New Freedoms in a More Open Cuba

Back in the decadent decades before Fidel Castro’s Communist Party took power and outlawed elitism, the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club was the very symbol of Cuban wealth and exclusivity.

Its aristocratic parties were renowned in the ‘40s, its pristine beach reserved for members and its 18-hole golf course off limits even to most tourists. So exclusive was the Biltmore that Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista is said to have been denied membership because of his ethnic roots.

But now, just in time for the 40th anniversary of Castro’s New Year’s Day victory over Batista, the same Communist regime that seized the Biltmore in the name of the people four decades ago and turned it into a public school has announced that the club is reopening its doors.

“Welcome to Exclusivity,” declared the headline announcing the new Club Havana in the state-run weekly magazine Options, which reported this month that the vintage 1928 beachfront property has been judiciously renovated to match the old country club.

Already, the new magazine reported, more than 90 prospective members have pledged an annual fee of $1,500 each. The catch: The Club Havana is for foreigners only, which is just as well. Most Cubans were scraping together what few extra dollars they had for Friday’s celebration of Christmas, which this month became an official holiday for the first time since 1969.

Club Havana and the return of Christmas are vivid symbols of the rapid economic and social changes in Cuba 40 years after the revolution and nearly a year after Pope John Paul II’s historic call here for the island nation to open to the world, and the world to open to Cuba.

As these anniversaries approach, government officials, Communist Party members, religious leaders and average Cubans interviewed here attribute the changes less to the pope’s visit last January than to the extreme measures that Cuban leaders have had to take to maintain their socialist system in the seven years since the collapse of the nation’s Soviet benefactor.

Here they call it, simply, the globalization of the Cuban state.

Most agreed that John Paul’s visit opened a new, although subtle, social space. The papal tour included televised homilies in which the pope stunned most Cubans by criticizing the nation’s moral decay and lack of political freedom, as well as the punishing U.S. economic embargo imposed on the island more than three decades ago.

Catholic Church Wins New Freedom

Although police continue to detain anti-government protesters who defy the regime in the streets, many Cubans now openly criticize government policies, even among near-strangers, in the privacy of their homes. The host of one recent dinner party here half-jokingly posted a sign beseeching: “Talking about what’s going on is prohibited.”

The pope’s visit also helped win new freedom and power for Cuba’s Roman Catholic Church, which has transformed itself from a pre-revolution bastion of the rich into a more populist institution in the years since the Communist Party seized church lands, closed religious schools and barred Christian believers from party ranks.

In the past few months, the government has granted visas to about 40 foreign priests and nuns, who will help extend the church’s reach in Cuba. It has permitted small expansion projects for parish churches and allowed a major religious procession here in the capital. State radio even gave 15 minutes of national air time Friday to Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s Christmas address, his second radio program since the papal visit.

“These are steps. What is essential is the institutionalization of change, like with the Christmas holiday,” Boston Cardinal Bernard Law, an influential clergyman with close ties to the Cuban church, said during a recent visit here. “It’s not enough to grant concessions.”

Orlando Marquez, spokesman for Cuba’s Catholic Church, added in a recent interview: “After about 40 years of difficulties in the relations between the government and the church, we have seen little steps in the last few months. But after all these years, it’s not so easy to change the attitude and the structure of society itself in just a few days.

“We need more changes--not only the church, but all of society.”

Concerns Over Social, Economic Disparity

For church leaders and most Cubans interviewed here, believers and nonbelievers alike, the more immediate concern is not religious. It is the emerging social and economic disparity caused by Cuba’s cautious market reforms and limited free enterprise. Even party members concede that reforms could threaten some of the revolution’s greatest achievements.

In fact, party officials say--and church leaders agree--that the papal visit was just a step in the opening of Cuba to global markets and ideas, which was born less of ideology than of economic necessity caused by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the loss of the billions of dollars in Soviet aid that had helped finance Cuba’s universal free education, medical care and basic staples of life.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba turned to foreign investment in tourism and other sectors. That private investment has helped pay for the socialist system as well as brought millions of new European and North American visitors to Cuba and funded scores of new construction projects, such as the new Club Havana, to cater to them.

To raise additional capital in the mid-1990s, the government legalized ownership of dollars and sanctioned a limited, taxpaying private sector. That created new incentives and aspirations, which most Cubans agree are transforming society--for good and ill.

Some of the doctors who helped create one of the Western Hemisphere’s best and cheapest medical-care systems are quitting to drive taxis and run small restaurants, earning wages, in dollars, worth 10 times their old state-paid peso salaries. Teachers who are part of an educational system that has produced 100% literacy are giving up state salaries of just $10 a month to become bartenders and waiters at tourist hotels, some earning $10 from tips in an hour.

Prostitution, drug trafficking and street crime--largely unknown in Havana less than a decade ago--were so widespread two months ago that police launched a continuous crackdown, shutting down all discotheques and saturating streets with anti-crime patrols.

One of the Communist Party’s most candid public assessments of these changes appeared this month when the party’s youth wing released a document that framed debate at the Young Communists’ Union national congress. The union is the party’s traditional breeding ground for future leaders and members, as well as a key barometer of the party’s image and weight in society.

Membership in the youth wing, it was reported, is down; one in six Cubans between 15 and 29 is a member. The number of young militants who join the party when they turn 30 also has decreased.

Youth wing leader Otto Rivero opened the conference by declaring to Castro, who was in attendance: “The youth will not let you down, nor will it let our people down.” Yet the meeting’s central document offered what most Cubans viewed as a humbling, though accurate, critique of growing decay in their society.

“The introduction of elements of capitalism, both in production and services, foreign investment and tourism, with its destructive results, were bitter steps that have brought inevitable social inequalities,” the document declared.

“There have been outbreaks of individualism, deviations associated with prostitution and other social evils. These manifestations of retrogressive values generally are leading to corruption, the emergence of new vices, the increase in crime: social deformations that hurt the younger generation first.”

A recent issue of the union’s weekly newspaper, Rebel Youth, featured a cartoon that underscored a new sense of frustration and cynicism among youth. It showed a fat reptile on an overstuffed chair, a glass of brandy in hand, a smile on its face and a cigar clenched in its teeth, with the words: “It’s fabulous. You only have to think about ‘Sir’ and speak about ‘Comrade.’ ”

Changing Rules Bring Frustration

A wedding this month at an aging and neglected Catholic church in the capital’s historic Old Havana district gave human faces and words to those frustrations--and to the role that religion is playing in helping some young Cubans cope.

Every pew of the cavernous Maria Auxiliary Church was packed, and the priest noted from the altar: “It is a great testimonial, and it is very important to recognize, that these two Christian young people, through their love, have done what only the pope could do before. They have filled this church.”

But after what was once a rare sight here--a traditional Catholic wedding, right down to the psalms and vows--guests gathered in an upstairs room for cake, juice and a candid chat about their lives today.

Most were in their 20s. They included artists, teachers, musicians and students, and all asked that their names not be used for fear of affecting their futures.

“The biggest problem for us is that we’re just living day to day,” said a 28-year-old friend of the groom, a high school teacher who recently left his state job to tutor better-off children for dollars. “And the rules seem to be changing so fast, we don’t know what will be right or wrong tomorrow.”

Added an art student: “Before, things were clear. The revolution brought us dignity for the first time in our history. It gave us education, better health care and safe streets. There were clear goals and rules to live by.

“But now, it seems like everything has changed, like it’s changing every day. Much of the security that once was there is gone now.”

Everyone in the small circle of friends had a recent crime story to tell. They shook their heads at the growing problem of prostitution. And they saw the church almost as a refuge, which they felt the pope’s visit had enshrined and empowered.

“For me, the first thing that really touched me since the pope came here was the government’s decision about Dec. 25, making it a holiday again,” the former teacher said. “Until then, it was as if the score between the non-Christians and the Christians was 10-0. With this, I feel like after more than 30 years, we finally won a point.”

Even outside the Catholic Church, there are similar voices of confusion and frustration among youth.

Cubans Face New Temptations

Another former teacher, who quit to work as a bartender in a state-owned hotel because it increased his salary tenfold, said he turned to the island’s traditional Afro-Cuban Santeria religion to help see him through the rapid and often contradictory changes, which the government officially calls “the special period.”

He said he’s studying to be a babalao, a Santeria priest, because to do so reinforces moral values that shield him against new temptations.

“I could make $300 a day selling ganja or cocaine, but that’s against my religion now,” he said, asking not to be identified by name. “I don’t blame the government for the way things are. They only changed the rules because the world’s new realities forced them to.

“Look, I don’t know who to blame. All I know is that I don’t know what the future will be. I just live day to day. What was, isn’t anymore. What is, is very difficult to understand. And what will be, no one knows.”