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© St. Petersburg Times, published April 19, 2003
HAVANA -- To visit Fidel Castro's Cuba, especially as a Yankee, is to enter an entrancing nest of contradictions:
Renovated architectural treasures of the 18th-19th century gleam golden, green, pink next to crumbling hulks of the same era; brand-new imported cars jostle on the Malecon seaside boulevard among barely mobile flivvers; stunningly handsome youngsters in fashionable duds saunter next to wrinkled older people in rags.
La Revolucion, now 44 years old, is present in billboards, posters, graffiti, postal cards, Che Guevara T-shirts for tourists and monuments. But with age they seem to have acquired a character that is more archaeological than actual. When a visitor to ancient Trinidad on the southern coast murmured the old slogan "Fidel, seguro, a los Yanquis dales duro!" ("Fidel, for sure, give it to the Yankees hard!") a young vendor burst into peals of laughter.
For many of the 11-million Cubans, it seems, Castro at 76 has mellowed from a former firebrand into something like a father figure. In March he attended the inaugural ceremony of a convent of the Catholic nuns of St. Brigid in Old Havana. They gratefully presented him with a medal and the honorary title of commander of their order.
But as the American invasion of Iraq got under way, some Cubans could not help wondering whether President Bush, after he is flush with victory in the sands of Mesopotamia, might turn his baleful attention to their island as a new focus for his axis of evil. Signs of new tension are there, with the United States imprisoning five Cubans on charges of espionage -- some sentenced for life -- while the Castro government recently arrested as many as 80 Cuban dissidents and placed others under house arrest after asserting James Cason, head of the U.S. Interests office in Havana, had conducted "gross and provocative" meetings with them.
Regardless of that, a question on the minds of Cubans old and young is what their country will be like after he passes from the scene. Few seem absolutely certain of the answer.
Asked, "Will revolutionary Cuba survive?" a middle-aged member of the ruling Communist Party replied, "I believe so -- universal education, health service and a socially committed government."
He pointed out that Castro's chief of staff is 29, his foreign minister 37, and there a host of other young, highly educated cadres.
Still, there are critical shortcomings in the legacy of the revolution. The press, including state television, is uniformly bad. Why? The party member said, "Because Castro started out his rule by copy editing every article in the press down to every comma and every period." The ideological watchdogs of the party keep up that practice.
Across Cuba's cities, towns and villages there are the clearly identified CDRs, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are expected to monitor any suspicious or unseemly activity in the neighborhood. A young Cuban called their work "institutionalized gossip." The older party member said he was thinking of retiring from the party when he retires from his job, "so that some old block captain won't be able to tell me what to do . . . but the CDR won't like that."
Yet in the last decade, Cuba has evolved into something quite different than Castro and his fellow revolutionaries might have envisioned. The changes, and they are substantial, resulted from the utter collapse of their once-generous friends in the Soviet bloc. Vanishing with them were more than $4-billion in subsidies as well as guaranteed markets for Cuban sugar, fruits and other products. Left behind were outright gifts which soon tarnished -- a huge, energy-swallowing cement plant from East Germany and a Soviet nuclear reactor of the Chernobyl design that never came on-line in Cienfuegos Province, and others.
What followed was what Cubans universally refer to as their "special period," which became a euphemism for outright hunger. "We lost weight even when we didn't intend to," a young Cuban recalled. He told a joke that praises the three accomplishments of the revolution -- health, education and safety in the streets -- followed by the three negatives: breakfast, lunch and dinner. There are still food shortages and Cubans receive ration cards for staples at rock-bottom prices. Havana is a city where meat-loving Cuban families keep chickens on their balconies, and one family a pig in the bathtub. It is against the law to kill a cow. Only the state may slaughter a cow or a horse.
The "special period" was ameliorated by foreign investment and tourism, cooperativization of large state farms, urban agriculture (in Havana and beyond one sees new garden plots green with lettuce and other vegetables), legalization of family remittances from the United States and the opening of dollar shops and small private businesses. These changes are not enough, restless Cubans say.
In effect, Cuba now has three economies. There is the state economy based on the Cuban peso; the second economy represented by the "hard peso" that is pegged to the U.S. dollar; and a third economy of the U.S. dollar pure and simple.
Contemporary Cuba is creating world-class pharmaceuticals such as the cholesterol-reducing drug called PPG. It is even producing wines in Pinar del Rio with Italian varietals. Spiffy foreign-financed hotels are going up in tourist enclaves on the Atlantic Coast as well as in cities like Havana and Cienfuegos.
Mario Coyula, a renowned Havana architect, fearing a tidal wave of fly-by-night investors when the 43-year-old U.S. embargo in trade with Cuba is finally lifted, says: "We are in danger like our ancestors (the Taino Indians) of trading pieces of gold for little mirrors (reflective glass). They want to build 600-room hotels instead of ten 60-bed hotels. The dilemma is how much to tighten, how much to loosen. My principle is to spread the wealth rather than creating ghettoes of wealth."
This seems a precious moment to a Yankee returning after an absence of nearly 30 years: the scintillating music seemingly played on every corner and in every cafe, the overwhelming charm of Cubans, the comfort and excellent food, low prices, the sense of personal safety. Will this disappear, inundated by Gringos, cars and their pollution, an unsupervised building boom, when the embargo is lifted?
On the one hand the Cuban paradise, with all its flaws including real poverty on the urban fringes, has been preserved by the spite-filled vengeance of the Cuban diaspora centered in Miami and by the mulish obstinacy and righteousness of a succession of U.S. administrations.
On the other hand, "If Bush really wanted to hurt Castro he'd lift the embargo," said a Cuban in his 20s.
-- David Binder is a retired foreign correspondent for the New York Times.