Fade-Out in Havana : The Cubans Cope With Threadbare Socialism; Will It End With Fidel, El Ultimo?

ANAIS NIN THOUGHT HABANEROS WALKED WITH A “PECULIAR INDOLENCE” WHEN SHE DESCRIBEDthem in her diary in 1922. “It is a slow, dragging step, a deliberate, swinging movement, a gliding serpent-like motion, something speaking indefinably of that characteristic laziness of the tropics and a state of mental apathy, a universal malady of Havana.”

* That’s just how I felt as I pulled myself from barbershop to barbershop in Habana Vieja, the old section of town. The first shop was closed in the middle of the day. Another had a sign out front announcing that its staff was on vacation and wouldn’t return for another week. A third required appointments until the afternoon hours.

* Finally, I found one open on O’Reilly Street. Inside were three chairs, three fans, mirrors the length and width of the shop and clumps of hair on the floor. Roberto Hechavarria nodded to me to sit in his chair. Roberto, in his 60s, gave me a good, basic workingman’s scissors-and-comb job. He used a straight razor to shape up the back and sideburns.

Earlier in the year Roberto had visited relatives in New Jersey , he told one of his waiting customers. “These people, they work all day for $8 an hour, and they get double time on weekends. I spent a day in New York.” He stopped cutting and focused on the Big Apple. “I loved it, the buildings, all that traffic, big crowds and the stores! One day, that was enough. After that, no more.”

Everyone was sociable. No complaints about food availability, no woeful tales of the current crisis--unlike the time, the story goes, that Fidel Castro went to a barber he’d patronized since 1959.

“I’ve been reading about this perestroika and glasnost ,” the haircutter begins, “and I was wondering--”

Fidel cuts him off. “That’s not for us,” and he goes back to reading his morning paper.

A few minutes later the barber again says, “You know, about this perestroika and glasnost --”

Fidel glares at him. “We are at a different stage of revolution. I don’t want to hear about it.” He returns to his newspaper.

Five minutes later the barber ventures, “I just can’t help wondering about this perestroika and glasnost --”

Fidel puts the paper down, turns around and wags his finger. “If you mention those two words again, I’ll have you locked up for 10 years.”

“OK, have it your way, comandante, but it makes my job much easier.”

“Makes your job easier. How?”

“Well, every time I say perestroika and glasnost your hair stands on end.”

I WENT TO CUBA BECAUSE I WAS CURIOUS; BECAUSE NO ONE AGREES ON ITS strengths; because I’d read so much about it; because it is forbidden; because it’s heartbreakingly lovely; because so many people have championed it while so many others have abandoned it; because Cubans make great music and aromatic cigars; because they’ve thumbed their noses at their former patron for more than three decades; because I’d grown weary of writing about Latin American “democracies” where forlorn, illiterate campesinas sit on city street corners selling combs, nail clippers and undervalued handicrafts while their malnourished, barefoot youngsters turn their palms up and say “gimme” instead of learning how to hold a pencil or read a sentence; because of its rich literary tradition; because my favorite players on the Washington Senators in the 1950s were Cuban; because I’m an incurable romantic; because we still have a Navy base there; because Cuban women are astute and alluring; because in the last 500 years of travel writing few cities in the world have been so effusively praised as Havana; because Teddy Roosevelt led the charge up San Juan Hill; because I like “Our Man in Havana” and “The Old Man and the Sea”; because I got a kick out of Desi Arnaz; because I was distrustful of Cuba’s bashers and cheerleaders; because I liked the twinkle in Fidel’s eyes; because I’d never been to a Communist country; because I wanted to learn to rumba; because Columbus landed there; because it has hundreds of miles of unspoiled beaches; because of its mystique.

In 1990, I stayed for six months. As a journalist, I could jump through a loophole in U. S. restrictions on travel to the island, and with the approval of the Cuban writers union I could travel whenever and interview whomever I wanted. I lived in the Focsa building, a monstrous concrete apartment house for foreigners and privileged Cubans a couple blocks from the Malecon, the seductive seaside promenade that lies between the city and the sea.

It wasn’t my first visit. I already counted some Habaneros as friends. In 1989, for instance, I had met a plastic surgeon who headed the city’s Jewish community of 1,000. The doctor, gruff-appearing, in his 50s with a perpetual stogie in his mouth, was quite friendly. His last name was Miller, his ancestors from Lithuania. Mine too. Could we be--? No, too far-fetched. We compared family trees. His father came to the New World in 1924; my grandfather about 30 years earlier. He knew all his Western Hemisphere relatives. We compared Millers, Jews and countries. Hanukkah was only a couple of weeks away, and I had brought a box of Hanukkah candles with me from the States. As we bid each other good night, I offered him the candles. “Here. These are from the North American Millers to the Caribbean Millers.”

His hands trembled slightly as he took them, his face softened, and his eyes moistened. I had doubled the number of candles for his synagogue. “Thank you,” he murmured.

Fidel Castro thinks he’s Jewish. Or at least part Jewish, buried in his past. “Castro” is among the more common names of Marranos, Spanish Jews who took on Christian identity during the Inquisition to avoid certain death at the stake. Fidel mentioned his heritage in private to Ricardo Subirana y Lobo, a chemical engineer and financial backer of the Revolution to whom he gave a diplomatic post in Israel in 1960.

If Castro is a Jew, he’s not a very good one. He doesn’t attend Rosh Hashanah services, nor does he shop at Abraham Berezniak’s kosher meat market on Cuba Street in Habana Vieja.

INSTEAD OF GOING DIRECTLY HOME FROM HABANA VIEJA, I TOOK A BUS--two other passengers paid to board, four didn’t--to San Lazaro Avenue, near where my map showed a little cul-de-sac called Hamel. A friend in the States spells his name similarly, and I thought I’d visit his street. To get to Hamel I passed a Socialism or Death bakery, a building with the likeness of 19th-Century poet and independence leader Jose Marti in the window and a man selling used records. His collection included Bobby Vinton, Mario Lanza, Stevie Wonder and Sammy Kaye.

Hamel was hard to find; it’s hidden in the back streets of the Cayo Hueso neighborhood. A drizzle began to fall through the dusk, and I thought a quick walk-through would be more than sufficient for my purposes. I was already composing a postcard to my friend: “The street with your name is two blocks long, with the obligatory slogans championing the Revolution (rah-rah-rah) and a bodeguita selling rice and other staples. The houses are in severe need of a paint job, and they all have bright flowers on second-story balconies.”

Instead, I was confronted by a mural the length of a football field, overpowering in theme, presence and execution. It was strong enough to physically stop me in my tracks, as if a lightning bolt had welded me to the ground. In a country where almost all public art, especially on walls, looks as if it came from the same brush, this mural on Hamel stood out for its intensity and intimacy.

Swirls of smoke, water, limbs, eyes and roots swarm around feathers, goddesses, serpents and sacrifices. Deities Yemaya and Ochun of the Yoruba sect entwine; others from the Abakua dominate adjoining segments of the mural. The mural illustrates one man’s interpretation of santeria , the slippery and enormously popular religion that is intractably part of the country’s daily life. Afro-Cuban beliefs, which came from what is now Nigeria, have evolved into a tradition firmly rooted throughout Cuba and surrounding lands. A note from the artist, in small letters on the mural’s edge, said the work had been painted from April 21 to July 24, 1990. He had wanted to complete it in time for the July 26 celebration of the 1953 guerrilla assault on the Moncada Barracks, the losing effort that nevertheless signaled the beginning of the Revolution.

A neighbor in a Miami Dolphins jersey came over as I stood admiring the wall. “You like it? It was done by a man on the street here. Originally it was a blank wall. The muchachos painted bad words up there. If you want, I can introduce you to the artist.” Just then a man leaned out of a distant third-floor window above and behind the work. “That’s him right there.”

And so began a warm friendship with Salvador Gonzalez, who takes his influences from santeria , Che Guevara and contemporary art, whose frustrations with his country’s shortcomings match his will to survive in it.

The work had been completed only a few months earlier, and Gonzalez was interested in critiques. Gonzalez, in his early 40s, was ready to spend half the night explaining his art and its inspiration to anyone who would listen. “I started at 10 o’clock every morning and sometimes I didn’t stop until two or three the next morning. After a while, neighbors kept me going with coffee, snacks, even paint, and at night they shined a light to help me work after dark fell. I didn’t have a blueprint or any paper. The bases of my work are the cultos sincreticos ,” santeria ‘s syncretic cults. “I simply did it from my own feelings.”

I asked Gonzalez whether the city had subsidized his elaborate project, but got no answer; he wanted to talk art. “I used an airbrush and a compressor. I’ve done other painting with the same theme. This is my gift to humanity. I bet there isn’t a mural dedicated to Afro-Cuban culture in the United States, is there? I want to show that Afro-Cuban is a living religion, even in a Communist society.”

By this time we were upstairs in his small apartment. His wife, Maritza, a leather worker, brought out some coffee, and we sat on padded wicker chairs next to the window overlooking Hamel.

“Remember, one of the first things you asked me was if the city underwrote this. No. I did it on my own. It’s a noble calling. When you sell your book, you get paid for it. I get paid by the admiration of the people who pass by here. All these people who have talked with me about Afro-Cuban beliefs, I want to help them. They come from all over the world.” He got out his address book with its calling cards from professors and journalists in Europe, the States and Latin America. “But I have never heard from any of them. They film here, they take photographs. I understand there was an article in a German magazine about my work, but I never see these things.

“Is it asking too much that those who take from here should send back a copy of what they’ve done? Sometimes I feel like I live on another planet. The work others do using my help is my only curriculum vitae .”

HAVANA IS FOR WALKING, NO MATter what neighborhood you’re in. The sidewalks are seldom wide enough for people to freely pass each other, but promenading etiquette allows spilling out into the street. The country wears its history in the streets, from plaques commemorating 16th-Century structures to busts of Jose Marti to today’s unimaginative architecture.

No cardboard encampments ringed the city. Crowded neighborhoods such as Centro Habana, in serious need of replastering, replumbing, repainting, rewiring and rebuilding, stood out for their ills, yet the utter absence of people so destitute they had to sleep on the sidewalks was continuously impressive. The few scavengers know to dig in dumpsters near buildings like mine, where foreigners live.

One night at two o’clock I saw a couple of middle-aged women sitting half asleep against a store window on Galiano Street. Could they, I wondered,have been the first indicators of the economy bottoming out? It turned out they lived around the corner. They wanted to be first in line for goods at a women’s apparel shop that they hoped would stock skirts their size when it opened eight hours later. Both women had ration books valid for that store the next morning. Nothing guaranteed that the skirts would be in, or that there’d be a selection of size or color or style--nonetheless, they’d be the first to know.

The complex ration procedure and the declining availability of merchandise reflected poorly on the system. People had little, but everyone had access to about the same amount of little. This system, unlike those of any neighboring countries, had found a roof for everyone, but still couldn’t assure city folk that country food would arrive on time--or at all.

When I first arrived, you could still buy goods for cash, but month after month more and more items were added to the ration book, right down to combs, razor blades and bananas. Bananas rationed in the tropics? Is coal rationed in Newcastle? A woman I know stopped me in the street and said: “Do you know that people are using toothpaste in the countryside to wash their clothes and bodies? ‘ Treinta y dos y P’alante! ‘ “ she spit contemptuously, referring to colorful billboards hailing the 32nd year of the Revolution--”Thirty-two and Onward!”

“Hah!” she snorted. “More like like ‘ Treinta y dos y P’atras! ‘ “--”Thirty-two and in Reverse.”

“I can see rationing in the first few years of the Revolution. Even 10 years. But we’re in the 33rd year of the Revolution and people simply take it for granted. I gave my youth to the country, my most active years. Now I’m in my 50s and we’re still being asked to make sacrifices.”

I had a Tropicola at a sidewalk cafe in Habana Vieja. Earlier I had stood in line half an hour for a slice of pizza. The line crawled along, stopped inexplicably for five minutes, then almost imperceptibly started up again, then came to another halt. I would have to learn Zen to survive in this town.

During the interminable wait you can read, talk with the people around you, eavesdrop, watch Havana street rituals, or daydream. When you’re last in line you feel the whole country in front of you, a sensation that dissipates only when someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “ El ultimo ?”--”Are you the last in line?”

TOMAS FERNANDEZ, A LIBRARIAN who’d helped me with some research, had suffered terribly since we’d last spoken. In the previous three days he had endured the following: A car had run over his dog, and the house where he lives with his mother--he is close to 50--had been burglarized in broad daylight. His best pants were missing, along with a pair of shoes and some shirts. He was the saddest about the loss of a cassette recorder that he used for interviewing subjects for books and some family valuables.

“Did you report it to the PNR?” I asked over dinner, referring to the Policia Nacional Revolucionaria.

“Yes, but they have so many robberies these days.”

“Where was the CDR when you needed it?” I asked. That’s the Comite de Defensa de la Revolucion, the block organization charged with, among other things, keeping an eye out for unusual neighborhood goings-on.

Tomasito had every reason to bad-mouth his CDR. Instead, he took a broader view. “Well, these are the little things we need to do better.”

We spoke of literature, ice cream, religion and sports. The conversation was animated and friendly. We were citizens of the world ventilating its foibles over good food and dark rum. The talk drifted to travel and its pleasures. “Why,” I asked, “does the Cuban government make it so difficult for its citizens to leave the country?” This was the main complaint I had heard so far. Most said they had no intention of abandoning their homeland; they simply wanted to visit different lands.

Up to this point Tomasito had been candid, loyal and revolutionary, critical only in constructive ways. My question, however, drew a silent and sideways smile. It meant that the answer was so clearly fraught with the basic flaws in the system that any response would acknowledge the illusion. The sideways smile is a vital element in Cuba’s facial vocabulary, a reply that by saying nothing says everything. Tomasito’s face slowly returned to normal.

“It’s not that the government doesn’t allow the people to leave,” he said, “it’s that the finances are simply not available. Besides, everything Cubans need is here.”

THE LLAMAMIENTOS, OR “CALLlings” were a series of meetings sponsored by the Communist Party in order to gather proposals for discussions at last year’s party congress. Llamamientos took place at night for neighborhood people, during the day at community centers for retirees, and in workplaces for laborers at every level to make their feelings known. Everyone had an opportunity to attend at least one Llamamiento.

Grass-roots democracy, as the Llamamientos were occasionally called, got off to a terrible start. Most people in this country of wide-ranging private views on everything from the designated hitter to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan simply didn’t feel comfortable speaking out in public. The party acknowledged this, and reissued its call, urging Cubans to bitch away. The only taboo subjects were multi-party government and socialism itself.

I showed up for a neighborhood Llamamiento that drew 75 middle-aged people and took a seat as a woman stood up to state her gripe.

“Now, I’m a Communist and a revolutionary, but we have problems.” She turned to face the audience. “These cutbacks in electricity are unfair. For years, all the neighborhood children have come to my house and used my phonograph and watched my television. I’ve always welcomed them. But now I have to cut back 10% of my electricity. Since I used the most I lose the most. That’s not right”

Another lady spoke about the women’s federation. “It should be restructured. The way it is now, it doesn’t help us.” A man complained about the erratic and poorly maintained public transportation system. “We can’t rely on it. You never know if a bus is coming or not.”

A parliamentarian turned almost every issue raised into a resolution. By the time I left at 11:30 p.m., close to a dozen resolutions had passed, to be sent along with literally hundreds of thousands of others to party headquarters.

Another day, I stumbled onto a street meeting between nearby residents and some officials. A crowd of 100 from the community stood listening to the petty authorities tell them about pending improvements to the neighborhood.

At first I thought this was a meeting of the block Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. “No, no,” the couple at my side said. “This is the local Poder Popular,” the People’s Power Council. “The city is divided into constituencies, and each Poder Popular is responsible for keeping the neighborhood in decent repair. They have regular street meetings like this. We call this grass-roots democracy.”

Does anything result from these assurances?

They gave me the sideways smile.

I PLANNED TO TRAVEL THE 210 miles to Cienfuegos, on the south-central coast, near the Bay of Pigs, by train--see the countryside, chat with passengers, arrive refreshed. This met with approval whenever I mentioned it, though everyone agreed that the rail system was pretty terrible. Then I added that I hoped to take the lechero , the milk run that stops in every two-bit pueblito en route. I might just as well have told them I hoped to swim the English Channel in winter.

“Nobody rides the lechero .” “It’s even less reliable than the regular train.” “Does it still run?” “They put the worst cars on the lechero .” “Don’t be a fool.” “Take the bus.”

“Look” I said, “if I wanted swiftness and efficiency I’d take the train from Zurich to Geneva.”

Once convinced of my intention, they offered advice: “Hold on to your bag the whole time.” “Wear a money belt.” “Don’t forget to bring a bottle of water.”

I arrived at the train station and stood in the usual lines for 2 1/2 hours before the train departed. The cars had slightly padded plastic reclining seats and windows so filthy they could only have been washed a few times since Fidel entered Havana. Shortly after we got under way, a skinny man lugging an enormous bundle walked to the end of the car and, one by one, passengers from all the other cars drifted into ours and queued up.

I did likewise, having learned the custom of quickly joining the back end of a line--” El ultimo? “--without knowing what waited at the front end. A supply of anything was worth the wait. The skinny man opened his bundle and pulled out a large basket of fresh cheese sandwiches. Even on a moving train, lines remained the rhythm machine of Cuban life.

The next afternoon Maria Isabel, head of public relations at the Hotel Jagua in Cienfuegos, invited me for a drink at the bar just off the lobby. She brought along Fefi and Mariela. They were all in their 20s, well spoken and full of smiles, nicely attired. Pretty. Giggly. Almost goofy. The three young women were full of questions. What had I liked most about their country? Least? What movies were popular in the States? Pop singers? Had I heard Paula Abdul’s latest? Had I gotten tired of black beans and rice yet?

Maria Isabel was a militante, a member of the Communist Party. The Young Communists League has taken on the role of cheerleaders who would not seem out of place in a Bud Light commercial. They stage rock concerts in the parks, pop music rallies along the Malecon, parties at the beach. Git down with the Young Commies! They paint walls with Socialismo o Muerte! in colors so electrifying as to awaken the socialist dead.

It was Maria Isabel’s turn to answer questions. “Who do I regard most highly?” A bashful grin crossed her face as she repeated my question. “Well, of course Fidel.” She said his name dreamily, as if she were announcing her new lover.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, DIRE reports filtered out of the country about its spotty success at self-sufficiency. Farmland, now tilled by hand and oxen, yielded fewer crops, and with virtually no gasoline, the harvest made it to the city less frequently. Eight-hour blackouts were common. Darkened streets virtually eliminated front-stoop domino games; Cuba’s essential frivolity suffered perilously.

So I went back to Cuba for a few weeks to see for myself. As the country groped for equilibrium, small, spasmodic indicators of discontent became more public. One Saturday afternoon, pedestrians in Vedado looked up to see thousands of little pieces of paper floating down from the sky. They read “DOWN WITH CASTRO.” Someone had tossed the tissue-thin papers from the top of a tall apartment house.

Within minutes police arrived to gather them up, but not before passers-by scooped up some themselves. The same thing happened in the following weeks. A friend happened by one of the paper drops and, startled, reached out to grab some. I had known him for almost two years, during which he had always shown revolutionary support.

I asked, “Who will have the temerity to tap Fidel on the shoulder and say, ‘ El Ultimo? ‘ “

His face lengthened. “I don’t know. Not anyone any time soon.”