By
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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