| Picture
gallery: Cuba today |
El Hombre Nuevo Santa Clara, in the Cuban midlands, is the city of Che. He
wasn't born here, nor did he die here, but exactly 50 years ago he captured
Santa Clara for the Revolution and the Revolution rewarded him posthumously
with a mausoleum, under which lie his remains.
Today tourists, often already wearing their Che T-shirts, fall stickily out of
their coaches and wander around the memorial, accompanied everywhere by the
Che music seeping out of the loudspeakers. Cubans, though addicted to
pictorial T-shirts, tend not to wear Che - perhaps because he's too
expensive, perhaps because they, too, have noticed his resemblance to Roddy
McDowall in Planet of the Apes. You are more likely to see an ancient man on
a bike proclaiming that “girls just want to have fun”.
Guevara would not have approved. In 1965 Che, in his role as revolutionary
thinker within a socialist state, wrote a book introducing the concept of El
Hombre Nuevo, the New Man, who would be unselfish, communal and moral rather
than material. Half a century after the revolution it doesn't seem unfair to
look for the new Cuban man in and around Santa Clara.
Back then, when Cuba was far more rural, Jorge's father was a
pro-revolutionary campesino (peasant farmer) in the pleasant country north
of the city, and when the Revolution was declared, father and young son came
to see Che at the one tall building in the city, the hotel, now the
lime-green Santa Clara Libre.
The city-dwelling Jorge jumped at the chance to go back to where he was born
and where some of his relatives still live. On a dirt road near the village
of Las Posas he pointed out the overgrown remains of his school, built in
1963, and abandoned in 1990, as the sugar industry declined and the rural
population fell. From time to time we'd meet people along the road,
invariably men, invariably friendly and invariably over 70.
A mile on, up a hill past some mango trees, was Jorge's uncle's house, next to
a field where they had first played baseball in 1934. There the uncle, a
bare-chested, moustachioed man of 86, still farmed a few hectares, kept a
pig or two and lived in a thatched bohio, a four-room shack, with his
daughter, her husband and his nine-year-old grandson.
Rum was served in a cut-off measuring bottle. “We have to watch the animals
all the time,” the uncle said of the farming. “Since 1990, if someone sees
an animal unattended ...” He made the universal sign of theft.
So has life been good since the Revolution? Jorge immediately changed the
subject, later explaining: “He was opposed to the Revolution so it was
better not to talk.”
Cuba, a country with the best agricultural land in the region, imports much of
its food, and something like half of the available land goes untended. The
state formally owns everything, farms cannot be bought and sold, farm
workers may not be privately employed and farm equipment is hard to get hold
of. After Fidel formally stood down to be replaced by Raúl, his
septuagenarian brother, last February, a land reform was announced whereby
unused state land could be worked by private individuals but it was hard to
see, given the other restrictions, how they could do much with it.
Ownership, or the absence of it, defines the Revolution. It is egalitarian to
allocate poor families to a large, stucco mansion in the Havana suburb of
Vedado. But the broken shutters, fallen plaster and plastic sheeting relay
the moral that a poor family in a large house is, eventually, a poor family
in a ruin.
Houses may not be sold, so Cubans wanting to move attempt to swap them, an
exercise in frustration that is occasionally made easier by illegal
exchanges of money. If you stay put you have to ask permission of the
authorities to create extra bedrooms - permission that is often denied
because that could take you past what is deemed necessary for a family.
The result is that, while there are variations in wealth in Cuba, they are
nothing like Britain or even Scandinavia. There are no obviously super-rich,
very few smart cars, almost no mobile phones, no gadgets, and dwellings run
from hovels to lower-middle class.
However, what differences there are, Cubans feel acutely. There is free
healthcare, but often no bandages or loo paper in hospitals, or the drugs
prescribed at the clinic just cannot be found. The person earning that
little bit more may afford these things, whereas their neighbour goes
without.
In a cool, dark, front room off the Santa Clara Boulevard sat Gustavo the
photographer, who drew me into conversation. In his late 30s, but looking
younger, Gustavo was a massive fan of Fidel, a great supporter of the system
and massively contemptuous of America. But what was also apparent about
Gustavo was his envy. First of those millions of Cubans in receipt of
remittances from relatives living abroad, and mostly in Florida. “They don't
want to work,” he said, sitting forward from his armchair, “They get money
out of nothing! One hundred dollars a month! They can go into a bar and
order 50 beers! But my wife gets just $40 a year, from her uncle in
Florida.” Forty dollars is the equivalent of three months' average wages.
Then Gustavo spoke about a “friend” who ran a paladar, one of the few
family-run private restaurants. “He gets thousands of pesos a year. And
another man, he has built a new house. Well, I say, ‘good for you if you are
not f*****g anyone',” in a tone that suggested otherwise.
I'd already been told about this mentality back in Havana. “You have a car,
you have nice trousers, someone makes a report,” a physiotherapist had said.
The “report” would go to the officials of the local Committee for the
Defence of the Revolution, a sort of Neighbourhood Watch for watching the
neighbours. The CDRs (whose symbols and wall murals are everywhere) were
originally imagined as a form of vigilance against subversion; today they
are everywhere understood as a form of social control.
A local CDR maintains a book listing everyone in its area, and everyone must
register by law with the CDR.
If your CDR doesn't like you it can harass you, stop your children getting a
place at university, prevent you being employed in the tourist industry or
get your licence to run a private restaurant or pensione denied.
“Since the 90s it's been very bad,” a paladar owner said. “They see you out
shopping and want to make an investigation. So you have to go to the CDR and
do a duty, because if you do not do something with them, you are against
them.”
Gustavo is unworried by such bourgeois anxieties. He hangs out in the front
with his mates, while his wife brings up their daughter behind. They won't
have another child, says Gustavo, until the world is a better place, but he
himself needs nothing more. He likes being in a place where people are
equal. So what about the effects of the tourist industry? “Ah,” he laughs,
“this is where Fidel is so clever! The foreign companies come in but the
Cuban Government owns the hotels! There are no blocked beaches, no
‘off-limits' for Cubans. We make the rules.”
We tested out Gustavo's contention the next day, driving northwest out of
Santa Clara, towards the “fishing village” of Caibarién, and then along a
50km causeway to Cayo Santa Maria, one of the newest resorts. As we got on
to the causeway there was a checkpoint, where we had to show our passports
and pay 4 CUC (Cuban convertible pesos), equivalent to ten days' wages, just
to drive to the Cayo. There, on the islands, were four huge hotel complexes,
three operated by the Spanish Sol Meliá company. Without reservations
(beyond the means of any Cuban) we could not access the hotel grounds, and a
ditch and a bank separated the road from the fabulous beach, along which
strolled naked tourists.
At 3pm the Cuban hotel workers finished their shift, departed through the
service gate (with its revolutionary inscription), climbed aboard Chinese
Yutong coaches, and headed back along the causeway to be dropped off at the
decaying boxy flats in Caibarién and at stops all the way to Santa Clara. As
they went they would pass the coaches of tourists returning from their
afternoon trip to the Che memorial.
“The tourists think it's very romantic,” said Jorge, who lives with the
constant worry that the authorities are spying on him for wanting to make
something of himself.
“Oh you live like we did 50 years ago, it's so good ...'. But what about our
lives?” Jorge, it is fair to say, is not a New Man.
The revolutionary road
“Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school”
“The Vanguard has its eyes fixed on the future and its reward ... The prize is
the new society in which individuals will have different characteristics:
the society of communist human beings”
“Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honours - such
honours as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is
that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage”
“What we must create is the human being of the 21st century”
“The present is a time of struggle; the future is ours”
“Our task is to prevent the current generation, torn asunder by its conflicts,
from becoming perverted and from perverting future generations”
“...the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”
Sources: Socialism and Man in Cuba by Che Guevara, copyright Ocean Books
