Ed Vulliamy
Sunday January 20, 2008
The Observer
“As humbling as he was humble, Paya’s narrative, beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, recalled meetings with Polish reformer Lech Walesa in early 1981.”
In Havana last week the trucks were busy replacing vintage American and Soviet fridges with new free models from China. Fidel Castro may have left centre stage but the revolution stutters on and as they head to the polls today Cubans are left wondering if it has run out of spiritual energy
The tangerine sunlight, deepening as dusk approaches, strokes the peeling stucco of Havana’s colonial ruins, every doorway teeming with life, the streets pounding with libidinous music.
But what everyone knows – every believer in the revolution which is proclaimed from the murals and every chica strutting her stuff; every old man slapping dominoes on to a fluorescent-lit table and every woman hauling her load – is that the sun is setting on more than just another day. And that as Cuba prepares for yet another cosmetic election today, and next year’s 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s proclamation of revolutionary victory (over which the stubbornly ailing jefe, or chief, no doubt plans to preside if he can last the final stretch), the fortress island is on the brink of fin-de-something. They also know that much more is crumbling – and in places being restored – than the magnificent cracking façades, and that change blows on the sea breeze across the Malecón promenade, where boys dare each other to dive and couples entwine.
The nature of that change is as mercurial as Cuba itself: where strident communist doctrine and tropical hedonism cohabit, where the superficial impression of quick-hit, sensual exotica (beloved by the ubiquitous tourists) belies canny preparations for Castro’s death, and hides those yearning for transformation out of the country’s hardships.
The more President George Bush denounces Cuba, as he did last month, calling it a ‘tropical gulag’, the more the communists heave a breath of life, for nothing unites Cubans more behind Castro and his brother Raúl – ‘temporarily’ at the helm – than a sense of righteous isolation from, and defiance of, the bully across the straits after half a century of punitive embargo.
Hoardings proclaim that ‘To threats and intimidation, Cuba responds: Más Revolución!’ – More Revolution’. But after 50 years revolution has become a vernacular business, and last week the streets of Havana were crammed with trucks loading and unloading fridges, the government having decided it was intolerable for people to have to put up with vintage American, and latterly Soviet, refrigerators and to replace them free with new Chinese ones – as though fridges told the story of patronage in Cuba over three generations.
But as one sage close to the government said, ‘Marx never came to the Caribbean’, and just as Soviet apartment blocks along the white sands seem incongruous – Leningrad del Mar – so does the notion of a narrowly ‘Chinese model’. There is a consensus among both the government and its opponents that whatever happens next should be in some way Cuban, and there is no assumption that Starbucks and McDonald’s are headed for Parque Central.
Raúl Sarmientos pours a glass of rum on his terrace and, with the confidence of the raconteur he once was on Cuban television, says that ‘the young generation is even more dedicated to the revolution than we were’. Perhaps he knows this is rubbish, perhaps he does not. Sarmientos is a co-ordinator for the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) in the Vevado quarter – the political neighbourhood watch. Yet even this loyal son of the revolution admits that ‘there have been terrible mistakes’ and that ‘in five years things will be very different. Although the protection of the Soviet Union was essential for survival, it was a terrible economic model’. Then he produces his photograph album featuring himself with Che Guevara’s widow, Aleida March, and his own wife with Castro. Does he miss all that? The TV raconteur of cliché looks suddenly human. ‘Yes. Of course.’
Sarmientos fails to convince, but not so Wilfredo Morales Lezca, a candidate for the provincial assembly in today’s elections – in which no one is opposed but candidates need enough votes to qualify for a seat. It sounds like a production line for political hacks, but talking to Lezca in his tiny bedroom stacked with physics books and decorated with pictures of Fidel and John Lennon takes you by surprise.
With disarming honesty and breadth of knowledge, 27-year-old Lezca, a mathematics teacher who shares this humble flat with his 93-year-old grandmother and other family members, says: ‘You may be surprised to learn that the communist movement in Cuba is quite young, although it’s hard to convince the generation that watches Friends on television and has this fantasy that capitalism means money and that kind of lifestyle for everyone.
‘They compare what they have here not with our neighbours but with the developed world, and remember only the hard years here after the Soviet Union collapsed. They have no idea of the sacrifices and hard work which have gone into what they have, like a good education and health service, despite the embargo. Yes, we have some problems with drugs and crime, but they’re minuscule compared to our neighbours, never mind the United States.’
But as Lezca points out, ‘a single country in the modern international market is like an ant in a herd of elephants’, and so co-operation with China is inevitable. The shift in Latin America from rule by military juntas to widespread social democracy is also pivotal to Cuba’s future, as illustrated by Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s visit last week. ‘We can now integrate Cuba into the new Latin America,’ says Lezca, ‘trading our strengths for those of others, as friends and neighbours.’
But second-guessing the survival strategy of Cuban communism in a capitalist world is not easy. The veteran Cuban journalist Angel Tomás González believes the key to change is the army, and its commander, the ‘temporary’ leader, Raúl Castro.
‘Fidel’s problem,’ says González, ‘is that he genuinely dislikes money. He was educated by Jesuits and remains an atheist Jesuit, wearing fatigues instead of the frock. That’s why there was no problem between him and Pope John Paul.’ The army, on the other hand, is ‘reformist, and it has no problem with money. For a while the army has run its own commercial enterprises with some success.’ Raúl Castro, he says, is surrounded by two groups: ‘the generals, and think-tanks of advisers who are mainly young. In some ways, the change everyone is waiting for has already happened.’
But to presume that Cuba changed is Cuba reformed is an illusion.
Apart from the loud-mouthed Cuban-American right in Florida – whose threat of return and a CIA-fuelled menace of civil war has faded over time – there exists a less bellicose opposition within Cuba. And seeking it out over the years is like peeling an onion, as it passes from generation to generation.
When I visited Cuba five years ago, like everyone else I made for the doyen of opposition, Elizardo Sánchez, surrounded by photographs of him with former US President Jimmy Carter. But Sánchez conceded he was no longer the driving force and directed us to the home of an electrician called Oswaldo Paya in the dilapidated colonial barrio of Cerro. As humbling as he was humble, Paya’s narrative, beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, recalled meetings with Polish reformer Lech Walesa in early 1981.
Despite persistent harassment, he was organising a petition calling for the upholding of specific democratic clauses in the Cuban constitution. It was called ‘Proyecto Varela’, after a Cuban nationalist democrat. Next thing I knew, Carter was beating a path to Paya’s door.
Paya is still in Cerro, his greeting warm but his manner haunted, fastening the door to talk lest our conversation be interrupted by the political police. Castro’s Keystone KGB has made life hell since we last met. The signatures for democracy were duly delivered and on Paya’s wall is a photograph of the moment. He points out his companions: ‘Antonio Díaz, sentenced to 20 years. And Regis Iglesias, 18 years in prison.’
Many were arrested soon after, and others during, the ‘Black Spring’ of 2003, which no one noticed beyond Cuba because the political police rounded up its quarry on the day the invasion of Iraq began. ‘Hundreds remain jailed,’ says Paya. ‘We have no idea how many.’
There will now be, says Paya, a new movement, the Cuban Forum, for ‘the legal institutionalisation of human and civil rights. We don’t advocate a loss of those values which grant free public health or education, and we don’t want privatisation so that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. We simply say that to force people to choose between social justice and civil and human rights is a false fork in the road. This is not intellectual activity, this is the fruit of people who have suffered repression every day of their lives.’
Just as Sánchez led us to Paya, Paya’s allies now recognise yet another, younger force. Generation Y is an internet site run by Yoani Sánchez, 32. She runs the site from a Yugoslav-designed tower block, having previously worked for a digital magazine called Conenso, whose tactic was to be respectful of the government it assailed.
‘We always called him Mr Fidel Castro, she says, ‘but never El Comandante or the bloody regime.’ She founded Generation Y ‘as a means of free personal expression – an exorcism of fear, enabling people to say online what they are forbidden to say on the streets about their lives and experiences under this government.
‘We’re not encouraging people to be dazzled by savage consumer capitalism like they were in eastern Europe,’ she says. ‘It’s the polemic of the government which dazzles people with capitalism. Here, if you see someone wearing an American flag, they’re probably Cuban. If they wear Che Guevara, they’re probably a tourist.’
The problem with her project is that most Cubans have no access to the internet and, though the opposition onion may peel youthwards from generation to generation, it emerges that among her inspirations is a name I know well, and that of no sapling in Cuban history.
Nearly 15 years ago, I encountered the remarkable Eloy Gutiérrez-Menoyo in Miami. He had been a commander on the revolution’s Escambray Front but, appalled by what he saw as its betrayal to the Soviet Union, mounted his own ‘revolution against the revolution’, for which he was jailed for 22 years. He passed seven of those years in solitary confinement playing chess against himself in his head and composing poetry, later set to music by Cuba’s great singer, Albita Rodríguez.
After he was released, Gutiérrez-Menoyo defected to Florida, where he set up Cambio Cubano to campaign for peaceful change in Cuba, lobby against the US embargo and call for dialogue with Havana. For this, his offices were firebombed by Cuban-Americans. He joked: ‘If the communists jail me and the right wing want to kill me, I must be doing something right!’ He promised in 1998 that our next meeting would be in Havana. ‘Impossible,’ I replied.
After winding through Havana’s elegant Miramar suburb, the concrete jungle of Soviet Lego bricks begins, but it is not hard to navigate a way to Gutiérrez-Menoyo’s apartment because every child whipping a top knows his name and speaks it with awe.
‘So you were wrong!’ jokes Gutiérrez-Menoyo, ‘but not entirely – in theory I don’t exist in Cuba. I have no identity card and no right to a home. But they couldn’t stop me coming back, where Cambio Cubano belongs. I am engaged in activismo,’ he says, ‘for democracy, free unions and a free press.’
Despite his age, Gutiérrez-Menoyo tours the country. ‘People say to me: “Eloy, when is the change coming?” But I have to be careful, because although the authorities don’t arrest me yet, they do molest anyone who talks to me and passes on our ideas and literature.’
Gutiérrez-Menoyo is so insistent on the independence of the Cuban opposition that he criticises other dissidents for being too close to the US. ‘I fought one revolution which was betrayed to the Soviets and I don’t want another for the sake of the US. In Miami I fought the right wing against the embargo on Cuba, now I am fighting the embargo by the Cuban government against the Cuban people.’
One wonders why the Cuban government bothers to persecute Paya’s and Gutiérrez-Menoyo’s movements and why it continues with this pale, but resonant, imitation of communism beneath the palms. Most Cubans pay the revolution little heed, but respect Castro in their carefree, patriotic way.
The restless desire for change is everywhere. At the Estadio Changa Mederos, Raúl and his mates are watching Havana’s second baseball team, the Metropolitanos, being thrashed by the provincial side Camagüey.
Every player, says Raúl, wants to play for the New York Yankees. ‘Wouldn’t we all want to go to New York?’ he shrugs, as Camagüey whack another jonron (home run) past third base and the white line in the dust.
The Rubén Alvarez school, with its focused pupils in smart red scarves, remains the envy of any parent of children in a capitalist country. But in the studious tranquillity of the quadrangle at Havana University, students from the computer science faculty bemoan the fact that if they stay in Cuba they will, like doctors and engineers, be paid a fraction of the salary earned by street-cleaners.
Román has found a wife-to-be in Birmingham in the UK, and says: ‘When people leave, it is used as something political by the government and by its enemies – betraying the revolution or fleeing communism. But it has nothing to do with politics, it has only to do with economics.’
The result is that the slow, calculated pace of change may now have to hasten, as Fidel Castro ails.
In her flat above the Havana skyline, Julita Núñez Pacheco stares at a picture of her husband, Adolfo, staring back from a button reading ‘prisoner of conscience’, as Amnesty International declared him and 74 others who were arrested suddenly over three days during the Black Spring.
‘In Cuba,’ she says, ‘you see open people, open faces, doors and windows. But inside every Cuban is their own policeman, only the policeman is getting weaker.’
Cuba Watch
Discovered by Columbus in 1492, the island was ruled by Spain until it gained independence following the Spanish-American war of 1898.
It has 11 million people and a land area of 110,922 sq km.
The US has imposed a trade embargo on the country since 1961.
Annual subsidies from the Soviet Union of up to $5bn helped develop strong health and education systems but ended with the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991.
In 1994, the US promised to take in 20,000 Cubans a year in exchange for Cuba stopping the flow of refugees.
The lease for the US’s Guantanamo Bay base can only be terminated by mutual agreement or if the US decides to abandon it.
The official literacy rate is 99.8 per cent.
The Cuban American community in Florida numbers one million. In 2006 alone, the US Coast Guard intercepted 2,810 Cubans attempting to reach America.
The official unemployment rate is 1.9 per cent.
The average monthly salary is $10-$15 but accommodation, healthcare and education are free.
Luc Torres