Cuba Alone

We met Ana on the Avenue Galiano, a shopping street in downtown Havana, where she was gazing longingly into a store selling plastic shoes for 20 pesos (15 cents). They are rationed, and it is not her year to buy new ones. Ana was eager to talk, but not in public, where the government’s ever present watchers could see. Come to my home, she said, and you will see how terrible life is here.

Home is a rundown walk-up in Old Havana, where filth clings to peeling plaster and the reek of garbage sticks in the throat. Makeshift walls, festooned with frayed electric wires, subdivide the old apartments into tiny windowless warrens. When we arrive early one morning, she is locked behind massive doors. A woman with the face of a Madonna stares impassively over the half door to her dark flat. Down the hall another head pokes out: the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution has taken note of our arrival.

Ana is 24, separated from her husband, and does not trust her neighbors. Inside, she shows us her shabby living room, the dim bedroom she shares with her son, a rudimentary bathroom and a dank kitchen equipped with a leaky sink, hot plate and ancient refrigerator. Its contents: beans, rice and a frozen three-month-old piece of chicken that she is saving for two-year-old Rolando. “The state gives you six pounds of rice a month, but we eat that in three ; days,” she says. When her rations ran out the week before, she sold her grandmother’s 10-year-old boots to buy turnips.

Ana, a secretary in a food cooperative a long commute away — it takes her three hours to get there — knows she may well live and die in this apartment, like her grandmother before her. “People are disillusioned,” she says. “We have education and health care, but we don’t have food or freedom. What can I give my child?” She feels caged and angry. “They control everything,” she says, making the gesture of a hand stroking a beard, which is how Cubans silently refer to their supreme leader, Fidel Castro. The woman down the hall reports regularly to the local block committee about her, says Ana, “because I am not a conformist.” She finds peace in her Bible, though her faith has earned her a black mark on the dossier that follows all Cubans from childhood to death.

She pours out her dreams in poems. On old paper salvaged from her office wastebins, she writes Dias de Mis Suenos, The Days of My Dreams: “I think of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and invite them to a party and give them a gift. Always the night ends with them drinking and playing music that makes me escape from this place.”

If Cuba is a land of dreams, it is because reality is too cruel. Ana’s house is a perfect metaphor for the country crumbling around her: the whole economy is in a state of advanced decay. After more than 30 years of Soviet-style socialism, life has turned much worse during what the Cubans call the “special period,” the four years since the Berlin Wall crashed and carried away the Soviet lifelines. Cuba must now fend for itself.

It cannot. People are hungry: food is rationed, but there is almost none to buy. Factories are shut: there is no fuel to run machines, no raw materials to process. Harvests rot in the fields for want of distribution. We see no cars and few buses on the broad boulevards; people travel by bicycle, horse and buggy, or crammed aboard the occasional flatbed truck. There are swizzle sticks but no soap; no toilet paper, no plain paper either. By day a pall of smoke hangs over the city: the government, desperate to limit the daily 12- hour blackouts of summer, spent some of its precious cash on cheap, dirty oil to fire the electric plants. But nights are still dark and silent; only the light from the tourist hotels casts a faint glow over the ocean-front Malecon. Havana is a ghost of itself, its once vibrant life leached out by hard times.

So why aren’t Cubans in the streets demanding the downfall of Castro and communism? Last week the State Department called Cuba’s future grim, “a prolonged, slow decline waiting for a catastrophe.” In a still-classified warning to President Clinton in August, the CIA predicted that “tensions and uncertainties are so acute that significant miscalculations by Castro, a deterioration of his health, or plotting in the military could provoke regime- threatening instability at virtually any time.” The CIA report sketches out “serious instability” and “the risk of a bloodbath.”

After a rare, two-week visit by American journalists to the island, it is apparent the issue is not so simple. Already Fidel Castro’s Cuba is no more. Whether he is leading the way or merely acquiescing to it, the socialist Utopia he built is sliding inexorably toward capitalism. But Cubans still believe that Castro’s revolution has given them something too precious to lose. People understand their economy is in ruins, but they see no one who could lead them out of their present misery but Fidel. The struggle under way is between Castro and the forces of history: Can he control Cuba’s mutation to his liking, or will freeing the economy steal the country out from under him?

Circumstance, not a change of heart, is the driving force behind Cuba’s grudging transformation. If the collapse of the Soviet empire had not cut Havana’s imports from $8 billion to $1.7 billion today, change would not be coming at all. Beginning in July, Castro announced steps to open up the economy. He legalized the use of the dollar, granted more autonomy to farmers, and allowed people in more than 135 small-time occupations, from shoe repair to haircutting, to work for themselves. “For 30 years we did not do anything like this,” Fidel told a group of 175 Americans visiting Cuba in violation of the 32-year U.S. embargo, “but the realities of today’s life have forced us to do this. It is painful, but we have no other choice.”

And more changes are coming: economics czar Carlos Lage has recently outlined plans to introduce a tax system, downsize the government work force, and restructure the agricultural sector. There is even talk of eliminating government control over who leaves the island.

But there seems to be no guiding strategy from the top. A diplomat tells this story about how the first changes came about. When the Communist Party realized the situation was desperate, it put out a call for advice. One plan proposed some 40 or 50 steps the government needed to take incrementally, beginning with putting food on the table. Then it moved on to reforms of various kinds and, finally, far down the list, to legalizing dollars. Fidel pointed to the dollar measure and said, We will start here.

The consensus says Castro is being forced to legitimize what the Cuban people are doing illicitly. “I think people push, and he eventually accedes,” says a Western diplomat. “I don’t see any fundamental decision by Fidel to change his ways of thinking.” A foreign businessman exploring joint ventures is certain that Castro is simply showing the pragmatism of a smart politician: “He’s not doing any of this because he likes it but because he will do whatever he has to do to survive.”

However it is happening, optimists say the door to real reform is now open. Cynics look at the narrow nature of the changes and shake their heads. Each modest economic decree is hedged with restrictions. Social tension could erupt, since those with families in the U.S. or jobs in tourism have access to dollars while government bureaucrats, doctors, engineers and the military do not. Cubans seeking to work for themselves must pass a check by the feared Ministry of Interior before getting a license; professionals — anyone with a college degree — are barred from self-employment. Farmers who want to sell vegetables privately find that the local cooperative still sets the price.

Cubans look back on the time before 1989 as a Golden Age, when the system brought them a standard of living better than most Caribbean nations and roughly equal for every citizen. In four years all that has vanished, leaving Cubans confused, embittered — and open to change.

They want reform, but they don’t know what kind. Bright young technocrats eagerly describe a world where capitalist energy will coexist with communist caretaking. An older woman involved in joint ventures insists that Fidel’s system needs only modest tinkering. A grizzled mine worker warns against any changes that bring back inequality. Reporters are invited into the country, but top officials decline interviews: they no longer seem to know what the party line is. “There is a new incoherence,” says a Western diplomat in Havana. “It’s not pluralism, but different people have different ideas about where the country should go.”

The results are schizophrenic. The government promotes Cubacel, a joint telephone venture with Mexican businessmen — and the government organizes a new category of medals called Combatants of the Revolution to keep old-think alive. While shops for Cubans stock a few rusted kitchen knives and cardboard toys, shiny Nissans carry tourists to refurbished hotels equipped with Sony TVs tuned to CNN.

If they have to change — and most accept that only reluctantly — Cubans are determined to change in their own way. No matter where you go on the island, what stratum of society you probe, you hear the same mantra: the achievements of the revolution. What they call the revolution is not communism, not socialist ideology, not even veneration for Fidel. “The achievements of the revolution” is code for cradle-to-grave health care, free and universal education, and generous social-security payments. Castro brought these benefits to millions who had almost nothing before the revolution, and after 34 years they are fiercely proud of the guarantees — so rare in Latin America — and are determined not to lose them. “There is no way you can take away the achievements of the revolution,” says 35-year-old reformer Pedro Monreal. “They are installed on the hard disk of my generation.” Cubans insist they will manage to keep these benefits and still revive their shattered economy.

We have to collect Julio Carranza, the young deputy director of the Communist Party’s Center for American Studies, at his house. He has no gas for his car, and his neighborhood is blacked out. We enter another world when we sit down with him and Monreal in the gilded elegance of Havana’s Ferminia Restaurant — dollars only. Wolfing down real meat, the two thirtysomething economists paint glowing pictures of a wondrous second-generation Marxism where quasi-private enterprise pays for the nation’s broad social safety net.

They are convinced that Cuba can have the best of both systems: the benefits of socialism and the wealth of the free market. Cuba can succeed where Russia and Eastern Europe have failed. But even these experts have only the vaguest notions of how. “I think we can do it if there is more income for the state,” says Monreal. The two envision less central planning but government control over the shape of the economy: a system encompassing private, cooperative and state ownership, all working to the common good. They talk of taxes, salary scales, redundant employment, monetary reform, but have no idea how they would really work. “One day Cuba will not use any ism to describe our system,” boasts Carranza.

Concepcion Portela could not agree less. Maybe it is generational: she is 61. “I am a Marxist,” she says. After years in a government ministry, she runs a private business advising foreign investors on joint ventures in tourism, biotechnology, construction. Her job — which she considers temporary, until “we work our way out of this situation” — is not to change the system but to preserve it by bringing capital into the country. Cuba, she insists, will never denationalize, never privatize: “I distribute what I produce to others.”

As we drive through the lush countryside, we are stunned that this island cannot feed itself. But the perversions of Soviet-style agriculture have left their legacy. To trade for Russian oil, Castro converted much of Cuba’s arable land to sugar. A government bureaucrat sighs as he tells the potato story. During the cold weather in Russia, Cuba would grow potatoes and ship them all to Moscow. Then six months later, when the Russian harvest came in, Moscow would send a year’s worth of potatoes back to Cuba, where they would have to be stored in huge refrigerated warehouses. Now the warehouses stand empty and useless.

Many people doubt the latest changes in agricultural policy will make much difference. Noel Prado, 37, farms 98 acres in Vegas, southeast of Havana, on which he must produce his government allotment of sugarcane. He seems content with Castro’s policies. “Food is not a problem here,” he says, patting his big stomach. He can sell some of his surplus peanuts, sweet potatoes, coffee, sheep and pigs. City friends travel 25 miles from the capital to barter for his vegetables and meat, but since he has no fertilizer, no pesticides and no electricity to pump water for irrigation, his production will not increase soon. He hopes private ownership will encourage other farmers to grow more, but he is dubious. “Cubans are used to receiving everything from the state,” he says.

The mine workers in the mountain town of El Cobre, west of Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province, where the revolution was born, are afraid of the dreamers in Havana. Oh, yes, Cuba needs to change, says a 57-year-old welder we’ll call Alberto. “But we need something for everybody, not just for a few.” He does not want his real name used, and he keeps looking nervously over his shoulder. “If they see me talking to you, tomorrow I will have trouble with the police,” he says.

But the clara, the rough-brewed beer the state sells on Sunday in the town plaza, has loosened his tongue. For 30 years his life was good, he says, until dollars were allowed. “I worked, I earned my pay, my family could live just like my neighbors.” But he has no family in the U.S. to send money, no relatives working in tourism to collect tips. “Some people can have dollars; I only earn pesos,” says Alberto. “The people with dollars can buy a pair of shoes, and I cannot. Why should my neighbor have more than me?”

The advent of the dollar has brought dismay even to the party faithful. Riding in an aging Lada to the countryside to buy food, a loyal government employee gripes, “We felt betrayed. Legalizing the dollar favors people who kept ties to their families in Miami, people who were not dedicated to the revolution, people who tried to kill us.”

Octavio lives better by betraying the system. We stop in front of his pristine white bungalow in the Havana suburb of Miramar. A knock on the door brings a discreet peek from behind freshly painted shutters. A voice murmurs to come around into the garden. Suddenly, we could be in Miami. American rock plays softly; red and blue lights color a trimly clipped lawn. Our host offers a hamburger, steak, perhaps a lobster? Red or white wine? A rum collins?

He runs one of Havana’s new speakeasies. Home restaurants are legal, but as a university-trained engineer, Octavio is barred from private enterprise. His official job earns him 300 pesos a month, a good salary in Cuba, but that equals a mere $2.50, the cost of a pork sandwich and a bottle of Labatt’s beer on his patio. “I have kids, and they need to eat. They want ice cream, things in the stores,” says Octavio, “so I do this. I have to have dollars.”

He sold some family antiques to foreigners — also illegal — to stock his giant freezer with pork, chicken and beef bought at the new dollar stores. Saturday nights his tables are full of “friends of friends” who can pay dollars for food they cannot find elsewhere. If his neighbors snitch, the government will confiscate everything. Wearing a white polo shirt, gold Seiko watch and Italian shoes, Octavio shrugs at the danger. “I will do what I must for my family,” he says, “no matter what Fidel ((he makes the beard gesture with his fingers)) says.”

He feels no remorse about cheating a government that he believes has failed him by its lies and mistakes. “First you have to guarantee food, then you guarantee health and education,” says Octavio. “Their priorities are backward. They spend on sports! You can’t eat sports.” Yet this son of a family that was well off before the revolution is not keen about the capitalist changes. “I think it’s an error to give purchasing power to the dollar,” he says. “My family lost financially from the revolution, but we gained spiritually, we gained morally.”

Varadero Beach, where rich gringos used to cavort in the days of the Batista dictatorship, is once again a clean, green ghetto for foreigners. Tourism is supposed to be the country’s short-term salvation, but it also accentuates the difference between those with dollars and those without. Everyone wants to work at Varadero: hotel maids earn more in tips than peso-poor engineers; teachers and Angola veterans drive cabs; and psychologists make plane reservations. The expertise of the Cubans who work for Eamonn Donnelly, the Irish manager of two German-owned hotels, runs from agronomy to piloting MiG fighters.

Now they just have to master Econ 101. Lawyer Julio Gonzalez, who oversees Donnelly’s busy Tuxpan Hotel, did not grasp some basic concepts at first. Put in charge of personnel, he let profits plummet as the staff, heavily padded with relatives and friends, ballooned. Once faced with the capitalist notion of being fired if he failed to meet his budget, Julio straightened out. “No one had ever been fired for anything before,” says Donnelly. “Now Julio is a devil of a capitalist.”

Gonzalez pats the computer printout on his desk showing a 92% occupancy rate at the Tuxpan and lights up an imported Kool Filter. He plans someday to be manager, even owner of a hotel chain. Does he believe in capitalism now? He grins: “I think like Jesus Christ that the bread has to be divided. Was Christ a communist or a capitalist?”

For many other Cubans, tourism is a pact with the devil. They remember how they felt exploited by rich foreigners before 1959. At the Tuxpan disco, the only Cubans allowed in are pubescent girls dressed in scanty Lycra minis who have bartered their company to rum-swilling tourists for a meal. It makes Julio Gonzalez angry even as he takes their money.

“Tourism is a sort of chemotherapy,” says historian Juan Antonio Blanco, director of a new private think tank. “You have cancer and it’s the only possible cure, but it might kill you before the cancer does.” The inequality, the privileges derived from separating the foreigner from his dollar, he says, “could prove more socially disruptive than the bad shape of the economy.”

We wonder why we cannot find more signs of brewing revolt. Cubans have a genius for adapting, we are told. Cubans are law abiding and have no taste for civil disobedience. Cubans are happy “if they have one plate of food and a bottle of rum,” says restaurateur Octavio. Cubans don’t believe in any ism but paternalism. “The state has provided for 30 years,” says Blanco. “That’s not the case anymore, but half the population has not adapted to reality.”

Exiles who dream of a revolution from below would despair. Many of the Cubans we meet show no interest in politics, nor do they talk about a political solution to their country’s problems. But not because this is a nation of devout communists: “Most people became revolutionary not from reading Karl Marx,” says Blanco, “but because they saw suffering in the streets.” Even in the privacy of a dissident’s house, there is no eager call for multiparty democracy. Most Cubans do not seem to care what kind of political system they have as long as they have an economy that works.

“A vast majority of the population,” says a Western diplomat, “is sitting and waiting until the situation is resolved for them.” In the streets of Havana there is little proto-capitalist bustle. The government says 86,000 people out of Cuba’s 11 million have applied for the required license, but it is not easy to find the new mom-and-pop enterprises. Canadian mining executive Bill McGuinty thinks his Cuban co-workers are eager to learn capitalist ways — up to a point. They are shocked by his attempts to bypass bureaucracy and befuddled by the quid pro quos of networking. “It will take a while for the mentality to change,” he says. “They have gone from 34 years of working together to every man for himself.”

How much of the lethargy is fear? Cuba’s detachment from the Soviet orbit has not lessened the state’s powerful instruments of political control. The security apparatus is omnipresent. Driving through Palma Soriano in the mountains above Santiago, we stop in a tiny cafe and strike up a conversation with a customer. In less than five minutes, a car screeches to a halt outside and four hard-eyed men stride in. Everyone falls silent as they shake hands all around, staring intently into each face. We get up to leave, and the leader smugly inquires, “Going already?” Marked on the outside of the car is the logo of the local party watch committee.

The government has been very effective at crushing opposition. The most ardent anti-Castro groups are in exile. Those remaining have been reduced to small, timid groups, and human-rights organizations report that the number of arrests of even moderate dissidents has risen sharply. Very few people, says Felix de la Uz, “are willing to do something to make the system fall.”

Friends of De la Uz call him a Dr. Zhivago. He fought underground with Castro’s 26th of July movement and in his early 20s went to the Communist Party school in Moscow for grooming. But by 1968 he had lost his zeal and wrote a stinging critique of the party for being undemocratic. He was banished to a railway shop, where he labored in silence until now.

“Marxism is a very coherent ideology,” he says, lighting a harsh Populares cigarette in his small, dim living room. “It seemed to have all the answers.” He laughs at the idea as he fingers his worn ration book. The modest economic steps the government has taken “won’t solve anything,” he says. “I think it’s more to save the government’s face. We’re making some changes to look good to the outside world.” He explains how each new decree will still leave the state in charge. “They don’t want to take these measures, or any measures,” he says. “The man with the beard knows very well that these steps signify that the power he has is being lost.”

Arranging an interview with a human-rights activist entails maps drawn on shreds of paper and mysterious phone numbers passed along by hand. When we finally catch up with Elizardo Sanchez, he tells us to leave our taxi a block away. Sanchez has been outspoken enough to land in prison for eight of the past 12 years. “People don’t understand what a regimented state we have,” he says. “The proof is that here, unlike Eastern Europe, the government is not changing, even though we have far worse economic pressures.”

Control is implanted in every crevice of the system, from the individual dossiers to the vigilante block committees. “We have the largest number of police per capita in the world,” says Sanchez, and he claims that nearly 1% of the population is in jail. In the past few months, he says, 5,000 to 10,000 citizens have been imprisoned for illegal economic activities, sentenced to eight to 10 years for slaughtering a state-owned cow or stealing state property. He warns, “The government is pushing the country to the edge of violence.”

No visitor can miss the real hatred Cubans express for their countrymen in Miami — despised for fleeing, feared for their threats to take back their property, blamed for the U.S. embargo that prevents Cuba from seeking assistance from friendlier Western nations. “We will never accept a government dictated by Miami,” says Sanchez.

The U.S. embargo, in place for 32 years, comes across to Cubans as an attempt to starve them into bringing Castro down. As the rigors of the “special period” worsen, Fidel has appealed to Cuba’s fierce nationalism and its image of itself as a David fighting Goliath. He has made Uncle Sam the scapegoat for the country’s economic disaster. Sophisticated citizens may not buy the argument, but at a visceral level it has helped reinforce Cubans’ siege mentality. Congress’s decision last year to toughen the embargo by barring foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with the island embitters and puzzles many. “You deal with China, Syria, why not Fidel Castro?” asks Sanchez. “The view in Miami, believed in Washington, that he is going to go away is a huge error. If Washington had a truly pragmatic vision, it would renounce its anti-Castro policy and help us reform.”

Travel around the island for two weeks and the lasting impression is the same: Cuba may be falling apart, but Fidel is not falling with it. Through a combination of charisma, national pride and repression, he still holds the island’s fate in his hands.

To an astonishing degree, people have separated their discontent with the way things are from the man in charge. Fidel can continue to count on a deep reserve of support from a populace proud that he freed the island from the foreigners who once owned the casinos and the sugar fields and the rich who exploited the poor. “He is like the godfather who will always look after you,” says historian Blanco. Things may be hard now, say three elderly ladies in a party-run senior citizens’ center in El Cobre, but thanks to Fidel, “somos feliz. We are happy.”

Cubans take as fierce a pride in their revolutionary heroes as Americans do in the men of 1776: they are the nation’s embodiments of freedom and independence. Che Guevara is their Lafayette, Fidel their George Washington. “He has a place in people’s hearts that goes far beyond the Communist Party or government structure,” observes mining executive McGuinty.

Bone-thin after four years of declining rations, Mario Caballero, a 52-year- old school administrator in Santiago de Cuba, is one of the older generation whose faith in Fidel is well-nigh religious. If his rhetoric recalls communist dogma of the ’50s, it still reflects sentiments deeply etched in the Cuban soul. “Before, our best land was Yankee. The sugar was Yankee. The electric system was Yankee. The phones were Yankee.” Never mind that the sugar crop is failing for the second year, that electricity and phones rarely work. “We may be living through a special period,” he says, “but at least all the property is Cuban.”

His friend Albert Memo, a retired electronics technician, remains content to entrust the future to Fidel. “We have a government we like,” he says. Cubans know capitalism, “and we don’t want it.” But if Castro says Cubans have to do things differently, Memo will go along. He leans back and reminisces: “I am exactly the same age as Fidel, 67. When you meet him, he is so impressive. When he talks, you really trust him, you would follow whatever he decides to do. I love him. Everyone loves him.”

Those who do not love Fidel have few options: wait until he dies, or flee. Ricardo and Raul are scheming to escape by sea, when they are not drunk on bootleg rum. Quaffing cocktails and beer at Ernest Hemingway’s old haunt, La Bodeguita del Medio in Old Havana, they rail against the system, unconcerned that they might be overheard. At 21, Ricardo is just out of prison after serving a nine-month term: he got drunk and spat on a statue of independence hero Jose Marti. Now he is officially a nonperson and unable to find a job. “How am I supposed to live?” he asks bitterly. He earns his keep by “inventing,” selling his jeans for 200 pesos, which fetched 40 lbs. of rice that he resold at quadruple the price.

Raul, 28, cadges meals from his mother when he is not selling goods a friend steals from a state factory. Although he speaks three languages, he cannot find work either, because his history of alcoholism is duly noted in his dossier.

With Ricardo and two others, Raul is arranging to buy a motorized boat to sail to Miami, where a brother recently landed on a raft. The youths have paid out half the 30,000-peso price, but have no idea how they’ll get the rest. “I want to be free!” shouts Raul. “I want to go to a hotel for a vacation. I want to take a car and drive into the countryside. We are Negroes in our own country; we are slaves.” His voice rises close to hysteria as waiters in the ; restaurant pretend not to hear. “I won’t stay here! I hate this country.”

We leave not knowing whether Cuba can safely make the journey back from a failed communist state, but the country is already on that road, like it or not. “People say we are a dinosaur,” says Juan Antonio Blanco. “But look at the map. Cuba is shaped like a crocodile. And like the crocodile, the Cubans have learned to adapt. That’s why we’re still around.”