In Castro's Faded Capital, Elian Is Backdrop to an Intense Way of Life
By Eugene Robinson Washington Post Service. International Herald Tribune. Paris, Wednesday, May 24, 2000
HAVANA - On a busy corner not far from the soaring, graceful, grimy dome of the old prerevolution capital building, dozens of people are waiting as the camello pulls up - a long bus whose swaybacked profile reminds everyone of a two-humped camel.
The bus is already packed, but new riders squeeze aboard. It is 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 article today, as on most days, is about Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old boy who has been reunited with his father in the United States, but not yet allowed to leave with
him for Cuba.
In decrepit and gorgeous Old Havana, a blast of dance music announces a party, in this case, a wedding reception. The site 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 would 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 T-shirt: ''Free Elian,'' it says.
In a struggling neighborhood far from the city center, a group of friends has converted the backyard of a 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 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 is nowhere. But here in Cuba, after nearly six months, Elian's image and story - the death of his mother at sea, his rescue, the custody battle with his relatives in Miami -
have become something like wallpaper.
No public gathering - 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 broadcast again and again, as if the aim were to have
everyone in the country learn it by heart.
And almost every afternoon at 5 o'clock, television here presents a two-hour ''roundtable'' where a shifting cast of talking heads analyzes and reanalyzes every incremental nuance of the story. Mr. Castro often shows up, and on one recent day he sat in the audience, raising his hand like any
other citizen 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 articles 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 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 in 1991, 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. Mr. Castro allowed limited economic changes, 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: 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 cannot 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 rundown. Everyone gets free education - unlike most other Third World countries, children do not roam the streets during school hours - even if the school buildings are decaying and there are not enough books and supplies.
Everyone is offered free medical care, even if there is not 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 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 nightlife - whatever.
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 supercurrency here. Most prices in Havana stores are denominated in dollars. If a Cuban lives in central Havana and wants to buy a refrigerator or a stereo or Nike sports
tennis, he buys 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, generally anyone who is young, has to
have dollars.
Many of these young people who hang around the tourist hotels turn out to be bright, engaging, resourceful. A few are bitter about the way things are, but most seem to be basically apolitical.
Mr. Castro's postrevolutionary Cuba is the only Cuba they have ever known; the government, which took power in 1960, 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,'' one says. ''Return Elian to the Fatherland,'' the other says.
About 800 meters 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 say individuals are sometimes hassled by the police, who in some parts of Havana are stationed one on every block. But basically they are left alone, provided they stay within established limits.
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. Mr. Castro and his system are sacrosanct and off-limits.
Situations that Mr. Castro and his system wrought - overcrowding in Havana, salaries that do not 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.
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 new amphitheater that Mr. 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.
The government uses 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. |