Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (13 page)

Hemingway’s widow donated the house to the Castro government. And Britain donated Hong Kong to China.

Roberto was chatty, full of official, government-approved information. On the way to San Francisco de Paula, we passed the dirty, bedraggled worker housing that everywhere mars the Cuban landscape. The buildings are nothing but concrete dovecotes: six-story-high, hundred-yard-long stacks of tiny apartment boxes open on one end. They must have staircases, but I couldn’t see any. Maybe the government comes along at night and plucks up people and puts them in their pigeonholes. “The workers made these!” said Roberto. Though, if you think about it, workers make everything. “The government gives them the construction material,” he said. “Then they rent for twelve years. And then they own them!” In other words, you get a free home in Cuba as long as you build it and pay for it.

When we drove into La Habana Vieja, Roberto pointed at a gutted hotel: “These are special worker brigades, doing this construction. They can work sixteen hours a day.” This must have been one of the other eight. Everyone was sitting around smoking cigarettes. “They get extra rations,” said Roberto, “a big bag with soap, cooking oil, rice, beans…” Roberto sounded as if he was describing the contents of a big bag from, say, Tiffany’s.

“In 1959 there were six-thousand doctors in Cuba,” said Roberto, apropos of nothing. “Three thousand of them left after the revolution. Yet we are training new doctors. By the year 2000 there will be sixty-thousand doctors in Cuba!” But Roberto could only talk government talk so long. He couldn’t stay off the real subject, what was on every Cuban’s mind all the time: the economic mess. “You see these cabdrivers?” he said, pointing to a line of tourist-only taxis. “People need to earn dollars. These drivers may be doctors.”

“In Cuba,” said Roberto, “anything you want is available—for dollars.” But people are paid in pesos, even if they work for foreign companies, which Roberto, in fact, does. The national tourist service isn’t owned by the nation anymore. It’s been sold to overseas investors. These people pay $300 a month for Roberto’s services. But they don’t pay Roberto. They pay the Cuban government. The Cuban government then pays Roberto 150 a month, in pesos.

Figuring out what the Cuban peso is worth is a complex economic calculation. To put it in layman’s terms, a pretty close approximation is nothing. Pesos are of use almost exclusively for buying rationed goods. The Cuban rationing system is simple: They’re out of everything. Although you can get a really vile pack of cigarettes for ten pesos. Think of Roberto’s salary as a carton and a half of smokes.

Roberto was able, however, to earn dollars through tips. Cadging these being, of course, the subtext to his economic discourse. He used to be a teacher but couldn’t live on the pay. His wife is a chemical engineer, but her chemical plant shut down three years ago. While we were walking around the old town, Roberto met another engineer, now working as a carpenter for dollars—building the table under which he’d get paid.

“Just to feed ourselves,” said Roberto, “we have to go to four markets. The ration store for, maybe, rice. Then the government dollar store—this is very expensive. Then the dollar market where farmers can sell what they grow if they grow more than the government quota. And then the black market.”

We drove down Avenida Bolivar, through what had been Havana’s shopping district. Hundreds of stores stood closed and empty, the way they’ve been since 1968, when the last small businesses were nationalized. “That is where the Sears store was,” said Roberto, pointing to the largest empty building. “But now we have nothing to sell.”

Every so often Roberto would snap out of it and resume the official patter: “Over there is a memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Perhaps you have a monument to them in North America?” I said I didn’t think so. But mostly, Roberto wanted to talk about free enterprise. He and his wife were sleeping on the mattress his mother bought when she got married: “It has been repaired over and over. We get the TV sometimes from Miami—oh, the ‘Beatty Rest’ mattresses! And what good prices!”

Roberto was optimistic. He kept showing me new family owned restaurants. “Look, there’s one!” He pointed to a pizza parlor. “There’s more!” He pointed to several pizza parlors. In Cuba, capitalism’s thin edge of the wedge comes plain or with pepperoni.

Roberto thought small private retail shops would be opening soon. He thought the government’s new “convertible peso,” which is pegged 1:1 to the dollar, would become the national currency. He was even enthusiastic about the fees the Cuban authorities were beginning to charge, such as highway tolls. “Maybe we will get better service,” he said. Roberto told me that the economy had “come back since the low point of ’94, a little,” and that this was due to the private businesses. “The only thing the government controls now is the taxes,” said Roberto.

He was wrong. Fidel Castro, in his 1996 year-end speech to the Cuban National Assembly, described the economic reforms thus: “We legalized robbery.” Castro then did, indeed, announce an income tax on the self-employed. But worse is probably to come. Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, addressed the Communist Party Central Committee, ranting at economic changes, foreign influences, and petty entrepreneurs trying to get rich. The Communist Party newspaper, reporting on the committee meeting, said, “
La sicologia del productor privado…tiende al individualismo y no es fuente de conciencia socialista.
” However that’s translated, it doesn’t sound good for business. (The Party paper, by the way, is named for the yacht aboard which Castro sneaked into Cuba in 1956. The yacht was bought from an American who had christened it after a beloved relative. Castro didn’t get it. This is why the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party is called
Granma.
)

That night, after Roberto had been sufficiently tipped, I went to a bar on the east side of Havana harbor with a European reporter who’s lived for years in Cuba. He thought economic reform was over. He said the authorities were “still emphasizing that outside investment is ‘not vital,’” and that they “still think the state sector can be made ‘more efficient.’” He quoted a Canadian diplomat: “The pace of economic reform in Cuba is determined by the learning curve in economics of Fidel Castro. And he’s a slow learner.”

As we talked, a young Cuban woman came out on the terrace. She ignored us in a very unprostitutional way, chose a chair just within earshot, and began avidly appreciating the city skyline. “I’d buy it if she were a tourist,” whispered the reporter, “but Cubans do not go to dollar bars for the view.”

There is one vibrant, exciting, and highly efficient sector of the official Cuban economy: the police. I was driving through the Vedado neighborhood in western Havana absolutely desperate to turn left. Finally, I just went and did so. Almost a mile away, in an entirely different section of town, a policeman walked out into the street, flagged me down, and wrote me a ticket for the transgression. There’s a space provided for this on the rental-car papers, and the fine comes out of the deposit.

The traffic-cop omniscience was creepy enough, but I happened to be on my way to visit a dissident couple. Well, “dissident couple” is a little dramatic. They hadn’t actually dissented about anything. They just wanted to leave Cuba. They went to Sweden and applied for asylum. But the generous Swedish refugee policy does not extend to refugees from progressive, socialist countries to which Sweden gives millions of dollars in foreign aid. They were sent back. And now they were in permanent hot water.

They lived in a shabby tower block with a ravaged elevator, piss stink in the stairwells, bulbs filched from the lobby light fixtures, and even the glass stolen from the hallway windows. And in Havana, this was a good place to live. The apartment had been inherited from a parent, a parent who had been an official in the revolutionary government. “Come on Friday,” the couple had said. “We don’t have power outages then.”

There were five rooms—small rooms (you couldn’t flip a pancake in the kitchen without standing in the hall), but five rooms nonetheless—and a bathroom (when the water was running). And not too many of the louvers in the jalousie windows were broken. Carlos and Donna—not their real names of course—come from families that had been prosperous (families that now, incidentally, won’t speak to them). The low, narrow-walled living room was filled with too much big, dark furniture from a more expansive age, like a Thanksgiving dinner for twelve put in the microwave. I felt claustrophobic although I was five stories in the air and could see the ocean shining in the distance.

Carlos and Donna are not allowed to hold jobs, but they each speak four languages and so are able to get work as guides and translators with the various groups of academics, philanthropists, conference delegates, and film-festival attendees who are forever traipsing through Cuba looking for international understanding and a tan.

“You have to earn dollars anyway here,” said Carlos. “‘Dollars or Death’ is what everyone says.” He showed me their ration books, which have categories for everything from tobacco to clothing. So far in 1996, only one liter of cooking oil per family had been available. Eggs were plentiful at the moment—fourteen a month for the two of them. Carlos and Donna also got two bars of soap a month, some months. There was virtually no meat, and it was inedible, besides. “All red meat has been nationalized,” said Carlos by way of explanation. Cuban nationalization does to goods and services what divorce does to male parents—suddenly they’re absent most of the time and useless the rest. Cubans can’t even get real coffee from the ration stores. They get coffee beans mixed with the kind of beans you get in tortillas. This tastes the way it sounds like it would and gives everyone stomach cramps.

The few legitimate delights of Cuba—coffee, rum, cigars—require not just dollars but lots of dollars. And even this doesn’t always work. The Monte Cristo coronas I bought in a government shop had the flavor and draw of smoldering felt-tip pens.

Carlos and Donna had had one other brush with the law. Besides committing the heinous crime of trying to move, they were also caught with dollars. Until mid-1993 it was illegal for Cubans to own dollars. Given what the peso was worth, that meant it was illegal for Cubans to have money. Carlos and Donna found sixty dollars tucked in a book they’d inherited. They dressed in their best clothes and, being fluent in French, tried to pass themselves off as foreigners at a beachfront hotel. “To get a decent cup of coffee,” said Donna. But the hotel waiter wasn’t fooled. Perhaps the two bars of soap a month was the giveaway, this being more than most French tourists use. As Carlos and Donna walked home, they were arrested.

They escaped any serious jail time, maybe because of their foreign-diplomat connections. But they were threatened with six- or seven-years imprisonment. And a year later the block captain—the government snitch who resides on every Cuban street—called them in and threatened them with imprisonment again. “When dollars became legal,” said Carlos, “everyone was happy. I wasn’t so happy thinking about all those people who were locked up for years sometimes, just for having one or two dollars.

“Still, I don’t have any hatred against the system,” he said. “But this is just for myself, for my own sake—I don’t want hatred to destroy me.”

“When we couldn’t leave,” said Donna, “we were in despair for a while. Then we became involved in the charity work of the church, in their hospitals. This created new meaning.”

“We’re happy now,” said Carlos.

But they don’t have children. They felt too cut off from Cuban society for that. Carlos doesn’t even know if his parents are still alive. And Cuba isn’t exactly the future most of us have planned for our kids. Unless we’re really mad at the little buggers.

“The revolution brought some benefits,” said Carlos, “at least at first. There was better housing, but it was gotten by giving away what had been stolen from others. The health care is free—and worth it. I can go to the doctor, but he can do nothing for me. This is why the Catholic Church must have its own hospitals. The education is free, too. But it’s indoctrination. This is not a real education. Then they make the students work on the sugar harvest. Of course, the students wreck the agriculture. They don’t care. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Carlos and Donna thought it was important that people know what a disastrous and terrifying place Cuba is. “Not for the sake of future revenge,” said Donna, “but because of the frailty of memory. People will forget how bad it was, the way they’re already forgetting in Russia. But more important, they’ll forget why it became that way.”

It will take a lot of forgetting. Socialism has had a nasty reign in Cuba. Hundreds of low-level supporters of the ousted Batista regime were executed, and thousands were jailed. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with AIDS antibodies have been sent to concentration camps. Critics of the government are forced into internal exile or confined in mental hospitals. The Americas Watch human-rights group has said that Cuba holds “more political prisoners as a percentage of population than any other country in the world.” Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization whose board of trustees is an ideological gamut running from Jeane Kirkpatrick to Andrew Young, says, “There is continued evidence of torture and killings in prison and in psychiatric institutions…. Local human-rights activists say that more than 100 prisons and prison camps hold between 60,000 and 100,000 prisoners of all categories.” (This is about twice America’s generous rate of per-capita incarceration.) How many of those categories are political? Well, from a socialist point of view, all of them. And any normal Cuban is probably going to wind up in jail sooner or later anyway, because, according to Amnesty International, serious offenses in Cuba include “illegal association,” “disrespect,” “dangerousness,” “illegal printing,” and “resistance.” Castro himself was in jail for a while under the previous administration and in a 1954 letter from his cell he wrote: “We need many Robespierres in Cuba.”