Castro’s Cuba Is the Only Way of Life Many Have Known

My grandfather went to work in Cuba in the 1950s, at a nickel-ore processing plant on Nipe Bay, in northeastern Oriente province, where my mother and her three sisters spent part of their childhood. Their life, in a town called Nicaro, was meant to be culturally insular: American social clubs, American schools, middle-class homes in a gated town, with streets on which the mining company had even planted cottonwood trees. Outside the gates and across the river from Nicaro was Levisa, for miners and other laborers, handymen and “houseboys,” like Cleveland Manning, a Jamaican who worked for my grandparents. Cleveland Manning lived in typical Levisa housing, a shack of cardboard and corrugated tin, with a dirt floor, and no running water or electricity.

These conditions are what my mother and aunts still talk about, when they talk about Cuba. In 1958, the place was burned on Fulgencio Batista’s orders, to root out what he suspected was sympathy for Fidel Castro and his rebels. Fidel, who grew up right nearby, in Birán, rebuilt Levisa, after he took power, as a kind of showcase of the revolution. People like Cleveland Manning were given homes with poured concrete foundations and indoor plumbing. Cleveland, who was naturally smart but had no opportunity for secondary schooling, was trained, after the revolution, in truck repair. For a black man like Cleveland from a background of dire poverty, the gains of the revolution were real.

When my mother asked Cleveland what he wanted for his birthday one year, he said to go and visit Fidel Castro’s boyhood home, and so we took him. This was in the year 2000. At the time, we were staying with a Cuban friend named Alina Delgado, who had gone to school with my mother and her sisters in Nicaro. (Alina’s father was a white Cuban who belonged to Cuba’s small managerial class.) Upon returning from our pilgrimage to the Castro family home, I asked Alina what she thought would happen if Fidel were to die.

“Oh, Raquel,” she said, shaking her head, “there is no one like him. No one.”

For a long time, there seemed to be a kind of anticipation in the West that when Fidel died, the trumpets would sound, the McDonald’s would spring up from Varadero to Baracoa and capitalism would pour in, along with tourists and wealthy families who had fled to the States, ready to reclaim old holdings. But there is a nation of 11 million people who live there, and have been doing things in a certain way for a long time now. Cubans have endured real hardship. Hopefully, they will have a chance to play a role in their own material and political destiny, to decide what their lives under socialism have meant and where they want to go.

In the past few years, the nickel processing plant in Nicaro was closed. Several hurricanes have swept through and damaged the area. And now the unimaginable has happened: Fidel is really gone. When my aunt called Alina to see how she was handling the news, Alina said everyone was very sad, very subdued. She said there is a pledge going around, for Cubans to sign, committing to uphold the values of the revolution. Her daughter, who lives in Havana, waited six hours in line to sign it. Alina told my aunt there was work in Nicaro, for now, dismantling the nickel plant, but that it was depressing to see it come down. There was hope of a new tourism center to be constructed in nearby Antilla, complete with plans to rehabilitate the lone Nicaro airstrip and make it a real airport. But progress on the project, Alina said, was incredibly slow. Maybe her grandchildren, she added with sarcastic humor, will see it finished.

Kushner is the author of Telex From Cuba and The Flamethrowers