"At one end of [the hallway] a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features…On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran…He sat down and began to write in his diary...He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down." (George Orwell, ‘1984’, Chapter 1)
It's perhaps a bit hoary, I don't know, to return from a few weeks in Cuba and compare it to George Orwell's '1984'. I suspect the comparison has been made before; I don't know if it has, and nor do I care. It was a comparison that assailed me almost as soon as I arrived. On one of my final days there, I was at the ticket office of the bus station in Holguín with a travelling companion and, apropos of whatever we were discussing at the time (I can't remember, and it doesn't matter), he said to me, "When you know what's happening in Cuba, you can't possibly enjoy it."
The frontispiece in the 'Lonely Planet' guide had instructed me to leave my prejudices at home and open my mind (or something to that effect). My prejudices were/are all quite leftist anyway (an understatement...), but I was quite happy to do as suggested; however, as some satirist or other once wrote, "if you open your mind too much your brain might fall out."
I speak Spanish. Fluently. This is not a boast, just a matter of fact. At times during the weeks there I wished that I had not had this ability. I toyed with the idea occasionally of pretending that I couldn't, but politeness always got in the way. It's just rude to pretend you can't understand when you can. It was, and is, though, a double-edged sword: it means that you can understand everything, and most conversations, anywhere, are tedious and mundane; yes, as the 'Lonely Planet' suggests, you can use it for all manner of things, including getting convincingly annoyed with people that you want to get rid of (cigar-sellers, beggars, luck-tryers, or just the plain boring), for getting shot of nuisances (...constantly asking "si es posible" that they can take one of your cigarettes as you happen to be sitting minding your own business...), for getting out of trouble, for reporting things to the police (...more of that later), for practical things, and for communicating with "real people about real issues" but, on the down side, well, it means that you have to listen to everything that anybody wants to tell you and, in Cuba, after a very short period of time, these become 'fill-in-the-blanks'-type conversations. In a different arena I could perhaps (and would) be sympathetic to the rationing, the inequality, the social class differences, the poverty, the scarcity, the misery, the effects of the embargo, the injustices and so on and so forth. I have, however, high standards. I expect socialist/communist revolutions to set equally high standards, or, if they can't, give up their claims to be socialist or communist. If it ever came down to a stand-up fight, I suspect I would be on the side of the Cuban "revolutionary process" rather than the "American Dream," which is why I am only going to write here about the things which I found contemptible, detestable, contradictory, hypocritical and schizophrenic...in short, things which a socialist or communist country should not be endorsing let alone practicing. Yes, there's a lot to admire about Cuba, but I'm not going to say too much about the education system, or the health service, which are the two pillars that everyone, even those I met who are not in love with The Idea Of Cuba, mentioned to be exemplary (more of this later, however), and whose virtues they extolled at length before turning to the everyday struggles that they had to put up with. Nor am I particularly convinced that it is a colourful, lively, musical, party-driven, full-of-joie-de-vivre place either. I was in Santiago de Cuba for the famous Carnival week. Yes, Santiago, home of the 'Son,' whose Carnaval equals that of Rio de Janeiro...I saw two Carnavales: one was the carte postale version for tourists and those with access to convertibles (again, more on this financial apartheid later...), overpriced, repetitive, superficial, insincere and, frankly, boring; the other was all cheap alcohol and getting drunk en masse on street corners in order to blot out whatever it was that needed to be blotted out. Yes, 'a good time was had by all', and I met some nice people and had some enjoyable and enlightening conversations, and enjoyed it, but partly, I suspect, I enjoyed it because I knew that there was a time limit on my being there. That might well say more about me than about the Santiagueros and the Carnavales, but this is my blog so therefore it's me I'm talking about...
As Frank said, "When you know what's happening in Cuba, you can't possibly enjoy it."
So this is about what's happening.
As I mentioned before, being able to speak Spanish is a double-edged sword. People tell you things. You hear contradictory things, and things which make no sense, and things which don't add up, things which, frankly, are unbelievable, literally as well as just figuratively, and things which you would rather not believe; you are able to read 'Granma' and 'Juventud Rebelde' and 'Clarin', you can watch TV and understand what is being said and how it is being said, and what is possibly not being said. In short, nothing misses your attention...but you end up with the feeling that you wished you were yet another Anglo-Saxon, in my case British, monoglot who had no clue what was being said or written, and who was on the island for a fun 'n' sun Caribbean holiday, one which, nonetheless, might still allow me to boast a little bit of one-upmanship ("Ah yes, Cuba, yes, I've been there. So, how was the Costa del Sol this year?").
"The Cuban news section is very good, but nothing of interest ever happens. The foreign news section is all about Chavez, or Honduras, basically, friends of Cuba; otherwise, it's all about how fucked up the U.S.A. is and how capitalism is on it's knees. The sports section tells us about the most recent competitions any Cubans have been in, whether it's volleyball or synchronised swimming where, of course, they were the best. That's Cuban media." Such was the assessment of a taxi driver regarding Cuban print media. Three things need to be said: (i) he was an ex-university lecturer, so not stupid; (ii) he had attempted to flee the country (to Miami, where else) to be with his brother (thus biased, and this is why he lost his lecturing position - by wanting to leave Cuba he was setting a bad example to his students) and, (iii) he was correct. What else is a foreign, western, ex-student, leftie activist supposed to do in Cuba but buy 'Granma' as often as possible? Ah, yes, 'Granma', the bastion of Cuban communism, that symbolic organ of revolutionary Cuba...only to realise that the taxi driver was correct, and that it was 8 pages of diatribe and propaganda, with the occasional moaning 'letter to the editor' from some old woman somewhere arguing that the revolution had been betrayed because either young people didn't respect authority any more or that the seats in the park in wherever had been vandalised...except on the days when Fidel published one of his 'reflections', in which case it was down to 6 pages, given that two pages were given over to him. Mind you, these reflections were later read out on the TV at night, and again the following morning, verbatim, so that, I presume, nobody would miss out, which is laudable. His analyses are readable and pertinent, and capable of making you sit up and take notice, especially since he is able to really identify those things which, in the rest of the world, might be considered politically taboo subjects, or which might only be addressed by good people like Naomi Klein or John PIlger. Trenchant analysis. However, at the same time, it does tend to rather reinforce the idea of the cult of the personality, and I thought we had left that behind with the death of Stalinist totalitarianism, or aligned it with unhealthy personality cults like those operating around football players or musicians. Yes, Cuba is riven with contradictions, and the mass media see them all played out at once, but 'riven with contradictions' is often a phrase used about Cuba in an adulatory way: again, the Lonely Planet talks in its introduction about it taking a lifetime to understand Cuba, and neatly side-steps the issue of the blatant injustices and oppressions, as if, then, they were quirky or endearing little things that shouldn't detain us too long before moving onto the next Mojito and a conversation with a poorly-paid doctor so that we can 'experience the REAL Cuba...'
...and here I am back home in Lebanon, a country riven with contradictions etcetera etcetera, and I am not even going to mention Robert Fisk again...
(to be continued)
