Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994 TAG: 9402200122
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WAYNE COUNTRYMAN and DAN WARD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's exotic and still beautiful, in many ways. We arrived in the dark of night, hoping reports of suffering were exaggerations. But Havana, Cuba's capital, quickly gnawed at our consciences.
Our government doesn't want anyone but scholars and journalists to go there. Don't give aid and comfort to the enemy, it says.
And if you're a journalist, Cuba's government probably doesn't want you there, either. While it craves U.S. dollars, it fears uncensored words.
The two of us toil at newspapers. For U.S. government purposes, we're journalists.
For Cuban purposes, we were just unassuming backpack-toting .
We saw ourselves as a couple of curious folks traveling too cheaply to give much aid and comfort to anyone, too discreetly to get arrested or thrown on the next plane home.
Why go there? friends and loved ones sensibly asked. People risk their lives in inner tubes, floating for days among sharks under a killing sun, to escape.
Exactly, we said. How often do you get to see a country - particularly a communist one in your own hemisphere - have to face up to catastrophic failure and the need to reinvent itself? One in which U.S. troops very well might be sent someday soon?
And at least the December sun there would be warmer than in Roanoke or Charlotte, where we live.
Havana has plenty of sun, but it's run out of just about everything else.
The Soviet bloc's collapse has deprived President Fidel Castro of his main sugar daddy and sugar customer. That loss, combined with the 33-year U.S. trade embargo, has left Cuba with only a fraction of the oil it needs.
Without oil, crops don't get harvested, trucks can't deliver goods, people can't get to work. Electrical blackouts shut down workplaces. To save hard currency for buying oil on the world market, Cuba sacrifices essential goods and services.
We saw evidence of this everywhere in Havana. People line up to buy a single item. When that item sells out, the shelves are bare again. Residents stood in lines a half-block long, clutching ration books, to buy pizzas that looked like pita bread smeared with vegetable dip. We could only imagine what happens when shoes or milk are in stock.
Building after building in Havana is unpainted and crumbling. Demolition and construction projects are difficult to tell apart, looking long abandoned. Exposed metalwork shows rust. People loiter at all hours, either without work or skipping it.
Bicycles far outnumber cars, most of which officially or unofficially are taxis. Probably half of the cars are American models built before Castro's 1959 coup and the 1961 trade embargo. Wire, rope and hope hold them together.
We hired a driver to take us 60 miles to Artemisa to visit relatives of a Miami friend. The first few miles in the green 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air stirred memories of cruising with an older brother and his buddies 30 years ago. The rest of the trip left us gasping for air as exhaust filled the interior.
The torn seats flopped at every bump. Nothing seemed to work except the engine, horn and oil-pressure gauge, which flashed continually. Roly, the driver, wasn't concerned. He said the car was much more dependable than Cuba's alternative, the newer Soviet Lada.
The family we visited scrounged together a midafternoon meal of pork (including snout), beans, rice and, somehow, two huge lobster tails.
Dinner was cooked on a small kerosene stove. The electricity had been out since 11 p.m. Nothing unusual about that, our hosts said, not knowing when it might return. When we asked one member, who said he worked on computers, why he was home on a Wednesday afternoon, he just pointed at the dim room's unlit light.
As the insistent family stood and watched, we nibbled the best meal of our week, making sure to leave plenty of leftovers; the food would provide them who knows how many extravagant meals.
The government can't provide for its people anymore, so a black market in almost everything thrives. After returning from Artemisa, our driver asked us to pay him inside the car, for fear nearby soldiers would see the illegal transaction. From the seat of their tall truck, two men in uniform watched $70 trade hands and did nothing but smile. Business as usual, in today's Cuba.
The day before, our driver's ring of friends had slyly shown us the desperation their families face and how they cope. The '55 Chevy, horn blaring in rush-hour traffic, carried us to a "house party" at the inner-city home of one of the gang. His mother gaily welcomed us, introducing us to her mother on a tour of their crowded home. The occupants included chickens and a goat.
Conversation and rum flowed freely. Several times we were asked for contributions to buy more bottles. Revelers of all ages and races danced for hours in the living room to worn tapes of American music from our youth - James Brown, Archie Bell and The Drells, "Volare."
Perhaps at a secret signal, most of the neighbors drifted away, as the host's mother already had. We were led by the four ringleaders to a bedroom. There they solemnly announced that we were to spend the night with the host's sister and her friend.
We didn't wait to hear the price, or even that there was one. We rushed out to the street and walked all the way back to our hotel, realizing that the party had been a financial scheme as carefully planned as a leveraged buyout. The rum probably provided some profit.
The next day the enterprising quartet tried to sell us boxes of cigars, completing the Havana business trifecta: black-market rum, cigars and sex - all cheap, all available on the streets, with supply far exceeding demand.
Castro legalized possession of dollars in July, essentially rendering Cuba's peso worthless and making his nation a slave to the uncooperative U.S. economy. Professionals who are paid 200 pesos - officially the equivalent of $200 - a month skip work to hawk cigars or rum to tourists.
On the black market, those 200 pesos are worth only a few dollars.
The sidewalk salesmanship comes in a dizzying variety of approaches. If you look foreign, everyone's your friend.
When one of us wandered from the hotel at midnight with his camera, he was approached by a young Jamaican immigrant with a sad tale. Before his recent conversion to Christianity, the young man confessed, he'd been a thief. One night, police caught him in the act and shot him in both legs even though he didn't resist arrest, he insisted.
"I don't steal anymore," he said. Studying the Bible keeps him busy, he was saying, when a truck backfired. He dived to the ground, looked around quickly, then shakily stood to recite Christian lessons.
When we parted after 45 minutes, his last words were: "Do you need a woman for the night?" Asked if that was right for a Christian, he shrugged.
The government's thirst for hard currency has created a form of apartheid. The best food and products go to restaurants and stores that accept only dollars. Guards stop most Cubans at the doors, making way for foreigners. At one restaurant, we saw two sets of menus - identical entrees, but with higher prices for Cubans.
One noonday, an elderly-looking man we later found out was only 51 stopped us on the street. Would we like to lunch at a "private restaurant?" he asked. He led us to the home of an electronics technician and a nurse. The couple cooked us scrambled eggs, black beans and rice, with pork rinds for hors d'oeuvres.
Meanwhile, the man who'd set up the meal (for food and a cut of the profits) discoursed on politics. He spoke of prison, of struggling to support his family, of struggling to organize resistance to a government that controlled all media. His dream - to live in the United States. With sadness and dread he spoke of his greatest desire - to get his 14-year-old granddaughter out of the country.
"There is nothing in Cuba for the girls except prostitution," he said bitterly.
For us - one of whom shuns Roanoke's Salem Avenue at night to avoid street-corner soliciting, the other a father with his own 14-year-old daughter to protect - this hit hard. Having to fend off advances whenever on the street at night depressed and wearied us.
When we arrived at the "private restaurant" the next afternoon we met a friend of the wife, another nurse. The worried-looking woman could only nod as we were told that her husband had set out for Florida on an inner tube three days earlier.
It's estimated that only half of those escaping by sea for Mexico or Florida survive. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, 3,656 Cubans reached Florida this way in 1993, a 43 percent increase from the year before. Almost all are allowed to stay.
Our black-market restaurant's promoter predicted that a spontaneous action such as a food riot or demonstration would provoke a military response and, ultimately, a revolution. He hoped the United States would then step in against Castro.
"We are sitting on TNT and everybody is holding a match," he said.
Even most Cubans with nothing to sell us said they see the United States as a potential friend, if not savior, despite the embargo. In the Museum of the Revolution, a virtual shrine to the current regime, a guide asked one of us to marry her and take her with us. She seemed half-serious. Other women seemed fully serious about it.
People frequently asked us what we thought of their country. [ital] gusta la gente" (We like the people), we'd respond. This usually delighted them, and inspired open expressions of contempt for the government.
Despite their frustrations and hardships, we saw no signs of crime. We felt safer than we would in a U.S. city of 2 million, even away from the military-patrolled tourist areas.
Cuba is so near the United States that during the 1940s and '50s it was a popular destination for day-trippers from Miami and Key West. For some, gangster-run casinos were the attraction; others sought more carnal pleasures. Before his 1959 coup, Castro called Havana "America's Brothel" and vowed to restore decency.
With U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista overthrown and the Soviet Union propping up the economy, Castro carried out his reforms, nearly eliminating tourism in the process.
A few resorts have been restored with foreign help, and many Canadians, Germans, Spaniards and Latin Americans now visit. Still, it's difficult to imagine successfully basing an economic rebuilding on tourism under the current political conditions. Yet this is what Castro said in a speech we read in the government newspaper as we (eagerly) flew back to freedom.
"We are walking over broken glass and at times we don't know where to put our feet," Castro admitted to the National Assembly during debate on the economy at year's end. He also said, "I have a strong conviction in socialism and I will never renounce that," The Associated Press reported.
Who will lead in the future - loyal Communists, or those who learned another path hustling in the black market?
We found more questions than answers in Havana. Every moment felt significant and memorable. Cuba is on the verge of a big change, and everyone there knows it. They just don't know what that change will be.
Countryman is a Roanoke Times & World-News copy editor. Dan Ward is a news editor for the Charlotte Observer.
by CNB