Why Havana Had to Die

By Theodore Dalrymple

Reprinted from City Journal

Decay, when not carried to excess, has its architectural charms, and ruins are romantic: so romantic, indeed, that eighteenth-century English gentlemen built them in their gardens, as pleasantly melancholic reminders of the transience of earthly existence. But Fidel Castro is no eighteenth-century English gentleman, and Havana is not his private estate, for use as a personal memento mori. The ruins of Havana that he has brought into being are, in fact, the habitation of over 1 million people, whose collective will, these ruins attest, is not equal in power to the will of one man. “Comandante en jefe,” says one of the political billboards that have replaced all commercial advertisements, “you give the orders.” The place of everyone else, needless to say, is to obey.

Havana has changed a little since I was last there, a dozen years ago. The vast Soviet subsidy has vanished; the economy now depends on European tourism. The influx of tourists, most of them in search of a cheap holiday in the tropics and cheerfully oblivious to Cuba’s politics, has necessitated a slight degree of flexibility. Small private family restaurants, called paladares (paladar is Spanish for palate), with no more than 12 seats, are now tolerated, though the hiring of non-family labor, deemed exploitative by definition, is still not permitted. Only certain dishes are allowed—not fish and lobster, reserved to the state restaurants—and those paladares that break the rules operate like speakeasies in the time of Prohibition, the fish-bootlegging owners keeping a nervous eye out for informers. (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution still operate everywhere.) The owner of one such that I visited—with no sign outside to mark its existence—anxiously looked through the peephole of the door before letting anyone in. The taking of a simple meal at one of the three tables turned into a scene from a spy novel.

Flea markets are also now legal in Cuba, and a petty trade in cast-off clothing and household goods takes place. Twelve years ago it was unthinkable for anyone to buy or sell anything in the open, for buying and selling were symptoms of bourgeois individualism and contrary to Fidel’s socialist vision, in which everything is to be rationed—rationally, as it were—according to need. (In practice, of course, this meant rationing according to what there was, which was not much.)

Openings to small-scale commerce have occurred before during Castro’s 43-year rule, but they have always soon succumbed to periods of “rectification,” after it became all too apparent that people were responding more vigorously to economic incentives than they ever had to the “moral” ones praised in the adolescent theories of Che Guevara. But this time the commercial activity is more secure, because it is essential to the regime’s economic survival. When last I was in Havana, even the dollar-laden foreigner couldn’t find food to eat outside his hotel—a situation that hardly encouraged mass tourism. Now, of necessity, cafés and bars aplenty cater to the visitor.

The economy is now extensively dollarized, a curious and ironic denouement to decades of impassioned nationalism. When I asked in my hotel to change money into pesos, I was told—quite rightly, it turned out—that I would not need them. The few dusty shops that were prepared to exchange goods for pesos—for moneda nacional—advertised this extraordinary fact in their windows, as if performing a miracle, though the goods for sale were few and of the lowest quality. Last time I was in Cuba, the possession of a dollar by an ordinary Cuban was a crime, virtually proof of disloyalty and disaffection, if not of outright economic sabotage of the revolution. Dollars were handled as if they were nitroglycerine, liable to blow up in your face at the slightest jolt; but now they are merely units of currency, which anyone may safely handle.

The sheer number of foreign visitors to Cuba means that, though the hotel lobbies are still patrolled by security men with walkie-talkies to ensure that no unauthorized Cubans enter, relations between Cubans and foreigners are more relaxed than they once were. To talk to a foreigner is no longer a sign of political unreliability, and conversations do not have to be carried out in a hole-and-corner fashion, behind walls, with one nervous eye open for spies and eavesdroppers. I even received a few requests that I send medicine, since none was available in the local pharmacies—an admission, unthinkable a few years ago, that all is not well in the much-vaunted health-care system.

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