By Holger Jensen . Scripps Howard News Service.
PostNet.com. Mar. 12, 2001 | 10:15 a.m.
HAVANA -- The Tropicana is jumping.
A big band is blaring out a staccato Cuban rhythm as half-naked showgirls
with candelabras on their heads dance sinuously among the diners, now and then
pulling a protesting tourist from his table to join them in a samba.
"This is the real Cuba,'' yells Pablo, a visiting Spanish businessman
trying to make himself heard above the din. "Mulattos who want to do
nothing but drink and dance.''
He is partly right. Cuba is a rainbow nation of Spanish, African, Creole
with a bit of Carib Indian thrown in; 11 million people of every shade
imaginable. And they do love their music.
But the Tropicana is not the real Cuba. Pablo has just bought a bottle of
champagne that amounts to a year's wages for the average Cuban. If you look
around, the only Cubans to be seen are staff and entertainers. The clientele is
almost exclusively foreign.
The Tropicana is a nightclub featuring Vegas-style shows reminiscent of the
days when Meyer Lansky and his Mafia cohorts controlled the gambling and
prostitution that financed Fulgencio Batista's brutal dictatorship.
The mobsters and tourists fled when Fidel Castro overthrew Batista in 1959,
and for 30 years Cuba rotted in Communist isolation. But the demise of the
Soviet Union, whose subsidies amounted to about $4 billion a year, forced Castro
to seek alternative sources of income.
Market-oriented reforms introduced in the early 1990s reopened Cuba to
tourism and foreign investment, legalized the dollar and allowed self-employment
-- as opposed to working for the state -- in 150 professions.
By 1995 tourism surpassed sugar, long the mainstay of the Cuban economy, as
the primary source of foreign exchange. Last year 1.8 million tourists spent $2
billion on the island, providing jobs for 100,000 Cubans directly employed in
tourist services and 200,000 indirectly, as private restaurateurs, taxi drivers,
performers and, yes, prostitutes.
That's why the government is devoting most of its scarce resources to
building 3,000 new hotel rooms a year. And that's why it tolerates "decadent''
nightspots like the Tropicana. In the words of Enrique Martinez, vice minister
of economic planning, "The political culture of our society has learned to
accept this necessary evil because it benefits Cuba.''
Translation: it brings in money. You can even take one of the showgirls
home, for a price. But in a country where the average wage is $11 a month, most
Cubans can't afford to frequent Havana's "international hotels,'' foreign
currency stores and other tourist haunts.
In the Floridita, a bar that claims to be the "Cradle of the Daiquiri''
once frequented by Ernest Hemingway, only foreigners can buy its $6 drinks while
gawking at photos of the bearded author consorting with Gary Cooper and a very
young Fidel.
Cubans who have foreign currency -- either tips off tourists or remittances
from exiled relatives in Miami -- cannot even rent a room in a tourist hotel
unless they are honeymooners or workers enjoying an incentive bonus. Newly
married couples get three nights, good workers up to a week's stay.
The very fact that the state uses tourist hotels as a reward -- "you
too can live like a foreigner for a while'' -- underscores the dire poverty on
the island and the new apartheid resulting from dollarization of the economy.
Cubans who have no dollars are becoming increasingly resentful of those who
do, and of being denied access to places where their pesos are worthless.
"It is an issue,'' said a senior Western diplomat here, "that the
government will have to address, or it will have a serious problem on its
hands.''
There are other irritants.
The Caribbean is one of the world's richest fisheries, teeming with lobster,
shrimp and tasty fish such as dorado dolphin (mahi mahi in Hawaii).
But most of Cuba's catch is reserved for export or tourism. Seafood, once a
staple of the Cuban diet, can only be bought with dollars on the black market,
and restaurants out of the tourist loop are out of luck.
Asked why he was serving pork instead of fish or lobster, the owner of a
seaside eatery in Mariel told me: "The only way a fisherman can eat a
lobster here is if he eats it on his boat.''
So I had the leg of a pig, tougher than an old combat boot, and broke a
knife trying to cut it.
There is plenty of seafood to be had, however, at the Marina Hemingway Yacht
Club on Havana Bay. A guard post at the entrance keeps Cubans out, but
foreigners are welcome to dine in its restaurants, rent a hotel room or one of
the plush waterfront villas that cost several thousand dollars a week.
The dock is crowded with pleasure craft, mostly American, violating the U.S
embargo on Cuba every time they refuel or spend money on supplies.
One sun-bronzed gent aboard a 45-foot sportfisherman from Destin, Fla, says
he comes to Cuba because "it has the most marlin.''
But he won't go into details or have his picture taken. "It's not the
Cubans I'm worried about but the U.S. government,'' he confides. "I've been
cruising for five years now and it's none of their goddam business where I go.''
Anotner boater is more forthcoming. Ed Able brought a 40-foot trawler down
from Cape Cod and has no qualms about saying how he got here.
"You need clearance from our Coast Guard but that's routine,'' he said "If
you're private boat, as opposed to commercial, they can't stop you. They even
tell you that Cuba accepts dollars, but not to spend any because that violates
U.S. law. We tell them we won't but of course we do.
"The Cubans make it real easy. The harbormaster gives precise headings
through the coral heads, you can get a two-month tourist visa right at the dock,
there are hookups and very reasonable berthing fees.''
The number of American boats at the marina is increasing, as is the number
of Americans who fly in through Canada, Mexico or Jamaica. Not counting
Cuban-Americans, who have special permission to visit relatives on the island,
nearly 77,000 other Americans visited Cuba last year, many attracted by tour
groups advertising "The Forbidden Country.''
But it is hardly forbidding.
"We admit any American without the barriers that Americans impose on
Cubans,'' said Dagoberto Rodriguez of the Foreign Ministry. "Remember,
while you are sanctioning us we are not sanctioning you.''
(Holger Jensen is International Editor of the Rocky Mountain News. E-mail to
hjens@aol.com.)
(Contact Holger Jensen of the Denver Rocky Mountain News at
http://www.denver-rmn.com.)
AP-NY-03-12-01 1110EST
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