It’s New Year and in the Casa de la Trova in Havana the music is interrupted by a broadcast from Fidel Castro to the liberated people of Cuba. All eyes are fixed on a small television screen in the corner as a Spanish voice drones over images of the apparent affluence 50 years of revolution have brought: an impressive health system, free education for all, sugar and tobacco exports�
The propaganda reel is met by silence. Not a word is breathed about the country’s economic collapse. And no one dares ask the question on everyone’s lips: Where is Castro? Is he still alive?
Then the guitars are strummed again, the band belts out Guantanamera and the salsa resumes with renewed vigour in the music house where the locals spend much of their time forgetting the hardships of daily Cuban life.
At first glance Havana is everything the iconic picture postcards promise. Vintage cars cruise past colonial Spanish facades, men smoke cigars and play dominoes at makeshift tables in the gaping doorways of cobbled streets, and women lean curiously over wrought-iron balconies amid fluttering clotheslines.
It’s only when you’ve exhausted your first two disposable cameras and the novelty of this island frozen in time starts to fade that you start noticing the cracks - the peeling paint, the broken windows, the leaky pipes, the missing handles on the old cars that have been lovingly maintained through generations because in this country it is impossible to buy new ones.
Armed guards drew the shutters onboard
Only when you sit down to another bland meal do you realise that the chefs suffer not so much from a lack of imagination as a lack of variety. Supermarket shelves are empty: the basics such as cooking oil and rice are dished out as part of state rations, but something as simple as peanut butter - or a piece of good cheese or a beef steak - is as scarce as hen’s teeth.
Hens, on the other hand, are plentiful - chicken is something of a staple in Cuba, commonly served with fried plantain instead of chips. It took me weeks to pin down the distinctive smell that clings to the dust and heat of Havana’s streets: fried chicken and over-ripe bananas mixed with the damp whiff of sewage.
And only when I lost my passport and was immediately dragged by the owner of my casa particular (a highly regulated B%26B) to the nearest police station did I pick up the more subtle smell of fear that lurked deeper below the surface. I knew foreigners were compelled to show their tourist cards the moment they checked in to stay overnight anywhere, and I had seen the casa owners meticulously record the passport numbers.
But what I eventually understood from my host’s anxious pleading that night was that the police frequently conducted midnight raids and that any casa particular caught breaking the rules - such as renting out too many beds or harbouring guests without legal tourist cards - risked losing their very livelihood.
‘Tourists only’
As I continued my travels, the hateful paraphernalia of the police state Castro had created to keep the United States out and his people in became increasingly apparent. During a short ferry trip across to Isla de la Juventud, armed guards drew the shutters onboard. I later learned that a group of Cubans had once tried, unsuccessfully, to hijack the ferry and divert it to nearby Miami.
Making my way further west to the diving mecca of Maria la Gorda, I was confronted by a beautiful but ghostly resort: because of the diving boats, no Cubans are allowed here. Suddenly it also became clear why it’s impossible find a good piece of fish on an island surrounded by teeming waters.
I tried to quiz the few young Cubans I met who spoke a bit of broken English about how it felt not to be able to leave their country. Most of them had never even experienced a winter. They could not imagine cold weather, just as they could not imagine a time when Castro was not their Comandante.
Despite the fact that they were inquisitive and obviously well educated about the rest of the world, they were reluctant to be engaged. It was partly a fear of eavesdropping policemen in a country where criticising the government, or even mixing too closely with tourists, is punishable by prison and partly patriotism sharpened daily by the pro-revolution and anti-American propaganda planted everywhere.
In Santiago de Cuba I drank my hundredth rum cocktail at a “tourists only” caf� marked by a sign that might as well have read “slegs blankes”; I visited a few museums with laughably skewed versions of history glorifying Che Guevara’s revolution; and I exhausted my convertibles (roughly equal to the dollar and the only currency foreigners are allowed to carry) on tourist rates 20 times that of local peso fares.
The stifling rules and relentless propaganda were as annoying as the constant flies buzzing around my mojitos and, by the time I reached Baracoa, a mystical seaside village perched on the eastern tip of Cuba, I was feeling rather homesick for capitalism and a good glass of wine.
While trundling through the tropical hillside past cocoa trees and tethered pigs, I met an unlikely couple in search of the same “white sandy” beach that our Lonely Planet had promised (most of the beaches around Baracoa are black and pebbly).
She was American and had defied US regulations by travelling to Cuba to visit the man who had captured her heart. He was Cuban and, I believe, less interested in love than in the possibility of escape it offered. The state had paid for his studies as an engineer, but he complained to me that he could have earned double from tourist tips by waiting tables.
He had applied several times to study further abroad, but each time he had been denied. He lives with his extended family, because Cuba has a shortage of accommodation and there is no hope for a place of one’s own. He is familiar with the Internet, but is not allowed a connection at home unless he can prove that he needs it for business purposes. Satellite dishes are also illegal, he moans.
He never said one bad word about Castro, nor mentioned the word “communism” or offered suggestions for a better system. But on that quiet little patch of white beach, the combination of restlessness, curiosity and frustration I had sensed among the intelligent young people I had met in Cuba’s noisy caf�s and casas de la musica finally found a voice.
Ra�l Castro, Fidel’s younger brother who is now set to take over as president, has hinted that he might lift some of the commerce restrictions and even invite political debate. If he does, he will become very popular very fast among Cuba’s young people. If he doesn’t, it seems that it will only be a matter of time before they, too, find a way to leave.
The Cuba I saw still maintained the romanticism of a forgotten era that remains charming despite the dust and the flies and the terrible food, but if you stay there for longer than an instant package holiday, it quickly becomes clear that it can’t last for much longer. - Foreign Service
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