It wasn't the greatest persecution of journalists in the past decade. On our
last afternoon in Santa Clara, Captain Gómez of the Interior Ministry
(Minint), and Raphael, the handsome spy, turned up at our lodgings and
informed us that we had an appointment at the police station in ten minutes.
“Be careful who you talk to,” a cigar factory employee had warned two days
earlier during a chat in the town square, “they are here, in ordinary
clothes. They listen and then, prison.” It was then that I noticed Raphael,
in his red and white T-shirt with “Northbrook.com” written on it.
We were interviewed by the two men at a desk under the stairs. I had been seen
writing things down, so was I working as a journalist, though in Cuba on a
tourist visa? No, I lied, my answers being recorded in the blank pages of a
2002 desk diary. Could they see my notebook? They insisted. I showed them a
reserve book in which I had noted T-shirt slogans.
Captain Gómez consulted Raphael in Spanish and reeled off a list of places we
had passed through in our hire car in the previous three days. Either
someone had followed us, or people in the towns had reported our presence,
however fleeting, back to the Minint men - or both. Gómez read me a little
lecture on respecting local customs and let us go.
It was dispiriting, rather than threatening. They had our number and were
watching us, and if we looked too obviously journalistic in the future, or
contacted one of the local dissidents, they would probably do what they had
done to so many others, which was to confiscate their notes and pictures and
put them on the next flight back to Europe.
This has been a fairly consistent pattern since a crackdown on dissidents in
the spring of 2003. Then, 75 independent journalists and organisers of a
petition calling for free elections were charged with subversion, tried
summarily without counsel of their choice and without reporters or diplomats
present and given sentences ranging from six to 28 years' imprisonment. The
European Union responded by imposing diplomatic sanctions upon Cuba, which
were lifted in June 2008 after some of the prisoners were released.
But the suppression of even a fairly mild opposition movement, and the entire
absence of a free press or free expression in Cuba, 50 years on, creates an
almost intolerable irony. The island is festooned with slogans and images of
youthful rebellion and exhortations to support revolution, while anyone who
seems at all rebellious is harassed into silence or jail by the exhorters
themselves. The heroic world, for the young - three quarters of Cubans have
been born since the Revolution - belongs entirely to a dying generation.
There is nothing for them to do but stay quiet and create an existence in
the gap between official rhetoric and the black market.
Jorge, a friend who had seen Che Guevara in the flesh 50 years ago, was
dismissive about the impact of the propaganda. “It's for the babies, not for
the grown-ups. It's very boring,” he replied.
And what about the Che worship? “You see those birds? Every morning they fly
over the town and every evening they come back. . .” And that was the end of
that.
Cuba, however, is not Stalinist Russia, and there are some interim pasts
permitted. In the cavernous Payret cinema in Old Havana, opposite the
wonderful Capitolio building, a mainly black audience was watching the new
big Cuban film. Kagamba tells part of the story, unfamiliar in the
West but very familiar to Cubans, of their country's decade-long and
successful military involvement in the Angolan Civil War. It was a conflict
in which more than 2,000 Cubans died, pro rata a casualty rate matching that
of the Americans in Vietnam. That was back in the days when Cuba punched
above its weight. Now all it has are hurricanes and anniversaries.
Less celebrated, though contemporaneous and equally well known, is what
happened at the port of Mariel, 25 miles from Havana, in 1980 when 125,000
Cubans - including many criminals - were permitted to get on boats for the
United States. This followed riots by what Fidel Castro described as “lumpen
elements” in the capital. Now you enter the scruffy town under bridges
bearing a huge cut-out of Fidel as a guerrilla, and the legend, “Comandante
en jefe, ordene!” (Commander-in-chief, order us!). It is the official
line, repeated in Santa Clara by Gustavo the photographer, that dissidents
are in the pay of the United States, or “the Empire” as Fidel calls it. “It
is more a matter of money than ideas,” Gustavo said. “They get faster visas
and food and stuff sent from the US.” The same argument, familiar from the
days of the Soviet Union, was repeated a few days later by a member of the
Cuban elite in London. “You don't know what you are talking about,” she said
repeatedly, in response to even the mildest questioning of this libel.
I had, she said, been talking to the wrong people. Like the Havana sports
lover who just wanted to see baseball on satellite TV but couldn't because
“the Government is run by stupid people”. Or the car mechanic who growled
that Che had been a murderer, that he hated the Government and wanted to
emigrate - to Angola. Or the mild bookseller who told me that “they think
for us, as though we are children”. He indicated a copy of Fidel's History
Will Absolve Me. “He promised elections in 18 months. Fifty years later
we are still waiting.”
But the glue that has kept Cuban society together has not been socialism, in
which Cubans don't really believe, but a particular form of charismatic
nationalism, in which the bearded David confronts the giant northern
Philistine. And, as is so often the case, it is hard to imagine a series of
policies as counterproductive as those the US has used over the years to
attempt to deal with the Castros, from botched invasions, assassination
attempts, the toleration of anti-Cuban terrorism, to today's trade embargos.
As Gustavo put it, in his comedy photography studio in Santa Clara: “I would
rather have Fidel for life. He's the only leader in the world who can tell
the Americans to f*** off and can get away with it.” Many Cubans have
relatives in Miami. That doesn't mean that they want to be run by Miami.
Fidel's vendettas may seem excessive, with the American interests section
building in Havana now faced off by the ridiculous and ugly Plaza
Anti-imperialista, with its forest of 40ft steel flagpoles set in olive
concrete blocks, like political leylandii (“No photography!” says the
old woman set to guard it), but it expresses a widespread distrust of things Yanqui.
“I want change”, one man told me, “but maybe the exiles will come here, buy
the houses, buy the businesses and then we. . .” he bowed his head “. .
.will be the workers.” He went on: “You know, it isn't so good and it isn't
so bad. The animal is not so fat, but it isn't so thin. People are afraid to
lose even this that they have.” The trouble is that even this that they
have, they may not have much longer. Cuba after the replacement of Fidel by
his brother Raúl has maintained its view that tinkering with the state
monopoly system (or “perfecting” it, as they prefer to call it) will be
sufficient to keep socialism alive. Their Get Out of Jail Free card has been
Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and his subsidies of Cuba through oil exports.
But with the recent fall in oil prices, it is clear that the Venezuelan genie
is in trouble granting one wish, let alone three. So four days ago, Raúl
Castro announced cutbacks in subsidies to Cubans, and hinted at a state raid
on tips earned in the tourist industry. When this was last tried, a year
ago, the popular reaction was outrage.
Today the gerontocracy and its younger tail are stuck for an answer. Substantial
reforms of the economy are bound to lead to income inequalities, as in China
and Vietnam, even if most Cubans end up richer. The socialist part of the
revolution would then be over. Some say that younger technocrats in the
leadership, such as Carlos Lage, the Vice-President , who engineered some
short-lived reforms in the 90s, can encompass the movement of Cuba to a
social democratic capitalist model. But they never provide any evidence for
this.
What has allowed the hardliners to resist reform in the past has been the
deployment of the American threat. No wonder then, that many Cuban
dissidents have embraced the election of Barack Obama, in the belief that he
is a very much more difficult bogeyman to use to frighten Cuba's children
out of change. “Obama, 100 per cent!” one young waiter in a tourist
restaurant said to me, putting his thumb up.
“And if you had an election here?” I asked. He laughed. “Everyone knows the
result of that!” No wonder, too, that the Cuban leadership has been so
downbeat about the new president. What would they use for social
mobilisation if Obama engineered through Congress a relaxation in the trade
embargo, and in visits to Cuba? What would they do if he offered to go live
on Cuban TV and speak to the people?
For many Cubans it is a dream.
For the old guard - as it celebrates the 50th anniversary today - it is
probably a nightmare.
