I am on a rooftop balcony
overlooking those massive steps of the Universdad
de la Habana, those steps where Fidel walked, where the words of revolución found a home, where students
organized to assassinate el president
Fugencio Batista in 1957--some serious student activism that was. Those steps,
as wide as they are tall, reaching up to a plateau of Greek columns and palm
trees in the heart of the city, one of the few on earth, that exceeds all
expectations with ease. We are talking Marx and global socialism while sucking
down Bucanero beers far too fast (or
not fast enough) for this humid Caribbean climate. The conversation waxes and
wanes with the sounds coming from the street and soon, we are onto more
pressing matters: the future of Cuba in the face of changing relations with the
US--that great northern Caliban--for the first time in the 60 year history of this
stubborn, juvenile blockade. It’s funny--this chip on the US shoulder, the one
front of the Cold War where we lost so comprehensively, is also the closest to
home. And Fidel has outlived them all: Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, and
Reagan--that mother fucker Reagan. We’ll see how all this plays out, but Castro
might even beat Carter and Bush (if we’re lucky, both of the Bush's).
We talk and
drink even as a storm in the east harbor brews and begins moving towards us. No
one is worried; rain in Cuba is warm and sweet. I remember the stories my
grandfather used to tell about his childhood in Santa Clara. About those hot
Cuban days and how he and his brothers would wait with all childhood impatience
and longing for the afternoon rains. After the storms, they would lay on the
concrete to cool their bodies as the sun made short work of the respite. I
remember these stories sometimes as if they were my own. Those stories may be
the greatest gift I have ever received.
La Habana--just the name stokes imaginations
and mystery (all well-deserved). It’s not the prettiest nor the most presentable
city, but it is certainly the most Cuban and, in my humble opinion, who gives
two shits about the rest. Parts of it remind me of other cities I know. Like
Asuncion: it is ramshackle and crumbling under the weight of its own character,
the colonial architecture (like colonialism itself) almost in need of public
decay before yielding to something else, something different, and utterly
unrecognizable to the West. Like Cape Town: preoccupied with the sea, oriented
towards the ocean with possibility, the smell of salt mixing with petrol and
life through narrow avenues and alleys. But really, Havana has no equal, not
even good competition. Love it or hate it (though you’d be a fool), Cuba is
Cuba and it is nothing else. There is no pretense. Murals and facades of
revolutionary slogans with portraits of Che and Fidel and Martí take the place
of the billboards that, in the rest of the world, remind us of how inadequate
we are, of the things we lack, of how incomplete our lives must be. Propaganda,
the imperialists would call the prior without seeing their disgusting
contradiction--isn’t the latter as well?
Internet
has come to Cuba in a big way; this is perhaps the biggest change since my last
visit to the island in 2012. Access is limited, however, and people crowd on
street corners to catch the signals of intermittent hotspots. Like everything
else in Cuba, getting online seems a communal activity.
After an afternoon on a beach east
of Havana, bottle of rum in one hand, cigar in the other, and after some hours
in the waves, trading notes with a hodgepodge group of socialists, Marxists,
anarchists and intellectuals from literally all over the world, I find myself
in the passenger seat of 1956 Chevy Bel Aire listening to Gangster’s Paradise
with a smile on my face that feels like few I have ever known before. The
ocean, at first shades of turquoise well-worn in the Caribbean, has now
shifted--ever so subtly--into shades of pink that don’t grace any palate
anywhere else in the world. It is a pink so soft and ripe that it exists only
right here, in this place, and right now, in this exact moment. And the thought
in my head: does Cuba have problems--ab-so-fucking-lutely. What society does
not? But if you come here, if you educate yourself, if you are willing to set
aside those preconceptions of what “the good life” is supposed to be (in the
capitalist world), you cannot help but appreciate what Cuba has accomplished.
If nothing else, it is an island that has sat here, just 90 miles from the
territorial US, and given a big fucking middle finger to those goddamn
imperialists that have tried, in vain, for 60 years to undo the Cuba that is
Cuba.
I do not
laud any aspect of Cuba or its history from the position of an idealist. Far
from it. As I have heard myself saying many times this week--we must apply the
same critical lens to socialism that we apply to capitalism. Indeed, the
question is not whether to critique or not, but whether we critique against socialism, or for socialism. And in that regard, I can
say I critique for the sake of furthering the struggle of the oppressed. I also
speak, not as a Cuban, but as someone who has studied and worked on this for
many years, someone who has spoken to Cubans on both sides of the divide, and
someone who has family on both sides as well. Opinions, even within my own
family, are quite divided. And while I cannot speak to the experience of living
in the Cuban state except through the stories I have gathered, I can offer
perhaps a slightly different perspective:
The first
time I visited Cuba was 2012. My father and I had brought my grandfather back
for his first visit in almost 60 years. This was in the middle of my Peace
Corps service during which I was working as an agricultural extension agent in
an incredibly poor and isolated community in Paraguay. My father and
grandfather arrived in Cuba from the US. Each of us was astounded by Cuba in
our own ways--my father and grandfather, seemingly more for the lack. The
economic differences between the lifestyle of the American middle class was
significant. But I was taken, not by the lack, but by the security of the
socialist model. What I thought then is what I still think today: I would
rather be a Cuban, even a poor Cuban, any day than a poor Paraguayan. Life may
not be ideal in Cuba--a product of history, the embargo, and undoubtedly state
failure--but it is far better across the board than for the majority of poor
that suffer in almost any other country married to the model of neoliberal
capitalism.
Socialism
is a project.
Capitalism
is the seeds of our own destruction, the worst externalities of which are
conveniently exported to those already suffering under the yoke of capitalist
progress.
I could be quite happy in this place, methinks.
-mario