Somewhere In Time - Cuba, Cuba2000

By Richard Curry

I departed Cuba with my friend Lanny in March of 1999 after a

10-day trip, with the feeling America helped create most of this country’s

problems. I came back this year by myself with the resolve to take a closer

look.

When traveling to Cuba as an American you must expect the unexpected and

prepare to handle it with patience. First, I got my confirmation of the

trip one-half day before I drove to the Miami airport. (I had paid six

months in advance).

In the Cancun airport I received vouchers for my plane ticket to Havana and

four nights at the Nacional Hotel one-hour before the flight.  In the

Havana airport a man was supposed to meet me and give me vouchers for a

six-day car  & hotel package so I could drive through the country.  Two

years in a row I’ve been left ‘voucherless’, which gives you an idea why

one million of Cuba’s 1959 population have left this island.

I took a bus trip with passengers going to different destinations. They

were all stunned into silence because they hadn’t expected the extremely

rundown conditions. As our bus approached the Nacional Hotel, a couple

commented, "This ain’t our zip code."

I checked into Havana’s most prestigious address - the Hotel Nacional La

Habana. This hotel would rank right up there with America’s finest, but

there were a few Cuban exceptions. The sign on the side of the elevators

said they only worked from 6 am to 11 pm. When I finally located my room

#315 on the third floor, I saw it was across from room #368. I still don’t

know how they formulated the numbering sequence. As I was putting my money

& passport into the room safe, the door fell off. I then turned on the TV

to watch a public demonstration in Santiago (a city I was driving to later

in the week.)

I watched on the edge of my bed as 25,000 Cuban people stood & waved an

ocean of flags for over two hours. In the front stood 73-7ear old Fidel

Castro. His arm never went down even though he has suffered two mild

strokes. Next to him was Elian Gonzalez’s father. Platform speakers flayed

their arms and talked themselves hoarse. I imagined the rhetoric meant

"let’s find every low-life, kidnapping, scumbag American on this island and

incarcerate & torture them with a cattle prod for the next 30 years!"  A

day later I got the correct interpretation: "How can America say they

believe in God when they can take a child away from his father? They are

devils."

The very day I arrived here a Cuban spy at the INS was exported out of the

U.S. and sent to Canada because of illegal activities. He then said he

would stay in Ottawa and go on a hunger strike. (Good plan, eh?) It must

have worked because one month later the FBI said it had no evidence he ever

passed government secrets to Cuban agents.

The first day at the Senate Judiciary Committee Meetings on Elian, Chairman

Orrin Hatch said, "Returning this child to one of the last prison nations

in the world - Fidel Castro’s wretched communist dictatorship would be a

terrible option to consider." This statement comes from America, where 25%

of the world’s prison population resides. 6.6 million Americans were

victims of violent crimes in 1992. Giving this story proper balance, during

the Latin American conferences held in Havana, Fidel allowed Cuban

government dissidents to speak to visiting dignitaries. As of today there

are now 260 new people in the prison system, with 266,000 prisoners in Cuba

• so much for speaking your mind!

My taxi driver one-day in his ‘56 Ford said, "The boy belongs with his dad,

and to be honest with you, I’m sick & tired of this political BS on both

sides. I’ve had it up to hereŠ" (as he pointed to the top of his head.)

Day 1: I walked the streets of Havana my first night and at no time did I

feel threatened. I sat with two street hustlers in a small bar and bought

them and myself run mojitos. When I later requested a coke, the bartender

left the building, went to a local concession stand, and brought me back a

can.

I took a photo of the two waiters here with a Maco shark jaw that was given

to the bar in the late ‘50s by Ernest Hemingway. I smoked a People’s

cigarette. It about floored me.

In Cuba there is a definite difference between the People’s Pesos world and

the tourist spending the country’s U.S. dollars. Vacationers get the

Mercedes taxis. Fidel owns a lot of Mercedes stock and ‘32 cars. It’s

rather ironic, now that Daimler-Benz and Chrysler have merged, as Castro

suddenly owns stock in America.

The people of the Revolution get a meager ration of sugar, coffee, rice,

beans and are rationed six eggs a month, one chicken a year, and babies to

age two only get 8 ounces of milk a day. (After age seven - no milk

rations). A family can get beef twice a month. Going beyond that creates a

problem. A person illegally selling beef can get 15 years in prison.

Cubans can travel by bike (most were donated by the Chinese), drive cars

owned before 1959, sit in camels (overstuffed buses pulled by trucks),

watch 3-channel TV (news, baseball, and Brazilian soaps), and board in

rundown city hotels. They’re not allowed into the dollar world, unless they

enter the black market. The average Cuban salary is $8.00 a month, and the

country’s top professionals make $30.00 a month.

Prostitution does still exist. My taxi driver, in a ‘56 Buick Special,

asked me "Do you know Spanish?" I said, ‘no’. "Do you have a wife in Cuba"?

When I answered ‘no’ again, he replied, "If you get a wife in Havana you

will learn Spanish."

I was offered women every single day; two directly in front of the

country’s Capitol Building. Many relationships could be had in Cuba for a

chicken dinner or room rent for the evening. I saw a young teenage girl

with a 50-year old man at the Tropicana. It’s very sad for me to see some

of the people of the Revolution survive this way.

Day 2: Walking the streets of Havana was like stepping back into my

childhood. I slid quarters to the street curbs competing with young boys.

Their pesos worked better. Soon I ran out of quarters.

Girls still play with well-worn plastic hula-hoops. Kids spin tops, play

cards, and shoot marbles. One boy took a bike tire rim and hammered it to a

concrete wall. Here he slam-dunked beach balls many hours a day.

I looked on as a father watched over his son as he ventured off on his

maiden voyage with a two-wheeler. The young kids seem well loved here. Some

men play dominos on street corners and some women look for hours into

storefront windows in Havana at things they can’t afford to buy.

Boys are playing baseball all over Havana - from the city parks to the back

streets. They use what’s available to them - sawed-off sticks for bats and

rubberband-tied balls.

I met a man from Seattle who brought four dozen new major league baseballs.

He’d go from game to game and give the team’s pitcher a new game ball. One

appreciative father who saw this invited him to his home for dinner. After

the meal, he went to his bedroom dresser and pulled out a baseball card for

his guest, giving him a 1949 Leaf Jackie Robinson rookie card. I later

checked its value - $2.500. Next time I bring sporting goods.

I did hand out Neosporin and Tylenol every day. To my surprise, most people

did know what it was used for.  Walking down one street I heard music from

Somewhere in Time coming through one of the iron grate windows. You just

can’t make this stuff up.

Day 3:  I walked for seven hours and Havana proved again to be an open

canvas. Every turn in the street afforded my camera a new opportunity to

express Castro’s repression of his people, to view the results of the

inhumane 41-year-old U.S. embargo, and to see the Cubans resilient good

nature. Here you discover the people - their integrity & warmth. Above all,

how they handle diversity and hard times and do it with a sense of humor.

There’s a feeling of family here and a concern and care for each other.

It’s a sense of community that has all but been lost in other societies.

Photo moments of the day included a six-year old boy tenderly holding a

dove with a broken wing to his chest, a small young girl using a weathered

baseball glove to block the mid-day sun, and a grandmother and

granddaughter sweeping the sidewalk in front of their home with identical

plastic brooms, except for the length.

On my return trip to the hotel a taxi driver picked me up. He said, "I

thought you were Steven Spielberg  for a minute - last month I picked by

Danny Glover." I said, "That’s nice because he can’t get a cab in New York."

Danny was in Cuba to assess the impact of the embargo and to investigate

the status of black Cubans. All races here have economic problems and at no

time in my two visits have I ever witnesses racial discrimination.

Cuba’s black & mulattos make up 60% of the total population - up from 45%

in 1959. Conversely, Cuban exiles in the U.S. are more than 95% white. But

race has  been a factor in Cuban politics. In Cuba, the Communist party’s

14-member Politboro has only two blacks. In the U.S. the CANF’s 50

directors, often described as a ‘government-in-waiting’, are all white.

In the evening I joined the ‘Dollar’ Society. At the Nacional Hotel’s

Cabaret Parisian, my first course was lobster medallions & huge prawns. The

second course was filet mignon. A waiter cut and lit my fresh Montecristo

cigar and poured Crystal beer. My seat was nearly on stage.

This show’s a sizzler with nearly every good-looking woman in Havana

performing in it. One part featured the dancers with wooden thong shoes

dancing to the music and drums of the song ‘La Vida Loca’ on hardwood

floors. It is a sound I’ll always remember.

Here I met Hans Berning. Hans is a 45-year old computer software salesman

from Dusseldorf, Germany. We became friends and he committed to travel

across Cuba with me in a rental car. Hans also spoke fluent Spanish.

I was fortunate to meet Hans, because I was faced with driving across Cuba

myself with very few gas stations, no mechanical ability, and zero grasp of

the Spanish language.

Day 4: New day - new adventures. Early in the morning I came across a youth

ballet company, the Escuela Provincial de Ballet.  I photographed five

young girls standing outside the building, offering one of their father’s

two dollars to buy them all ice cream. He politely declined.

The company’s piano player told me it was inappropriate to do this, and

added that because it was a state-sponsored institution, it was also a very

dangerous thing to do. I later got permission to speak to the woman in

charge. I told her I worked with the National Ballet De Cuba  the year

before and had donated shoes from the Atlanta Ballet Company.  None of this

mattered.

I was then walked to the National press Office, where I filled out forms

and answered questions for 90 minutes. $140.00 later I received my

government press papers to work as a journalist in Cuba. They also kept my

passport and visa for the next six days.

At the rental car desk, I met Hans were we signed on for a six-day journey

through the heart of Cuba in a Toyota Yaris. We were told the trip to

Camaquey would be five to six hours, which would have us finishing in the

daylight. However, this was not taking into consideration Hans & Richard’s

expertise in navigating and driving. We were lost five minutes into the

trip. It took an hour just to find our way out of Havana. No signs, and I

mean, NO signs.

Directions are difficult for Cubans because most don’t venture too far, but

they always tried their best to help us. Thank God my wife bought me a

compass.

One time we had to drive against traffic in the wrong direction and then

proceed up & down a precarious dirt road to find our way to the correct

route. When nightfall came, we were still three hours from Camaquey.

The shoulders on the side of the road were severely deep at times. The

trucks coming at us at 60 MPH would have, at times, only one light shining.

I barely missed two bike riders on the narrow road. This 3 hours was simply

the most unnerving thing I have ever done in my life. Hans, the world

traveler, was of the same opinion.

One moment that struck me as funny was when I looked in the rear view

mirror and could see a young girl holding her brother’s hand. One moment

later, he fell into a ditch and disappeared. She just kept walking. (You

had to be there.)

We arrived in Camaquey . It was 10 PM. The maze of winding streets was dark

& narrow. It was surrealistic.  Henry Morgan and his men ransacked this

city mercilessly in 1668. Another pirate attack followed a decade later.

Fear of pirates is evident in Camaquety’s resultant early-colonial

architecture. It’s inner core is surrounded by a labyrinth network of

winding streets, abutting in squares of all shapes & sizes, blind alleys,

and forked streets - all with only one exist. According to the ‘plan’,

should the city find itself under siege, the assailants would find the

tables turned on them once they were trapped in this so-called ‘city of

squares’.

Two young bike riders came out of nowhere to guide us to the hotel in the

center of town. No one was on the streets for a good 10 minutes, then we

saw two tall blonde women in high heels & black evening dresses walking

together. I checked out the hotel in town with its $21.00 a night rooms,

but we decided we wanted to stay at the hotel just outside of town. Getting

to our hotel room was somewhat of a problem. The doors didn’t have any

numbers. The bartender cooked us a chicken dinner at 11:30 pm and we went

to bed with the plan of never driving the Cuban countryside at night ever

again.

Continued Next Issue