Andrew Bergman. George Magzine. http://www.georgemag.com/
Screenwriter-director Andrew Bergman traveled to Havana for an international film festival but saw no movies. Instead, he filed this fascinating report on Cuba today-an island running on empty.
It is the first week of December, and I am touring Havana by bus. With a contingent from the Writers' Guild of America, I have arrived for the International Festival of New Latin Cinema via the first direct flight from New York to this island in 40 years. None of us has any idea what to expect
from Cuba; it is so close to home and yet as distant, somehow, as Belarus.
The sense of weirdness was heightened by our surreal arrival at the Jose Marti airport, engulfed by news crews at 2:30 in the morning on a Saturday. But the weirdness is evaporating now as we get out and around in the daylight and realize, yes, this is still the Caribbean. This is the Tropics.
The old town, Habana Vieja, is as beautiful in its decay as Venice. A composition in every doorway: the levels of paint peel, the color of hanging wash, and the fixed attention of the people.
People beg everywhere; they are desperate for dollars. You snap a picture of someone and payment is immediately requested. At first it seems crass, but you think, Why the hell not? It is a business. It is part of tourism. An old man wearing a red-starred Che beret sits picturesquely on a stoop,
smoking a pipe with a cigar stuck in its bowl. His face is as lined as a map. He is like a found work of art. You snap his picture and give him a dollar. You move on. Three blocks later, there he is again, poised on another stoop. This is what he does for a living. He poses for tourists. He is local
color. So is a jet-black woman who reads tarot cards outside a café called El Patio. A flower in her hair, a cigar jutting out of her mouth, she is too good to be true. Take her picture; hand her a dollar. She is no more something one has discovered than, say, the Statue of Liberty. Later, in
the cheesy and tchotchke-driven market, I see velvet paintings featuring her, cigar and all.
The Cuban people are almost uniformly handsome, yet, unlike Miami Cubans, they are very thin. The lack of weight is a little alarming, although maybe I am just used to the general heft of Americans. The dogs on the street are the scrawniest I have ever seen; mutts totter weakly on spindly legs,
sniffing in vain for scraps of food. There are no scraps in this city. It is like a tropical death camp for dogs.
Throughout Havana, there are predictable slogans on billboards and heroic drawings of Che, but Fidel's kisser is nowhere to be seen. It is the opposite of the cult of personality. It is the cult of the Unseen Beard. The word is that Castro never speaks in public anymore, only on television.
Our tour bus takes us to Revolutionary Square, where Fidel used to address his comrades at Wagnerian length. A huge area is paved over for people to stand and listen to speeches; poles studded with loudspeakers are placed every 50 yards or so. It is gray, totalitarian Moscow come to the Tropics
-- the opposite in texture of the rest of Havana, which is all music and swaying hips and petty hustles.
The next day, I go back to Old Havana and see a hilarious curiosity -- a garden built by Fidel in honor of Princess Diana. The garden is small, filled with flowering shrubs, and surrounded by a 6,000-square-foot circular walkway. A plaque on its western wall honors Diana of Wales. The place, a
kind of Cuban Strawberry Fields, seems a total non sequitur until I get this explanation: Fidel detests the Brits and created this lovely horticultural tribute to tick off the royal family!
At night, I make my first attempt to attend a film at the festival. Like everywhere in Havana, there is a long, long line. This is a city of lines: lines at stores, lines for buses. Masses queue up every day to board the so-called camel buses, ancient humpbacked, truck-towed conveyances filled
to overflowing. If no buses are available, Cubans ride solemn faced on packed trucks. And at the end of the ride, they line up again for more waiting.
So the line at this Cine Charlie Chaplin is no surprise, but the masses of police are. One festival official waves us into the theater; the police then block our path. The doors swing open, the crowd pushes forward, then the doors are shut again. More police appear, and they have that Chicago
1968 look in their eyes -- slightly panicky, ready to rumble. I decide that no movie is worth this and return to my hotel to drink cuba libres and listen to salsa. In Cuba, music is always the consolation prize.
There is a "children's demonstration" on Monday afternoon, down by the Malecon, to demand the return of Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban boy who was rescued off the coast of Fort Lauderdale clinging to an inner tube. At around five, masses of schoolchildren come marching down the
street, followed by students from the University of Havana. A phalanx of buses suddenly appears, 40 or 50. They are modern buses of a kind rarely seen in Cuba -- green and white, rolling in one after the other, evenly spaced and eerily choreographed. It is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment.
The buses stop together, as if on command, and students peacefully pour out. They march toward the rally in a holiday spirit. It is an "organized demonstration," with the accent on organized.
Then the speeches begin. I retire to my room and turn on the TV -- the demonstration is being carried live on the Fidel Channel. How cynical it all seems. Costumed schoolchildren singing songs, third graders denouncing the imperialist U.S. This hardly seems a political issue. This is a personal
tragedy. I believe it's right to return the kid to his father, but when politicians hide behind children, it is the surest sign of the corruption and cynicism of a regime. I think of Saddam Hussein tousling the hair of wary youngsters.
A while later, Fidel is seen on TV visiting Elian's school and listening as model students extol the wonders and beauties of socialism. He nods and pats their shoulders, and smiles; he asks questions in a kind of catechism. A correct answer elicits a hearty laugh, but Fidel's eyes are as dead as
those of a mackerel. This is the new totalitarian, intellectually flat-line Cuba.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had encountered old, literary Cuba -- a visit to Hemingway's serene Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), outside Havana. It is a simple and beautiful house, with books, animal heads, and the most perfect writing desk -- semicircular and massive. There is also much booze,
another reminder of the writer's ethos during the first half of the century.
No longer a god in the States, Hemingway is still big-time Papa down here. Tour guides mention his name at every opportunity. The Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he resided in the 1930s, and the fabulous La Bodeguita del Medio, where he ate and drank, are impeccably preserved and dedicated to his
memory.
Old Cuba, new Cuba. I saw the most appalling poverty on the trip out to the Hemingway finca. The city has beautiful housing stock, but most of it is crumbling into sooty blocks, and the air is filled with carbon monoxide. Much has been written about the car-museum aspects of Cuban life, and it
is no exaggeration -- sherbet-hued Chevys and Fords of the 1949-1955 era are everywhere, kept running by the Western Hemisphere's most resourceful mechanics. But the downside of these vintage beauties is the nonexistence of emission control. Keep windows rolled down at your own peril; halfway
through the 40-minute ride to Hemingway's place, my head was spinning.
On Tuesday I hire a taxi so that I can visit Pinar del Rio, the city with the great cigar factory. My driver, whom I shall call Roberto, is a dark-haired, bright-eyed man who could have the sleek good looks of a bandleader if 40 years of Cuban life and three packs of smokes a day had not frayed
him around the edges. Roberto speaks passable English, which is a rarity in this country, a testament to an educational system not keen on popular exposure to non-Cuban or non-Marxist ideas. A half hour out of Havana, Roberto begins to unburden himself. I ask how he feels about Fidel.
He turns from the wheel and eyes me. "I can trust you, yes?" he asks. I assure him that he can. "I hate him," he says. I ask how his parents feel, given their knowledge of life in pre-Castro Cuba. "They hate him," he says. "Ninety percent of the people hate
Fidel. The other 10 percent work for the government." He taps his chest and says something very simple, something that Ronald Reagan, had he been seated in this cab, would have quoted for the rest of his life. "It is not the economy here. It is terrible, but that's not it. It is that I
want freedom, you understand. I want to be able to say what I want." The cabbie's eyes tear up as he makes this declaration, and I am on the verge of subscribing to the National Review. It is really as simple as that. Cuba is a police state. As we roll down the highway, police are visible
everywhere, observing the passing cars.
I see many Cubans standing on the highway. There are government-owned trucks obligated to stop and give them a ride. Workers stand and wait, as do families, children -- always waiting. Waiting is the national pastime.
Speeding past these hitchhikers leads Roberto to the subject of making a living in Cuba. Again, it is painfully simple. Workers are paid $10 a month. That's the deal for pretty much everyone. Roberto earns $10 a month as a cabbie, although he lives on his tips. His wife is a schoolteacher and
also earns $10 a month. Police officers earn $40 or $50 a month but are held in such low regard that the state has great difficulty recruiting them. I am next to speechless at the level of wages, but it is clear that this state-induced poverty is a means of political control. Cubans cadge dollars in
various illegal and quasilegal ways, and the state winks at such behavior as long as it does not cross the border into politics, as long as no real economic power accrues. If it does, the state can simply shut the activity down, jail the perpetrators.
Roberto asks directions continually, gets lost at least twice. God knows how long he has been a cabbie; his degree is in engineering. We pass more families waiting for rides; they stare at our little taxi with the awe usually accorded a sighting of Air Force One. I feel like the man in the top
hat from Monopoly.
Pinar del Rio is near the tobacco fields and is home to the great Fabrica de Tobaco of Cuba, where the Cohibas and Romeos and Hoyo de Monterreys are rolled. I tour the factory and chat with the men and women who sit rolling the gorgeous tobacco by hand. To even a one-a-day cigar smoker like me,
this is a visit to mecca; the smell of the leaves is dense and intoxicating, the workers cheerful and anxious to chat and, of course, to hustle. Side deals can be made -- $2 a cigar for brands that will fetch 20 times that much in the tony cigar shops of London, Paris, and Montreal. Workers are
allowed to bring home two cigars a day, to dispose of as they wish. They catch your eye, they wink.
"Why this embargo?" one of them asks me. "What is the point?" I tell her I believe the U.S. trade embargo is stupid and does no one any good. But that is not exactly true. It does Fidel a great deal of good. It allows him to put the bogeyman's cap on the United States, to
identify its economic policy as a prime force behind the daily woe of Cuban life. It has never been clearer to me how criminally stupid and cowardly this policy is; if Florida had a half-dozen electoral votes, rather than its 25, the embargo would have been lifted years ago.
That night, my last in Havana, I dine at a paladar. The paladares are restaurants set up in private homes. Two or three tables, and one selects from a limited menu, but then all menus in Cuba are limited. Although the paladares are legal, they have the aura of a speakeasy. Seven of us arrive at
a house on a side street; we have been told to watch for a man who will be whistling. We pull up in a seven-seater maxi-taxi, and a thin youth crosses the street before us; he smiles and begins to whistle. We follow the whistling boy up five flights of stairs until we are on a rooftop -- a sort of
garden apartment, but open to the stars, with potted plants everywhere. It is completely enchanting, like a restaurant dreamed up by schoolchildren, a restaurant in the clouds.
The food is hit-and-miss, but the hits -- llike a fried dumpling filled with meat and peanuts that probably requires an immediate angioplasty -- are mouthwatering. A Chilean wine with the bouquet of lighter fluid is less successful, and the fish has the texture of a flat tire. But no matter. The
ambience and the relentless good nature of our hosts represent the very soul of Cuba: the humanity and resourcefulness of a people who have absorbed an enormous amount of punishment.
I fly back to the U.S. early Wednesday morning. As I go through security at the airport, my briefcase is opened; a polite young woman discovers the beginnings of this journal, handwritten on a legal pad. She reads it, slowly and thoroughly, then hands it back to me. The woman smiles and wishes
me a good trip.
Havana to Miami is 40 minutes by air. Forty minutes to another world. The passengers on the plane are largely Cuban-Americans. They seem happy to return, but also wistful, and I wonder if there is not a measure of survivor guilt in their eyes as the Florida Keys appear below.
When the plane touches down, they break into prolonged applause.
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