Cuba and me
When I finally visited Cuba, I learned how much I didn’t know about it.
Twenty-one years ago, I was lucky enough to spend the summer between my junior and senior years of college in Paris. I stayed in a tiny little one-room apartment in a fantastic neighborhood just blocks from the Luxembourg Garden. In those days I was very serious and goal-oriented (even if my goals were all short term ones), and I was thinking that summer about the senior thesis I’d need to write the next year for my Comparative Literature degree.
My minor was Latin American Studies, so I found a shop that carried books in Spanish. The previous fall, while studying abroad in Mexico, I’d been tempted to travel to Cuba but had lost my nerve, so I gravitated towards books by Cubans. I discovered that I liked Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen. I was intrigued by how celebratory Guillen was about blackness. Being a biracial person raised in the very white environment of 1980s Orange County, California, openness about race felt foreign and exciting to me, and I decided to read more of these Cubans.
I chose to write my thesis on Cuban and American anti-slavery fiction. My argument was that Cubans had embraced the tragic, mixed-race, slave heroine as a symbol of the racially mixed Cuban nation, while America had rejected her and clung to a white national identity. I was really happy with my thesis, and my advisor suggested I might try to publish it in some form. But when I showed it to my dad’s Cuban friend, someone I’d know my whole life and whose opinion I really valued, his response was tepid. Kind of like, that’s nice for college work, but you don’t really understand anything about Cuba.
I guess I could have pursued it. If I’d gotten a Ph.D. in literature instead of going to law school, maybe I would have made my way to Cuba sooner on an academic visa. But I didn’t. So I was left with the romanticized vision of Cuba I’d constructed in college. In my mind, Cuba stood in opposition to the least admirable aspects of American society. This “fantasy island” dealt openly with race and even embraced racial mixing, it decoupled education from wealth and provided health care for all, it was warm and uninhibited and sensual. I’ve wanted to visit this Cuba for years, and finally, this February, I had a chance to go.
Cuba is not the paradise I’d imagined (I know, you’re shocked)
My first impressions of Cuba pretty much met my expectations. Island air and waving palm trees met me as I stepped off the plane. My first real view of Cuba, leaving the airport, was of a high wall, its faded and chipped plaster sporting larger than life images of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. It felt like a dream, and I remembered the words printed on a t-shirt I’d been given twenty years before. Cuba te espera. Cuba waits for you. For a moment, it seemed that the Cuba of my dreams truly had been waiting all these years.
By the next morning, I was not so sure. For one thing, in my dreams of Cuba, Havana was faded and decaying, along the lines of genteel poverty. In fact, Havana is really, really dirty. Soot in the air, grime on the buildings, dog poop and trash everywhere. That kind of dirty. Also, I’m 42 now, not 22. Driving on a poorly maintained highway with no working seatbelts in the car used to feel edgy and cool, but now it just feel dangerous. I have two kids to get home to. Youthful dreams, meet current reality. Unclear if you two are going to get along.
The racial paradise I’d imagined Cuba to be? Well, sort of. There’s definitely more matter-of-fact discussion of color. Between white and black there are some five or six other shades that aren’t imagined to correlate directly with heritage or parentage, but simply describe the color of someone’s skin. This seems to soften the sharp racial distinction we tend to make in the United States between black and white. That doesn’t mean there’s not privilege associated with lighter skin in Cuba. But there is more open acknowledgment that privilege exists, even if there is not really a plan to do anything about it.
Cubans are as much like us as they are different
Is it banal to say that one of the biggest surprises about my trip to Cuba was how much the struggles and strivings of Cubans resonated with me as an American?
My week-long visit happened just a few weeks before President Obama’s, and people in Havana were abuzz about it. In honor of his visit, and also because it seemed like one of those “only in Cuba” sights I shouldn’t miss, I went to the American Embassy. I’d heard that the Cuban government had raised a sea of black flags in front of the buildings to hide pro-democracy messages displayed on an electronic billboard. (“In a free country you don’t need permission to leave. Is Cuba a free country?”) (Read the Wall Street Journal article about this here.)
When I got to the embassy the flags had been removed, and I was faced with the unsettling landscape of a square city block covered with bare white flagpoles — a sign of the political thaw begun when President Obama re-established diplomatic ties between our countries. Though the electronic billboard was dark and the black flags were gone, the bare flagpoles and some anti-imperialist slogans remained, like the lingering taste of bitterness in Cuba’s relationship with the United States.
When I studied Cuba it was through the lens of literature, and I never turned a critical eye on its political history. I had taken our governments’ mutual enmity as a given — a legacy of the Cuban Revolution and the Cold War. But our countries’ relationship is deeper and more complex than that. While often we have been in opposition to each other, we have also been intertwined, which is why my intuition was correct that learning about Cuba would be a useful way for me as an American to gain insight into my own country. What I had never stopped to consider was the flip side. If my vision of Cuba had stood for a different way of approaching race, and education, and health care, and sexuality, what did their vision of America mean to Cubans? My week in Havana offered me the chance to appreciate the United States’ outsized role in Cuba’s national narrative — the official story Cubans are taught about what it means to be Cuban. I came to appreciate that the Castro government’s emphasis on America’s villainous role in that narrative may have helped to cripple Cuba’s post-revolution development.
My sense of Cuba and the United States as culturally in opposition was matched by our governments’ insistence that we were politically and socially opposed, but both impressions are overstated. Brief but illuminating interactions with regular Cubans showed me that although the Cuban government’s stated values are different from the values underlying the American system, the problems facing Cubans in their communities are analogous to ours, and individual Cubans are reaching for similar innovations to the ones community-minded Americans are trying.
Cuba to the U.S.: Can’t live with you, can’t live without you
On the top of my list of “only in Cuba” sights was the Museum of the Revolution, a true Cuban original that shouldn’t be missed on a first visit to Havana. The museum is housed in the former Presidential Palace, and while its dusty and utilitarian display cases don’t seem like palace decor, the Palace itself has so faded and decayed over the decades that there is a certain harmony to the overall picture. The visitor can pay tribute to the relics of Cuba’s secular saints — Che’s boots, for example, and the eye glasses, mess kits, and outerwear of lesser-known revolutionaries. The visitor also learns that in the eyes of Cuba’s revolutionaries, they did not start a new revolution against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s. Rather, they took up an abandoned revolution that was begun in the 1860s, championed in the 1880s and 1890s by martyred patriot Jose Marti, and stymied by U.S. intervention and interference since then.
American history students learn that Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders routed the Spanish in 1898 in what we in the United States call the Spanish-American War. In the Cuban narrative, the Spanish-American War was actually a Cuban war of independence from Spain. Cubans do not celebrate Roosevelt and his Rough Riders for delivering victory to Cuba’s 19th century revolutionaries. Instead, the Cuban narrative suggests that by taking credit for the victory, the Americans stole Cubans’ opportunity to forge their own destiny and diminished the sacrifices of Cuba’s revolutionary heroes.
After Spain surrendered to the United States in 1898, the United States extracted concessions from Cuba in exchange for its sovereignty. To the current government’s chagrin, Cuba accepted the Platt Amendment, an agreement permitting U.S. interference in Cuba’s day-to-day affairs. The Amendment was only in effect until 1934, but even afterwards Cuba remained economically dependent on the U.S. market for sugar. Cuban politicians therefore solicited the approval of the U.S. government and trade groups when setting economic policy.
This history lesson is the backdrop when the aging revolutionaries of today’s Cuba denounce American imperialism. The grievances Cuba’s 1950s revolutionaries carry against the United States are not based only on our hostile reaction to their seizure of power, but are rooted in their perception that the U.S. has consistently and for over a century denied Cuba’s right to self-determination. A small but significant island in the U.S. orbit, Cuba never enjoyed full sovereignty in the way the United States and Western European nations have. U.S. sugar interests dominated the island’s economy before the 1959 revolution, and the U.S. government interfered in its politics and governance. After the revolution, the United States’ continuing refusal to recognize Cuba’s Communist government cemented Cuba’s conviction that the United States would never willingly allow Cuba to manage its own affairs. Once the Castro government had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, tensions between the Soviets and the U.S. must have only enhanced the Cuban government’s rancor — both actual and rhetorical — toward the United States.
In its zeal to reject all things American and its enthusiasm for communist ideology, the revolutionary government became overdependent on the Soviet Union and failed to plan for its own economic future. For a long time, Fidel Castro has blamed the suffering of the Cuban people on the United States’ trade embargo. Before I went to Cuba, I didn’t know how to evaluate those claims. Being there, I saw first-hand how Cuba’s ideologically-driven financial system distorts and frustrates business development there, and how the revolutionary government’s failure to make meaningful investments during the years of Soviet patronage left the country underdeveloped. I realized that the trade embargo, while certainly not helpful, provides as useful rhetorical crutch for Cuban decisionmakers to disclaim responsibility for their own failures.
As has been well documented, Cuban housing and physical infrastructure are crumbling, it has failed to invest in technology, its lack of industry means its highly educated young people can’t use their training, and it seems to be lurching toward a haphazard expansion of economic and political freedom without a plan to preserve what the revolution did accomplish. And the revolution has some significant accomplishments. Cuba has a literate population, low crime rates, and universal health care. These are enormous achievements for any nation, much less a post-colonial island nation. But its as if, once the revolutionary government provided education and health care, it had no idea what else to do.
Individualism and communitarianism thrive in both countries
As anyone might expect, ordinary Cubans seem less committed than their leaders are to rejecting the American way of life. On our flight from Los Angeles was a man who appeared to be a Cuban national, and who was decked out from head to toe in brand new, brand-name American clothes and accessories. He had two enormous suitcases, and we joked that either he was running a smuggling ring or he was bringing everything he could carry — even the clothes on his back and the watch on his wrist — home to his relatives. He was emblematic of another contrast between reality and my vision of Cuba: how everyone in Havana was hustling, out to make a buck. My naively romantic idea of Cuba as a left-behind land of sun-bleached fishing boats and endless salsa parties just kept on being shattered. For example, one morning we took a shared local taxi from our Vedado hotel to Old Havana. The driver waited until all the Cuban riders had left the cab, and then pointed to the American flag on his dashboard and told us he was a friend of the United States. As he no doubt intended, we gave him a big tip.
Yet if a certain level of American individualism is flourishing in Havana, a kind of communitarianism seems to have gained a level of moral authority in America and Cuba alike, in the form of localism. Our most fascinating day in Cuba was when we visited a microenterprise in a fishing village near where Hemingway used to dock his boat. More interesting than the government-sponsored fishing cooperative was the car wash started by a private citizen. In a village where potable water was not always plentiful, this resident felt aggravated when he saw people using it to wash their cars. Using gravel and the natural slope of the land, he created a graywater filtration system at his home and used the recycled water to wash cars. We asked him if his business made a profit. Without missing a beat, this Cuban with chipped teeth and worn coveralls replied, “Every business has to make a profit.” But in a twist that showed that the revolution’s ideals persisted, he was reinvesting his profits by constructing an outdoor classroom on his roofdeck so he could teach local children about how he used recycled water to grow fruit trees, maintain livestock, and meet his family’s needs.
Not long after my return from Havana I read an article in the New York Times about a company in Jackson, Wyoming, called Vertical Harvest. (Read the article here.) The company built a high-rise greenhouse, answering demand for locally-grown produce during Jackson’s freezing winters. According to the article, Vertical Harvest provides jobs for local residents who have conditions like Down syndrome and spina bifida that would make it hard for them to find work, but it is not a charity. It is a public-private venture dedicated to improving the local community, filling a market niche, and making what the New York Times calls a “modest profit.”
In spirit, Vertical Harvest sounds a lot like the car wash I saw in Cuba. These are projects that are in principle not political, but they have quiet political implications in that they both respond to failures in system design. In Cuba, where economic decision-making is centralized, there has not been a mechanism other than law and regulation for addressing inefficiencies like washing cars with scarce potable water. In the United States, where market interventions by government tend to be less overt, there has not been an economic incentive for our highly industrialized and concentrated food industry to meet consumer demand for local produce in a small market like Jackson.
Both projects have faced political hurdles. The car wash was closed for a while so that government inspectors could assure themselves that nothing forbidden was going on there. And according to the Times story, Vertical Harvest had to win over at least one project opponent whose objections stemmed from his political leanings: the vice president of Jackson’s Tea Party group initially thought the greenhouse would drain public resources and compete unfairly with existing businesses. Ultimately, the Cuban government functionaries were convinced that the car wash, though accomplished through private initiative and innovation, nevertheless did not break any laws or undermine the revolution. And the founders of Vertical Harvest could walk opponents through their business plan to demonstrate that it was consistent with free markets and limited government.
Looking at the Cuban car wash and Vertical Harvest, I see a convergence from two very different points. The Cuban government is controlling and paternalistic, so that even though the car wash was inspired by a desire to solve an environmental and public health problem, it was seen as suspicious because it originated outside of government. Meanwhile, the United States has a federalist system intended to preserve local autonomy, but though Vertical Harvest’s greenhouse would make Jackson more autonomous in its food production, ideological conservatives (who, by the way, claim to like federalism a lot) were suspicious of it because it required partial public support to get off the ground. In both countries, innovation on the local level required entrenched interests to re-think their notions of what sorts of activities might be consistent with their ideology.
When billboards in Havana today proclaim that “The Revolution Continues,” one interpretation is that citizens should not dissent against the revolutionary government and should remain united against common enemies (i.e., the United States). That may be the interpretation their authors intend. But another reading of the billboard might be this one: that the 1950s cadre of Cuban revolutionaries is like the revolutionary generations before them. Each one moved the needle towards sovereignty, liberty, and equality for Cubans of all colors and economic backgrounds, but none have got all the way there. To the extent the 1950s revolutionaries wanted to see their government as a radical departure from the United States, it seems as though there are some features of modern societies, like centralization, that find their way into every system in one form or another. Whether centralization is intentional, like in Cuba, or is a consequence of both market and government factors, like food production in the United States, community-level enterprises may be able to fill in the cracks where large players can’t or won’t solve problems.
Twenty years after college, it was long past time for me to let go of my dreams of Cuba. Although the reality was grittier and more uncertain than I had imagined, it was just as fascinating as I ever thought it would be. Turns out the real Cuba is multi-dimensional in a way neither my youthful ideas nor the flattening rhetoric of either government would acknowledge. Cubans and Americans have plenty to learn from each other and more possibilities for collaboration and two-way information sharing than we may have thought. Cuba te espera.
