Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (15 page)

The newspaper reporters were getting bored. “What effect is dollarization having on families and society?” asked one of them. Said Marquetti, looking bureaucratically oblivious, “Number one: foreign investment. Two: intensive development of tourism. Three: opening to foreign trade.” Sis has been out hitchhiking and someone made a foreign investment in her. It’s all part of Cuba’s intensive development of tourism. And, boy, is she open to foreign trade.

“What about the prostitutes?” said the other reporter, more or less reading my mind. “There are rumors that the government turns a blind eye because of the dollars they bring in.”

All at once, Marquetti looked human and, indeed, rather enthusiastic. “They are very inexpensive,” he said. “They are very educated. They are very young and very pretty. Cuba is a country that attracts tourism for cheap sex,” he said, stopping just short of a wink. Marquetti tried to look grave again. “Since the crisis there has been a negative social impact, but you can’t eliminate it through repressive means.” It’s not like these girls are scattering mattress-price leaflets. “We have to look for other solutions, such as education.” But he’d just said they
were
educated. “Some sectors of Cuban youth, they view prostitution as a solution to their economic problems.”

As for Hiram Marquetti himself, he was selling his report on the Cuban economy—five dollars per copy.

Before the revolution, annual per-capita income in Cuba was $374; that’s about $1,978 in current dollars. So Cuba is poorer than it used to be, although the poverty is spread around a little more. Castro’s government is as dishonest as the prerevolutionary government was. The modern corruption involves more greed for power than passion for lucre, but that’s actually worse. And the depraved sex is still available if you can sneak the whores past the elevator operators.

Getting more people to sneak whores past elevator operators was, so far, the best the Cuban government had been able to do in terms of a plan to improve the economy. Tourism was supposed to be the salvation now that Soviet aid had vaporized and sugar was selling for less per pound than garden loam. About 700,000 tourists a year were visiting Cuba, an increase of more than 100 percent since 1990. The Cuban government expected foreign companies to invest an additional $2.4 billion in tourist facilities by the year 2000. This would double the number of hotel rooms on the island. And every one of those rooms will be occupied, I predict, by somebody as ticked off as I was.

Because Cuba does not quite have the tourism thing figured. When I checked into the Hotel Nacional, I was given the manager’s room, in which he was living. I was given another room. The key card didn’t work. The bellhop went to get another key card. Then the safe didn’t work—no small matter since Americans can’t use credit cards in Cuba and have to conduct all business in cash, an awkward lump of which I was carrying.

When I returned from the hotel bar bloated with
mojitos,
the key card didn’t work again. I went down to get another. The elevator took ten minutes to arrive. The new key card didn’t work. I went back. The elevator took another ten minutes. That key card didn’t work, either. The maid let me in.

I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a series of chirpy phone calls from the government tourism service in the downstairs lobby. CubaTrot or Havan-a-Vacation or whatever it was called had a driver and a translator and a guide and something else, maybe a circus elephant, waiting for me, bright and early, ready and willing, all set to take me anywhere I wanted to go, except back to bed. None of which stuff I had ordered.

At dawn on the second morning the operator called saying I “must go to reception immediately.” When I went downstairs the desk clerk said, “It was nothing.” When I went upstairs the key card didn’t work. At dawn on the third morning it was a wrong number. On the fourth morning it was someone jabbering expressively in French.

At least I was always awake in time for breakfast. Every day I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and I never got the same thing twice. I traveled to a beach resort in Trinidad on the Caribbean coast, and at dawn the phone rang—a hang-up. I ordered coffee, toast, and orange juice, and got coffee, orange juice, and a cheese sandwich with ketchup on it. The next morning at about 7, a room-service waiter arrived at my door, unbidden, with a plate of dinner buns. As I was checking out, there was an irked Canadian couple at the front desk saying, “We got a message. You told us, ‘Call from Toronto,’ nothing else, eh? We’re thinking there’s maybe something wrong at home. So we try and we try, and we get through, eh? And it costs us fifty dollars. And nobody’s called us at all.”

I had driven to Trinidad on the
autopista,
which is a six-lane…a four-lane…sometimes a two-lane…. The Russians never got around to finishing it. And it’s not like there are any divider lines painted on it anyway. The
autopista
runs from Havana southeast through the middle of the island. There was so little traffic that cows grazed on weeds coming up in the pavement cracks. I had stumbled into a radical ecologist’s daydream. Or so it appeared until I’d pass some East German tractor trailer spewing a mile-long cloud of tar-colored exhaust.

You have to watch out when you drive in Cuba, but you never know what you’re watching out for. It could be anything. Potholes, of course, some of them big enough for a couple of chairs and a coffee table. Then there are the people who leap out from the side of the road frantically, desperately, even violently trying to sell you one onion. Or a string of garlic. Or a pale, greasy-looking hunk of something. Lard? Flan? Pound of flesh? (It turned out to be homemade cheese.)

At every major road junction there were scores of hitchhikers, not the prostitute kind but regular folks, whole families among them. Cuba’s national transportation system is in butt-lock. Says
Fodor’s
guide, “Be prepared to wait three days for the next available bus.” Standing among the people with their thumbs out were the traffic police. They stopped cars and trucks (though not those with
tourista
license plates) and made them take passengers.

Cops helping you bum a ride—now here was the revolution the way I had it planned thirty years ago when I was smoking a lot of dope. Except, not exactly. The reason so many people were hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere was that they’d been sent there to work on the sugar harvest. I don’t recall that the workers’ paradise of my callow fantasies contained any actual work.

That sugar harvest was going on all around me. Or, rather, not going on. I’m no agricultural expert, but I’m almost certain that leaning against fences, walking about with hands in the pockets, and sitting on stalled tractors smoking cigarettes are not the most efficient methods of cutting sugarcane.

Much work had been done, however, painting propaganda slogans.

SOCIALISM OR DEATH
appeared on almost every overpass. What if the U.S. government had slogans all over the place? I tried to come up with a viable campaign. My suggestion,
AMERICA—IT DOESN’T SUCK
.

As for “Socialism or Death,” after a couple of weeks in Cuba, I was leaning toward the latter option. To which the Castro government’s response is: Death? Yes. No problem. That can be arranged. But,
first,
socialism!

I turned off the
autopista
onto a raggedy strip of pavement through the Escambray Mountains. The sun went down, and suddenly traffic materialized—gigantic Russian trucks driven without sense, headlights, or any idea of keeping to the right on the road. I emerged from the mountains at Cienfuegos. Says
Fodor’s:
“The people of Cienfuegos…constantly tout it as ‘
la Linda Ciudad del Mar
’ (the lovely city by the sea).” They’re lying. From here it was a thirty-mile drive through coastal mangrove swamps on a road covered with land crabs. Every time I went over one, it made a noise like when you were ten, and you spent two weeks making a plastic model of the battleship
Missouri,
and your dad stepped on it in the dark. I tried avoiding the crabs. They scuttled under the wheels. I tried driving at them. They stayed put. The road smelled like thirty miles of crab salad going bad.

It was almost 10
P.M
. before I got to my hotel on the beach, the Ancon. But the buffet was still open. They were serving crab salad. I went to the bar.

In the morning the ocean sparkled, the sand gleamed, the cheese sandwich with ketchup arrived. Bright-pink vacationers frolicked in the surf or, rather, stood on the beach discussing whether to frolic in the surf, having seen large numbers of stingrays the last time they frolicked.

The Ancon was filled with middle-aged Canadians having the middle-aged Canadian idea of fun, which consisted mostly of going back to the buffet for seconds on the crab salad. The architecture was modernistic. The rooms were comfortablistic. The food was foodlike.

There are worse tourist facilities in Cuba, namely all of them. The Ancon is top of the line. I inspected the other beach hotels near Trinidad, and I had driven out to see those along the
playas del este
outside Havana. Most were stark. Some were dank and unclean. And one spread of tiny prefabricated cottages with outdoor sinks and group bathrooms looked like nothing so much as a Portosan farm.

Cuba serves the very lowest end of the international holiday market. When some waiter in Paris recites the
plats du jour
like he’s pissing on you from a great height, you can extract your mental revenge by picturing him, come August, on Cuba’s
Costa del Fleabag,
eating swill in a concrete dining hall.

I wandered around the Trinidad region. I went to see the Iznaga Tower, an early nineteenth century neoclassical structure with seven arched and columned setbacks tapering to 140 feet at the pinnacle—monumental but so delicately proportioned that the whole thing seemed about to take flight. It looked like a spaceship designed by Palladio. The purpose of this beautiful and subtle artistry, which took ten years to construct, was to keep the slaves from goofing off. The plantation owner would get up on top and give everybody the hairy eyeball. The tower was no longer in use. With the block-captain system, the chattel labor now spied on itself.

I drove through the Valle de los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills, as it’s romantically called) and over the Escambray Mountains again. As late as 1967, anti-Castro guerrillas were extant here. The Cuban government prefers to call them “bandits.” Back in Trinidad, in what used to be a church, there’s the marvelously named Museum of the Struggle Against Bandits, which should certainly open a branch in the U.S., maybe in Dan Rostenkowski’s old congressional office.

Not much was actually in the museum. The centerpiece was a beat-up pleasure boat supposedly captured from the CIA. Two suspiciously new and definitely Soviet machine guns had been mounted on its deck with unlikely looking half-inch wood screws. The rest of the displays were mostly devoted to photographs of Cuban soldiers “martyred by bandits.” One of these poor soldiers was named O’Really.

Not much was actually in Trinidad, either. It’s very old, if you like that sort of thing. Trinidad was founded in 1514 by Diego de Velazquez, the conquistador of Cuba. Although Cuba didn’t really take much conquering. Confiscador would be more like it. The local heyday was in the eighteenth century, when Trinidad was a major slave port. Then better slave off-loading facilities were built in Cienfuegos. Not much has changed in Trinidad since, and this gets the guidebooks excited.
Fodor’s
goes on at some length about how this “marvelous colonial enclave” has not been “polluted with advertising, automobiles, souvenir shops, dozens of restaurants and hotels, and hordes of tourists milling through the streets.” Which, translated, means nobody’s made a centavo here in 200 years.

The buildings around the main square were patched and painted. The buildings not around the main square weren’t. Practically everything was one-story high and built flush against tiny, crooked streets paved in stones as large as carry-on luggage.

I got lost heading back to the hotel. The streets were becoming even tinier, and the people standing around in those streets were not looking full of glee that UNESCO had declared Trinidad a World Heritage Site. In fact, they looked depressed and mean. I was getting more than the usual number of cold stares and catcalls, and just when I’d thought to myself, “I wouldn’t care to stop here,” I stopped there.

The starter motor whined uselessly. The car was inert. A crowd of impoverished Cubans gathered around me. I was frantically looking up “Placating Phrases” in the
Berlitz
when I realized the rude noises and gestures had stopped. The people in the crowd were smiling. And not the way I would have smiled if I’d found a moneyed dimwit trapped in my barrio. “
El auto es busto,
” I explained, opening the hood in that purposeful way men have when we don’t know what we’re doing.

“
Mi amigo es mecanico,
” said a fellow in the crowd. He and two of his friends grabbed the fenders and pushed the car down the block and around a corner. A big guy about my age came out of a house, shook my hand, and removed the car’s air filter. While the big guy probed the carburetor, the crowd went to work. One kid brought tools. Another kid sat in the driver’s seat and worked the ignition on the big guy’s instructions. Two young men rolled a barrel of gasoline up the street and tipped some into the tank. An old man came out of another house with a pitcher of water. He checked the level in the battery cells and filled the windshield-washer reservoir while he was at it. A second man removed the distributor cap and inspected the points. He pulled the spark-plug wires and looked into their sockets. A third man detached the fuel line and began sucking on it, spitting the gasoline into the street. The big guy took the fuel pump apart. The distributor cap man disappeared for a while and returned with some scavenged spark-plug sockets, which he spliced onto the old spark-plug wires. Other people checked the radiator and the oil. “I have an aunt in Union City, New Jersey,” said someone. That was the extent of anybody’s English.