of tar-colored exhaust.
You have to watch out when you drive in Cuba, but you never know what you’re watching out for. It could be anything. Potholes, of course, some of them big enough for a couple of chairs and a coffee table. Then there are the people who leap out from the side of the road frantically, desperately, even violently trying to sell you one onion. Or a string of garlic. Or a pale, greasy-looking hunk of something. Lard? Flan? Pound of flesh? (It turned out to be homemade cheese.)
At every major road junction there were scores of hitchhikers, not the prostitute kind but regular folks, whole families among them. Cuba’s national transportation system is in butt-lock. Says Fodor’s guide, “Be prepared to wait three days for the next available bus.” Standing among the people with their thumbs out were the traffic police. They stopped cars and trucks (though not those with tourista license plates) and made them take passengers.
Cops helping you bum a ride—now here was the revolution the way I had it planned thirty years ago when I was smoking a lot of dope. Except, not exactly. The reason so many people were hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere was that they’d been sent there to work on the sugar harvest. I don’t recall that the workers’ paradise of my callow fantasies contained any actual work.
That sugar harvest was going on all around me. Or, rather, not going on. I’m no agricultural expert, but I’m almost certain that leaning against fences, walking about with hands in the pockets, and sitting on stalled tractors smoking cigarettes are not the most efficient methods of cutting sugarcane.
Much work had been done, however, painting propaganda slogans.
SOCIALISM OR DEATH appeared on almost every overpass. What if the U.S. government had slogans all over the place? I tried to come up with a viable campaign. My suggestion, AMERICA—IT DOESN’T SUCK.
As for “Socialism or Death,” after a couple of weeks in Cuba, I was leaning toward the latter option. To which the Castro government’s response is: Death? Yes. No problem. That can be arranged. But, first, socialism!
I turned off the autopista onto a raggedy strip of pavement through the Escambray Mountains. The sun went down, and suddenly traffic materialized—gigantic Russian trucks driven without sense, headlights, or any idea of keeping to the right on the road. I emerged from the mountains at Cienfuegos. Says Fodor’s: “The people of Cienfuegos…constantly tout it as ‘la Linda Ciudad del Mar’ (the lovely city by the sea).” They’re lying. From here it was a thirty-mile drive through coastal mangrove swamps on a road covered with land crabs. Every time I went over one, it made a noise like when you were ten, and you spent two weeks making a plastic model of the battleship Missouri, and your dad stepped on it in the dark. I tried avoiding the crabs. They scuttled under the wheels. I tried driving at them. They stayed put. The road smelled like thirty miles of crab salad going bad.
It was almost 10 P.M. before I got to my hotel on the beach, the Ancon. But the buffet was still open. They were serving crab salad. I went to the bar.
In the morning the ocean sparkled, the sand gleamed, the cheese sandwich with ketchup arrived. Bright-pink vacationers frolicked in the surf or, rather, stood on the beach discussing whether to frolic in the surf, having seen large numbers of stingrays the last time they frolicked.
The Ancon was filled with middle-aged Canadians having the middle-aged Canadian idea of fun, which consisted mostly of going back to the buffet for seconds on the crab salad. The architecture was modernistic. The rooms were comfortablistic. The food was foodlike.
There are worse tourist facilities in Cuba, namely all of them. The Ancon is top of the line. I inspected the other beach hotels near Trinidad, and I had driven out to see those along the playas del este outside Havana. Most were stark. Some were dank and unclean. And one spread of tiny prefabricated cottages with outdoor sinks and group bathrooms looked like nothing so much as a Portosan farm.
Cuba serves the very lowest end of the international holiday market. When some waiter in Paris recites the plats du jour like he’s pissing on you from a great height, you can extract your mental revenge by picturing him, come August, on Cuba’s Costa del Fleabag, eating swill in a concrete dining hall.
I wandered around the Trinidad region. I went to see the Iznaga Tower, an early nineteenth century neoclassical structure with seven arched and columned setbacks tapering to 140 feet at the pinnacle—monumental but so delicately proportioned that the whole thing seemed about to take flight. It looked like a spaceship designed by Palladio. The purpose of this beautiful and subtle artistry, which took ten years to construct, was to keep the slaves from goofing off. The plantation owner would get up on top and give everybody the hairy eyeball. The tower was no longer in use. With the block-captain system, the chattel labor now spied on itself.
I drove through the Valle de los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills, as it’s romantically called) and over the Escambray Mountains again. As late as 1967, anti-Castro guerrillas were extant here. The Cuban government prefers to call them “bandits.” Back in Trinidad, in what used to be a church, there’s the marvelously named Museum of the Struggle Against Bandits, which should certainly open a branch in the U.S., maybe in Dan Rostenkowski’s old congressional office.
Not much was actually in the museum. The centerpiece was a beat-up pleasure boat supposedly captured from the CIA. Two suspiciously new and definitely Soviet machine guns had been mounted on its deck with unlikely looking half-inch wood screws. The rest of the displays were mostly devoted to photographs of Cuban soldiers “martyred by bandits.” One of these poor soldiers was named O’Really.
Not much was actually in Trinidad, either. It’s very old, if you like that sort of thing. Trinidad was founded in 1514 by Diego de Velazquez, the conquistador of Cuba. Although Cuba didn’t really take much conquering. Confiscador would be more like it. The local heyday was in the eighteenth century, when Trinidad was a major slave port. Then better slave off-loading facilities were built in Cienfuegos. Not much has changed in Trinidad since, and this gets the guidebooks excited. Fodor’s goes on at some length about how this “marvelous colonial enclave” has not been “polluted with advertising, automobiles, souvenir shops, dozens of restaurants and hotels, and hordes of tourists milling through the streets.” Which, translated, means nobody’s made a centavo here in 200 years.
The buildings around the main square were patched and painted. The buildings not around the main square weren’t. Practically everything was one-story high and built flush against tiny, crooked streets paved in stones as large as carry-on luggage.
I got lost heading back to the hotel. The streets were becoming even tin
ier, and the people standing around in those streets were not looking full of glee that UNESCO had declared Trinidad a World Heritage Site. In fact, they looked depressed and mean. I was getting more than the usual number of cold stares and catcalls, and just when I’d thought to myself, “I wouldn’t care to stop here,” I stopped there.
The starter motor whined uselessly. The car was inert. A crowd of impoverished Cubans gathered around me. I was frantically looking up “Placating Phrases” in the Berlitz when I realized the rude noises and gestures had stopped. The people in the crowd were smiling. And not the way I would have smiled if I’d found a moneyed dimwit trapped in my barrio. “El auto es busto,” I explained, opening the hood in that purposeful way men have when we don’t know what we’re doing.
“Mi amigo es mecanico,” said a fellow in the crowd. He and two of his friends grabbed the fenders and pushed the car down the block and around a corner. A big guy about my age came out of a house, shook my hand, and removed the car’s air filter. While the big guy probed the carburetor, the crowd went to work. One kid brought tools. Another kid sat in the driver’s seat and worked the ignition on the big guy’s instructions. Two young men rolled a barrel of gasoline up the street and tipped some into the tank. An old man came out of another house with a pitcher of water. He checked the level in the battery cells and filled the windshield-washer reservoir while he was at it. A second man removed the distributor cap and inspected the points. He pulled the spark-plug wires and looked into their sockets. A third man detached the fuel line and began sucking on it, spitting the gasoline into the street. The big guy took the fuel pump apart. The distributor cap man disappeared for a while and returned with some scavenged spark-plug sockets, which he spliced onto the old spark-plug wires. Other people checked the radiator and the oil. “I have an aunt in Union City, New Jersey,” said someone. That was the extent of anybody’s English.