Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflection and Music

Shame, this country’s sinking in shame and it doesn’t even know it. My interlocutor was in his early 20s but his voice sounded like that of a man in his 60s. One of his feet was up against the wall outside the block of flats where I had grown up in Havana. People are angry, he continued, but that anger is projected either, inwards and therefore winds up as self-annihilation, or outwards towards the weaker ones. They know who is or are, rather, responsible for this country’s problems but no one wants to talk about it. Only in the church, nowadays, he said caressing, his crucifix, do you find the same morals and ethics you used to come across years ago.

Havana waking up

He might not have been older than twenty-five, but this young man was representative of the people I spoke to in my latest visit to Cuba. It had been more than four years since I had last been and there were changes to digest. I wasn’t sure, though, whether they were the right changes. Whereas four years ago I had had a similar conversation with four or five young people who discussed their dreams and hopes with me quite openly, this time I had the opportunity to sit down (or stand outside my building) with other youngsters. In my previous visit the news about Fidel passing the baton to his “younger” brother (almost eighty-two-years-old and counting) was almost the only topic my audience wanted to talk about. Nobody imagined in their wildest dreams that Modesto Castro was going to put his modesty to one side and go for an outright “sell-sell-sell” approach to solve Cuba’s economic woes. Houses? For sale. Cars? For sale? Bodies? For sale. Well, the latter had been on display since the late 80s when the first prostitutes, nicknamed “jineteras” (a variation of the Spanish word, “jinete”, “horserider”) sprang up overnight in the main streets in Havana and expanded throughout the country.

In 2009, however, when talking to these four or five young people, I realised that none of them saw the solution to their problems by relocating abroad. Whatever they were thinking of, leaving Cuba for good was not – at the moment – the immediate step for them. I remember them questioning me thoroughly on my job, what I earned (I didn’t disclose my salary, and told them that was private information), what my wife and I used our wages for and the cost of living in the UK. Each one of these late-teenagers of early-twenty-something gave me the same answer with variations: I want the same, mulato, and I want it now. I don’t want to have it when I’m sixty or seventy. I want to have the right to travel if I want to, to set up a business if I want to, and to send my child to school if I want to. The determination in their eyes (I spoke to each youngster separately) made me shudder a bit. What if they couldn’t have what they wanted? Would they rebel?

Che for sale

No. Four years down the line, one of those young people is in the States now. He didn’t want to wait, so he left for a country in which he won’t have free healthcare. But, I can hear him asking me, what’s the point of free healthcare when you don’t fall ill very often? What happens the rest of the time when you’re healthy?

This is the dilemma that the Cuban government hasn’t cracked for more than fifty years. It was OK when we had free subsidies from the former Soviet Union, but now that we are in a “normal period” (I’m fed up with the whole “special period” label. “Special” was when we had the full support of the old socialist bloc. This is what “normal” would have looked like since 1959) the state hasn’t got a clue as to what to do with the economy. In the meantime, though, it is haemorrhaging generations who are either leaving the country in droves or drinking themselves to an early death. Raúl and co. think that by conjuring the (very real) spectre of the US embargo, shout out a few revolutionary slogans and go on demonstrations people will be satisfied. That might have been the reality when I was a child, but it hasn’t been the reality for the last twenty-five years. That’s a quarter of a century, a generation lost to political incompetence and narrow-mindedness. The average salary of a Cuban nowadays doesn’t amount to more than ten pounds per month. Even those in higher wages, say, 800 pesos, struggle to make ends meet because erstwhile community spirit has given way to a dog-eat-dog type of society. It’s hard for a foreigner, regardless of where s/he sits on the political spectrum, to understand Cuba without living the life of a Cuban. It’s not a black-and-white issue like that affecting someone else in another developing country. Nevertheless, it’s a life whose complexity ought to be accepted and not condemned or patronised. Sadly, these are the default positions of those who opine on my country. And they won’t, unfortunately, contribute anything towards the elimination of that feeling of shame my interlocutor mentioned at the beginning.

©2013

Photos by the blog author

Next Post: “Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music... Ad Infinitum”, to be published on Wednesday 8^th May at 11:59pm (GMT)