A Cuba Diary  

Tamar Karet went to Cuba for a holiday….
 

I had conflicting impressions of Cuba before I went. Of course, I'd read the reports over the years about heavy-handed press censorship and the persecution of dissidents, but I couldn't see how this fit in with what I'd heard personally.
 

A recent impression came from a friend's email a few weeks before I went, warning me that on her visit she was harassed constantly by people wanting money, soap or pens, and that the food was terrible, but then she concluded with the paradoxical comment that she found Cuba so magical she couldn't wait to go back.

The second was of my mother floating into my bedroom in a cloud of perfume, swishing skirts and suppressed excitement, followed by my father clutching a gold-plated statue of two entwined ballroom dancers. We were in Miami Beach, where we went every winter, and my parents had just returned from a trip to Havana where they had won a ballroom dancing contest. All glamour and decadence, a promise of what I might savour when I grew up.

And it's all true. Cuba's poverty is all-pervasive. The economic squeeze which began when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and the American economic boycott began led to shortages everywhere, and there was never any money for extras like new cars, or even maintaining buildings. After 1991, when the iron curtain came down and Soviet aid ceased, basics were in such short supply that people in the countryside learned to use  'soap' plants to do their laundry. I was told they only avoided complete disaster because Castro struck a deal a few years ago with C?ar Chavez to send doctors to Venezuela in exchange for shipments of oil.

So it's no wonder that the fabric of the country - the buildings, the cars and indeed anything manufactured - is in a serious state of dilapidation. But... the lack of money has preserved the old fabric to such an extent that I only had to squint in order to see Havana in the way my parents did. Music is everywhere, not only in the tourist venues, but also on the street, echoing from every courtyard, wafting through the air, nearly always wonderfully performed, rhythmic, life enforcing. No wonder that my parents, lifetime devotees of ballroom dance, loved to fly off to Havana.

The cars, mainly 1950s American models, are exquisitely maintained: Cubans have had to become mechanical geniuses. Of course, there aren't enough of them, so everyone walks everywhere. A possible side effect is that I saw very little pollution. There also isn't enough money to maintain roads or put in any of the street 'furniture' our risk-averse authorities consider necessary such as humps, traffic signs or even road markings. Outside Havana the cars and lorries weave across the roads to avoid potholes, navigating slowly since the surfaces are too uneven for speed.

Thus, Cubans are forced to carry out the kind of experiment we read about in Denmark and Holland, where everyone and everything shares the markings-free roadway. I expected road chaos, but instead I saw safe and courteous drivers, and I never did see an accident.

Lack of cash means Cubans can't afford to waste anything, so recycling is a necessity of life, not an ecological choice. Nor can they indulge in overeating. There's very little meat but, insofar as I could tell, there seems to be enough food now, particularly in the countryside where people can farm their own (presumably organic) vegetables. The people I saw looked tremendously fit.

I realised that I was only getting a tourist's perspective, using rudimentary Spanish, so I decided to try to locate a distant relative whom I'd heard lived in Havana. Despite an unusual surname, Elena was not listed in the phone directory, an early warning that I wouldn't find her amongst Cuba's phone-owning elite. Several phone calls to Miami and Westchester finally yielded an address in downtown Havana.

The crumbling entrance to Elena's building signalled no encouragement. I followed a boy who appointed himself our guide up a rusting stairway and then Elena emerged, a stick-thin woman about my age with a drawn, haggard face lightened by an enormous smile. It didn't matter who we were: a warm welcome and a cup of coffee came before any questions.

The daughter of Cuban exiles who had raised her in Miami, she'd returned to Havana with her husband to take up academic positions. The details of how they'd been forced out of these jobs were not described, merely indicated by shrugs and downcast eyes. Now living on tiny pensions, they were restricted to one shabby room with a kitchen alcove and a sleeping loft. I realised that an offer of money would be an insult, but the satchel of soaps and other (resalable) western goodies was gladly received.

We left Havana to drive about five hours to the east to the city of Trinidad. On excursions into the mountains there I met farmers on smallholdings whose lives were pared down to the basics of stark poverty. I forgot about whether their lifestyle was 'green' and wondered instead how to help. And then I looked out over the hazy mountain jungle, with its royal palms and waving fronds, heard the parrots screeching, and saw the waterfall tumbling into the farmer's own pool, and thought: this is magical.

I couldn't reconcile the paradox. At a superficial level, one could almost conclude that being strapped for cash has forced Cubans to live an exemplary 'green' life, and one on which they thrive. Yet clearly this is no paradise, as poverty and omnipresent state control keep everyone on a tight leash. Nonetheless, there is a tremendous feeling of camaraderie, reminiscent of what I've read about London during the blitz, as people pull together to survive hard times. Perhaps that is why, despite the restrictions, Cubans are still immensely proud of what they have.


 

laterlife interest

The above article is part of the features section of laterlife.com called laterlife interest. laterlife interest contains a variety of articles of interest for visitors to laterlife.com written by a number of experienced and new journalists.

It includes both one off articles and also associated regular columns of a more specialist nature such as Healthwise, Talkback, Gardener's Diary, and a beauty section called Looking good in later life.

There's also 'It could be you' by Maggi Stamp laterlife's counsellor on human relationships. 

Also don't forget to take a look at our regular IT question and answer section called YoucandoIT by IT trainer and author Jackie Sherman.

To view the latest articles click on laterlife interest or to view indexes to previous articles click on laterlife interest index. To search for articles about a certain topic, use the site search feature at the top of the navigation.