The Chickens Come Home to Roost. Part I: Der Klassenfeind

I apologise for my negligence in writing recently but I was overwhelmed by a number of circumstances which made it almost impossible to sit down and coherently put my thoughts together.

To begin with, in addition to my trip to California which I mentioned in my previous post, my wife son and I also visited the last remaining Worker's and Farmer's Paradise of Cuba. I was torn as to how to address it in the first place and I will admit it was very disconcerting to be in a country where you have no consular support-but that is a different story.

To get the timing right, on the second or third day there we woke to the earthquake in New Zealand. Cuba and New Zealand are about the same size and surprisingly (to me) there are more Cubans (~11 million) than there are New Zealanders (~4 million).

But I get ahead of myself.

My son is a student of Political Science who has moved around quite a bit on the left-right axis. He has somewhat followed Mark Twain's axiom that if you aren't a communist by the time you are sixteen you have no heart, and if you aren't a capitalist by the time you are 25 you have no brain.

I say somewhat because his path has not been so straight forward. A staunch Republican at the age of 12, as a 20 year old he spent last summer going door-to-door raising funds and garnering signatures for the American Family Workers Party in the harsh environs of Bridgeport, Connecticut, so I'm not sure where he is on the spectrum currently although he is definitely leaning towards capitalism.

But he is not the real focus here other than it was his burning desire to see how Communism/Socialism works in practice which took us to Cuba in the first place. We supported his interest. My wife and I fit Mark Twain's view of human evolution so we were especially interested to see how Socialism worked in a warm climate given that our previous exposure was to East-Bloc Socialist States.

This last point is important. A lot of recent anthropology discussions have revisited the ideas of the energy and determination of those inhabitants of the northern climes in contrast to the relative indolence and lack of ambition of those in southern climes.

So there we were suddenly in Cuba. For me it was a weird mixture of my childhood in eastern Tennessee in the Fifties and of trips to Spain, southern Italy and Yugoslavia in the Sixties. For my wife it was post-war Germany followed by similar reminiscences of southern Europe in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The cars were from my youth, as was the (lack of)traffic density. The horse and ox-carts in the city as well as on the major highway were straight from a bygone era in our western culture, albeit 90 miles from the US mainland.

It was a land stuck in time, or perhaps better said, stuck in various times. Arriving at Jose Marti Airport my son and I were singled out for an interview by some immigration officers. It was uncomfortable, unorganised and somehow what I expected/feared from a communist state.

But then you get into a cab to Old Havana, and as you dodge potholes, street sellers, dogs and the ever present throngs of people looking for a ride the backdrop of Cuban music starts to take over and you just sit back and take it all in.

Our expectations were unclear for although we had done a reasonable amount of research beforehand about the only thing friends had told us who had been (almost uniformly) was how bad the food was. As part of our preparation we read "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Our Man in Havana" so we were prepared for the old cars, rum, cigars and unfortunately prostitution. We were not however prepared for the crumbling infrastructure, nor however, the calm almost tranquil feel which either despite or perhaps because of the organised chaos pervaded the place.

Havana is amazing. First it is much larger than I imagined. Our hotel had a rooftop terrace where we sat looking out over the cityscape drinking the first of many daiquiris. There are few streetlights and no advertising so as the sun settled over the bay the city slowly darkened but for the headlights of cars and buses.

This too is important. Cuba's demand for energy is quite low. They drill their own oil which is apparently not of good enough quality to sell profitably on the open market but sufficient for their needs.

In every neighbourhood there is a state store where Cubans go to get their basic foodstuffs. Either everyone, relatively speaking, or no one goes hungry. After 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union malnutrition had stalked the land as the loss of Soviet support in conjunction with the ongoing embargo by the United States was devastating. The economy didn't really stabilise until the turn of the century. Since then it has bounced along above a subsistence level but not overwhelmingly so. Housing, food, education and health are all provided by the state.

This has the benefit that although no one appeared to be wealthy, in a week I only saw 1 or 2 apparently destitute people, and they were in Havana. It also has the disadvantage that there was no room for ambition and growth reflecting some grafitti I once saw in Leipzig proclaiming that security and comfort makes one fat and lazy. I didn't see many signs of obesity, but there was a distinct lack of drive which translated into a very slow orderliness.

The tool of choice in the countryside was the machete be it in a sheath on a saddle or just stuck in someones belt. But in 7 days I never felt threatened despite getting lost many times in back alleyways or country roads.

I mention this only in passing as a week later we were driving in Palm Springs one night after dinner and inadvertently crossed a border into a part of town where I felt extremely uncomfortable.

But far more important was the contrast encountered when I left Cuba and entered that other paradise, California, but that is for Part II.