WELCOME TO CUBA #3 of 4- HELL FREEZES OVER

It’s cold here. Who’d’ve thought I’d be wearing my goose-down vest in Cuba? My taxi driver says he’s never seen it this cold before, at least not this year. There are some cold winds blowing down out of the north, or maybe it’s just George W’s last breath of hot air now turned cold. Nevertheless the tourists out at Varadero are probably clamoring for refunds about now. This isn’t what they paid for. Maybe that’s not surprising considering its location a half degree north of the Tropic of Cancer. Those lines are no joke. In a couple days I’ll be a half degree south so we’ll see if there’s any difference. That’s the same stretch of water that Montego Bay sits on the other side of, and it was plenty warm and sunny the same day I boarded the plane for cold gray Havana. I’ve always thought of communism as cold and gray, but not Cuba. The tourist brochures advertise its luz, color, sabor y alegria, but that’s for you, not them. They get poverty, deprivation, promises… and long lines. Nothing defines Communism like long lines and the lack thereof implied, and the limits and rations therefore imposed. Now that may be very rational, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right.

Communism made a gamble, that the world was already developed fait accompli and that the only problem was one of distribution. Communism never foresaw DVD’s, PC’s, and cell phones, much less FaceBook, MySpace, and TravelPod. They certainly never foresaw that the consumer revolution would be manufactured in Japan first then China, leaving Western ideologies in the dust. Cuba is still there, clucking defiance. It’s sad, Fidel claiming on Obama’s inauguration that the West’s problems are ‘insolvable’. He may be right of course, but you don’t prove it by shutting off all dialog. That’s contrary to the spirit of dialectic. Cuba shows no news of the outside world, zero zip nada- just buddies Venezuela and Bolivia, the club growing ever smaller. If you perceive a world of limits, then the world is limited, admittedly also the mistake of many Western ‘small planet’ ideologists in the Seventies, myself included. I stand corrected.

Cuba’s got a hard adjustment to a market economy ahead and the longer they wait, the harder it’ll be. The dual currency system is only the most graphic illustration of such. China gave their dual currency up long ago, and Laos and Vietnam are slowly moving beyond dual-pricing, though you can expect Vietnamese to overcharge foreigners for as long as they can get away with it. Leaving prices un-marked facilitates this. Even Thailand does it sometimes, trying to overcharge me for something with the price written in Thai, absolutely refusing to believe that I can actually read it, even as I recite it to them word by word. Old notions die hard. At one point Vietnam even had prices for returning Vietnamese, in addition to foreigners and locals. It’s cumbersome to say the least, and subject to much abuse. When Thailand tries such nonsense they never check identification, just apply racial and facial criteria. A flight attendant in South America once explained to me how they’re trained to know what language you speak by looking at your face, Sociolinguistics 401.

Nevertheless, there is an emerging middle ground between ‘local’ mn and ‘foreign’ cuc currency, and that means reasonable prices in cuc, something that is slowly occurring in the places designed for upscale Cubans and emerging restaurant chains, such as El Rapido. There an espresso costs $.25-.30, instead of the ridiculously low nickel or overpriced (for Cuba) dollar. That’s still the best price I’ve had since late ‘70s post-devaluation Mexico City, when a good US wage was $4/hour. Good prices draw tourists, but so do simple open systems, such as integrated transportation and a single currency.

Fortunately the war’s over, almost. I thought a policeman might not let me go yesterday, but that was because the guy wouldn’t stop talking when I asked for directions, not because of any imcompatible overt offense (now there’s a trivia question for ya’). The gendarme at the airport weren’t so friendly. First some guy pulls more over straight off the plane and quizzes me about my intentions, presumably because I’m American. Then the nice Immigration lady seemed concerned that I was just ‘going all over’ as if that were suspicious in and of itself, acting as if Cuba were just another country in the Caribbean. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I guess I should be some bright-eyed little wannabe socialist or a fat-bellied tourist, one or the other, just for the sake of clean neat categories. Then the Customs guy started looking at my notes, as if notes imply plans imply covert activity, or so I imagine, and still do.

The big surprise here is that it seems no one’s ever met an American. I thought it was way past all that by now, what with reasonably priced flights from TJ and anywhere in Canada. It’s not.

“I’m fifty-one years old and you’re the first American I’ve ever talked to,” a friend of the house I’m staying in just told me.

“We’re not much different, are we?”

“Not at all, five fingers, two hands, two arms, two legs.”

We trade travel stories, he telling me of his trips to the Warsaw Pact countries and Angola. That sounds like a tour of duty to me. They make no attempt to hide their Communist connections, even a bit nostalgic I sense. I tell him my stories, and he gets excited when I talk about Hanoi. We have common ground. There are people named Hanoi here, or at least one who’s now a celebrity. I guess the Sixties affected everyone differently, we with our Dylans and Elvises, they with their Hanois and… Warsaws maybe? Havana reminds me a lot of Hanoi, similar latitudes and similar attitudes, the same ambience of revolutionary doctrine and military discipline and faded glory and pedicabs and… that edge, that psychological edginess that cuts both ways.

We have more common ground- a history of plantation slavery and resultant cradle of African-American diaspora culture. Cuba gets high marks for maintaining its African traditions, but in fact it’s probably the whitest place I’ve seen in the Caribbean so far, or Latin America either, except for Argentina. I haven’t been to the US Virgin Islands. If my Trinidad theory is correct, the culture defends itself most intently where it’s most threatened. But the ‘traditional’ dress here of Mammy-style pure white and lacy fringe, similar to that of Salvador, Bahia, Brasil, surely refers to the colonial time and place, not Africa itself, doesn’t it? You don’t see such in other predominantly black Caribbean countries. Or maybe it’s a religious thing, with connections to santerismo similar to Brasil’s candomble or N’awlins voodoo. You can see little stalls devoted to such in the back alleys, similar to the hechicerias shops I used to see in Oaxaca, Mexico, some thirty years ago. And of course Cubans are as anxious, and as hopeful, about what Obama’s going to do, as we all are. Still his first impression of an actual American comes from me. Now that’s truly scary.

So I finally bite the bullet and sit down and do some Internet. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. Many hotels have got the machines, but few sell the card with the code you log in with. They tell me any card will work on any machine, so I go buy one at a hotel I know has them, but they also have a waiting line. It turns out the card won’t work anywhere else, so I end up waiting two hours to finally log on. Real Commie queues, just like the old newsreels! Cool… TWO HOURS WAITING FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF USING INTERNET AT THE RATE OF $7 PER HOUR!! And then I can’t even get into my bank account, reserve a room with my credit card, much less Skype anyone. It’s barbarous. My world telephone won’t call through to Thailand either. I’m cut off. I’m glad I shortened my trip. I like Cubans, I think, but this is ridiculous. I get into the queuing aspect, though, becoming the traffic cop for Gringos ‘out of the know’, since lines are not always linear. I even took the pizza out of a local’s mouth after he called his order in over my head. I read him the riot act, and then left casting aspersions on his upbringing. When natives get restless, the tourists get even. Good fun was had by all.