Boy of Their Dreams
By Eugene Robinson. Washington Post Staff Writer. Monday, May 22, 2000; Page C01
HAVANA –– On a busy corner not far from the soaring, graceful, grimy dome of the old pre-revolution capital building, dozens of people are waiting as the camello pulls up--a super-long bus whose swaybacked profile reminds everyone of a two-humped camel. The bus is already jampacked,
but somehow new riders manage to squeeze aboard. It's stifling, claustrophobic, unbearable-- except that people bear it with little complaint because the camello is cheap and for many there is no other way to get home, or to their second jobs, or wherever it is they must go.
One woman who managed to find a window seat is reading Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. The lead story today, as on most days, is about the boy Elian Gonzalez.
In decrepit and gorgeous Old Havana, a blast of dance music announces a party--in this case, a wedding reception. The venue is somebody's house. Furniture has been removed from the little sitting room or pushed against the walls. The place pulses with merengue and salsa and rum-soaked laughter,
and the energy of so many dancers that they'd never fit if they didn't take care to dip and sway in unison. The party continues long into the night, spilling into the narrow street, open to anyone who cares to drop in.
A middle-aged man walks past wearing a faded T-shirt: "Free Elian," it says.
In a struggling neighborhood far from the city center, a group of friends has converted the back yard of one house into an open-air gymnasium. There is a full circuit of weight machines, ingeniously cobbled together from scrap steel, weathered planks and baling wire. This afternoon, two women
are busy performing their daily leg presses and butterflies. Some of the improvised machines look a bit dangerous. But the more immediate peril is a brisk wind that occasionally sends ripe mangoes plummeting from the leafy canopy above.
On one wall, gradually losing color and definition: a poster with the likeness of Elian.
In the United States, the case of Elian Gonzalez has gone through the full media cycle: First it was everywhere, now it's nowhere. But here in Cuba, after nearly six months, Elian's image and story have become something like wallpaper.
No public gathering at all--certainly, no public gathering deemed worthy of broadcast on state-owned television--seems complete without mention of Elian. Fidel Castro's May Day speech, at which he dissected the Elian case at great length, is aired again and again, as if the aim were to have
everyone in the whole country learn it by heart. And almost every day at 5 in the afternoon, television here presents a two-hour "round table" where a shifting cast of talking heads analyzes and reanalyzes every incremental nuance of the story. Castro himself often shows up, and on one
recent day he sat in the audience, raising his hand like any other companero when he wanted to make a point.
No issue of Granma or Rebel Youth or any other state newspaper is complete without one or two Elian stories on the front page. If the Cuban government's message to its citizens these days could be reduced to one word, that word would be Elian.
But despite his ubiquity, Elian generally occupies no more than the background of any Cuban scene. The foreground tends to be dominated by the fervid intensity with which Cubans live their lives, with which they work and play.
Cuba has recovered considerably from the crash that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc--which meant the end of generous subsidies. There was a time, in the early 1990s, when hungry city dwellers had to hitch rides out into the countryside to barter with farmers for
food. Castro allowed limited economic reforms, invited limited overseas investment, and welcomed American dollars. The time of desperation is over.
But the recovery has been only partial. Witness Havana's decrepit housing stock--graceful and crumbling old mansions have been subdivided into dark warrens of little apartments, and the high-ceilinged apartments themselves further subdivided with improvised sleeping lofts called barbacoas. No
one looking for a place to live in Havana would conclude that this is a booming economy. Almost every building needs plaster or paint or both. The whole infrastructure of the city needs urgent attention that the government can't afford. Fleets of tanker trucks cruise the potholed streets, for
example, delivering drinking water the low-tech way.
Still, everyone has a place to live, however run-down. Everyone gets free education--unlike in almost any other Third World country, you don't see children roaming the streets during school hours--even if the school buildings are decaying and there aren't enough books and supplies. Everyone is
offered free medical care, even if there isn't nearly enough medicine. The safety net is still there, but it is torn in places and much easier to fall through.
For ordinary Cubans today, survival means not just having to work, but having to hustle. For officials who believe in the Cuban revolution and its goals, that means trying to chart a true socialist path for a nation that has little time to parse slogans or memorize speeches, a nation suddenly on
the make.
Any foreigner walking down the Prado, the leafy boulevard running from Havana's Central Park to the sea, is constantly approached by young men. "My friend!" they call. "Mon ami!" They will try language after language until they get a response, then they offer to help you buy
cut-rate cigars smuggled out of the factory, or find a good private restaurant where unauthorized but tasty seafood is served, or negotiate Havana's steamy night life--whatever. If you don't want to buy anything, they are happy to stand there talking to you until some want or need suggests itself.
If you still aren't buying, they want to make an impression for the future. "Remember me," they say. "Next time."
This is the main hustle in today's Cuba: the pursuit of the U.S. dollar, which is not so much a parallel currency as a super-currency here. Most prices in Havana stores are denominated in dollars. If you live in central Havana and you want to buy a refrigerator or a stereo or Nike tennis shoes,
you buy them with dollars.
State salaries and pensions that are still paid in Cuban pesos almost, but not quite, suffice to buy heavily subsidized necessities in state-owned food stores. That may be enough for older people who are content with their lives. But anyone with ambition--and generally, that means anyone who is
young--has to have dollars. Young people gravitate toward tourists for the same reason that Willie Sutton gravitated toward banks.
Many of these young people who hang around the tourist hotels turn out to be bright, engaging, resourceful. When you ask them about politics, a few are bitter about the way things are--"The whole world is passing us by, and things here never change," one young man complained. But most
seem to be basically apolitical. Castro's post-revolutionary Cuba is the only Cuba they have ever known; the regime is part of the landscape. The open question is how to get over, how to advance. How to get some of those dollars.
At the intersection where the Prado meets the Malecon, the curving esplanade along Havana's famous seawall, there are two billboards with likenesses of Elian Gonzalez. "Return Our Boy," says one; "Return Elian to the Fatherland," says the other.
About a half-mile farther down the Malecon is the spot where, long after midnight, Havana's subculture of gay men and lesbians gathers. At 3 a.m., hundreds of people are there--laughing, smoking, cruising. It's a lively scene, these days tolerated. Participants said individuals are sometimes
hassled by the police, who in some parts of Havana are stationed one on every block. But basically they're left alone, provided they stay within established limits.
This partial, conditioned tolerance extends as well to other subcultures. One recent night, in a gritty neighborhood far from the graceful Malecon, scores of dreadlocked Rastafarians gathered at a school auditorium for an evening concert by reggae bands in honor of the anniversary of Bob
Marley's death. Havana's relatively few Rastas tend to hang out together, and this concert was by far the biggest event of the week.
When one of the bands launched into Marley's great love song "No Woman No Cry," the audience sang along phonetically. It was like a reggae concert anywhere in the world, perhaps except that the smoke filling the auditorium was all from tobacco.
"We can't really practice the Rastafarian religion as it's meant to be, since they won't let you smoke marijuana in this country," said Daniel Rosales, a reggae promoter and producer, when asked how the government reacted to him and his friends. "They don't really hassle us at
all, but we have to keep it tied to the music, to culture. As long as it's arts and culture, that's fine. If they see anything that looks like a movement, then there's trouble."
Liberty-with-limits may be just half a loaf, but it was hard won. The arts here are allowed to put artistry first, before revolutionary mission. That basic precondition for the creation of art was once a matter of bitter struggle, especially during the period, a generation ago, when many of the
parameters of censorship were challenged and some were ultimately transcended. Castro and his system are sacrosanct and off-limits. Situations that Castro and his system wrought--overcrowding in Havana, salaries that don't go far enough, the hustle for dollars from tourists or relatives in
Miami--are rich artistic fodder.
"It was a struggle of culture versus structure in the 1970s," said Alicia Perea, who heads the Cuban Institute of Music, a government agency. "I think culture won."
Back on the Malecon, near the gay gathering spot, a discotheque called La Pampa plays nothing but American hip-hop and young Cubans greet each other with "Whazzup," just like the Budweiser guys.
A bit farther along the seawall, right next to the U.S. Interests Section--the closest thing to a U.S. Embassy in Cuba--is a brand-new amphitheater that Castro recently ordered built, probably the sleekest and best-kept structure in Havana. Its purpose is to serve as an "open tribunal"
for speeches and demonstrations calling for the immediate return to Cuba of Elian Gonzalez.
Cuba's overall situation might be qualified as dour, but Havana is far from a dour place.
In Central Park, a group of men gathers every morning this time of year and eventually swells to 100 or more. All day, every day, with pointed words and aggressive gestures, they talk trash about baseball. It's passionate and pointless, an entertaining way to pass the time.
In historic Old Havana, the streets ring with music--music that spills out of taverns, that comes from stereo stores or floats down from the balconies. Cubans without a pocketful of dollars are not welcomed in the tourist bars where bands play Cuban son, so they stand outside and listen anyway,
dancing in the street.
A young Cuban woman stops to dance merengue with an old blind man who spends every day in his spot on Obispo Street. He bows to her, deeply. Passersby applaud.
Days have an improvisational feel, like a long jazz riff. You might start by intending to telephone someone, but find that at this particular moment the Cuban telecommunications system is not inclined to connect your telephone with his. In fact, sometimes a caller gets a recorded message that
says, in effect, "We can't connect your call, so maybe you should just go over there."
So that's what you do. And maybe you see the person you wanted to see, but maybe you don't. Maybe you run into somebody else along the way who sends you in a completely different direction.
Nighttime fun begins late. At Havana's top-rank music halls, where tourists and locals go to hear the great Cuban bands and dance the night away, headliners rarely take the stage much before 1 a.m. Revelers rarely leave before 3, and then often to go to some other spot and dance some more.
Exactly when habaneros sleep remains a mystery.
On weekends, people go to the beach--not all the way to famed Varadero, which has become a deluxe tourist colony, but to closer beaches like Santa Maria, with its white sands and its honky-tonk feel. Workers can sometimes win a week's free beach rental for exemplary performance.
After school, children play stickball in the streets. Sometimes a home run bounces off a passing car, or a passing pedestrian's head. Nobody seems to mind.
Few other places can so effectively sustain the illusion of being elsewhere in time. Sit in the lobby of the Riviera Hotel, a glorious Mob-era artifact, and look out at the Malecon and the sea as a '58 Chevy goes by, followed by a '59 Chrysler, followed by a '54 Dodge, and you feel transported.
You feel as if Meyer Lansky might walk into the building any minute--or that Castro's band of revolutionaries, fresh from victories in the hills, might storm in and declare the workers liberated.
Watch state-run television and you are taken back to a time when people spoke without irony of "workers" and the "bourgeoisie," when the fight against "imperialism" was a worldwide struggle, when Marxist analysis was considered a vibrant school of thought.
Talk to Cubans on the street, though, and the illusion becomes vapor. It is hard to find anybody in the city--certainly, anybody under 40--who speaks the archaic language of revolution with any enthusiasm or skill. The language of the streets belongs to the wider world, the post-Cold-War,
postmodern world of U.S. culture and capitalist values. One recent afternoon, a young Cuban man walked through Old Havana wearing a T-shirt that said on the back, in English, "DON'T ASK ME 4 [expletive]."
The government makes use of the Elian case to teach messages about socialism and solidarity. People respond, overwhelmingly. But they seem to respond much more to the human aspects of the situation, and to national pride, than to the political lessons being taught. Instead of seeing an icon,
they see a little boy.
On a recent Saturday, hundreds of people paid 5 Cuban pesos apiece--with a much higher price of $5 apiece for foreigners--to gather in the courtyard of a Havana bar for an afternoon of performances by a traditional drumming group and an all-woman salsa band.
It was less a show than a party, with the audience as much a part of the action as the entertainers. In the front row sat a group of older women, senior citizens, who delighted the crowd with sexy dance moves and saucy flips of their hair. A few even ventured onstage, impelled by whoops of
encouragement. Whole families were there, mothers bouncing young sons and daughters in their laps to the beat. Couples managed to dance salsa, complete with spins and twirls, in an aisle no more than a few feet wide.
Then one of the singers with the drumming group started a call-and-response rhythm with the crowd.
"Elian, tu eres la felicidad de Cuba," he said.
"Elian, tu eres la felicidad de Cuba," the crowd answered.
The chant went back and forth, over and over, growing in power. For a moment it felt more like a revival meeting than a party. The voices grew stronger and stronger and stronger; the world outside seemed farther and farther away.
"Elian, you are the happiness of Cuba."
Playing Ball With Cuba
Saturday, May 20, 2000; Page A22. Editorial.
THE BALTIMORE Orioles don't need a foreign policy; they need some relief pitching. Nevertheless, as it struggled without much success to get back to .500 this week, Peter Angelos's team seemed to be dabbling in international politics with the issuance of a statement that indicated it would not
sign ballplayers who come here from Cuba.
Syd Thrift, vice president for baseball operations of the club, which played a home-and-home series with the Cuban national team last year, told the Washington Times: "After the good will created between the two countries by the visit, we--Mr. Angelos in particular--feel it best to not do
anything that could be interpreted as being disrespectful or . . . encouraging players to defect."
Questioned later about the statement, Mr. Thrift said it enunciated a "concept" rather than a policy, and whatever it was, Mr. Angelos amended it soon afterward by saying the Orioles would consider signing Cubans but "would not solicit or encourage anyone to defect--rather we
would discourage that."
Mr. Angelos spent some time in the company of Fidel Castro during last year's venture in baseball diplomacy, but even so it's hard to understand his sensitivity about disrupting the order of things in Cuba. The Orioles' owner is a very successful lawyer-entrepreneur whose father emigrated to
this country like millions before and after him to make a better life here. Among the emigres in this century have been numerous Dominican outfielders, Venezuelan shortstops and Japanese pitchers. From Cuba, however, you don't generally emigrate--you escape. Then you have to "defect" (an
increasingly archaic verb).
Most people in this country regard it as a triumph when a talented man such as Orlando Hernandez makes it through a sea of adversity to pitch for the Yankees and earn his fortune in America. They certainly don't consider it something to be discouraged.
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