Island that Dared (49 page)

Twice Irma invited me into her shadowy bed-sitter, stuffed with heavy dark furniture. ‘I like to practise my English while I tell you my thoughts for Cuba’s future. We must mend fences with Washington, it’s for our gain. We’re always America-oriented, even before 1898. Talking about a
love-hate
relationship is silly, it’s not that complicated. We only hate what all US administrations have done and tried to do. I remember how it was when thousands of Soviet helpers lived in ghettoes, more than twelve thousand technicians and soldiers with families. All stayed separate – schools,
apartment
blocks, restaurants, sports and social clubs – no dating or
intermarriage
. Even the children couldn’t bother to learn Spanish, we had to learn Russian or use interpreters. All the Party’s “eternal friendship” rhetoric got very boring. If those helpers were
Yanquis
, and Washington respected us, we’d have made real friends. See our young now, loving US films, music, clothes, IT gear – food if they could get it! But don’t be fooled, they’d not like the flavour of a US puppet government. That’s the message the State Department can’t hear.’

Irma had high hopes of Carlos Lage Davila as a fence-mender. ‘He’s a good sort of age, mid-fifties, experienced but vigorous. A physician by training but by nature a very smart economist – and in touch with public feeling. He knows millions of Cubans are just dying to set up private enterprises and Cuba needs them all. Too bad if some people get richer than others – that’s the way of the world though Fidel won’t have it.’

I felt a little buzz of shock as on touching a defective lamp switch. To hear
el comandante
named in a sentence implying censure is extremely unusual; in my case it happened twice in four months. As though to prove herself a sound nationalist Irma added, ‘Martí believed a country of small property-owners is a truly rich country. I agree, I’m not wanting the corporations back.’

Juan arrived early on the Saturday morning, bringing sunshine with him, and after breakfast we strolled in Casino Campestre, Cuba’s biggest city park, blessed by two rivers – the Juan del Torro and the Hatibonico – and magnificently wooded. Each mighty tree is meticulously labelled in Spanish and Latin and many of the thick contorted roots extend twenty or thirty feet overground, seeming quite separate from their trunk. One set coiled down to the narrow Hatibonico – then reappeared on the far bank. Monuments to local notables abound and parents wishing to relax in the
cerveza
tent may safely dump children in an immense playground, carefully fenced. A vigilant superintendent sits in a wooden hut by the only entrance gate and allows small children to leave only with the adults who deposited them.

Juan had lived in English-speaking countries for several years and our mutual friend had described him as ‘a new breed of dissident, over-loyal to Revolutionary ideals’. When his criticisms of certain ‘joint ventures’ with foreign investors were too widely repeated, he was asked to retire early. He knew exactly where he would like to see the ‘new Cuba’ going and lamented its already being off in the opposite direction.

Listening to Juan’s development of this theme, I understood why our mutual friend had identified us as kindred spirits. He longed for a Cuba that looked ahead, recognising the long-term significance of the Special Period’s achievements.

‘We’ve been there,’ said Juan. ‘We’re an important example because we’ve survived. We’ve proved a people thrown back on their own resources, without warning or outsiders’ aid,
can
survive. The Revolution’s greatest achievement was not ousting Batista but quietly making an alternative plan after the Soviet collapse. We’ve adapted to having to go backwards, which is how even the US will have to go one day not so far off.’

‘But,’ I objected, ‘you weren’t really without warning. Fidel foresaw the collapse ahead of most world leaders. And isn’t tourism outside aid? And how many Cubans are willing to continue going backwards? Adapting to a temporary crisis is different.’

Juan believed that the majority could be educated to accept a
permanently
‘green’ society. ‘If Fidel had twenty more years he could make them proud of that!’ In 2006, when the World Wildlife Fund singled Cuba out as ‘the only country now developing sustainably’, Juan was not surprised. Obviously horse-buses and ox-ploughs can contribute more to solving the world’s environmental problems than ‘new technologies’. We agreed that the technologists who made so much of the mess can’t reasonably be expected to clean it up while maintaining the value of shares. Do the world’s corporate and political leaders really believe that this is possible? ‘Maybe they have to fool themselves,’ said Juan, ‘or they’d get scared. Going backwards doesn’t protect power and profit!’

By then we had retreated to the
cerveza
tent though its few torpid table fans did nothing to relieve the humidity. Opening our Buccaneros, Juan deplored the nature of Venzuela’s industrial aid: a petro-chemical factory, a monster cement factory, an expanded nickel-smelting plant – ‘How
will our sustainability look in 2010?’ Given the urgent need for more consumer goods, to replace essentials worn out or broken, President Chavez’s petro-dollars should be used, argued Juan, to set up little factories, here and there around the island, providing jobs for redundant sugar workers.

In Casino Campestre, as elsewhere, T-shirts saying ‘VIVA Chavez!’ and baseball caps inscribed ‘Venezuela’, were now popular amongst all age groups. Juan commented on Cuba’s feeling much less isolated in recent years, partly as a result of Fidel’s reception (an unprecedented
demonstration
of affectionate respect) at the momentous Mercosur summit ten days before his illness struck. Latin American leaders are, understandably, better informed than any others about Cuba’s revolution and the reasons why its humane social policies go with varying degrees of repressive authoritarianism. Juan added, ‘Che should be here to feel how the Latin American currents are moving – even after his death he stayed powerful. Who said “You can kill a man but not an idea”? It’s a favourite Fidel quote, I should remember the source.’

We talked then about the adjective ‘communist’ as incessantly deployed to confine Cuba to an ideological territory despised throughout the capitalist world. Even now its Cold War accretions make the average reader/listener/viewer recoil, while putting a gloss on anti-Castroism per se. I recalled how my generation grew up hating and fearing
Communism
; the Cold War distorted international relations for most of my lifetime – beginning when I was fourteen, ending when I was sixty. In Roman Catholic Ireland it was easy to instil a loathing of atheistic Russia where churches were desecrated, children taught to revile God, priests and nuns slaughtered and raped (‘violated’ was the 1950s word). We didn’t hear anything about the Russian Orthodox Church’s sometimes lethal detestation of Roman Catholicism: that would have spoiled the picture. Personally I had decided by the age of eighteen that Christianity (or any institutional religion) was not for me; yet I abhorred Soviet Russian’s dogmatic and brutal atheism. (Fidel was surely right – ‘Every people in the history of the human race has had some diffused
religiousness
’.) Then, with the Cold War’s ending, came a persistent sleight-
of-tongue
campaign. ‘Socialism’ was disgraced, defeated, dead; deliberately ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ were and are used as synonyms – confusing a generation, making them all the more reluctant to challenge the morality of Capitalism Rampant.

With sudden vehemence Juan exclaimed, ‘There was
no
Cold War! It
was an arms race that only the richest could win. And communism wasn’t defeated in Russia – like Gandhi said about Christianity, it would be a great system if someone tried it.’

‘That depends,’ I said, ‘on what you mean by “communism”. But I agree the Cold War was phoney.’ And then we marvelled at the Western public’s gullibility – its sheer want of common sense – throughout those decades. Picture the Soviet Union in 1945, gutted by its contribution to defeating Nazism – at least twenty million dead, the economy in ruins. The notion that within the foreseeable future that country could – or would want – to invade Western Europe or anywhere else was insane. But it was a notion dear to the military-industrial complex’s heart, the best possible fertiliser to keep ‘defence budgets’ growing.

Juan described Cuban Socialism as ‘a more authentic popular
movement
’ then the Soviet version ever was. Yet even friends of the Revolution, he complained, didn’t recognise – or misinterpreted – its genuinely populist foundation while critics ascribed Fidel’s mass support to authoritarian manipulation. ‘It’s the other way round,’ asserted Juan. ‘Fidel’s mass support gave a permit for authoritarianism – or what looks like it.’

My negative reaction to the word ‘populist’ brought a quick assurance that Fidel was a populist leader in the best sense, the ordinary Cubans’ spokesman and facilitator, someone so directly linked to the populace and who empathises so strongly with them that he can voice their deepest wishes and often unexpressed thoughts. When Juan asked, ‘Do you know Ernesto Laclau?’ I shook my head.

‘You should read him, an Argentine political theorist, I did my thesis on him. He says there can be no socialism without populism and the highest form of populism can only be socialist. I believe that.’

Scornfully Juan dismissed those who make fun of Fidel’s long speeches. Such oratorical marathons were, he insisted, an essential ingredient of a populist leader’s relationship with his followers. Mysteriously, over the years, those apparent monologues had had the effect of dialogues, strengthening the bond between speaker and audience while creating a powerful collective identity among vast crowds. Moreover, outsiders didn’t appreciate how often Fidel’s speeches from podiums or on TV were reinforced by leisurely conversations with ordinary individual workers or small groups. Until shortly before his illness, he regularly toured all the provinces, listening to the populace no less attentively than he used to listen, in his guerrilla days, to the Sierra Maestra
campesiños
. ‘Remember,’ said Juan, ‘we’re not talking about blind, stupid followers. The populist
leader and the populace are interdependent. That’s why Gaitan said, “I am not a Man, I am the People”.’

Soon after Jorge Gaitan’s famous declaration, in April 1948, the
Columbian
oligarchy used assassination to abort his revolution. Then Argentina’s Colonel Peron foretold, ‘That country will not return to normality for fifty years’. An understatement, as Juan pointed out. ‘It’s now sixty years and no normality in sight.’

Juan was an unusual Cuban in several respects, not least in his
willingness
to speculate with a foreigner about the future of Cuban Socialism.

‘So where,’ I wondered, ‘does all you’ve said leave Castroism post-Fidel?’

Juan didn’t feign optimism. He had a sharp-edged (or simplistic?) vision of the Revolution as a noble project demeaned by Sovietisation. ‘
Communism
wasn’t – isn’t – our problem.
Sovietisation
is still holding us back.’ This idiosyncratic
fidelista
went on to define Sovietisation as a worse handicap, during Cuba’s present critical transition stage, than the US embargo which only has practical consequences. He diagnosed ‘intellectual paralysis’ within the Sovietised bureaucracy, just when new thinking is needed to protect the Revolution’s gains and build on the unity Fidel’s populism achieved. He condemned the habitual use of stale Soviet-speak – a considerable irritant to the younger generation, a signal that their leaders feared to ‘think new’. Meanwhile they were ‘acting new’, compromising with capital, openly looking to China as their model. At that point Juan shuddered – visibly, physically shuddered. After a moment’s pause he said, ‘China mixes the worst of both worlds, capitalist greed with communist tyranny. Odd how we don’t hear Washington demanding “free and fair elections” before trading with those tyrants.’

Plainly Juan’s recent ‘career change’ had inflicted a deep wound, been traumatic enough to distort his perception of Cuba on the cusp, a country with no alternative but to compromise Revolutionary ideals. I urged him to look on the bright side. What Washington had been dreading for years – a smooth transfer of power to Fidel’s designated successors – was now a
fait accompli.
The friends I had contacted since my return spoke of their new collective leadership with pride; even those most critical of corruption, inefficiency, bureaucracy and chronic shortages were not at all eager for US ‘help’. The ‘intellectual paralysis’ could, I suggested, be overcome in time by the new leadership. Professor Fred Halliday, an occasional advisor to the Cuban Foreign Ministry since the early 1980s, described in 2000 ‘an impressive group: witnesses of four decades of revolutionary upheaval and
international drama, familiar with the leaders and inner workings of the Cuban state, well-travelled, committed to the broad aims of the Cuban revolution, sceptical of much of what passed for Marxist or radical writing in the west, and devoid of the kind of rhetorical posturing that so often characterises officials of such regimes.’

Repressing my own pessimism, I argued that the current compromise with capitalism didn’t have to lead to the abandonment of Castroism, only its modification. Capitalism Rampant is now being exposed as inherently unstable, dependent for its survival on the use of high-tech military power – therefore doomed eventually to be defeated by the Majority World’s
low-tech
resistance. And it could be that Cuba’s experiment will serve, throughout the bloodiness, to hearten those who believe in people before profit.

The Camaguey Ballet Company, founded in 1967, is a close second to Cuba’s Ballet Nacional which leaves foreign audiences breathless when it goes on tour. Juan had planned a
Giselle
evening at the Teatro Principal; he knew the Director who might wish to meet an Irish member of the CSC. The Birmingham and London Royal Ballets regularly donate shoes to Cuba’s ballet schools, their transport organised by CSC’s Music Fund. Astonishingly, Cuba has eleven provincial dance schools, in addition to the National School, and all performances draw wildly enthusiastic mass audiences – though before the Revolution classical ballet was unknown on the island.