Cuba Libre

1

ContentsIntroduction 3

1 Special Period in Time of Peace 6

2 A Paradise Beneath the Stars 9

3 Hard Currency 28

4 Waiting and Watching 36

5 Uncertain Future 39

Cathedral Square in Havana. (Photo: George Bryant/Toronto Star file photo)

3

Introduction

Once upon a time, I took on the task of writing Fidel Castro’s obit-uary.

Well, it’s a common mistake.After all, people have been anticipating the man’s demise for

years — for decades, in fact — only to be proved wrong, over and over again. Why would I be any different?

I was not in Cuba when I received the assignment. I was in Is-rael, reporting on a conflict known to Jewish Israelis as the Second Lebanon War and to Arabs as the July War — a six-week outbreak of fighting in the summer of 2006 that pitted the Syrian-backed politico-military organization known as Hezbollah against the Is-rael Defence Forces.

One afternoon, I was driving back down to Jerusalem to take a few days’ break from the wailing air-raid sirens and the incom-ing Katyusha rockets that were then the dominant features of life in the north. My cellphone rang. It was the Star’s foreign editor in Toronto. He said the wire services were reporting that Castro had fallen seriously ill in Havana and might not survive for long. They needed an obituary. Fast.

The foreign editor thought to call me because I used to live in Latin America, I speak Spanish, and I had travelled to Cuba many times. I had even met Castro himself on two indelible occasions.

Besides, I tend to write pretty quickly.So I continued on my way to Jerusalem. I checked into the Inbal

Hotel overlooking the German Colony, hauled out my laptop, and got straight to work. I won’t say much about the contents of that opus, and for a simple reason: as of early 2013, or more than six years after I wrote it, Castro is still alive. Maybe I shouldn’t be sur-prised. The Cuban hails from a long-lived family, and he is surely a

Cuba Libre

4

survivor. During half a century in power, he has managed to evade hundreds of attempts on his life, many of them sponsored by the U.S. government, in what President Lyndon B. Johnson once de-scribed as “a goddamned Murder Inc. down in the Caribbean.” If Castro could survive an onslaught such as that, why would he be bothered by what was merely a life-threatening illness (gastroin-testinal bleeding, as it turned out)? More than six years later, he is still among the living, still roosting over the implausible edifice of his life’s work, the Cuban Revolution. True, the grey-bearded co-mandante has mostly withdrawn from public view, devoting him-self to private pursuits, while also penning occasional pensées — sometimes engaging, mostly pretty dull — that appear in the pages of Granma, the Cuban Communist Party’s daily propaganda sheet.

When I wrote Castro’s obituary, George W. Bush was still the president of the United States, the 10th man to serve in that office since Fidel took power in 1959. By the time my Middle Eastern posting was done, about three years later, Barack Obama had be-come the 11th president to occupy the White House on Castro’s watch, and the voluble and hirsute Cuban was still in power as first secretary of the island’s Communist Party, even though the day-to-day job of running the country had been handed over to his slightly younger brother, Raul, formerly the defence minister. In 2011, Fidel formally resigned from the party leadership, and his successor once again was his brother. As a result, the transi-tion seemed more nominal than epochal. Besides, there is little doubt that Fidel continues to exert considerable influence, albeit indirectly.

In most of the ways that matter, the long reign of Fidel Cas-tro Ruz is still unfolding according to what, in his improbable life story, passes for a plan. And so the same stubborn questions that have long stymied Cuba-watchers confound them still. When will Fidel Castro finally depart? And what will his departure mean, for

Cuba Libre

5

his own legacy as well as for the 11.2 million people who live in Cuba, not to mention the 1.8 million Cuban exiles who dwell in the United States? What will change — and what will endure — when the last, lonely battle of the Cold War extinguishes its flicker-ing, solitary and nonsensical flame?

“For life with Fidel” reads the graffiti in downtown Havana (Photo: Reuters file photo)

In short, how will Cubans manage to get by after Fidel is gone?The answer, it seems to me, is best formulated by posing an-

other question: how do Cubans manage to get by while he’s here?

6

1 Special Period in Time of Peace

I first met Fidel Castro during the winter of 1982, when I was ac-companying a group of Canadian parliamentarians touring the re-gion to prepare a report about civil war and revolution in Central America. Their mission entailed a stopover in Havana and a meet-ing with Castro. That particular session was closed to the jour-nalists accompanying the group. But once the private discussions were done, we were permitted to join the politicians — including Castro, who positioned himself at a drinks trolley and proceeded to mix mojitos for everyone in attendance, serving them person-ally, one by one. He wore his customary olive fatigues and later placed himself in the middle of the room, where he gamely fielded one question after another. He was about six-foot-three and he seemed to glow.

That was a good time to be the president of Cuba. The Soviet Union was still a going concern (at least when viewed from the outside) and Moscow was still a generous patron to its only Carib-bean satellite state, providing roughly $5 billion in annual support, about 40 per cent of that in the form of grants. But hard times were waiting, and they descended with a sickening thud. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet empire, Cuba suddenly found itself without a foreign benefactor for the first time in nearly 500 years, and the country’s economy plummeted. It was a vertiginous decline, reflected not only in the cold, hard statistics printed out in government documents but also on the potholed streets and in the mostly crowded homes of Cuba’s cities, towns and villages, where people did whatever they could to get by. Many went hungry. Others resorted to horses or pony carts for transportation. Old Havana was crumbling, and beggars began to appear in public, pleading for alms, a phenomenon I had never

Cuba Libre

7

encountered in Cuba before.The government referred to those strapped and woeful years

as the Special Period in Time of Peace, an anodyne phrase that fails to capture just how painful an episode it was. Authorities were obliged to compromise certain tenets of Communist orthodoxy, opening the doors wide to foreign tourism, for example, while per-mitting Cubans to hold U.S. dollars, never mind that they were often illegally obtained.

A Havana businessman sells his wares in 2012 (Photo: Reuters file photo)

The state also yielded a grudging space for the establishment of small private businesses such as restaurants, known as paladares. During a visit to the island in the early 1990s, I had dinner one evening with a Cuban friend at a hole-in-the-wall paladar in Ala-mar, an eastern suburb of Havana, and what I remember best was the sheer ebullience of the restaurant’s owner, a young woman in her 30s who had obviously been dreaming all her life of launch-ing a business such as this, modest and make-do though it was.

Cuba Libre

8

Granted, times were extremely hard, but at last she was doing what she might well have been put on this earth do, managing a busi-ness of her own. She described her plans for the place — a couple more tables, a larger patio, new features on the menu, maybe live music. I never learned if the woman was able to follow through on her plans for expansion or if her business even survived. It would be a miracle if it did. When it came to concessions on private en-terprise, the Cuban government veered fitfully this way and that, producing a climate of uncertainty that few could endure. It’s dif-ficult enough to succeed as an entrepreneur in a capitalist country. Imagine the odds in a socialist state.

But Cubans find a way. Somehow, they do. Consider the island’s small army of makeshift mechanics who manage to keep all those stately, 1950s-era American jalopies on the road, propelled by Rus-sian motors and patched together with homemade spare parts and the Cuban equivalent of Krazy Glue. There’s a kind of genius at work in Cuba, a quality that owes much less to the wonders of tropical socialism than it does to the sheer grit and resourcefulness of Cubans themselves. Somehow, in spite of the odds, the obstacles, and the absurdities of living out their lives in what is practically the world’s last standing Communist state, Cubans have managed to survive and, what’s more, stay sane. To find out how they do it, there’s really no other option than to book a seat on a southbound jet with a boarding pass stamped HAV, for Havana.

9

2 A Paradise Beneath the Stars

For a Canadian, what is possibly most startling about Cuba is how close it is — just a three-hour flight from Toronto. Granted, the trip used to take longer. As recently as the early 1990s, the Russian Ilyushin jets flown by Cubana de Aviacion on the Toronto-Havana route were obliged to chart an eastward course to the Atlantic Coast of Nova Scotia before bearing south — this to avoid flying over U.S. territory, something Cuban aircraft were prohibited from doing. The detour added an hour or more to the flight time to Ha-vana and was yet another irritating reminder of the economic em-bargo Washington has long imposed on the island.

The embargo remains in force, but it is no longer as formidable as it used to be. The Americans sell food to Cuba now, as well as medicine; passenger planes fly regularly between Miami and the Cuban capital; and Havana-bound aircraft are permitted to navi-gate U.S. air space on their way from Canada. Nowadays, during the final stages of that southward flight, it’s worth your while to keep a close watch out the window. On a clear day, there’s a good chance you’ll see Florida’s all-American Highway slinking far be-low, a long network of roads and bridges that links Key Largo to Key West, a feat of engineering that looks awfully spindly from 30,000 feet in the air. The roadway also gives you an easy reference point to judge just how close these two bitter enemies are. Just 145 kilometres of salt water separate Key West from Havana.

The aircraft will be beginning its descent about now, plowing over the green hills, sugar plantations and pinwheel palms of the Caribbean’s largest island, rimmed by its finest beaches, and ruled by the region’s longest-serving autocracy. Arriving at the new main terminal at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport, I always feel an excitement that is palpable, a tingling in the spine. The terminal

Cuba Libre

10

itself is a large, airy building crowned by an ungainly wing-like superstructure — a Canadian-built facility inaugurated in 1998 by then prime minister Jean Chrétien and the President of the Repub-lic of Cuba, commander-in-chief Fidel Castro.

Although the frozen north is the largest source of tourists on the island — supplying between a third and a half of the total — Ca-nadians do not descend in large numbers upon the Cuban capital itself. Instead, most make straight for Cuba’s beach resorts such as Varadero or Holguín. But Havana may well be my favourite place on the planet. The taxi ride into the city lasts about half an hour, always through traffic composed almost entirely of extremely old cars, punctuated by a pony cart or two. The summer heat is deadly, the winters are sublime, and in any season of the year Havana is unlike any other city in the world.

True, it’s grubby in places, if not downright decrepit, but it puls-es everywhere with music and life, nowhere more so than along Calle Obispo, a narrow pedestrian mall that cuts through the old city from the Parque Central eastward to the Plaza de Armas. After checking into a hotel at the edge of Old Havana, I almost invari-ably head straight to Obispo for a re-introductory stroll, happy to be in the country again. The always-crowded street is a sort of open-air gallery where the main commodities on display are the people and the music.

Of all the cultural medicaments that have sustained Cubans through the rigours of life in a Communist state, few have been more potent than music and dance. A walk along Obispo will take you past one venerable bar after another — La Lluvia de Oro, Café Paris, the rooftop terrace at Hotel Ambos Mundos, all with ex-pert son bands playing heartfelt renditions of what is, to be honest, a somewhat limited repertoire, ranging from “Comandante Che Guevara” to “Yolanda.” A detour along Calle Belgica will bring you to Café Monserrate, another great spot for music, with a clientele

Cuba Libre

11

divided about equally between Cubans and foreigners. An elec-trified son band is almost always jolting the sultry air, no matter the hour. Almost every song you hear has a distinctive percussive quality — a five-beat rhythm knocked out on a pair of wooden dowels called claves — that will always resonate for me like the heartbeat of Havana itself.

Music and dance can be found everywhere in Havana (Photo: Oakland Ross/Toronto Star)

It’s a town where every block seems to offer up another singer and another song. You simply have to follow your ears. Or hop a taxi to a district of western Havana known as Marianao, where a legendary Cuban nightclub called La Tropicana occupies a lush, three-hectare estate that began life in the late 1800s as a private residence. If any institution embodies the ability of Cubans to adapt and persevere — and party — against a backdrop of never-ending crisis and confusion, then it’s the Tropicana.

Just ask Mayrelis Fargas, who was just 20 years old and a student at the Tropicana dance school when I met her while

Cuba Libre

12

working on a story.“When I saw the Tropicana on TV — the dancers, the costumes

— I thought, ‘How beautiful,’ ” said Fargas, recalling her child-hood. “I said to my mami, ‘Take me to dancing school, please,’ and from then to now, I have studied dance.”

Each weekday afternoon, Fargas would leave the cramped three-room apartment she shared with her aunt and her grand-mother on Calle Ermita, not far from the huge monument to the Cuban Revolution. She would climb aboard a bus for the half-hour journey to Marianao. Where 72nd Ave. meets the railway line to Zanja, she’d hike her gym bag onto her shoulder and climb down, cross 72nd, and march beneath the mango trees and onto the grounds of the Tropicana.

Fargas was one of the elite. At any given time, only about 40 of Cuba’s most promising young dancers are enrolled at the club’s school. A few of them — the very best — eventually go on to join the Tropicana company, while the rest depart for other less-sto-ried Cuban cabarets. A lot was at stake for Fargas and her fellow students, seldom more so than on this particular day. Only three months remained before graduation, and she and the others had just completed their penultimate set of exams. That afternoon, they were to learn how they had fared. With her dreams riding upon the result, Fargas headed backstage to change.

Established in 1939 as a restaurant and cabaret, the Tropicana has long been a legend among Caribbean nightclubs. The place has endured social unrest and revolution, dictators and gangsters, even the collapse of the Soviet empire, and nowadays seems to be holding its own against its latest and perhaps greatest challenge — nightly busloads of rubbernecking tourists on package holidays from London, Lyon and Munich.

Granted, much has changed at the Tropicana since its golden age in the 1950s, when up to 900 patrons would cast bets in its

Cuba Libre

13

smoky casino or gather at its starlit tables — corrupt Cuban of-ficials, American gangsters, diverse gamblers, and women, wom-en, women. Martin Fox, then the club’s owner, would often rent a Lockheed Super G Constellation airliner to fly his clients between Miami and Havana.

Following the 1959 revolution, Castro soon stopped the club’s roulette wheels, and the customers changed as well. Before long, technical advisers and Comintern officials from Moscow, Buda-pest and Prague took the places in the audience formerly occupied by dictator Fulgencio Batista, his local cronies and their American partners in crime. And yet, even as this slender island reinvented itself as a Soviet outpost in the Caribbean, the Tropicana somehow managed to remain what it had always been — a temple of the senses, a celebration of the night.

Now as in decades past, the spectacle begins at 10 p.m. sharp, with a woman’s stentorian voice bursting through the darkness.

“Senoras y senores,” she intones. “Bienvenidos a la Tropicana — un paraiso bajo las estrellas.”

Immediately, the 20-piece Tropicana orchestra strikes up a brassy Latin number, while women in white gowns and feathers with tall, spangled headpieces stride up from the audience and converge upon the stage. Lights explode overhead, illuminating a profusion of waxy-leaved tropical flora and a kaleidoscope of dancers. Men in ruffled red bolero jackets materialize from no-where, amid swirling clouds of dry ice. A choir appears, crooning through the branches of an immense weeping fig tree.

Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Tropicana — a paradise beneath the stars.

On three occasions already, Fargas had been recruited to dance on the Tropicana stage, each time to replace an ailing or absent performer and each time subjecting herself to an exhausting two-hour marathon of costume changes, dance, and

Cuba Libre

14

more costume changes.“I didn’t think I’d do as well as I did,” she said of those unforget-

table nights. “Dance is difficult. It’s not an easy thing. But maybe it’s not so difficult for me. I’ve been doing it since I was a little girl.”

And now it was judgment time. The student dancers flopped down onto the sprung wooden floor of the practice studio, their backs to the walls, their knees tucked to their chests. Fargas hud-dled at the far end of the room, dressed in a multicoloured hal-ter top, pink Lycra shorts and a pair of high-heeled dancing shoes with sharply pointed toes.

The bearer of tidings, both good and bad, was an imperious woman named Mery Salazar, who spoke with the speed and inten-sity of a human machine gun. She called for everyone’s attention, peered down at her clipboard, and began to read out the marks from the latest exam, proceeding from high to low.

When their names were called, the students didn’t look up or betray any emotion. Instead, they frowned with concentration and, as quickly as Salazar read the numbers aloud, scribbled the results in their notebooks. Later, outside, the sepia light of eve-ning drifted through the almond trees and bamboo stalks, and the young women comforted one another, while the men dispersed, almost without a word. After changing back into her street clothes, Fargas headed off beneath the mango trees to catch her bus home, and there she promptly shared her news. With an average score of 91.8 per cent, she stood at the very top of the Tropicana class.

Later, after bathing and consuming a late dinner, she watched some TV before finally going to bed. By now, it was well past 10 o’clock and, back in Marianao, the greatest show in Cuba was once again electrifying the tropical night, just as it has done since 1939. Meanwhile, in her bed at home on Calle Ermita, Mayrelis was dreaming — and, in her dreams, she was dancing.

—

Cuba Libre

15

Let’s face it, music and dance are to Cubans what food and drink are to people in many other lands, but Cubans do not get by on music and dance alone. They’ve also been known to dabble in something they like to call beisbol.

This, of course, is the Spanish name for a sport that most people think of as a quintessentially yanqui game. But Cubans don’t tend to look at it that way. In fact, not a few Cubans are firmly convinced that baseball isn’t American at all. The game was, they insist, hecho en Cuba. Made in Cuba. This is a dubious claim, particularly when you consider that most Cuban baseball terms are obvious corrup-tions of their English models. In Cuba, a hit is a jit. A home run is a jonron. To be at bat is to be al bate. A pitcher is a picher. A dugout is a dugout.

Once, during a play-off game between Los Industriales of Ha-vana and a visiting team from the Island of Youth, I spoke to Sigi-fredo Barros, veteran sportswriter for Granma. He acknowledged the American roots of the sport but said that baseball crossed the Straits of Florida to Cuba a very long time ago, in the early 1860s. Now, a century and a half later, he believes the Cuban game and its U.S. counterpart are close in quality, although he gives a slight edge to his compatriots.

“The (U.S.) major leagues are a great spectacle, but in a tactical sense we are a little in front of them,” he said. “American players are a bit like robots.”

The fans at Cuban baseball games have the familiar habit of banging together those annoying bat-shaped balloons, just the way the spectators do in Toronto. In most other respects, however, a baseball game in Cuba is a far different experience from its major league counterpart in North America. There are no streaming bill-boards or huge jumbo video screens at Estadio Latinoamericano, the 55,000-seat stadium in Havana; no long pauses in the action so that commercial messages can be aired on TV for viewers at home;

Cuba Libre

16

no glitzy, overpriced souvenir stands; no extravagant promotions for beer or automobiles or lawn-care equipment. In fact, there isn’t even beer. Instead, there is just a smattering of polite revolutionary messages posted above the outfield stands. “For Peace and Friend-ship,” counsels one. “Cuban Sport: On the Paths of Victory,” sug-gests another.

Fidel Castro takes a swing in 1977 (Photo: Associated Press file photo)

“This is pure baseball,” said Barros. “In the United States, the stadiums are like fairs. Here, there are no commercials. There are no stores. This is just baseball.”

And baseball, after music, is arguably the passion closest to the collective Cuban soul — unless you consider Santeria.

That’s the term Cubans use to refer to an African-based system of beliefs and rituals that is almost certainly the most widespread religion on the island. One estimate, now likely out of date, sug-gested that there are about 200 babalawos — or Santeria priests — for every 4,000 Cubans.

That’s a pretty good showing in what is formally an atheist

Cuba Libre

17

state not known for being warmly receptive to organized religion. Western churches, particularly the Roman Catholic church, have long struggled in these conditions. But santeros, as adherents of Santeria are known, have operated in the shadows for centuries and are accustomed to getting by without official sanction. As a result, they have flourished even under a regime of godless social-ism. Nowadays, Santeria almost certainly possesses more Cuban adherents than does the Vatican. It is easy to pick out the faithful in a crowd. Either they will be dressed completely in white or, if wearing normal street clothes, they will be recognizable thanks to the beaded necklaces that they favour and whose colour patterns identify them with a particular orisha or god — white beads for Obatala, for example, or red and white for Chango, or green, black, and purple for Oggun.

Some years ago, I set about researching an article about Sante-ria in Cuba. I was worried that it might prove difficult to persuade people to speak openly about their beliefs or their private religious experiences, but the opposite turned out to be true. Almost every-one I approached had Santeria stories to tell and was bursting to share them.

Of course, Cubans could probably fashion a fully fledged re-ligious cult out of just about anything you might care to suggest — an old wives’ tale, an urban legend. To test this proposition, I once paid a visit to Havana’s vast Necropolis Cristobal Colon, the largest and grandest graveyard on the island. Each year on May 3, a small but fervent congregation of the faithful assembles in the cemetery by a modest tomb that marks the final resting place of one Amelia Goyri de Adot. A daughter of the island’s elite, Goyri died in childbirth more than 100 years ago, at just 24 years of age. In the decades since her passing, she has come to be known as La Milagrosa, or the Miraculous One, and she is now a potent symbol of the richly layered life of the spirit that is as powerful a source of

Cuba Libre

18

sustenance for most Cubans as music and dance, if not food and drink.

It was a gorgeous morning in early May when I headed to the cemetery to pay my respects to the Miraculous One on the anni-versary of her death. About 200 others had decided to do the same, all wishing to offer tribute to the mystery of Amelia.

“I owe her a lot,” said Teresa Duran, who told me she worked as a custodian at a Havana health clinic. “She always helps me a lot.”

“I have a lot of faith in her,” agreed Norma Gonzalez, a teacher. “If you are sick, you pray to Amelia.”

What is supposed to have happened to Amelia Goyri de Adot after her death was astonishing enough that it has sustained a cult that continues to flourish roughly a century later. Here is the story.

On May 3, 1901, Amelia died in childbirth, along with her still-born son. They were subsequently entombed together here, with the infant placed at his mother’s feet in her coffin. The widower of the tale, Eduardo Adot y Lopez, was inconsolable. During the ensuing years, he took flowers to his wife’s tomb almost daily. In 1914, with his own health failing, Adot asked to be taken to Ame-lia’s crypt one last time. While there, he requested that the vault be opened so he might gaze upon his wife’s remains. What he and others witnessed that day gave birth to the legend of La Milagrosa. Somehow — so the tale goes — the stillborn baby had managed to make his way from the foot of the coffin and was now safely cradled at his mother’s breast, enfolded in her arms. A miracle.

Eduardo died the next day, Dec. 3, 1914, but the story of Amelia did not die with him and has continued to fascinate Cubans, drawing a daily stream of the faithful to this otherwise unremarkable marble tomb. It’s surrounded now by hundreds of stone tablets, each inscribed with a testament of gratitude from someone whose prayers — for good health, for a son or a daughter, for some other benefit — were apparently answered by the woman

Cuba Libre

19

whose body lies here.“She wears the crown of gold,” said Medys Gonzalez Castro,

one of the pilgrims commemorating Amelia’s death that day.Eventually, a violinist showed up, along with a guitarist and a

singer clad entirely in white. The musicians assembled near the tomb, where they performed a rendition of “Ave Maria,” followed by “Las Mananitas” (“The Little Mornings,” the Latin American equivalent of “Happy Birthday”), and then more Christian hymns.

The people hummed and sang along, many clutching bunches of gladiolas. Meanwhile, the sun beamed down through cotton-batten clouds, and everyone seemed content — a small miracle in itself. Chalk up another one to La Milagrosa.

—

I could probably have used a blessing from La Milagrosa myself one afternoon in the spring of 2004 when I ventured out to a su-permarket in western Havana known informally as Quinta y 42. The name is taken from its location, at the corner of Fifth Ave. and 42nd St. I meant to gather information for an article about Cuba’s burgeoning network of dollar stores — places where foreign visi-tors and Cubans alike could shop for consumer goods of all sorts by paying in foreign currency. The stores represented an attempt by the Cuban government to soak up the growing supply of dollars that were then entering the Cuban economy, partly by legitimate means — tips for hotel or restaurant workers, for example, or for-eign remittances sent back to the island by Cubans living abroad. The money was also acquired through less salubrious activities, such as prostitution or black-market currency trading.

Either way, the dollar stores were a boon for some, allowing Cu-bans to indulge their long-frustrated consumer appetites. But the increasing dolarizacion of the country’s economy was also having the unintended and potentially ruinous effect of dividing Cubans

Cuba Libre

20

into two separate economic classes — those with access to dollars and those without. This was hardly the stuff of utopian socialist egalitarianism.

I marched into the store and began wandering up and down the aisles, scribbling in my notebook. I was listing the various import-ed products on sale, their country of origin and their price. Among many other products, I found tinned sausages, ground coffee, New Zealand butter, a range of hair-colouring products in shades rang-ing from platinum blond to dark brown. I had got no further than the ketchup section, when a security guard confronted me, soon to be joined by the assistant manager and later by the manager himself, a gruff, no-nonsense individual wearing a pair of silver-rimmed eyeglasses.

I suppose they’d been watching me for quite a while, trying to figure out what was going on. Here I was, an obvious foreigner, ambling through the store, making mysterious notes — behaviour that must have struck them as suspicious, and possibly sinister.

I explained what I was doing.“It’s not authorized,” said the assistant manager. “It’s not autho-

rized to carry out interviews or to conduct polls.”Some might regard what followed as yet another trampling of

individual freedoms in one of the last Communist countries in the world, and maybe they would be right. On the other hand, I wasn’t carted off to prison or expelled from the island. Instead, the manager — who never did supply his name — invited me to accompany him upstairs to his office, where we enjoyed a fairly intense but always respectful discussion that touched on perceived inconsistencies in Canadian foreign policy, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Cuban-Mexican relations, corporal punishment, and the Ho-locaust.

As for the suitability of writing down the names and prices of the products arrayed on a supermarket’s shelves: here, we failed to

Cuba Libre

21

reach agreement. I was for it. He was against. Because he was the store manager, his view prevailed. I was allowed to keep my note-book, however, and we parted with a handshake.

Oakland Ross in Cuba (Photo: Oakland Ross)

Outside, I marched over to a nearby café, ordered a coffee, and installed myself in a white plastic chair at a white plastic table in order to jot down some notes about what had just happened. A policeman sauntered over, evidently already aware of my contre-temps in the ketchup section. He asked to see my ID, which I pro-vided. He took my papers to a nearby police vehicle, where I sup-pose he reported the details by radio. Before long, he returned and gave me back my documents.

As a violation of my human rights, this minor misadventure at Quinta y 42 belongs somewhere at the very low end of the scale. Still, the denouement to the experience — the extremely prompt intervention by police — powerfully suggested that government surveillance in Cuba really was as pervasive as many insisted. They weren’t just imagining things.

Cuba Libre

22

Still, in fairness, I should probably mention a Canadian coun-terpart to that incident in Cuba. Some years ago, I was at home in Toronto researching an article for the Star about the international coffee trade. During the course of that research, I visited the Star-buck’s café near Yonge and Bloor streets, the one that occupies the building that used to be the Albert Britnell bookshop. I wanted to make a list of the different coffee-related concoctions that Star-buck’s purveys, and so I pulled out my notebook and began copy-ing down portions of the prominently posted menu. A young and humourless man approached. He identified himself as the man-ager and demanded to know what I was doing. I explained. He re-plied that I must stop at once or he would call the police. I told him to go right ahead, and maybe he did. I waited, but no peace officers showed up. Canada, it seemed, was not quite a police state yet.

But Cuba is a police state, or it certainly was then. Just ask Raul, a man I met one afternoon in Havana. He said he worked as a guard in a cigar factory and proceeded to give me some on-the-spot guidance about social control, Cuba-style.

“Cuba has a lot of police,” he declared.This was a few days after my own brush with the state secu-

rity apparatus, and I was strolling past the massive domed Capitol building at the western edge of Old Havana. Raul and a friend of his were lounging on the sidewalk, sipping white rum from green plastic tumblers, while several Cuban policemen with a trio of German shepherds on leashes were busily detaining another of Raul’s friends, along with two other men.

“Beautiful dogs,” commented Raul. “Ugly owners.”He explained that, after being stopped by police, his friend and

the two other men had failed to produce the government-issued identification card, known as a carnet, that Cubans are required to have in their possession at all times. Now, he said, they would be taken to a police post and obliged to spend a night in jail while

Cuba Libre

23

security checks were run. If nothing untoward turned up, they would be released in the morning.

“If you put up your hand in protest,” Raul complained, “they will cut it off.”

Presently, two of the policemen wandered away, leaving just a single cop behind. One of the detainees shuffled over to plead with me for $20 (U.S.), so that he could bribe the remaining policeman and thereby avoid spending a night in jail. He said he had two small children at home. I declined. The man pondered this for a while and then said that even $10 would probably do the trick. Again, I said no. Pretty soon, the lone policeman herded his three captives away on foot.

As an exercise in state authority, this confrontation near Old Havana seemed neither deeply menacing nor entirely benign, but it tended to confirm the belief shared by many Cubans that they were almost always being watched, one way or another. Though it was seldom violent, the resulting system of social control was pervasive and oppressive, and it could also be cruel.

Some will protest that Cuban-style repression does not begin to compare with the wholesale horrors committed by other far more ham-fisted regimes — and they are surely right. Consider the so-called Dirty War unleashed in the 1970s against suspected leftists in Argentina, a campaign of pathological brutality in which up-wards of 30,000 people were murdered or disappeared. Or consid-er the nearly compulsive savagery of the Rafael Trujillo dictator-ship in the Dominican Republic. Castro was not like that, not even close. In Cuba under Castro, lethal measures were a last resort in the resolution of political conflict, not the first response. But Castro could be vengeful when the occasion arose. Of the Cuban leader, it was often said that he rarely forgot — and never forgave.

He was also a micromanager of legendary proportions. In 2003, a group of Cuban men hijacked a ferry in Havana Bay, a vessel with

Cuba Libre

24

some 50 passengers aboard. They tried to escape to Florida, but they were turned back by Cuban naval patrol boats. That was not the end of it, however. Instead, a standoff ensued, and so Cuba’s supreme commander rushed to the scene himself in order to ne-gotiate personally with the hijackers. In the end, they agreed to surrender. A day or so later, they were executed by firing squad.

I oppose capital punishment on principle, but even if that were not so I would still have found this punishment to be grotesquely severe. On the other hand, you could appreciate the logic of it, the logic of deterrence. The executions were carried out for a clear rea-son. They were not some random, paranoid slaughter. Castro did not operate that way. He was decisive. He could be ruthless. But, for the most part, he was only as harsh as he needed to be. Cuba under his rule has had no equivalent of the dank underground gulags, the torture chambers and mass graves, which have under-pinned the authority of other tyrants in other lands. At any given time under Castro’s rule, there might have been roughly 300 pris-oners of conscience in Cuban jails. That number is grim enough — 300 squandered souls, at any given time. But the numbers were small by comparison with other dictatorial regimes. For all his faults, Castro was hardly the monster the U.S. government’s pro-paganda machine makes him out to be. Of course, he was no civil libertarian, either.

—

Meet Miriam Leiva.I was in Havana once again, this time on my way to a cramped,

book-filled apartment on Calle 39A in the Playa district where Leiva, a 57-year-old independent journalist and grandmother, greeted me at the door. She was wearing navy-blue slacks and a blue, short-sleeved top. Her red-tinted hair was cut short, and a pair of stylish eyeglasses were perched on her nose. Behind her,

Cuba Libre

25

a small yellow parrot chattered in a wire cage balanced atop an antiquated refrigerator. Meanwhile, out on the tree-lined street, a police officer shambled dutifully past, clad in the standard grey-and-blue uniform of the Cuban constabulary.

Miriam Leiva (Photo: Reuters file photo)

Leiva shrugged. “I doubt that it’s a coincidence.” On this par-ticular street, she said, there was always a police officer strolling past. “I know there is a microphone in this apartment. I know my phone is bugged.”

Leiva was a “mercenary,” after all — or at least she was married to one.

Her husband is Oscar Espinosa Chepe, 63 years old at the time, a Cuban economist who was serving a prison sentence for activi-ties the authorities had labelled as sedition. Along with 74 fellow dissidents — a mix of journalists, academics, researchers, and ar-chivists — he had been rounded up in the spring of 2003 and then bundled into jail following the briefest of trials. Sentences for the 75 ranged from 14 to 28 years, with Espinosa Chepe somewhere in

Cuba Libre

26

the middle at 20 years.None of these dissidents was guilty of violent behaviour, and

yet all were being rebuked with soul-crushing punishment. Many would almost certainly die behind bars, for the crime of disagree-ing with their government. Espinosa Chepe seemed likely to figure among them. Suffering from a chronic liver condition, a thoracic hernia and persistent hypertension, he did not seem well-equipped to survive two decades in a Cuban jail.

A former economics counsellor at his country’s embassy in Bel-grade, Espinosa Chepe had gradually lost faith in Cuba’s socialist economic system and was eventually fired from government ser-vice as a result. He later turned his energy to poring over publicly available documents on the Cuban economy, writing about them, and sending out his work for publication abroad.

According to his wife, he didn’t earn much from his writing. A magazine in Madrid called Encuentro paid him $25 (U.S.) for each piece he submitted. A Miami-based Internet magazine known as Cuba.net paid him even less, just $15. As well, he hosted a weekly half-hour radio program that aired on Radio Marti, which was bankrolled by Washington and broadcast its signal to Cuba from a beacon located in South Florida. Called Charlando con Chepe — Chatting with Chepe — the radio show paid him nothing at all, Leiva claimed.

Nonetheless, Chepe, who had also worked for the National Bank of Cuba, was found guilty of acting against the independence and territorial integrity of the state — in other words, sedition. “They keep him incommunicado,” she said. “They don’t want Os-car to know anything. They don’t let him have books about eco-nomics, and he’s an economist. I took him a biography of John F. Kennedy, and they said no.”

Of course, these things cut both ways. When it comes to the mishandling of complex political challenges, the United States

Cuba Libre

27

has at various times shown itself to be every inch a match for Ha-vana. Consider the case of the so-called Cuba Five, a handful of Cuban agents who were operating underground in Florida in the late 1990s. According to the Cuban version of events, the five were not spies in the conventional sense. They had no designs against the United States. Instead, they were simply acting in Havana’s de-fence, monitoring the activities of radical anti-Castro groups in Florida — groups that had a long and, at times, alarming history of carrying out acts of violence against Cuba. Eventually, Havana volunteered to share its intelligence with Washington. Instead of saying “gracias, companeros,” U.S. authorities arrested the five and charged them with espionage. Convicted in 2001, they received as-toundingly severe sentences that ranged from 15 years’ imprison-ment to life-times-two, a response that seems vastly out of propor-tion to their alleged offences. Of course, the location of the trials might have influenced the outcome. U.S. authorities insisted on trying the men in Miami, a town dominated culturally and politi-cally by Cuban exiles, where anti-Castro loathing is practically a civic duty — and where such outlandish sentences were possibly not a complete surprise.

In the end, the ailing Oscar Espinosa Chepe was released from prison on grounds of ill health after serving only a year or so of his two-decade sentence. I spoke to him on the phone after that, and he was still what he has always seemed to be, a smart man with ex-cellent research and analytical skills, who calls a spade a spade. He is free now but in poor health and was recently hospitalized once again. Meanwhile, many of his fellow dissidents remain behind bars, for the crime of disagreeing with the state.

28

3 Hard Currency

A Cuban acquaintance of mine, who at the time held a senior job at a branch of a Cuban bank, once told me that her country’s socialist economic system actually suited most people quite well. No one had to work very hard if they didn’t want to, she said, and almost everyone received enough to meet his or her basic needs. Provided they kept their criticism within certain broad limits, Cubans could complain publicly about the things they didn’t like. They could even grouse about Castro himself. Surprisingly often, they do just that, but mainly they get on with their lives, somehow managing to cope with the frustrations, shortages and restrictions that seem to be endemic in a centrally planned economy and a top-down state.

As the new millennium has worn on, however, the tone has begun to change. The familiar street-level carping has taken on a harder edge, not simply because life is tough — it has always been tough — but because life had become a whole lot tougher for some than for others. Suffering is rarely a good thing, but it probably doesn’t seem quite so bad as long as it’s evenly shared. Take the equity out of it, and a people’s patience dries up fast. For many Cu-bans, the main culprit for their multiplying tribulations has been foreign currency — foreign currency and a cancerous little thing called graft.

Consider a woman of my acquaintance named Maria, a sin-ewy sexagenarian who understood that there were now two kinds of people in her country — those with reliable access to foreign currency and those without. She also knew exactly which of these two groups she belonged to. It was the one that scuffled to earn a little convertible cash by engaging in one scam or another — in her case, by selling phony three-peso Cuban banknotes to gullible tourists. The notes bore the likeness of fallen revolutionary Che

Cuba Libre

29

Guevara and were actually worthless, but at least they could be kept as souvenirs. Even so, there weren’t many takers.

Old Havana (Photo: Catherine Porter/Toronto Star)

Cuba Libre

30

Roughly half a century after the overthrow of dictator Fulgen-cio Batista and the launching of Cuba on its snakes-and-ladders course toward tropical socialism, few issues hobble the revolution as thoroughly as this — a cold question of hard cash. Some Cubans have it, while most Cubans don’t, and the members of the second group are damned unhappy about scrounging for their keep in a socialist paradise where foreign capitalists and local schemers seemed to be having all the fun. For many decades, it had been a mainstay of official Cuban orthodoxy that the leading threat to the revolution was posed by the United States of America and its con-niving, anti-Communist ways. By the mid-2000s, however, it was pretty much taken for granted that the most potent dangers to the system lay not without but within.

Even Fidel Castro, then approaching his 80th birthday, ac-knowledged that the most urgent peril to the regime he had led for nearly 50 years was not the spectral U.S. military invasion he so frequently warned about, but something quite different: a col-lapse in domestic support for a system that was now plagued with inequities and abuses.

“We ourselves, we could destroy it, “ he once told a Spanish interviewer, “and it would be our fault, if we are not capable of cor-recting our errors, if we are not able to put an end to many vices, much theft, much diversion of money, and many sources of fund-ing for the new rich.”

Bearing right along Avenida Monserrate, Maria waved toward a blue-painted building known as Harris Brothers, which had recently reopened as a four-storey shopping emporium, stocked with foodstuffs and consumer goods that were available only in hard currency — precisely the kind of currency that she, like most Cubans, chronically lacked.

Thanks to swindles, good fortune, family connections, or op-portunism, a select few of her compatriots did have access to for-

Cuba Libre

31

eign currency, or its Cuban equivalent, known as the peso convert-ible, or CUC, then worth $1.08 (U.S.). As a result, they enjoyed a quality of life that was unavailable but not invisible to the vast majority of islanders, those condemned to a dreary existence on a ration card, augmented only by the measly purchasing power of the lowly national peso — the nonconvertible one — then trading at about 24 cents to the U.S. greenback.

Like almost everyone in this land of shimmering palms and frustrated shoppers, Maria could rhyme off the prices of the goods for sale at Harris Brothers, goods that she could not hope to buy, not in a country where a medical doctor, legitimately employed, earned the equivalent of less than $20 a month. In fact, the furni-ture, electronics, toys and clothing for sale at Harris Brothers or at other hard-currency retail outlets in Cuba would be unlikely to impress most Canadian shoppers — prices were high and quality generally low — but they were a galling affront to most Cubans, a reminder of all that they could not afford and never would be able to afford, unless something drastic happened.

For the time being, a great many Cubans did what they had to do, resorting to some kind of fiddle in order to get by, working por la izquierda, as it was known, or “on the left.” They diverted goods from their workplaces for resale on the street, for example, or used state-owned vehicles for a little undocumented private enterprise, or targeted free-spending tourists for incidental bribes.

Or they sought out a legitimate foreign-currency source of their own. Down by the harbour in Old Havana, for example, I met a young woman working as a waitress in a restaurant pa-tronized mainly by tourists. Trained as a nutritionist, she said she could earn no more than the equivalent of $15 a month by toiling in her former profession — the same amount she now shelled out each week for two hours of private English instruction. Result: she waited tables so that she could pocket the hard-currency tips. Be-

Cuba Libre

32

hind the wheel of his car on the Malecon — the meandering bou-levard that traces the length of Havana’s sprawling waterfront — a grey-haired taxi driver explained that he had studied for a decade in Moscow in the 1970s, earning a master’s degree in engineering. Back in Havana, he rose up the ranks of the state-run taxi com-pany until he reached the top management rung, where his salary amounted to about $20 a month. Now he earned four times that much, working one day out of two, driving a cab for tips.

Still, however much they complained, it would be misleading to portray the lot of most ordinary Cubans — even those without ac-cess to hard currency — as a condition of grinding misery. In fact, as they stride along the Obispo pedestrian mall in Old Havana or stroll up and down La Rampa in the Vedado section of town, deni-zens of the Cuban capital give precisely the opposite impression, and their demeanour may help explain how it is that Cubans have managed to endure, more or less in peace, all these long, strange years of Communism, economic hardship and cultural isolation. The truth is, things are bad — but they aren’t that bad.

“They say there’s not enough clothing, they say there’s not enough food,” said a Cuban acquaintance of mine, gesturing from behind the wheel of his car. “But look. Everyone seems well-dressed. Everyone seems well-fed.”

So they do. What’s more, a foreign visitor in Havana will search in vain for evidence of the desperate poverty, especially child pov-erty, that still blots the human landscape of almost every other Lat-in American capital, a distinction that seemed to hold true, more or less, even during the most parlous days of the Special Period. Still, it was clear that the centre was no longer holding.

“Almost everybody agrees that things will have to change,” a European diplomat remarked. “But the scope of the change is the question that we are asking.”

Most observers hoped that reforms would be bold and come

Cuba Libre

33

quickly. But no one really knew what the future might hold. Mean-while, Cubans dug through their purses and their pockets for any-thing that had the feel of cold, hard cash.

And they waited.

—

As for Fidel, he has been visibly fading with each passing year.Once all but tireless, the Cuban leader was beginning to suffer

sporadic bad days that inevitably sullied the good. In the spring of 2004, he was obliged to cut short at least one speech because he wasn’t feeling well, and la bola, or the ball — Cuban slang for the rumour mill — bounced into action. But that episode passed with-out serious consequences, and Castro went right back to work. Just as it had done for years, a fleet of cars bore him into the city ear-ly in the morning, often tracing a route along Quinta Avenida, a handsome green boulevard that parades through western Havana, ornamented with topiary ficus shrubs, casuarinas and scarlet-blos-somed flamboyant trees. Said to be in sturdy shape for a man his age, Castro had long ago sworn off his beloved Cohiba cigars and was believed to live simply for the most part.

But something was wrong.Late in 2005, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded

that the Cuban leader was suffering from incurable, degenerative Parkinson’s disease. That report was shrugged off by many, includ-ing Castro. And yet, in public, the man with the beard began to favour his right arm, often using his left hand to pour glasses of water for himself, for example, or to execute his patented oratori-cal gestures: the outstretched index finger used to issue a warning; the flattened palm that cut the air like a knife; the upward-pump-ing forearm and clenched fist that were supposed to bring a sitting crowd to its feet.

The problem with Castro’s right arm might have had less to do

Cuba Libre

34

with a putative case of Parkinson’s than with the lingering effects of a serious fall he took earlier that year, after delivering a five-hour speech in the central city of Santa Clara. He damaged his right knee and fractured his right arm. Castro recovered from that set-back, too, but by almost any measure he was an old man now, and it showed in almost every way.

Increasingly, life in Cuba had become a sort of death watch — when would Castro succumb? But even as they watched and won-dered and waited, Cubans somehow managed to get on with their lives, making the best of their lot in whatever ways they could.

Consider a sixty-something seductress named Xiomara San-chez Lombillo. It was a sunlit Saturday morning when I met her, and she stood amid several chipped wooden tables on a dark, tiled floor in an antique Cuban bar, a haunt once frequented by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Established in 1894, the place is called Dos Hermanos and is a well-aged, wood-panelled haunt on the Avenida del Puerto, down by the harbour in Old Havana. Sanchez earned her livelihood by singing for tips in an antique joint more heavily patronized by Cubans than by foreigners. Ably accom-panied on accordion by one Alberto Reysin Faval, she eased her flowered blouse provocatively off her shoulders and started to sing, coaxing one bittersweet old melody after another through the fil-ter of her smoky soprano — “Dos Gardenias,” “Lagrimas Negras,” “Quizas.” She sang not only for sustenance but also for the sheer joy of song, all the while cradling a small but attentive audience in the palms of her slender hands.

Later, during a break in her performance, Sanchez invited me to her table and announced that her 68th birthday was less than a week away. “You could write a novel about my life,” she confided. “It has been long and sad. But here I am.”

She might have been speaking for all Cuba.

Cuba Libre

35

Xiomara Sanchez Lombillo (Photo: Oakland Ross/Toronto Star)

36

4 Waiting and Watching

A withering tropical sun beat down upon the teeming Plaza de la Revolucion, where a familiar bearded gentleman in olive-green fatigues leaned against a dark wooden podium and did what he did best.

He went on and on and on.How many rice cookers did this Caribbean outpost of com-

munism produce in the previous year? How many electric stoves? How many refrigerators?

Fidel Castro on May Day in 2006. (Photo: Rick Eglinton/Toronto Star)

The hours plodded past, but the bare-headed man at the micro-phone scarcely seemed to notice the passage of time, so engrossed was he in his words and ideas. No economic statistic was too in-consequential for him to highlight. No suspected act of U.S. ag-gression was too outlandish to denounce. Meanwhile, a crowd offi-cially estimated at 1 million sweltered in the vast plaza and waited

Cuba Libre

37

with almost superhuman patience for His Excellency Fidel Castro Ruz, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolution and president of the republic, to be done.

The year was 2006, and these people had now been waiting for more than 47 years. Increasingly, however, the wait was wearing thin, while the presidential lectures had become downright pain-ful. On this occasion — that year’s May Day celebration of Cuba’s workers — Castro’s voice was reedy, and he read his speech in an uninflected drone. He frequently lost his train of thought and sometimes fumbled helplessly among his papers in a state of piti-able confusion.

“He used to be like a magician, but he has lost a lot of power in his speech,” my European acquaintance said. “The end cannot be very far away.”

We’d all heard that before.It was a year since my previous visit. On the surface, the city

had changed little. All those ancient, 1950s-era American autos still lumbered along the slender streets of Old Havana. Young men still transported paying customers around the city in jerry-built bicycle-rickshaws known in Cuba as bici-taxis. As evening ap-proached, you could still install yourself on the patio in front of the Hotel Inglaterra to sip a cold Cristal as a son band played and the tropical dusk settled over the Parque Central. Later, you could wander along the tiled Prado toward the Malecon, where young lovers huddled on the seawall overlooking the Strait of Florida, spooning in the pewter moonlight.

The next morning, I dropped by the International Press Cen-tre near the Hotel Habana Libre, formerly the Havana Hilton. I needed to register as a foreign journalist and pick up my Cuban press credentials. It turned out that I was in luck. There was to be a news conference that afternoon, featuring Venezuelan President

Cuba Libre

38

Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro himself. The two leaders would be fielding questions from a small gathering of foreign and local re-porters. I signed up at once.

This was a few days before that year’s May Day speech, and I was wholly unprepared for the Fidel Castro I encountered in a small theatre that same afternoon in late April 2006. This man was unquestionably old, with watery eyes, pallid skin and stiffened joints. He frequently clapped his hands at inappropriate moments. He sometimes laughed for no apparent reason. Now and then, his face collapsed into an inexplicable and almost buffoonish grin. His curious behaviour and his physical frailty seemed all the more conspicuous because he was seated beside Hugo Chavez — who would later have grave health problems of his own but who was in fine form then — a much younger and far more vigorous man than his Cuban host. That afternoon, Chavez expressed himself with authority, often pounding the table for emphasis, while Castro lit-erally fawned upon him, in a way that seemed oddly undignified for a meeting between national leaders. Of course, if I were re-ceiving nearly 100,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan oil on barter terms — as Cuba was — maybe I would do a little fawning myself.

But still.“He goes around in circles now; he loses his place, forgets what

he is talking about,” said the European. “He is boring.”Fidel Castro — boring?Autocratic, certainly. Obsessive, no doubt. Steadfast, to a fault.

But boring?Who could have dreamed it would one day come to this?But so it had.

39

5 Uncertain Future

Just two months later, the Star’s foreign editor would phone me in Israel and ask me to write that obituary. It seemed that Castro’s time had surely come. It would turn out, of course, that almost ev-eryone was wrong — yet again. On the other hand, Fidel Castro’s long decades of single-handed dominance were unquestionably at an end. Before long, he would be obliged to cede the formal trappings of power to his brother Raul, the long-serving defence minister. Many expected that now, at last, real change was in store.

So far, it hasn’t worked out that way. Raul has instituted a series of reforms, but they don’t yet represent the bold march toward a new future that many had envisioned for Cuba. As for relations be-tween Washington and Havana, they don’t seem to have improved at all. In fact, Cuba now enjoys full diplomatic ties with every sin-gle country in the Americas, except the United States.

“We are isolated,” said Wayne Smith, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based Center for International Policy. “Cuba seems to have the same effect on U.S. administrations as a full moon has on werewolves.”

The Cubans are hardly blameless.“There are Taliban-esque sectors in the government that don’t

want changes,” said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, the elderly and ailing dissident, now freed from prison. “They know they will lose power with change.”

And so they resist, instead binding their fortunes to the only mast they know — the man named Fidel. For 50 years, Fidel Cas-tro was the wunderkind of national liberation, haunting, hector-ing, enraging and enthralling his fellow Cubans. He cowed his do-mestic opposition, mocked the United States and outfoxed a long succession of would-be assassins, all the while holding together an

Cuba Libre

40

arcane and idiosyncratic governing apparatus largely through the force of his own formidable will. At the very least, that was bound to be a tough act to follow, much less emulate. What will the Cu-ban Revolution become without him?

Raul, Fidel’s brother, is considered a competent administrator, but he lacks a beard, not to mention a big, booming personality, and besides, he is just five years younger than his sibling — hardly a long-term solution to anything. Sooner or later, Cuba will have no choice but to stake the revolution’s future on the country’s youth, a generation that has little experience of political power and no di-rect recollection of the predatory capitalism that the Castro broth-ers and their now-stooped comrades fought so bravely — and so very long ago — to overcome.

In the fall of 2012, I returned to the island for the first time in several years, and a sense of change was surely riding on the hu-mid, salty air. For one thing, all those antique, 1950s-era Ameri-can cars that have long served as motorized symbols of cubanismo, had proliferated to an extraordinary degree, and capitalist-style reforms were responsible. Under Raul, the island’s government was permitting certain limited ventures in small-scale capitalism, including restaurants, beauty parlours, and some forms of mer-chandising. Plus: private taxis.

That meant potential profit, a commodity long prohibited in Cuba.

Before you could say “¡Llenalo!” (“Fill ’er up!” in Spanish), the owners of many previously decommissioned American automo-biles had refitted their vehicles with diesel motors, to take advan-tage of diesel’s lower cost, and put the refurbished antiques back on the road. Nowadays, the results are impossible to miss — a truly massive cavalcade of automotive museum pieces rumbling beneath the ficus trees and past the crumbling colonial facades.

Other changes are either in force or pending. Cubans can buy

Cuba Libre

41

and sell their houses now. Access to the Internet, while still oner-ous, slow and elusive, is nonetheless more open than it used to be. The government has also waived its long-standing and universally loathed requirement that Cubans wishing to travel abroad must first obtain an exit visa — a document that, in fact, was supplied only on rare occasions and only to those who enjoyed political ap-proval. The impact of this particular reform is likely to be more symbolic than real, for few Cubans have the money for foreign travel or are likely to qualify for entry visas from other countries. Still, it’s a start — as well as a sign of more changes ahead. Granted, the pace of reform is not nearly as fast or as bold as many would wish. On the other hand, and considering the geriatric circum-stances of Cuba’s top leadership, it’s a wonder of sorts that changes are happening as quickly as they are. Meanwhile, some things in Cuba really do seem immune to alteration, among them Fidel himself. Now 86, he continues to lurk in the political background, no longer the commanding figure he used to be — but far from an irrelevance. Or, as Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. Inter-ests Section in Havana, once remarked: “He has dominated that place for so long. He looms so large. It’s difficult to go against him.”

Still, all men are mortal — and Fidel Castro is a man. It so hap-pened that my visit to the island in October of 2012 coincided with a palpable uptick in intensity for the Castro death watch. After all, Fidel’s newspaper column hadn’t appeared in several months. Surely that meant the end — only, of course, it didn’t.

Castro eventually resurfaced with a piece in Granma, denounc-ing the reports of his death as “stupidities.” Photographs appeared in print, showing him greeting a gaggle of recent Venezuelan visitors. He was sporting a broad-brimmed straw hat, wearing a checkered shirt, and clutching a cane. One of his visitors was Elias Jaua, a Venezuelan politician, who described Castro as “very well, very lucid.”

Cuba Libre

42

So it wasn’t quite over yet, this long, swooning rumba that unit-ed the fate of an entire people with the will of a single man.

One day, of course, Fidel Castro will die. Top party and mili-tary officials know it and must have prepared themselves for the event. The end will come, and they will have no choice but to step out into the harsh tropical glare to face the people without Fidel. It seems likely the regime will proceed with, and perhaps accel-erate, its course of cautious reform, following the trail blazed by Beijing — capitalist-style economic changes combined with the maintenance of centralized political control. Maybe that will work in Cuba. It’s doubtful it will satisfy Washington.

May Day crowds at the Plaza de la Revolucion (Photo: Rick Eglinton/Toronto Star)

The truth is that no one really knows what the future holds for Cuba after Fidel. There are many who insist that Castro, the con-summate revolutionary, cannot help but leave a deep and compel-ling legacy, one that will last a very long time. They may be right. But I suspect that Cuba’s future really rests in the hands of Cubans themselves, in their passions, foibles and dreams — their music,

Cuba Libre

43

their faith, their stubborn resilience — rather than in any quantity of marathon speeches delivered by a man with a beard. Besides, the world can be an ephemeral place. I think back to that first day of May in 2006, the last time I saw Fidel Castro in the flesh. He was leaning against a podium in the Plaza of the Revolution, stumbling through that day’s three-hour discourse — a frail and at times be-wildered man, a stooped shadow of the giant he once had been. At exactly 11:37 a.m., after three hours and 29 minutes at the mi-crophone, Castro realized he’d had enough. He drew himself to attention, launched a final revolutionary slogan into the steamy midday air — “Free Fatherland or Death!” — and within minutes he was gone.

At once, the crowd in the Plaza de la Revolucion followed suit. Swift as a Havana hotel worker pocketing a hard-currency tip, the vast square emptied, until all that was left was an infinity of little plastic Cuban flags cast upon the dusty ground, along with count-less empty water bottles and scattered sandwich wrappers — the only tangible evidence that, once upon a time, a massive throng stood here, cheering dutifully for a man named Fidel.

Oakland ROss is a feature writer for the Toronto Star. During the

1980s, he spent five years covering Latin America as a newspaper

correspondent based in Mexico City. He visited Cuba frequently in

those days and has traveled to the island many times since. The

winner of two National Newspaper Awards, Ross has written four

books, including a collection of short stories, a travel memoir, and

two novels, the second of which will be published in April 2013 by

HarperCollins Canada. It’s called The Empire of Yearning.

© 2013 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

all rights reserved. Published in Canada by Toronto star newspapers limitedunder the imprint StarDispatches.

Toronto star newspapers limitedOne Yonge st.Toronto, OnM5E 1E6

Publisher: John d. CruickshankEditor: Michael Cooke

stardispatches:Editorial director: alison Uncles Project Editor: susan Renouf Copy Editor: shauna RempelCreative director: nuri ducassiPage design: anda lupascu

Cuba Libre

IsBn: ePub3 978-0-88785-571-9 Mobi 978-0-88785-572-6 webPdF 978-0-88785-573-3

Cover photo: dreamstime photo illustration

Parts of this eRead were written based on research conducted for Toronto star features.

StarDispatches is a weekly series of quality journalism in ebook form from the newsroom of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper.

Please visit us at stardispatches.com