HAVANA: One day, in Havana, a friend offered me a cup of coffee in the lean-to shack that served as her kitchen. The ground coffee was precious, a tightly rationed bag so small it was clear we were about to consume a good part of the family’s monthly ration in one lavishly hospitable gesture. It was brewed with care and presented in a small white cup with no handle.
My friend apologised for the cup. “It’s from the Ministry of Culture,” she explained. “The minister was so frustrated that his cups were being stolen he ordered a man to knock off the handles with a hammer.” She doubled over with laughter. “But we stole them anyway. What did he expect?”
Fidel Castro’s appropriation of the state of Cuba is mirrored in thousands of lesser ways by ordinary Cubans who live on the edge of the surreal. Today, most Cubans remember little before Castro. They have lived in a world in which one man seeks to occupy not only their imaginative space but much of their waking lives, his make-believe version of the revolution their official daily narrative. His — and their — iconic achievement is to have survived the efforts of 10 US presidents to remove him. As Castro reaches his 80th birthday on Sunday, too frail now for the long-planned official celebrations, the people and the revolution — like Castro — are tired and nervous of the change that grows closer.
Cuba’s location, 90 miles from Florida, is its blessing and its curse, locking the country into the close embrace of the United States in a relationship long poisoned by mutual dependence and suspicion.
When Castro made his revolution, in 1959, he had to decide whether to knuckle under or to survive on his wits and the self-interested generosity of the US’s enemies. Nationalism determined the choice. In the 90s, with the collapse of the USSR, Cuba was revealed as a Soviet remittance man, a dependant whose cheques had abruptly ceased, and who had fallen on hard times and was forced to adapt. Now there’s a new economic relationship with China and the oil-rich Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, has stepped up to the plate, giving Castro a late lease of life with which to try to refresh an exhausted revolutionary message.
To the outside world, Castro has played the victim: the subject of the long US economic embargo and periodic, comic-book assassination attempts. In his near half-century of rule, he’s promoted revolution in Latin America, risked nuclear war and despatched troops to Angola.
At home, he’s played the tyrant, his speeches are the closest his people can get to a political definition. But Cubans must live the daily paradox of Castro’s Cuba, in which the civil society of the law and of the citizens’ rights are crushed, while the other civil society — of the informal economy, the parallel world that enables many Cubans to get by — has thrived. Free health and education services reach first-world standards, yet a surgeon moonlights as a bellhop in a tourist hotel to earn hard currency tips.
The signs of Cuba’s long economic decline are everywhere: the picturesque 1950s Chevys rusting on Havana’s streets; the crumbling magnificence of Cuba’s colonial cities; the teenaged prostitutes touting for trade on the Malecón; the professional couple reduced to beggary in a slum, in despair for their children’s future; the ageing intellectual, his library adrift in time, un-replenished since the 50s; the empty shops and the half-filled ration quotas.
These are the visible symptoms of a society paralysed by political control, at once fearful of and dependent on the dictator, arrested in its outward appearance in a moment of separation from the outside world, when 20th-century modernity ceased to hold sway.
Time forced Castro to contemplate — and to attempt to control — the post-Castro era. The outline of the transition arrangements are visible: his marginally younger brother Raul is designated the figurehead of continuity and a small circle of power-holders, whose intentions and loyalties remain undefined, is in place. The US will seek to reassert its dominance. The Cuban exiles will try to seize their long-delayed opportunity. In Cuba, people secretly assemble rafts to hazard the crossing to Florida.
In Florida, exiles are preparing boats for the moment of return to Cuba. The Cuban people, buffeted by their particular geopolitical drama for nearly half a century, sense the gathering of a new storm as the Castro era draws to its close.
—Dawn/The Guardian News Service