WELCOME TO CUBA #4 of 4- LIFE BEHIND THE IRONIC CURTAIN

Sundays are not bad here, more to see and do than many places in Latin America. I run across an active cathedral while walking the old city, so decide to stick around for Sunday mass, my first ever. That’s typical me, waiting to attend my first mass in a Communist country. Before this I’ve only attended a small one in Gualupita, Mexico, up in the mountains close to Toluca, where my sweaters used to be made, maybe still are. There we slit chickens’ throats and made mole’ and paraded through town with an image of the virgin of Guadalupe just like the most normal thing in the world. This one on Sunday is a little more involved. It drags on so long I’m getting really hungry towards the end. So when everyone goes up for their holy wafer I sneak out to go look for a holy hot dog. My stomach rumblings threatened to disrupt the service. Aqui estoy, Senor, para hacer tu voluntad.

It’s good to finally get out into the countryside. This whole trip has had too little of that, and too much city. This is something of a life’s thesis for me, that civilization is not limited to cities, and northern European cultures have proved that, they the barbarians of the Roman outback who eventually superceded and surpassed it oh, say, around 1700. The larger synthesis of course is that cities CAN be very nice places, green and clean and not so mean. My current life thesis is similar but with a different emphasis- that nomadism (nomadicism?) is not only normal but healthy, put of our psychological and biological makeup, of vast frontiers and open skies. We didn’t just accidentally disperse all over the globe- we were driven, by the powerful engines of our imagination. Obesity is not much of a problem with this lifestyle, nor are mortgages. True, cities are a great repository of great art and the great artifacts of culture; let the clerks handle that. This is dialectical materialism in real time- thesis, antithesis, followed by a more complete synthesis, hopefully.

There’s nothing spectacular about the Cuban countryside, but still it’s nice, rolling fields with agricultural plantations and the occasional wilderness. We pass through Cienfuegos, a small city on the western coast, where half the passengers, mostly backpacker types, disembark. I notice scads of touts hawking rooms on the periphery. I breathe a sigh of relief. As much as I prefer to avoid touts, I prefer to avoid expensive hotel rooms even more. I assume the situation may be similar elsewhere. When we finally pull into Trinidad an hour and a half later, I gulp audibly. Uh-oh, I’ve been here before, not here exactly, but many other places like it, most recently San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The rot sets in first where the fruit is ripest. It’s too small, a tourist enclave and little else. A lady on the sidewalk holds up a sign reading “ROOMS $15”, looking for all the world like a cute little webcam ‘performer’ with a sign across her bare midriff reading something like “$.99 min.” They swarm me like flies on shit, even though I explain that I’ve already booked a room. The problem is that my place knows nothing of it, even though I’ve paid a deposit.

So now I need the barkers and their colored balloons and their cheap cheap rooms. That’s no problem, but I immediately book onward transportation, just two nights and one full day here. That should be enough, considering there’s no food, or should I say ‘only expensive food’. The street scene in Havana, limited though it is, at least has some variety. Here there’s pretty much only pizza and sandwiches, though still only a quarter US a pop. Then prices for Gringo food go straight up from there, $8-10 a plate and on into the stratosphere. It’s no wonder everybody wants your lunch money, as if I spend money like that every meal every day for something as common as fried chicken. But that’s the big deal here, hawking you to come to their house to eat. I tire of the routine quickly. “Open a restaurant!” I bark back. There is some good music here, though, just like the Hemingway quarter of Havana. That’ll soothe frayed nerves. There are good deals to be had, too, it just takes time to familiarize myself with them, the guy with the coffee, the old lady with the fruit, etc. I went crazy when I found coconut custards and cakes for a dime a pop, buying a bag full for the onward journey.

All in all Trinidad’s okay, with a lively little late-night music scene, though I can think of probably a dozen places in Mexico just as colonially charming without a UN plaque. But this ain’t Mexico; this is Cuba. I travel onward to Santa Clara. This gives me not only another view of Cuba, but also a different route back to Havana, so as to avoid backtracking. It certainly doesn’t have the charm of Trinidad, but compensates with diversity, lots of local theatre, and I even manage to catch a concert. At least neither’s got the bombed-out feel of much of Havana. Comparisons to Hanoi are okay; comparisons to Phnom Penh are not. Only problem is that buses stop through on their way between Santiago and Havana, so the availability of seats depends on how many people get off. Ouch! This is what happens when you don’t have Internet, but they don’t seem to know that, or care. Long distance taxis do good biz in Cuba btw, claiming prices no more than the buses for foreigners, but I haven’t tested them yet.

The only guaranteed seat leaves at 3am the next day so I take it, figuring to save a night’s rent, too, since I don’t usually sleep too well anyway. This whole trip’s way over budget thanks to that flippin’ ferry in Suriname and the generally high cost of rooms in the Caribbean in high season. Thank God for the low-budget Melbourne Inn chain in Barbados and Port-of-Spain! If Cuba had wi-fi I could balance my budget here over the next three weeks, but I can’t go incommunicado for that long. That’s not negotiable. Cuba’s starting to get on my nerves anyway, and I’m sick to death of pizza, so that’s good. Otherwise I might feel some regret. Too short of a travel time gives false impressions, too. I’ll try to find something cheaper than Montego Bay in Jamaica, with wi-fi hopefully too, maybe Negril. At least I finally get through to Thailand on my world phone. I’m not behind an iron curtain after all, just an ironic one.

What else do I need to tell you about Cuba? Oh yeah, they’ve got $3 bills, both local currency and convertibles. That’s notable, especially the local ones with Che’s picture. What else? There seems to be very little racism in Cuba, blacks and whites freely intermixing and seemingly unconscious of it. That’s good. What else? Travel is easy, plenty of hostales and casas privadas outside the capital, so nothing to worry about there. They’ll find you. These people also smoke a lot, especially cigars, though cigarettes, too. Going to a concert in an auditorium? No problem. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. They drink a lot, too, mostly rum, available almost any time almost any place. The analogy to the Russian’s vodka is too obvious to ignore. My most communistic friends back home are usually the most pharmaceutically experimental also. Religion’s far from perfect but it’s better than all that I reckon. The three most common items at any street stall are: cigarettes, rum, and condoms, in no certain order, whatever gets you through the night. Now that sounds like my kind of dialectical materialism.

For some reason Cuba imports Gallo Beer (that’s a rooster, not an Italian) from Guatemala, reflecting new realities and trade relationships (ssshhh! Don’t tell Uncle) that got severely severed in 1954 the year of my birth and my taxi driver’s car. I thought about trying one for old times’ sake, but… naaah. Beggars here are creative, freely offering to show you their disease, bandaged back, third eye blind, etc. Pragmatic women are not to be outdone. They’ll follow you back to your hotel and THEN approach you, as if proximity implies acceptance. After a quick inconclusive chat in the Paseo del Prado, one even snuck through the door of my apartment complex while I was holding it for a key-less elderly lady. They’re quick, and stubbornly persistent. And oh yeah, Cuba’s got a long hard road ahead. They’re good people, I think, but they’re out of the loop. Some feelings are going to get hurt. Except for North Korea most all the other old Socialist bloc nations have long reverted to market economies with its ensuing growing pains. Their newly capitalist sons and daughters now come to Cuba out of nostalgia. When Cubans go to the US they probably look for lines to stand in, just to feel normal.

Cuba and the US attitude toward it is an anachronism. Communists and capitalists here and there have both fed on polarization and non-rational behavior for far too long to prove points that are no longer even valid, much less necessary. There are other more valid issues facing us today. But for me, this trip’s almost over, seven countries in as many weeks including Jamaica thrice. That’s not bad. Fortunately I got to stay in most of the countries long enough to go through the full range of emotions, in the case of Cuba: surprise, shock, disgust, adaptation, love, hate, and acceptance in that order, the other countries with probably fewer steps. That’s realistic. Always stay long enough to get sick of a place. Anybody who is totally in love with a place probably doesn’t know it very well or doesn’t know many others, or is fooling himself, one. So now I’m off to Jamaica then back to the US then on to Europe while the dollar can still hold its pants up. Life’s a beach, but I persevere.

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.

WELCOME TO CUBA #2 of 4- PIZZA SI, WI-FI NO

It may be too little too late to save much of Havana. The old city is crumbling and it may be too late to renovate. If a massive program of renovation were initiated immediately, I doubt they could save it all. Hopefully they can come up with a plan to save the most important parts. As it is, the only part of the old city that sparkles are Hemingway’s old haunts around the wharf. Even there some gaudy modern buildings have been unfortunately constructed, though some that look like genuine Gaudis fare much better.

Black ladies with fruit on their heads and cigars in their mouths pose for tourists and tips, and Cuba’s legendary Afro-derived music is played in tourist bars and restaurants. The newer (turn of last century) west-of-downtown Vedado buzzes with activity also, but there it’s the locals, not tourists. If Miami has its Little Havana, then Havana likewise has its Little Miami. There in the Vedado are the modern office buildings and busy streets and smiling people. It’s only the vast gray area between the old wharf and the new Vedado- aka Centro- that hangs in limbo, waiting to be rescued. I even find my Cubana airline office in the new quarter. They’ll change my flight for $100. Flights are all priced in USD, and even though they penalize you to cash them, they seem to be all you can re-convert your convertibles to. I decide to wait, pending resolution of the Internet problem. Stay tuned.

But there is no resolution to the Internet problem in Cuba, no good one at least. The few salas de navegacion that exist are Intranet only, with an ‘a’ not ‘e’, and that means Cuba only. No amount of Southern US accent will change that. And you thought China was bad, blocking sites and such, especially now that the Olympics are over? Here they just block the whole thing, pretend it doesn’t even exist. Intelligent people ask me what I need it for; they don’t even know. And even the local stuff’s not cheap for the locals, almost two bucks an hour. The ‘real’ Internet is available only in hotels, and at prices approaching $7 per hour, highest I’ve ever paid anywhere in the world. That smarts. Wi-fi does not exist, at least not complete with Internet, ‘local only’. Nobody told me that, not Lonely Planet, not volunteer sugar-cane harvesters, nobody. I can’t deal with it. I can suffer many inconveniences, but not that. So I go back to Cubana de Aviacion and change my return date, cutting my trip almost in half. Then I go to the bus station and get a ticket to Trinidad, the colonial gem on the southern coast.

After four days of getting my bearings greased and realigned, my trip is now one-third over. I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend it all in Havana, like I did in Port-of-Spain. There’s too much here to see and do. Problem is, without the Net I hardly know where to go or what to do next, much less be able to book a room in advance. When I go to a new country every week, I can hardly plan them all out in advance and to minute detail. I can’t carry seven guide books. So I work in real time, but without the Net I’m reduced to intuition, and that’s dangerous in high season in the Caribbean. I could get hit with some outrageous hotel prices. You laugh, but I’ve already booked an RT flight LA-Rome for next month, and this trip’s not even over yet. But I should have things finally under control here economically and philosophically, so time to book, an excursion that is.

Everything’s not cheap of course, just food. Beyond a few cheap hotels they rise in price quickly and astronomically, and they still don’t have wi-fi. I’m currently staying in a casa particular, which is good value, but it feels a bit awkward being in someone else’s home, though the homes themselves are nice enough. It’s good to know that behind some of the time-worn exteriors are quite comfortable interiors. I moved out of my first hotel to save a few bucks and because nothing worked right. Remote controls never do- dead batteries usually- but I expect the faucets to. I actually took an Asian mandi-style splash bath for two days, rather than watch them turn my room into a work-site for two days, or God forbid, loan me a screwdriver. That would’ve required another chapter on Marxist class struggle. At least they had cable TV and good coffee, b’fast included. Loud Chinese kids were taking over the place, too, ostensibly students studying Spanish, or so they said, but I could see that look in their eyes, planning the future invasion- “you open the grocery store, I’ll do the restaurant, and Zhou Blou here will sell trinkets; we’ll pool our money and labor to start…”

The casas buzz you up by dropping down a key on a cord. But still they aren’t THAT much cheaper than the cheap hotels, and they don’t have cable TV either. Commie TV sucks, lots of shows about cows and the weather, but at least it has no commercials. So I tentatively book a room here for next weekend and figure I’ll wing it this week, starting in Trinidad. At least I’ll see some countryside in central Cuba. I want to be in ‘new’ Havana on the return anyway, with few or no tourists. The ‘real thing’ comes in many flavors. Old Havana may be more romantic, but I hardly need to get romantic with myself. With myself I always get lucky. If I were single, though, I’d probably give the girls here a second look, azucar moreno, el chocolate que me gusta… Ironically the long-distance bus system seems to be segregated between tourists and locals. When I asked for information, they asked if I was a tourist (thanks for asking), then sent me to another area of tourists only, mostly back-packer types. Hmmm…

At least they’re real buses here, not the crowded mini-vans that pass for public transportation in Jamaica, among others, including the Guyanas. Since I’m returning early from Cuba, I’ll be obliged to finally see some of that Jamaican countryside, too. It’s a trade-off. At least Internet is not illegal there, and it’s free at the Bobsled Café in Montego Bay, though a bit erratic. Like I said, not everything’s cheap here. With maps $5 a pop, excursions here involve quite a bit of dead reckoning, looking at my downloaded map on the laptop and getting my bearings, then starting out, noting landmarks, and trying to remember to compensate for any unexpected changes. That cheap street food is not so exotic either, basically variations on the themes of grease and starch. Fortunately I brought vitamins, because the smoothies and juices aren’t enough to compensate for the lack of veggies in the diet, regardless of their status as vitaminicos in South American parlance and habit. I know that ‘camp-out’ feeling well, vitamin deficiency, not of scurvy magnitude, but enough to blur the edges of my perception, so I can’t think of clear and witty things to amuse you, my readers. I have responsibilities. I remember running out into the Mexican midnight once to search the pharmacies for vitamins. Now I come prepared.

To be honest there probably is a bit of resentment at selling to foreigners at dirt cheap prices, though it usually stays below the surface, reflected only in surly behavior. Cubans are not big on ‘Thank yous’ anyway; I guess it’s not Communist. That food is subsidized by the government, which means the blood sweat and tears of the populace. But those high prices are made with subsidized food, too, remember, meaning everyone’s subsidizing the new capitalists. Why not help the tourists a bit too? Good prices are a selling point. I decide here and now that if trade with Cuba is liberalized, I’ll become a trade-show geek one more time just to promote their handicrafts… but I could be lying, not to you, but to myself. There are some nice things here, especially wood carvings, including… MY FROGS! MY COMMIE FROGS BORN IN HANOI ARE NOW IN CUBA!! History and evolution follow strange paths.

There are some other nice crafts here also- especially textiles, leatherwork, and ceramics- and Cuba’s reputation in the fine arts and literature is notable without question, but you can keep the art naïve that fills the stalls in tourist districts. Though superficially interesting, it’s more naïve than art, especially if they think I’ll buy it, analogous to the street musicians here who can’t play their instruments and the poseurs with their cigars and heads full of flowers posing for tips. I suspect mass-production and the hiring of ‘local color’ to peddle it. They’re parasites on the true musicians and artists who deserve to be seen and heard. So there, I said it. Hopefully I’m wrong.