They can’t believe they’re still in Cuba

IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG to figure Cuba out. The whole island is a stage putting on a rather austere production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” What’s hard to figure out, as in the play, is exactly what Cubans are waiting for -- even they don’t know.

But that sense of waiting, of a suspended reality, is as palpable in Havana as is the sticky humidity that corrodes the vintage American cars and the colonial Spanish buildings. Cubans have been waiting, and waiting, for years -- whether it was for the revolution to fulfill its promise or to run its course as a result of the Soviet collapse. Neither has happened, so Cubans are left to await, with a mixture of resignation and grudging respect, the death of Fidel Castro, who has been in power 47 years and turns 80 in August.

But even that begs the “what are we waiting for?” question, because no one quite knows what will happen the day after.

Certainly the day after cannot just be about Raul Castro, my host in Havana. The dictator’s younger brother runs the Cuban military, which in turn runs the tourism industry, making Raul concierge in chief to the hordes of German, British, Spanish and Canadian tourists who flock to Cuba in part to spite Uncle Sam.

In a recent interview with a French journalist, Fidel seemed to dismiss his brother’s future relevance when he pointed out that Raul is only four years younger than he is and that another generation would have to take over at some point. There are a number of other players vying to succeed Fidel -- Vice President Carlos Lage Davila; Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Raul Alarcon, president of the National Assembly -- but assessing their relative chances and merits feels like a trivial pursuit best left to those who can name the last leader of East Germany.

The real question in Cuba is whether the system, in all its kitschy, anachronistic glory, can survive the only leader it has known, the comandante who rode into Havana from the Sierra Maestra 47 to serve as impish nemesis to 10 U.S. presidents (and counting). That’s highly unlikely, and Fidel seems to know it.

His harsh crackdown of recent years -- rounding up dissidents and reversing timid steps toward a market economy -- is driven by his desire to ensure that Cuba’s socialism outlasts him. But the man who famously declared that “history will absolve me” when tried by his predecessor half a century ago must know that history will catch up with this island.

“We are more fidelistas than socialists,” says Lizardo Gomez, a veterinary student at San Jose University, located on the outskirts of Havana. Gomez is an earnest believer in the principles of the revolution, but he concedes that Cuba is unlikely to be a socialist nation in five to 10 years. He thinks Fidel’s successors will be able to muddle through for a year or two, but after that, who knows?

He says all this in the back seat of my rental car on the way to the city of Cienfuegos -- the throngs of hitchhikers such as Gomez and the obligation to pick them up are among the charms of revolutionary solidarity.

CASTRO LIKES to bask in his “Bolivarian” partnership with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and he points to the rise of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to suggest hemispheric trends are going his way. But it’s self-delusional for him to ignore the fact that these and other Latin American leftists were elected, and that their cities remain teeming bastions of private consumerism, while in Cuba you’d better not lose your rationing card if you want that bar of soap you are entitled to every three months.

Cuba’s nightly newscast loves to show fellow Latin Americans rallying against free-trade agreements with the U.S. The goal, once again, is to reinforce the notion that events are going Cuba’s way, but the message is mixed.

“If only we could protest spontaneously like that here,” says Eliezer, a bookseller in Havana, echoing a common refrain among Russians exposed quarter of a century ago to scenes of anti-nuclear protests in Western Europe. “The trouble with this country,” he goes on to say, presumably ignoring the thousands of compatriots who brave the Straits of Florida each year, “is that no one is willing to die for freedom.”

Eliezer sells some risque material in his bookshop, but he says the way to stay out of trouble is to not get air-conditioning (a bourgeois comfort that might raise suspicions), stay off the Internet and never learn English. That’s quite a survival guide.

Over in Havana’s Miramar district, Natalia Bolivar, a prominent intellectual, says: “This is a mystery island where we all manage to get by fine, thank you, despite such absurdly insufficient rations like a monthly pound of chicken. We all are scamming something, paying a high price to live in the land we love.” Her survival guide: surround yourself with art, music and other forms of escapism.

A collective incredulity that dulls the imagination is afflicting the island nation’s 11 million inhabitants, akin to the “I-can’t-believe-I’m-still-here” exasperation Bill Murray’s character felt in the movie “Groundhog Day.” Cuba’s news radio station is called Radio Reloj, featuring a clock’s jarring second hand ticking between its propagandistic vignettes, as if to convince the audience that time is actually passing.

Most people seem to know that they are living in a Stalinist theme park -- albeit a somewhat whimsical Caribbean version in which the customs agents who grill you wear fishnet stockings and irrepressible salsa tunes still waft. But Cubans no longer dare speculate how they will transition back into the real world.

Church officials worry that much violence, of the spontaneous score-settling variety, is in store. Diplomats speculate about possible “precipitating events,” beyond the obvious one of Fidel’s passing. A botched hurricane response, a la Katrina? Too many blackouts during this “year of the energy revolution”? You never know. What became the tragedy of China’s Tiananmen Square was triggered by the death of an ousted reformer, and protests tied to a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev in the fall of 1989 helped bury East Germany.

The U.S. embargo against Cuba has long provided Castro a convenient, all-purpose scapegoat. Yet compared to a previous visit 14 years ago, I am struck by the extent to which the drama unfolding here, or yet to unfold, is no longer about us.

Yes, most Cubans I met are bitter that Washington wants to make their lives more difficult, but on the whole they don’t hold the United States responsible for their hardship.

Even Castro is downplaying the siege theme these days. He must be torn between wanting to gloat that he has stared down the empire and not giving up his scapegoat entirely. In one of his trademark marathon speeches last November, commemorating the 60th anniversary of his admission to the University of Havana -- hey, any excuse will do -- Castro said Cuba would never become a colony again: “This country can self-destruct; this revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”

THE REGIME is busy rooting out corruption and what it calls “ideological vulnerability,” meaning it doesn’t want to be seduced by the types of economic reforms that China’s communist leaders have wholeheartedly endorsed. Castro’s Chinese comrades are wagering that large doses of economic freedom will keep people so content that the Communist Party will be able to retain its monopoly on political power. Castro worries that once you cede too much autonomy to the private marketplace, your political monopoly is doomed.

Private businesses, and there were never many in Cuba, are being shut down, and Castro no longer allows U.S. dollars to circulate. Angel, a former fisherman who works as a government inspector of neighborhood bodegas that distribute the subsidized rations, acknowledges his country is a mess. “How are people supposed to live on a half-pound of beef a month?” he asks, pointing to his rationing card. He thinks it’s unconscionable that the regime won’t allow people to open up their own stores if they want.

As we sit in his cramped apartment, he shows off his pirated CD collection and offers me a Beck’s beer that he obtained because in his position people like doing him favorcitos.

The regime’s propaganda has become more muted in recent years, at least judging by the public billboards around Havana. Posters that once boasted that “we owe everything” to the revolution are now deemed perilously double-edged. So most billboards now bash the U.S. for jailing Cubans accused of spying, and for supposedly giving safe haven to Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro militant who stands accused of a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner and who is being held on immigration charges in Texas, pending a resolution of his deportation proceedings.

Cuba’s more uplifting propaganda is about Castro’s foreign policy, which is all about turning the country into another Doctors Without Borders. Some 25,000 Cuban doctors are on missions overseas, and not a day seems to go by without more needy, grateful patients being flown in for treatment.

That may win some hearts and minds elsewhere, but Castro’s impulse to dispatch doctors around the globe is creating a backlash at home. “It’s all very admirable,” says Angel, “but we are a poor nation that cannot afford this at a time when medicines are scarce here.”

THE UNITED STATES, for its part, must come up with a new strategy to win over hearts and minds in Cuba as it prepares to engage Castro’s successors. Even if the administration refuses to lift the ill-advised embargo, it should find a way to convince ordinary Cubans that their fellow baseball-playing nation -- an older sibling, by virtue of culture and history -- does not mean them harm. Creating a widely trumpeted, multibillion-dollar transition investment fund to aid Cuba once it has a democratic government would be a good start.

In the meantime, Cubans continue to wait. No experience is more emblematic of life in Havana these days than standing in line to enter the iconic Coppelia ice cream parlor in the Vedado district, a flying-saucer-like structure in the middle of a park. Uniformed guards manage the lines that converge on it from six directions. My first attempt to enter was thwarted by a cop plucking me out of the line and insisting that I go to an adjacent hard-currency ice cream stand, where there was no wait. But the next night the confusion of a tropical storm helped me gain entrance into the high temple of Cuban ice cream.

As luck would have it, I shared a table with two soldiers, Mario and Ramon, on leave and clearly mortified to be sharing a table with a foreigner. A waitress hurriedly dispensed bowls of an orangy-vanilla ice cream -- no choice here -- covered in chocolate sauce.

My tablemates each downed three of the bowls, and chided me for having only one after waiting in line for so long. “It’s OK, it was worth it,” I say truthfully, not because the ice cream was any good, but because I hadn’t known what awaited me inside.

I hope most Cubans find their wait worthwhile too.