Paulo Roberto de Almeida
FROM
THE MAGAZINE The City journal
The Last Communist City
A visit
to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see
Politics
and law
Cities
The
Social Order
TED SOQUI/CORBIS
Downtown Old Havana,
just blocks from the capitol
Neill
Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium,
starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154.
The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the
title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The
film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa,
where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather
cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for
pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s
dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing
socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve
always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian
fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally
got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban
reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium,
a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high
above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The
Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured
by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles
of those who keep the poor down by force.
Many
tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet
model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.
Ihad
to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s
tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they
known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can
keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It
felt like a victory. Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s
nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever
visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed
to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in
time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant
for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades.
Outside
its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a
catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs
have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has
long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile
traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without
seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana
exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis
arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a
life in the ruins.
Marxists
have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine
guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista
from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a
Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro
secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist
battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money;
the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan,
then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba
was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the
wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread
by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the
University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a
privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as
Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of
Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United
States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro
and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to
leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents
could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United
States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in
1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist
playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.”
Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary
classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do
not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.
But
rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the
middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan
says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual
rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of
being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living
standards over the period.”
Communism
destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and
deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet
Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about
this period in his book Cuban
Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were
on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods
almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . .
Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans
“used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned
with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye
and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers
down Cubans’ collective spines.”
By
the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an
ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of
existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the
global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe
and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving
foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food—as the
locals do—so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars—restaurants
inside private homes—to open, though no one from outside the family could work
in them. (That would be “exploitative.”) Around the same time, government-run
“dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to
non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created.
When
the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother
Raúl in 2008, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains
heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20
a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and
lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health
care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says,
“All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have
the skills to perform their tasks.”
Even
employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The
government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to
manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it
wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the
company pays $8–$10 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly.
Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the
workers—but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in
my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The
workers don’t get $8–$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day—a child’s allowance.
The
maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to
have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend
extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the
bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author
Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana
Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and
bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some
dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.” Perhaps the saddest
symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic—a problem
the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in
Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are
average women—wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers—who solicit johns once or
twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet.
The
government defends its maximum wage by arguing that life’s necessities are
either free or so deeply subsidized in Cuba that citizens don’t need very much
money. (Che Guevara and his sophomoric hangers-on hoped to rid Cuba of money
entirely, but couldn’t quite pull it off.) The free and subsidized goods and
services, though, are as dismal as everything else on the island. Citizens who
take public transportation to work—which includes almost everyone, since Cuba
hardly has any cars—must wait in lines for up to two hours each way to get on a
bus. And commuters must pay for their ride out of their $20 a month. At least
commuter buses are cheap. By contrast, a one-way ticket to the other side of
the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual
salary.
As
for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own
bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are
available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in
hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many
doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is
now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors
left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens
of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging
from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY
HEADACHE?”
Housing
is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of
Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to
live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate
housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a
Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on
their hinges at odd angles.
Education
is free, and the country is effectively 100 percent literate, thanks to
Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power.
But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police
state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 100 percent.
After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the
same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression.
Cuba
is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez describes an
astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during which he boasted
that the economy was doing so well now that everyone could drink milk. “To me,”
Sánchez wrote, “someone who grew up on a gulp of orange-peel tea, the news
seemed incredible.” She never thought she’d see the day. “I believed we would
put a man on the moon, take first place among all nations in the upcoming
Olympics, or discover a vaccine for AIDS before we would put the forgotten
morning café con leche,
coffee with milk, within reach of every person on this island.” And yet Raúl’s
promise of milk for all was deleted from the transcription of the speech in Granma,
the Communist Party newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to
ensure that everyone got some.
Even
things as simple as cooking oil and soap are black-market goods. Individuals
who, by some illegal means or another, manage to acquire such desirables will stand
on street corners and whisper “cooking oil” or “sugar” to passersby, and then
sell the product on the sly out of their living room. If they’re caught, both
sellers and buyers will be arrested, of course, but the authorities can’t put
the entire country in jail. “Everyone cheats,” says Eire. “One must in order to
survive. The verb ‘to steal’ has almost vanished from usage. Breaking the rules
is necessary. Resolví mi problema,
which means ‘I solved my problem,’ is the Cuban way of referring to stealing or
cheating or selling on the black market.”
Cuba
has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the majority; and a
quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each has its own currency:
the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the capitalist bubble uses the
convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth nothing. They can’t be converted to
dollars or euros. Foreigners can’t even spend them in Cuba. The convertible
pesos are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents
for each one—the government takes 13 percent off the top. The rigged exchange
rate is an easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also
enables the state to drain Cuban exiles. A million Cuban-Americans live in
south Florida, and another half-million live elsewhere in the United States.
They send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to family members still on the
island. The government gets its 13 percent instantaneously and most of the
remaining 87 percent later because almost every place that someone can spend
the money is owned by the state.
Castro
created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba’s little capitalist bubble
from the ragged majority in the Communist economy. “Foreign journalists report
on the creation of ever more luxurious hotels, golf courses, and marinas,” Eire
says, “but fail to highlight the very simple and brutal fact that these
facilities will be enjoyed strictly by foreigners and the Castronoid power
elite. Apartheid, discrimination, and segregation are deliberately built in to
the entire tourist industry and, in fact, are essential to its maintenance and
survival.”
Until
a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren’t allowed even to set foot inside hotels
or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find themselves exposed to
the seductive lifestyles of the decadent bourgeoisie from capitalist nations
like Mexico, Chile, and Spain. (I cite these three countries because most of
the tourists I ran into spoke Spanish to one another.) A few years ago, the government
stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because
Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because
most Cubans can’t afford to go to these places, anyway.
A
single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month’s salary. One night in a
hotel costs five months’ salary. A middle-class tourist from abroad can easily
spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year. I had dinner with four
Americans at one of the paladars.
The only Cubans in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for
the five of us came to about $100. That’s five months’ salary.
The
Floridita bar in downtown Havana was one of Ernest Hemingway’s hangouts when he
lived there (from 1940 until 1960, the year after Castro came to power). He was
in the Floridita all the time—and, in a way, he still is. There’s a statue of
him sitting on his favorite bar stool, grinning at today’s patrons. The décor
is exactly the same, but there’s a big difference: everyone in the bar these
days is a tourist. Cubans aren’t strictly banned any more, but a single bottle
of beer costs a week’s salary. No one would blow his dismal paycheck on that.
If
he were still around, Hemingway would be stunned to see what has happened to
his old haunt. Cubans certainly aren’t happy about it, but the tourists are
another story—especially the world’s remaining Marxoid fellow travelers, who
show up in Havana by the planeload. Such people are clearly unteachable. I got
into an argument with one at the Floridita when I pointed out that none of the
patrons were Cuban. “There are places in the United States that some can’t
afford,” she retorted. Sure, but come on.
Not even the poorest Americans have to pay a week’s wage for a beer.
Cubans
in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it
without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it
needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible
pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed
over my cash—she does this all day—but when she first got the job, it must have
been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep
foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists
tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and
to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the
additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact,
they’re an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell
phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a
while—that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much
chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my
dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are.
Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an
average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a
month—30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell
wrote in Animal Farm,
his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only
in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with
the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class
and even the poor outside Cuba.
About
half the dinners I had were acceptable, and a few were outstanding, but the
breakfast buffets in my hotel, the Habana Libre, were uniformly disgusting.
Bacon was half-raw, the sausage made from God-knows-what. The cheese was
discolored, the bread hard and flavorless. Yet the grim offering was advertised
in the lobby as “exquisite.” Maybe if you’ve spent your entire life on a Cuban
ration card, it’s exquisite, but otherwise—no. The question wasn’t what I
wanted to eat, but what I thought I could eat
without my stomach rising up in rebellion.
Leftists
often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly
lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food
desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street
from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard
currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what
passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with
malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk,
bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of
rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it.
No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–11 has a far better
selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. I heard, but cannot
confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four
months.
Shortly
before I left Havana, I met a Cuban-American man and his wife visiting from
Miami. “Is this your first time here?” he asked. I nodded. “What do you think?”
I paused before answering. I wasn’t worried that I would offend him. He lives
in Miami, so his opinions of Cuba are probably little different from mine. But
we were in a crowded place. Plenty of Cubans could hear us, including the
police. They wouldn’t arrest me if I insulted the government, but I didn’t want
to make a scene, either. “Well,” I finally said. “It’s . . . interesting.” He
belted out a great belly laugh, and I smiled. His wife scowled.
“I hate this
place!” she near-shouted. Fidel himself could have heard, and she wouldn’t have
cared. She wasn’t going to be quiet about it. Tourists who visit Cuba and spend
all their time inside the bubble for the “haves” could leave the country
oblivious to the savage inequalities and squalor beyond the hotel zone, but
this woman visits her husband’s family in the real Cuba and knows what it’s
really like.
“His
family is from here,” she said, “but mine’s not, and I will never come
back here. Not while it’s like this. I feel like I’m in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I
visited Iraq seven times during the war and didn’t have the heart to tell her
that Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous
these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with
which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It’s the wrong comparison. So are
impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn’t a
developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own
government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared
not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly
Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after
all.
An
advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant on the top
floor is “probably” the best in Havana. I had saved the Sierra Maestra for my
last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th floor. I had my first and only
steak on the island and washed it down with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set
me back no more than having a pizza delivered at home would, but the total
nevertheless exceeded an entire month’s local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate
alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the
president of some faraway minor republic.
I
stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked
like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the
grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will
look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical
imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a
Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local
people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top
of Cuba’s Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism’s inequalities are not
so jagged and stark.
Michael J. Totten is a City
Journal contributing editor and the author
of five books, including The Road to Fatima Gate.
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