|
Visitors to Cuba
should take care to be discreet
By Bill Mcclellan. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, MO, 01/11/2004.
From a bench in the plaza across from the
church, I could hear the children's choir
singing "Silent Night." The high-pitched
voices rang in the morning air. "Noche
amor, Noche de paz." I had been in
the church earlier, my presence owing as
much to curiosity as to devotion. Who would
attend? Until recently, Christmas was not
even a holiday in Cuba.
I had arrived in Havana five days before
Christmas. My family and I were with a cultural
exchange group. I had read a story a month
or so earlier in U.S. News and World Report.
The story said that our government was stopping
these cultural exchange tours at the end
of the year. I called the company mentioned
in the story. "You have anything that
would put us in Cuba for Christmas?"
I asked. They did, and so here we were -
my wife and kids, and my brother-in-law,
Doug, and his wife, Graciela.
We spent the first part of our trip in
Havana, which is beautiful but disintegrating.
Buildings are falling down. The long-standing
U.S. embargo is most noticeable on the streets
- the American cars predate Fidel Castro's
victory in 1959. Watching the parade of
bicycle taxis and Dodges and Chevrolets
built five decades ago, I felt as if I had
stepped into Graham Greene's "Our Man
in Havana."
The government, of course, blames the embargo
for the country's problems, but I had the
sense that the people aren't quite so sure.
Or maybe they're just tired of being poor,
and no longer care whose fault it is. They
are smart and self-reliant - their mechanics
must be the best in the world - and they
are, I suspect, a very tough audience. Most
seem to have televisions - little black
and white reminders of the Soviet Union
- and the programming is tightly monitored.
We could not get Cuban television in our
hotels, but I was told that the fare runs
heavily to propaganda, and that a popular
show is "Mesa Redonda," a discussion
show. Thinking of "Donnybrook,"
I asked, Do the people argue? "What's
to argue? Everything is the fault of the
U.S." This was said with a mocking
tone. But mocking whom? I could not be sure.
There was much of which I was unsure. Our
guide, for instance. That he was smart and
ambitious should go without saying. A tour
guide has access to tips, which means he
is better off financially than a surgeon.
Our guide studied Russian in school and
survived that particular train wreck. He
was raised by his grandmother, not entirely
unusual in a country where divorce is common.
(That seems to be one of the results of
the suppression of the church.)
At any rate, I thought about our guide
as I sat in the plaza. We had left Havana
on the morning of Christmas Eve and had
driven to the colonial city of Trinidad,
five hours away. I had stayed in the hotel
that evening, but one member of our group
had gone to a Christmas Eve service and
had seen our guide. When asked about it
the next morning, he had seemed embarrassed.
"I went out of curiosity," he
said. "I actually found it rather boring."
In a communist country, that is a politically
correct thing to say, and political correctness
means something in a dictatorship. Maybe
our guide is a secret believer, I thought
to myself. His grandmother would have come
of age before the revolution. In all likelihood,
she was a believer.
By the way, I had plenty of time to think
about this. I myself had gone to church
out of curiosity, and when the priest seemed
to go on and on, I had thought, "This
is a country where Castro can talk for five
hours at a time, and who knows if this priest
might try to match him?" and so I had
slipped out into the plaza.
Later that day, I was approached by a Cuban.
"Lobster dinners for eight dollars,"
he said. I made arrangements to meet him
on a road outside the hotel grounds. This
was, actually, verging on the illegal. In
fact, it was illegal. Cubans are allowed
to operate private restaurants in their
homes - these restaurants are called paladares
- but the entrepreneurs can serve only rice,
beans, chicken and fish. Only the state-owned
restaurants can serve such delicacies as
lobster, shrimp and beef.
Two Cubans were waiting for us in a 1952
Dodge at the appointed time. The driver
opened the trunk, and his partner hopped
in. The driver then shut the trunk. This
seemed odd. The six of us piled in the car
with the driver, and away we went, finally
stopping on a dirt road outside a house
that looked very unlike a restaurant. The
driver liberated his companion from the
trunk while the six of us gazed apprehensively
at the little house. But its appearance
was deceiving. Inside it was very much a
restaurant. Our lobster dinners were terrific.
By the way, the driver told us he makes
$6 a month. It is not enough, he said. And
so he works in the black market of illegal
lobster dinners.
That night, our scheduled activity was
a visit with a local Committee for the Defense
of the Revolution. The head of the committee
was an older fellow. After a formal presentation,
he and I chatted. He offered me some rum.
I accepted. We have food, he said. I'm not
hungry, I replied. We just had a very fine
lobster dinner, I explained. At the hotel?
Oh no, at one of your private restaurants,
I said.
My sister-in-law, Graciela, gave me a sharp
look.
I am, of course, capable of saying stupid
things in English, and do so dismayingly
often. I am even worse in Spanish. I'm so
busy thinking of how to say things that
I don't think of what it is that I'm saying.
"What is the name of this paladar?"
the jefe asked me. "Where is it?"
In Cuba, the word for snitch is chiva.
When we were in Havana, we visited the Museum
of the Revolution, and I saw the actual
hand-written statement the rebels had read
on the air after seizing the national radio
station. Among other things, they asked
the people for help in catching the chivas
who had served the old government, the chivas
who had tormented the people.
Now, almost 45 years later, the head of
the local committee for the Defense of the
Revolution wanted to know the name and location
of the place where we had eaten lobster.
I told him I didn't remember. He looked
at me, suspicious and disbelieving. Unhappy,
too, and I thought that unhappiness is the
fate of so many revolutionaries.
In the end, they become what they once
despised.
E-mail: bmcclellan@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8143
|
