Castro’s Never Never Land
Cubans know a new version of their country is about to be born. Like any birth, it’s going to be messy and involve plenty of screaming. And how this new Cuba grows from infancy to maturity is unknowable.
Having just spent a week touring Havana and questioning locals at length about this strange interregnum between the slow fade of Fidel’s communist project and whatever is to come, it’s clear Cubans are both ready for change and apprehensive about its course and velocity. They know in the wake of Barack Obama’s startling announcement about normalizing relations that the eyes of the hemisphere are on their island.
This will not be a second revolution. It’s a mistake to see Cubans as a bitterly oppressed people yearning to be free. Few speak fondly of the Castros — indeed they barely ever speak of them at all —but they also don’t speak dreamily of Starbucks and McDonald’s.
It’s no easy task to get into the heads of Cubans, and not because the Communist apparatus has dulled them into the kind of suspicion and surrender that characterized the former Soviet states. There may be little zeal in this 57th year of the revolution, but there is also almost no measurable appetite for the overt trappings of capitalism.
Indeed, the absence of entrepreneurial instincts can be quite confounding. I ask the hotel concierge where I can rent a bike and he flatly says, “There are no bikes for rent.”
Restaurant servers are personable but they never try to pad their tip by upselling menu items or offering a second glass of wine. I ask my guide Alfonso how they are paid. He tells me the restaurant we’re in is owned by the government and staff draw a salary. Don’t different restaurants compete for the better servers? Alfonso shrugs his shoulders and asks what the point would be.
Alfonso is a 54-year-old lawyer and son of a diplomat. He is well-travelled and lived for a time in Germany. His wife is a psychiatrist. We spend days in conversation trying to figure out relative comparisons about earnings and the cost of living, but Cuba’s two different currencies are a befuddling thing. On the government balance sheet the peso and the convertible peso (CUC) trade one to one. In practice, the conversion rate is 25 to one. Alfonso’s wife earns 600 pesos a month, which works out to 24 CUCs. My friends and I pay Alfonso 70 CUCs a day for driving and guiding us. He no longer practices as a lawyer.
Alfonso worries about the coming years and his apprehension is echoed by almost everyone I speak with. The greatest fear is that the country’s free education and health care will be compromised. “I can have a heart attack,” says Alfonso, “and if I stay in the hospital for a week I pay nothing.” I point out the same would be true in Canada, and he nods. “Maybe we can learn some things from you.”
You would expect a certain collective indolence to prevail in a country so lacking in capitalist impulse, but the streets of Havana bustle with stylishly dressed people who walk with purpose to whatever jobs they may have. They are young, slim and welcoming. It’s easy to mistake their lingering gaze as a come on.
Traffic is light at all times of day and by my eye a third of the cars in the capital are vintage Detroit. They’re charming but they also emit a choking exhaust that hangs in the air. The streets are largely free of the tourist shakedown you encounter in most impoverished cities. They are also very safe. I walk alone through a half dozen boroughs by night and day without ever feeling I have trod into dodgy territory. I ask Alfonso where the rich people live and he tells me there aren’t any.
To the casual observer there is no evidence of racism or sexism. Gays don’t have it easy, but the ones I speak with tell me in recent years the population has evolved toward a live-and-let-live attitude.
The streets are in excellent condition. The city itself is literally crumbling. As I race in a 1955 Chevy along The Malecon, vacant lots interrupt the adjoined façades like teeth knocked out of a hockey player’s mouth. In those buildings that still stand, weather-beaten wooden buttresses prop up the floors and lintels as a kind of bookmark for restoration that may or may never come.
There’s an upside to all this. The failure to emulate the rest of the world in constantly demolishing and replacing buildings has left Havana’s historic character intact like some sort of colonial Never Never Land. In the old city you walk through block after block of antique three- storey buildings on streets narrow enough that people talk across them through windows with worn wooden shutters. Inside many you find quadrangles open to the sun; perfect for a languid lunch or lemonade. On Paseo di Marti’s tree-lined pedestrian promenade you pass hotels, clubs, theatres and former mansions in what feels like a movie set left to the elements to decay.
UNESCO has restored a fraction of these buildings but it’s going to take private money and plenty of it to return Ha- vana to its former splendour. Which, of course, is the source of the country’s collective angst about the road ahead.
They worry that American money will big foot the process and bring a curtain wall of towers to the Bay of Havana. They are wary of expatriate Cubans who, after so many years abroad, may have alien ideas of what the country craves. They’re ready to be rid of the most stultifying effects of the Castro years but fretful about what ineffable aspects of their culture and society may also be in play.
This is Cuba’s time and it’s clear a bright and exiting future lies ahead. Its people are highly educated, sophisticated and sure of who they are. What they aren’t sure about is who they will be.
On my recent trip to Cuba, I asked someone where I could rent a bike. ‘There are no bikes for rent,’ was the blunt reply