The Suicidal Cows of Cuba

I went with one of the first groups of American tourists allowed into Cuba after our fifty-plus year embargo on casual travel there. Well, in 2012, our group wasn’t really supposed to be going for casual reasons either. We went under a strict “People-to-People” program intended for earnest cultural exchange only - not for frivolous junketing. We were not supposed to cavort on the beaches or go laughing along the Malecon. It was all supposed to be – Study! Learn! (However, some of our group did manage to slip in a little idle beachcombing along the way.)

Out guide was a friendly, non-dogmatic individual, obviously coached in how to walk the line between appearing pleasantly open to tourists’ political criticisms on the one hand – and remaining loyal to Cuba’s revolutionary doctrine on the other hand. Our itinerary was largely about the Revolution. We saw statues of Che Guevara everywhere, and banners extoling his heroism, quoting his slogans. “Hasta la victoria siempre!” When I asked why there were almost no statues of Fidel or banners containing quotes from him, I was told that it was traditional to only honor the dead in that way. (Fidel was still alive then, and, according to the newspaper in Havana, conferring daily with his buddy Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.) I wasn’t so sure that could be the reason for Fidel’s absence from any public displays though.

We stopped to contemplate the meaning of the Revolution in Revolutionary Square. We were taken through several Revolutionary Museums, one of which included somewhat unconvincing life-size papier-mȃché/plastic figures of Fidel and Che trekking through the Sierra Maestra mountains where they had landed after boating from Mexico. We saw Granma, the yacht that Fidel and his eighty-two fighters had crammed aboard for the voyage. We saw bullet holes in the Museum that had been the Presidential Palace, created as Batista’s government went under siege. We were shown the secret doorway in Batista’s office, allowing him escape. We also saw the bullet holes in the “Quick Delivery” truck that Castro had coopted as transport. We went to the town of Santa Clara, the site of Che’s most decisive revolutionary victory over the mobbed-up Batista regime, and the site of Che’s Mausoleum/Memorial.

My fellow tourists quietly mumbled among themselves about what a psychopath Che had been, ordering the torture and death of thousands of “opponents.” Before I’d gone on this trip and listened to my politically more aware companions, I hadn’t realized the extent of Che’s savagry. When I got home, I studied up on him a bit. I happened to catch an interview on a Spanish-language TV station, done with Benicio del Toro who’d played Che in the latest biopic about the man. Although my Spanish was limited, I could catch most of the exchange. The interviewer was very antagonistic towards the actor, asking him how he could in all conscience have sympathetically portrayed such a monster. Del Toro was clearly caught off guard by this attack. He twisted around in his chair, trying to beetle in on the agent or other lackey responsible for booking him onto the show. I could tell “Che” would be responsible for one more head-rolling after the program was over.

The interviewer finally put the question plainly to del Toro. “How could you favorably portray a man who committed so many atrocities, who was a mass murderer, who advocated murder on a grand scale?” Fumbling to get his mike off so he could depart the show in protest, del Toro shot back his final justification. “Che was not pro-murder! He was NOT pro-murder! He was pro-capital punishment!”

I laughed. I told myself I’d have to remember to invoke that defense the next time I hacked anyone to death. “I did NOT murder him! I committed capital punishment!”

Despite all this unsavory history I was garnering about Che sub rosa on the trip – still, it was touching to stand there in the Santa Clara Memorial and see the volume of Tom Sawyer he’d read as a lad in the comfortable, middle-class enclave of Argentina where he was raised. That was before he studied medicine - before the motorcycle tour that formed the basis of his Motorcycle Diaries – before he became a psychopath/icon on the world scene.

Everywhere we went there were refrains of the Revolution. When we took a vintage train through some suburbs, a little boy came out of his somewhat ramshackle mobile home where we could see “I Love Lucy” playing on an old black-and-white TV in the living room. (That was probably one of the few American TV shows allowed to be run in Cuba.) The toddler brandished a very real-looking gun (could it be?) and asserted himself for us. Getting meaninglessly, ironically in the spirit of it all, a few of us stuck our heads out of the train window and yelled, “Viva la Revolutión!” Our mocking support didn’t cause the boy to waver from his belligerent stance. He stood as rooted in the Revolution as all of Cuba has been since 1959.

We were also conducted to places representative of the current daily life of Cuba, but the spirit of Che and of the Revolution loomed large along the paths to most of these places. Our guide took us to a Catholic church in order to demonstrate that Castro had never prohibited people from worshiping as they saw fit. But our guide dismissively told us that usually only very old people were interested in attending church. We were taken through the church office to show that the place was indeed a going operation. The office had an old plastic wall phone dangling off the hook on its cord and a 1940’s typewriter sitting on a dusty desk. A dusty file cabinet and a tattered chair stood as the only other furniture in the place.

We were then escorted through Santería religious shrines and art displays, which truly did show signs of lively, ongoing observance. We were taken to musical/dance performances. A Buena Vista Social Club tribute band played during one special dinner held for us. We were reminded how music has been the soul and joy of the Cuban people, sustaining them through difficult times. We went to a sugar cane press operation and a cigar rolling factory where the workers, mostly women, sat, again, under posters of Che.

Whenever anyone of us stepped off the official walkways threading through various displays, a guard blew shrilly on a whistle and fiercely gestured us back on track. I was reminded of the piercing cry that Donald Sutherland emitted in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to alert the other pod people that there was a remaining human still among them.

But there was a lot of genuine humanity along the way. For me, the most affecting place we visited was a print shop. The owner proudly took us on a tour of his manually operated flatbed presses, his addressograph machines, his paper cutter whose guillotine called for the weight of a hefty person to lower. All this equipment was from the 1930’s and 1940’s - just like the equipment my family had eccentrically stuck with through practically the whole run of the printing business we operated in Chicago. I almost cried to once again enter this world that had existed before computers, cell phones, and touch buttons.

In my lame Spanish, I tried to communicate to the owner how wonderfully happy and at home I felt in his shop. Those old machines that were run by repetitive manual movements were something the youngest child could help operate. So I’d been raised as an integral part of my parents’ work. I’d been a contributor, rather than just a consumer, from the moment I could toddle around. Those old machines also had the advantage of being fixable by the average person. They didn’t depend on abstruse circuit boards that called for “technicians” to repair. When anything broke on these old machines, someone could just go over and trace how a series of cams ended up driving a feeder belt – and it was done. In that sense, such a world was more truly democratic and interactive.

So that visit to the print shop was a highlight of my time in Cuba. But the thing that most fascinated me was the look that this trip afforded into the economy of a totally socialist dictatorship. Many people mistakenly hold up Sweden as a model of socialism that we should emulate. But Sweden is actually a mixed economy that is friendly to most kinds of smaller-scale private enterprise. By contrast, in Cuba, the government really does own or proprietarily regulate just about everything. When this is the case, some really ludicrous measures become necessary – as I found out.

Our guide told us that families were allowed to own a few small animals – a few chickens and sometimes even a pig – and to decide the fate of these animals. However larger animals, such as cows, are strictly government-owned. Any cow we saw out grazing in the field would not be owned by an individual. It would have been assigned to a farmer who would act as its caretaker. Before the advent of Castro, Cuban farmers often owned their own land and all the animals on it and could decide for themselves what use to make of those animals. But any such initiative was eliminated under Castro.

When his caretaker law regarding farm animals was first passed, a strange sort of epidemic of manic depression overtook the cows of the land. One after another, they “committed suicide.” A number of them were reported to have stampeded at full speed onto the upturned prongs of pitchforks, impaling themselves. Others drowned. One particularly inventive cow even managed to electrocute itself while in a transport of this bovine despondency.

When the government official responsible for any of these animals finally came out to take an accounting and found cows X, Y, and Z, missing from the pasture – the farmer naturally related the sad circumstances of each cow’s last moments. He’d explain how he’d noticed that Matilda had been notably down in the dumps, not eating well, not interested in going out into the field. And then early one dawn, he’d seen what this obvious dejection had come to. Matilda had jammed her head between the wires of the pasture fence - and had twisted. She had strangled herself. Sure enough, she had done away with herself.

Then the farmer would explain that there’d been nothing he could do but extricate the carcass from the fence, carve it up, and distribute the resultant parcels of beef. It wouldn’t have been good to simply let the cow rot there in place, all that good meat going to waste. The farmer advanced his plea - surely such profligacy would not have been in the spirit of the Revolution.

It didn’t take long for Castro to get wise to this gambit. He forthwith passed a law. Our guide read from the statute book. In summary, this addendum to the law of cow custodianship stated that the death of any cow, whether by suicide or any other means, was to be IMMEDIATELY reported to the appropriate government official. That official would then come out and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of a deceased cow, or anyone who saw a neighbor eating such meat and failed to report it – would be subject to the severest penalties. A heavy fine and or up to five years at hard labor in prison would be the consequence.

Needless to say, the cows of Cuba seemed to cheer up considerably after that.

So Cubans are perforce largely vegetarian. Most of the meat that is produced on the island is saved for tourist consumption. But even tourists are often given short shrift on that score. It was plain the government wanted to put its best foot forward and impress us, among the first Americans to visit, by giving us their very best – showing us what largesse Castro’s Communist regime was capable of producing. But we often challenged each other to find any discernable piece of protein (fish or foul) in the paella dishes that were our regular fare.

On a couple of occasions, our group was treated with formal dinners in one of the old casinos that “the mob” used to run on the Island – back in the day. A few of these lavish casinos have been restored, or at least have been prevented from deteriorating in the way so many of the colonial buildings have been allowed to crumble. These scheduled dinners promised to be sumptuous affairs. In one case, mahi-mahi was on the menu. I thought – at last! We were going to get some solid servings of fish, an item I thought would have been one comestible available to everyone in this island nation.

The meal was okay, but the fish seemed to lack some savor and freshness. When one of the foodies on our tour quietly commented about this to the waiter, the waiter whisperingly confided that the fish had been imported frozen from Viet Nam some time previous. On another occasion, the fish we were served turned out to be Mrs. Paul’s fish-sticks, imported from Canada. All this while we sat virtually within view of the vast blue, unspoiled ocean waters.

Of course, then we realized the problem. Very little fishing takes place in Cuba – because no boats are allowed. As I looked out over the large arc of the Malecon esplanade along the waterfront, I was struck by the absolute absence of any boats in the waters as far as the eye could see. There were no marinas, no private craft putt-putting around the harbor, no pleasure boats. Being in possession of a boat is one of the most serious offenses a Cuban can commit. That prohibition extends to anything that could conceivably be made to float, including planks of wood. Brutal prison time will be your lot if you’re caught with a wooden storage pallet, a skiff, a canoe, even an out-sized rubber duckie. That’s all because any such device could, and likely would, be used to get its possessor to Florida.

There are a few licensed government fishing vessels, but it has been difficult to ensure that even the seemingly most ardent pro-revolutionary captain won’t turn tail and head for the U.S. once at the helm. In a few of the smaller towns we passed through, I did see some marinas where some relatively modest private yachts were anchored. But these belonged either to government officials or to rich German or Canadian tourists or expatriates whose wealth substantially helped to support the regime. No average citizen would conceivably be granted dispensation to possess such crafts. Ergo, it was Mrs. Paul’s fish-sticks again tonight.

Along with the residents of Cuba, we pioneering tourists were also under strict orders regarding what we could bring into or out of the country. For example, we were told we could not bring in for distribution any religious literature. For some reason, we were not supposed to take out any copies of the daily newspapers or any other literature that might have pro-revolutionary content. I think these latter orders might have come from our U.S. government.

We were also not supposed to bring back any novelty items or other goods purchased in Cuba, unless they had distinct “artistic value” – that is, unless they were in keeping with our “People-to-People” cultural exchange mandate. Most of us fudged on this point, or completely disregarded the edict and loaded up on tchotchkes, without any consequence. Selling these was one of the few ways Cubans had of making money off the tourists. Begging was strictly prohibited, and again, was something severely punished. Only a few individuals, elderly women, approached me for a handout during the tour, and they did so VERY surreptitiously.

One thing we had been positively encouraged to bring INTO the country though were school supplies. We were told the students of Cuba didn’t have sufficient pencils, pens, crayons, or even paper. Since we were scheduled to visit a typical grade school classroom in Cuba, our American organizer told us to bring some such supplies. We’d make a good-will presentation to the classroom teacher during our visit.

I bought some pens and pencils for the occasion, but then I also thought to pack a number of extra boxes of band-aids. We’d been told all medical supplies were also in very short supply. Bandages seemed suitable gifts for both classrooms and doctors’ offices. Unfortunately, I never got to personally give any of these gifts. Someone in our group created an international incident that prevented me from ever going into a classroom.

We were a large group, so when it came to the classroom tour, we were divided into two sections. The first section would visit the classroom while our section would take a walking tour of Havana. Then the following day, our sections were supposed to switch places.

But at the end of the first day, when my section returned from our walk around Havana, we were met with an obvious flurry of consternation in the hotel lobby. We were told to go to our rooms and wait there. The American tour organizer and our Cuban guide reassured us that everything could probably be worked out – that everything would probably be alright. Those “probablies” were frightening.

We never got the full story of what happened. But it seems someone in that first group going to the classroom had distributed either some religious literature or else some pamphlet copies of the U.S. Constitution onto the students’ desks. Although Raúl Castro was technically President of the country then, Fidel still made most of the decisions and he had reportedly been infuriated over this infraction of tourist rules. It seems he’d been on the edge of asking us to leave the country forthwith, and he was additionally leaning towards canceling the People-to-People program altogether.

He had been monitoring our visit closely. Our visit was to serve as a bellwether of how future groups of American tourists could be trusted to abide by the rules and be welcomed. For a few moments, chances for any further people-to-people exchanges seemed dim. That would have been a shame, but I was excited to know Fidel Castro’s eye had been on me. At least briefly, I’d been the equal of Barbara Walters.

As it turned out, things were smoothed over. We were going to be allowed to stay, but neither our section (nor likely any immediately following groups of American tourists) would be allowed into any classroom. Instead it was announced the following day that our whole group would be taken to view “the caves.”

Oh-oh. That sounded ominous. But as it turned out, the caves were not dungeons where political prisoners were to be indefinitely detained. No, these were the famous caves of Viñales, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In their geology and ecology, they are illustrative of the island’s prehistory.

It was a bit of a drive from Havana to Viñales. The road was surprisingly good, but it took us through miles of rather featureless scrubland. Along the way, we saw several more instances of what was a typical sight throughout Cuba. We saw old cars broken down on the side of the road, being worked on by creative owners who knew how to get the old vehicles up-and-running again with duct tape and all manner of improvised bits and pieces. Almost every car owner in Cuba necessarily had to be a kind of Humphrey Bogart working on his African Queen. A little judicious gob of spittle here, a kick there, a belt from off your pants made to serve as a fan belt – and voilà.

The ubiquity of old cars from the 1940’s and 50’s has become Cuba’s defining characteristic. When Castro took power in 1959, an embargo against most imports of large-ticket items from the U.S. and from many other non-Communist countries was put in place. Castro further made it illegal for citizens to privately own newer cars, newer TV sets, newer radios, newer anything significant enough to more properly be owned by the government. However, unlike many dictators, Castro didn’t confiscate whatever cars and other devices people already had. And so, Cuba’s streets are filled with lovingly maintained pre-1959 cars, and homes are filled with black-and-white TVs. A large part of citizen time is taken up scrounging the world remotely for old carburetors, old tuners, old tubes.

The repair of an old car is often the occasion for a social gathering. When a car stalls, men will gather around, push it off to the side, and exchange ideas about how to get it going again. I envied this spur to conviviality. I had spent many years restoring my father’s 1948 Chrysler, always hoping this would put me in the middle of some such jovial, educational confabs. It never worked out that way. But on this trip, I could live vicariously, looking at all the spontaneous, neighborly get-togethers inspired by immobilized cars.

A gathering around one particular such break-down on the road to Viñales caught my attention. A 1940’s car was off on the grassy verge, its hood up, three men leaning over, peering in at the car’s innards. As I watched, a cow in the nearby field stopped munching grass and came over to join the colloquy. It nosed its way in between the men and stood should-to-shoulder with them, peering down at the car’s engine.

Oh, how I wish I’d had my camera at the ready! Captions for that photo would have written themselves. “An Expert Mechanic Weighs in on the Problem.” “Mooooove Over. I Can Tell You What’s Wrong.”

The thoughtful intensity of the cow’s gaze did indeed give a person confidence that it could diagnose the trouble. But it made me worry a bit. On the off chance the cow wasn’t able to come up with a solution – would that send the cow into a tailspin of self-loathing and low self-esteem? Would it be enough to drive the cow to suicide? Then since suicide is contagious, would that one cow’s desperate act trigger another rash of suicide among all the cows of the district? If so, who would Castro blame for that? What addition to the law would he enact to address this new wrinkle in the problem of free-ranging cows? “No cow shall be allowed to participate in the maintenance or repair of any vehicle…”

POSTSCRIPT

It had been quite a trip, one of the most memorable I’ve taken. But back in Chicago, I was left with one problem regarding my Cuban sojourn. What should I do with my Che? Some acquaintances of mine, now superannuated hippies, had handed off their poster of Che to me as they’d down-sized. I’d conscientiously hung the poster on the side of my refrigerator, attached with magnets. It covered the whole side of my big Amana.

Well, truth to tell, it wasn’t only my feeling of obligation to use and conserve anything given to me, and it wasn’t only the magnets that kept the poster up there. The poster had stayed in place in my house for the same reason it likely stayed prominently featured in the homes of many people who had no real partisan feeling or awareness. We all sported the poster because Che was so handsome.

Would he have become such an icon if he had been just an average-looking man? So are looks everything after all? Do we give our interest, our loyalty, our fervor, to one man over another because the one is able to strike a move star pose? I looked at my refrigerator, wondering what I should do. Now that I’d learned how much true evil was at the core of Che’s character, how could I justify keeping him on display in my home? Was handsome going to win out over humanity?

I’ve deferred making any decision about taking down the poster. It’s not that I’m transfixed by the look of Che. No, that’s not the reason. It’s just that I’m too lazy to do any redecorating now. After all, I still have that strip of star-burst decals that was on the molding of my kitchen when I moved into this place, decades ago. I simply don’t get around to doing things in a hurry.

And so Che is still suspended there on my refrigerator – a magnetic image.

Hasta la victoria siempre!