Children of the Revolution
(Originally published in W, The West Weekend Magazine)
Roberto Gonzalez remembers the Revolution in Cuba like it was yesterday. As a bearded, 27-year-old law student from Santiago de Cuba in the country’s East, he hid in the hills of the Sierra Maestra with his wife Maria and their baby daughter for ten months. They camped in shelters dug into the hillside, and learned how to shoot rifles. Without food or water, campesinos, local farm workers sympathetic to their cause, killed pigs and goats for them to eat. They were part of the Third Front that, along with a young Fidel Castro, stormed Santiago on the 31st of December, prompting the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, to flee the country. When the news reached them at daybreak on January 1, 1959, “Everybody ran out into the street, hugging and kissing us,” says Roberto, now 77 and clean-shaven, speaking from the terrace of his up-market, though dilapidated, apartment in the Havana suburb of Vedado.
Within weeks they moved to the capital, where they were given a house vacated by “traitors”, the millionaires and wealthy who fled to Miami, no doubt thinking they’d be back in a matter of months. Five decades later – the Revolution celebrates its 50th anniversary on January 1, 2009 – they’re still there, sharing the house with their son, granddaughter, and sister-in-law, and renting rooms to foreigners to make ends meet.
“We’re poor, but no Cuban goes without food. Everyone has access to medical care. Every child gets an education,” says Roberto, who before retirement was a chief prosecutor for the regime, and who once worked alongside Che Guevara. He still undertakes military duty once a year. “If I had to fight I could be a sniper, I’m still a good shot,” he says, leaning forward in his chair convincingly.
While espousing the achievements of fifty years of socialism, his voice takes on a militant, raspy tone. His wife Maria, 71, rocks back and forth in her chair, inspecting freshly manicured fingers and toes. Their son, Roberto Junior, a lawyer too but currently unemployed, nods along, though shortly drifts off to sleep. The sunset turns the sky pale pink. On the street below people in shorts and spandex tops water verges by hand and walk their dogs, and shout up to each other, in lieu of working buzzers. The calmness of the Havana afternoon, like so much else in Cuba – the old American cars, the pre-teleprompter newsreels, the 80s sitcom reruns they show on TV – seems like a throwback to an earlier age.
Everywhere in Cuba you get a sense the Revolution is on its last legs. From its ailing, ex-Comandante Fidel Castro, taken ill with a mysterious intestinal disease in 2006, whose military fatigues have been replaced by shiny tracksuits and occasional appearances out of his sickbed, to the broken economy and crumbling buildings. Tourists flock to the island like history voyeurs, eager to catch a glimpse of a system in its final gasp. They want to see communist Cuba before Fidel dies, and everything changes. How much will actually change, is anyone’s guess. People have been predicting the end of the regime since its beginning and, fifty years on, so far they’ve all been wrong.
A few hundred metres away, at the end of Calle 23, a multi-lane drag dubbed “La Rampa,” filled with grunting 1950s Oldsmobiles, Chevvys, and shiny new Yutong buses from China, is Havana’s famous Malecon, or seafront boardwalk. Here, night after night, a different type of Cuban gathers. These are children of the Revolution, fourth and fifth generations on. Born during the “Special Period” – a time of harsh privation in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse withdrew US$4 billion of subsidies from the Cuban economy – they have none of the loyalty to the Revolution their elders profess. Young, hip, with bottles of rum and nowhere to go, dressed in their best – the girls in tiny mini skirts and halter tops, the boys in acid-washed jeans and glittery baseball caps – they cram along every space of concrete wall. Mobile phones and iPods are sought-after status symbols. Those who have them flaunt them, headphones planted conspicuously in ears.
Many have access to Miami TV, beamed illegally to Cuba through clandestine satellite dishes, its slick US-produced shows and commercials for new kitchens, Dodge cars and KFC outlets catapulting them into a consumerist world tantalisingly out of reach. The same goes for the more than two million foreign tourists who flood the island each year, flaunting the latest cameras, laptops and designer sunglasses. One joke doing the rounds in Cuba involves a schoolboy asked what he wants to be when he grows up. “A foreigner,” comes the cynical reply.
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After centuries of foreign rule and exploitation – first by Spain, then the US – many Cubans welcomed the young revolutionaries. The Revolution immeasurably improved the material lives of millions of Cubans, eliminating the most abject poverty while destroying the middle and wealthy urban classes, and imposing a general paucity, if not poverty on millions of others. The regime cut prices for gas, electricity and public transport, put price controls on goods sold on the open market, built thousands of new classrooms, sent scores of ‘literacy brigades’ out into the countryside to teach the population to read and write, and introduced free health care. As a result, Cuba today has a longer life expectancy (from 60 in 1959 to almost 80 today), and higher literacy rate (99.8 percent, compared to 96 percent in the US) than most other Latin American countries, comparable to those in the developed world. And they are highly educated: one if every 15 Cubans is a university graduate.
At first Castro claimed he wasn’t a communist, but as his regime turned increasingly socialist and authoritarian – in 1960 he defaulted on his promise to hold elections within a year – thousands of rich and middle class Cubans fled the island (the houses they left behind were seized and divvied up between loyal fidelistas). As the Cold War cranked up, the US looked on in horror at the communist revolution gathering steam 150 km south of its shores. When Castro nationalized all US properties on the island in 1960, the US responded by slapping an embargo on Cuba that remains in place today, and cut off diplomatic relations in January 1961. Ironically, the embargo may have turned out to work in Castro’s favor, giving him a scapegoat for the mismanaged economy’s failures, and rallying nationalist support against an external, ‘imperialist’ foe: the US.
Likewise, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where CIA-backed Cuban anti-Castro forces unsuccessfully tried to invade Cuba, only consolidated Castro’s regime and reinforced anti-American sentiment on the Caribbean island of 11 million. It also drove Cuba further into the arms of the Soviet Union, who were more than happy to have a communist ally right under North American noses. In 1961 Cuba officially became a Marxist-Leninist State, and brought the world nearly to the brink of nuclear war when the Soviets installed missile bases on the island, in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Cuba increasingly adopted Soviet methods of planning and production. The streets filled with Ladas, Russian was taught in schools, and Cuba’s famous white-sand beaches were filled with vacationing Russians. Due to massive Soviet subsidies, the 70s and 80s were a time of relative prosperity. Some of Cuba’s greatest achievements, notably in health and education, were made during this time. Birth rates and infant mortality fell, high immunization rates led to the eradication of preventable contagious diseases such as malaria and diptheria, and life expectancy reached over 77 years, the highest in Latin America and on par with the US. Everyone received free medical care.
Meanwhile, the regime was becoming increasingly intolerant of opposition. There were periodic crackdowns on dissidents, homosexuals and other ‘undesirables’. A network of spies, reporting to neighbourhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, created an atmosphere of fear, secrecy and paranoia. Anyone seen to openly criticize the regime was liable to be jailed, leading people to refer to Castro not by name but by gesture: a thumb and forefinger over the chin, simulating a beard.
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Carlos opens a tattered wedding album, its falling-out pages containing black and white photos from the 1980s. A younger version of himself holds onto his pretty mulatta bride in a flowing dress, a floppy white hat over one eye. He points at guests in one of the photos, reveling around the happy couple. “That was 28 years ago,” he says. “Everybody in this photo is now either dead or over there.” Over there is a reference to the United States.
More than two million Cubans have fled to the US since 1959, most of them to Miami. The biggest exodus happened in 1980, when, responding to rising discontent, Castro allowed free emigration from the port of Mariel, west of Havana, releasing a flood of 125,000 emigrants, known as Marielitos. Along with those who fled, Castro expelled dissidents, criminals, homosexuals and mental patients. Then US President Jimmy Carter, had no choice but to accept them.
Carlos didn’t leave, he says, because at that time he still believed in the system. “Things were going well economically,” says the former high-school teacher. “But it was also at that time that the state was cracking down hard on dissidents.” One day he saw a couple who it was known were planning to leave, being chased by neighbours along the Malecon. When caught, they were beaten till they were bloody. After that he got depressed, he says. “I realized that the rhetoric of the revolution was a lie.” But he liked his job, and his life was here, so he stayed. Like many Cubans, he has no desire to live in a capitalist society, he just wants this system to function better. “It was a Utopia,” he says. “But Utopias don’t work. Not here, and not in any country in the world.”
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With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USSR withdrew billions in annual subsidies, and the economy contracted by 35 percent overnight. The island sank into its darkest days, known as the “Special Period.”
Sylvia, a pretty medical student from Santa Clara, was a teenager at the time. She owned one pair of canvas sneakers that she wore every day. She made her clothes from re-sewn scraps. “People were eating rats and cats and whatever they could find on the roads,” she says, “frying eggs in water instead of oil, and making condoms out of plastic wrap and elastic bands. Can you imagine?” she says. There were electricity blackouts for up to 18 hours a day, buses and taxis gave way to horse-drawn carts, and harvests rotted in the fields for want of distribution. Despite even these hardships, the Revolution survived, largely due to the well-honed Cuban skill of ‘resolving’ – that is, the ‘beg, borrow, steal’ method of survival. Also, a propaganda-honed philosophy of luchando, fighting – against capitalists, external foes, hunger – helped steel the Cubans in their darkest hour. “We learned to grow very thick skins,” says Sylvia.
The privations of the “Special Period,” forced the government to reform key sectors in the economy, and open its doors to the outside world in the form of limited foreign investment, and tourism. People started renting out rooms in their houses, known as casa particulares, and setting up restaurants in their front rooms, called paladares. There was unprecedented contact between Cubans – long sheltered from the outside world via rigorous censorship and travel bans – and foreigners. During this time, Castro eased relations with practising Catholics, previously banned from the Communist Party. Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in January 1998, and Castro declared Christmas a public holiday again, three decades after it was cancelled.
While alleviating financial woes, the moves led to the re-emergence of a class system in Cuba, and brought back an old foe of the Revolution: prostitution. Before 1959, Cuba had been known as centre for vice and excess, and Castro had done much to ‘rehabilitate’ former prostitutes, sending them to work camps and schools in the countryside. Now, many young Cubans were turning to jineterismo – a particularly Cuban form that literally means “jockeying” and covers a broad spectrum from petty hustling to prostitution – a phenomena that continues today. Ageing Europeans with beautiful young Cubans on each arm are a common sight, and marriage proposals – Cuban to foreigner – come thick and fast. “Some of my friends are what you’d call jineteros,” says Jorge, a 27-year-old from Trininad de Cuba, south of Havana. “Tourists come here looking for a good time, a good-looking Cubano to dance with, whatever. For many of these guys it’s the only way they can make any money, whether it’s to support their families or to see the world.”
Tourism also opened up a double economy, as first US dollars, then CUCs, Cuban Pesos convertible into hard currency, were introduced. Those with access to CUCs, worth twenty times that of normal pesos, called moneda nacional, live far better than those earning the latter. Except for the most basic necessities, most goods are sold in CUCs. The average Cuban earns the equivalent of about $17 CUC a month (about US$20), the price of a few mojitos in one of Havana’s fancy bars. For that reason, many doctors, engineers and scientists choose to drive taxis or work in hotels, where they earn in CUCs, rather than practice their professions.
Estella, a retired university professor, receives a pension of $240 Cuban pesos a month, which is about $10 CUC ($15 US dollars), and takes in foreign Spanish students to make some extra cash, which earns her another $40 CUC. Every morning she goes out into the street, looking for food to buy on the black market. Like all Cubans, she receives monthly supplies from the libretto – a rations book that provides 1 kilo of potatoes, 8 eggs, a chicken thigh, rice, one packet of spaghetti, three packets of cigarettes and matches, milk, a little oil, beans, sugar and flour. “It’s enough for a week, not a month,” she says.
She buys vegetables in moneda nacional from the market, though often there’s not much in stock. After this year’s wave of hurricanes, there were no tomatoes or onions, or much of anything else, for three months. Extras – cheese, meat, fish, butter – must be bought on the black market, or in dollar shops where the price in CUC is super-inflated. “I never know what I’m going to cook for dinner,” she says. “It depends on what I find. You have to invent recipes.”
A few streets away, Tonio is an example of Cuba’s New Rich. The 37-year-old former chef has a business working with foreign tourists, finding them rooms, Spanish and dance classes, and taking a percentage of each. In this way, he can earn about $350 CUC a month, enough to buy nice clothes, eat well, and pay the regular bribes Communist Party officials require to allow him to keep his business going. He also finds time to spend his afternoons by the hotel pool at the Havana Libre – the nationalized Havana Hilton, pool entry: $5 CUC – working on his tan with the holidaying tourists.
Tonio’s dad ran a clandestine printing press in the 1950s that produced pro-revolutionary propaganda, and was rewarded for his loyalty with the apartment where Tonio was born and continues to live. It’s been partitioned to lodge foreigners, along with a space for his ex-wife. Housing shortages are so common in Cuba divorced couples often continue living together. Some families build barbacoas, literally barbeque plates, platforms erected between floors with high ceilings to create an extra room.
Tonio’s seven-year-old son, Toniocito (“Little Tonio”), likes to watch cartoons and play on his dad’s computer, bought several years ago on the black market. In recognition of the changing social status of many Cubans, the government this year allowed the sale and private ownership of computers and cell phones, pushing the black market price down, but not eliminating it. Officially selling for about $1000 CUC (US$1100), only wealthy Cubans can afford to buy them.
All Tonio wants to do is travel – he’s never been on a plane. He’s waiting for a visa to be approved so he can visit his girlfriend in Spain, but isn’t hopeful he’ll receive it. He says no one believes in the Revolution anymore, despite what they say officially, and despite the faithful thousands who turn out for public rallies. Nor is he hopeful of change under Raul Castro, the brother to whom Fidel handed power, officially, in February 2008. “It’s all cosmetic,” he says. “He’s an old Communist, just like his brother.”
When the transition happened, many predicted rioting in the streets, and collective demands for change. Without Fidel, people thought, whose iconic, iron-fisted leadership has always rallied support in Cuba, things would fall apart. Instead, the handover has been relatively smooth. More pragmatic than his big brother Fidel, Raul has steadily set about putting small but symbolic reforms in place. As well as allowing private ownership of cell phones and certain white goods, he granted farmers the right to manage unused land for profit. He also signed UN human rights accords and announced that workers can earn productivity bonuses, doing away with the egalitarian concept that everyone must earn the same.
He’s moved to strengthen Cuba’s relations with China, Vietnam and Venezuela (who provides most of Cuba’s oil in exchange for doctors and training – leading to complaints in Cuba that all the good doctors are overseas), prompting speculation he’s planning to follow an “Asian model” of capitalist-style communism. He’s signaled he’ll meet US President-elect Barack Obama, who in turn has said he’s willing to meet Castro after taking office in January. However, Obama has signaled he won’t support lifting the embargo until Cuba releases all political prisoners, of which there an estimated 219 on the island, according to an independent human rights group.
More change is on the horizon, government officials say, like easing restrictions on traveling abroad and the possibility of allowing Cubans to buy and sell their own cars, and perhaps even their homes.
For all Cubans, the question of what will happen ‘when Fidel goes’ looms large. Despite having handed over the reigns to his brother and other senior Communist Party officials, he still comments actively on politics in the daily newspaper, Granma, and there’s a perception that while he’s around, not much will change. Having survived repeated assassination attempts, including an infamous CIA plot to kill him with an exploding cigar, the 82-year-old ex-Commandante can’t live forever. Nor can his brother Raul, now 77.
Some predict that the Cuban gusanos (worms) in Miami will sweep in to reclaim their lost houses and flex their economic muscle. Others fear that an abrupt end to the system will mean chaos and corruption, similar to that seen in the former USSR. More likely, is gradual, State-sponsored liberalization, similar to that seen in China. Most Cubans, however, having seen various shades and stripes of socialism over the regime’s fifty years, at a loss to guess.
Estella, who at 67 has lived through five decades of Cuba’s Revolution, stirs a sweet, thick cup of coffee in the lounge room of her 1930s Art Deco apartment. A faint smell of gas rises from the stairwell. Suddenly there’s the sound of rushing water, as the pipes creak into action for the day’s supply, which Estella collects by filling the bathtub and buckets, to last the next 24 hours. She hasn’t had hot water since 1967. “Asi es Cuba,” she says, with a smile and a shrug. This is Cuba. In front of where she sits, her 13-year-old granddaughter Lucy watches re-runs of a 1970s “Heidi” cartoon on TV. She’s in her school uniform, a yellow skirt and high white socks. “I have no idea what to expect for her,” Estella says, her smile fading. Her eyes moisten. A migrant from Eastern Europe in the 60s, she came to Cuba full of hope for the new socialist regime. Today, the grandmother of two fights daily to put food on the table. “I only hope that she gets to live a little better than I have.”