I went to Cuba in 2012 with a tour group. We were in the
first wave of Americans to go to Cuba strictly as tourists, although we were
cautioned that this wasn’t supposed to be typical tourist fun and frolic. Our
tour director had to fill out reams of paperwork admitting us under the
auspices of serious cultural exchange. We had to swear we were going for
strictly educational purposes. So please - no laughing!
I had heard about the prevalence of old cars from the
40’s and 50’s on Cuba’s streets. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see
Havana’s morning rush hour to be a re-creation of a busy street in America in
1950. But I was surprised to find that so much of Cuba as a whole was a
frozen-in-time tableau of American circa 1959, when Castro came into power.
This trip became an experience of time-travel even more than its intended
“People-to-People” exchange.
When Castro took over, he ordered an end to most private
enterprise, to most free market buying and selling. However he didn’t
confiscate a lot of what ordinary citizens already had. So although Cuban
citizens couldn’t buy new cars, machinery, or many large appliances in the
ordinary way Americans are used to, they could still own the things that were
in their possession as of 1959. Cubans have made an art and a science of
keeping all those things repaired and running.
I was almost overcome with nostalgia when we were ushered
through a print shop in Santa Clara. There was the printing business my parents
had started in the 1940’s! There were the Linotype machines and the treadle
flatbed presses. There was the manual cutting machine with the big bar-handle I
used to hang on as a child to apply the weight needed to get the blade to lower
and slice through the paper stack. Who says you can’t re-live your childhood –
you can’t go home again? I found I was able to do both in Cuba.
Along with its evocation of a homesick melancholy, Castro’s ban on private ownership also had some humorous side effects. Cubans are allowed to own pigs and chickens – but they aren’t allowed to own cows. The cattle, which are mostly Brahmins, are government property. Farmers are only appointed as caretakers of the cow or two allotted to them. They are not allowed to slaughter or in any way personally use the products of the animals in their care. What little beef is available in Cuba is reserved for tourists.
But when Castro first put this edict against slaughtering
and eating cattle into effect, many farmers found a sly way around the ruling.
They would claim their cow had met with an unfortunate accident, or even that
it had “committed suicide” by falling on a very sharp knife. Not wanting to see
any meat go to waste, the farmer had claimed it his duty to eat the meat before
it spoiled.
Castro soon put a stop to this risible evasion. Our guide
read us the amended ruling that Castro had handed down. He now specified that
farmers were not allowed to slaughter or consume any cow, no matter in what
manner it met its demise. Any bovine death, whether by accident or by
self-inflicted wound, had to be reported to government officials, who would
then come and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of such an
animal was subject to a heavy fine and/or imprisonment. Anyone who saw someone eating such unauthorized
meat and failed to report the crime, was similarly subject to heavy fine and/or
imprisonment.
Apparently cows cheered up considerably after that more
specific enactment. The suicide rate among Cuban ungulates has dropped to
almost zero.
Another one of the dietary restrictions that has come
about as the result of bans against private ownership was surprisingly – fish.
As we tourists sat with the vast expanse of ocean in view out of our restaurant
window, we were served mahi-mahi imported from Viet Nam. Of course! I suddenly realized
what had been missing from all these scenic ocean views. Boats! There was
beautiful Havana Harbor, with not a boat, not a dinghy, not a skiff, not a
canoe in sight. I realized the problem. The average Cuban citizen is strictly
forbidden from owning a boat or even so much as a plank of wood – for fear of
more attempts to cross to Miami. So fishing is almost completely foreclosed as
an occupation throughout most of Cuba. Even we tourists were reduced to eating
fish imported from Viet Nam, or even something like Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish
sticks – imported from Canada.
But throughout all the beauty and melancholy and
anachronism of Cuba – the primary message our tour guide was assigned to get
across to us was the message of “The Revolution.” Everything begins and ends
with the Revolution in Cuba. This is where we get down to Che (Ernesto)
Guevara.
We saw Revolution Square; we saw the bullet holes that an
early uprising had put in the Palace from which dictator Batista escaped through
a secret door; we saw Granma, the boat which brought the Castro brothers and
Che along with a ragtag band from Mexico to the Sierra Maestra region of Cuba
to start their forward push to power; we saw the revolutionary car they’d used
and the one plane they’d briefly had at their disposal. Those latter are in
cordoned off areas of the Revolutionary Museum, guarded by functionaries with
shrill whistles they’ll blow at you if you step off the designated walkway and
get too close to one of these almost mythic artifacts of the Revolution. But
mostly there was Che.
There weren’t any loudspeakers exhorting the citizenry to
Revolutionary fervor in Cuba, as I heard there had been in Maoist China. Cuba
is a quiet place, with no cell phones, no boom boxes, very little media noise
of any kind. But there are posters and billboards everywhere, almost all of
them containing a picture of Che and one of his classic quotes such as the
somewhat ambiguous and grammatically skewed, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (Until
Victory Always”).
I asked our tour guide if Fidel Castro might feel a
little left out. There are ten public invocations of Che for every one there is
of Fidel. Our guide said oh, no. It was customary to honor the dead. That’s why
Che’s image is writ large all over, while Fidel waits in the wings when it
comes to mythic representation.
I wonder though. If Che had been less handsome, would he
be featured as prominently? If Alberto Korda’s photograph of him hadn’t become
a world-wide rallying point for anyone with a discontent – would his images
have so markedly outnumbered those of Fidel in Cuba? Even I have one of those
iconic posters of him on my wall at home. Seeing it for the first time, an
acquaintance said, “What? Are you a Communist?” I told her no. A former flower
child I knew had just been down-sizing, and I was the recipient of a lot of the
“stuff” she unloaded. Besides, I explained, everybody
has a picture of Che. It doesn’t reflect anyone’s political philosophy. I fall
into that insouciant category of people described by the Argentine saying, “Tengo
una remera del Che, y no sé por qué” (I have a Che T-shirt, and I don’t know
why).
But for whatever reason, Che is the order of the day in
Cuba. I hadn’t known much about what he did after his and Fidel’s band took
over Cuba. Some of the other people in my tour group were better informed
though, and they filled me in on details our Cuban tour guide could not, or
dare not, mention. I learned that Che had ordered the execution of scores of people
he considered to be Batista “loyalists,” or people who had simply been too
successful as businessmen and were therefore assumed to be right-wing
supporters. I learned that he had also been brutal to many of his own men as
they fought beside him when he carried the revolution on to the Congo and then
into Bolivia. When a man who’d been fighting through the jungles alongside Che
for a long time decided he wanted to quit and “fight no more” in these
harum-scarum battles – Che summarily shot him in the head and snatched the watch
off the wrist of the dying man.
By the time we were ushered up the steps of Che’s
Memorial in Santa Clara, I was thinking it best I take his poster down when I
got home, as meaningless as that pin-up had been to me in the first place. But
there wasn’t much time to consider my altered opinion of Che then. We were
hurried along into the Memorial. No cameras, umbrellas, purses, or bags, were
allowed inside, so we loaded all these accessories onto our tour guide. He ended
up looking incongruously like a roving peddler standing out there at the
entrance to the Mausoleum, weighed and bulging with hot items for sale.
The interior of the Memorial was designed like a grotto.
It was dimly lit. A fountain provided the soothing sound of trickling water.
There was an eternal flame. The walls were of stone and brick and I immediately
saw the names of many men inscribed on them – men who had fought alongside Che in
one place or another. But where were the remains of Che himself? Our tour guide
had told us to “look for the star.”
Finally I saw it, just as the guards were hurrying us
along to make way for other admirers, or curiosity seekers. The star was a
small light projected near the top of one column of names. It confused me at
first. Then I realized Che’s full name was inscribed as it had been given to
him when he was born in Argentina in 1928 – “Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.”
His bones had only been found relatively recently in
Bolivia after what many say was a combined decision made by the CIA and
Bolivian officials to shoot him after capture in 1969. His burial spot was left
a secret, presumably to prevent just what has happened – to prevent his
martyrdom.
From the grotto we went into an adjacent room that was a
Museum of his artifacts. People were allowed to linger there. So I took my time
puzzling over his early family photos, over the instruments he’d used as a
medical student in Argentina, over the books he’d read as a youth. Tom Sawyer was the most prominent among
these. How could such benign beginnings lead to such a cruel character? That’s
the eternal question.
However, seeing him personalized this way made me waver
in my decision to rip down his poster from my wall when I got home. In fact, he’s
still there. But his persistence in my field of vision is more the result of my
lethargy and indifference to all home decorating projects than it is the result
of my having given him a reprieve for his crimes against humanity.
This trip was to offer up one more small spotlight of
humor. It wasn’t quite the guffaw of cow suicides, but it has given me an
occasional chuckle. I started to do some follow-up research on Cuba when I got
home. I viewed U-Tube interviews with Castro that spanned the decades, starting
with his fervent avowals to Mike Wallace shortly after he took power that he
was NOT a Communist and would certainly NOT lead Cuba in the direction of Communism.
There were also some video of Che himself.
But the YouTube interview that has given me pause to
laugh along the way was one with actor Benecio del Toro. Del Toro played Che in
a film meant to be an epic re-enactment of Che’s post Motorcycle Diaries struggles. In reality the picture struck me as
being a sort of flat account of fighting, fighting, fighting… But Benecio del
Toro had just come off the high of this movie’s release when he did the
interview I saw.
The interview was in Spanish, intended for a Spanish
language TV station. But I was able to make out enough of what was said. The
show’s host was a young woman who went on the attack the moment del Toro sat
down opposite her. She asked him how he could possibly have lent himself to
such a project – validating, glamorizing such a ruthless dictator as Che
Guevara. She asked how del Toro could live with himself after so roundly betraying
the public’s trust in him as an international star by sympathetically
portraying such a monster as Che.
Del Toro began to fidget in his chair, in obvious
disbelief that he was being challenged this way. He began to roll his eyes
around, likely trying to search out the person responsible for booking him into
this ambush. I imagined that his agent was summarily fired as soon as the show
went off the air. But del Toro soldiered on for a while, talking about how it’s
an actor’s job to portray all kinds of people, not just those whom the actor
agrees with or those who are likeable. However, it was obvious that del Toro
was at least somewhat well disposed towards Che and his revolutionary ideals.
The interviewer wouldn’t let up though. She was not
appeased by any of del Toro’s vague answers about the role of an actor. She
kept pounding home her objections. However, before he unclipped his mike and
walked off the set, del Toro got in the rejoinder that has stayed with me, a
model of unintended humor. When the show’s host demanded once more to know how
he could portray a murderer, he responded:
“Che was not a murderer.
He was just pro-capital punishment.”So there it was – a motto I could live by. The next time someone displeases me, I can eliminate him with impunity. When they try to convict me of murder, I will protest, “No, you can’t do that. I am not a murderer. I was just exercising my Constitutional right to be pro-capital punishment.”
One small victory of absurdity over absolutism; one small
star-shine of humor in the melancholy of Cuba’s blues.
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