A Revolution That Has Run Out of Gas

Reflections on a trip to Cuba

I should probably have let my readers know beforehand, but the reason you haven’t heard from me in a couple of weeks is that I spent all of last week in Cuba. You might ask: why go to a country that saw 10% of the population flee in just two years, whose power grid collapsed nationwide earlier in the fall, that is suffering from soaring inflation and worsening shortages of food, fuel and medicine—where, to sum up, the people have lost all hope for the future. Why go there?

One answer would be: to see for myself, but that’s not really true. The truth is, we made the plan back in the summer, at a time when it wasn’t clear to me just how bad things had gotten in Cuba. Also, the truth is this was a family trip, a belated celebration of my mother’s 80th birthday, and after different members of the family (including my mother) suggested a variety of different ideas, only to see them shot down by one or another member of the group, Cuba is the suggestion that emerged as the most viable consensus choice. And so we went.

The trip was an organized tour, a kind of a highlights-of-the-country thing. We toured old Havana, visited Fusterlandia and Muraleando. We paid homage to the Havana Club “museum of rum” and to the Conservative synagogue, Beth Shalom. We visited a garage that keeps 70-year-old classic American cars running and rode through the city in a couple of different ‘53 Fords that had been converted into convertibles. We heard Frank Delgado sing at Fangio Habana and we wandered through the FAC. And we didn’t spend the whole time in Havana. We went to Playa Larga and Girón, where we took in Cuba’s official take on the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We went to Trinidad and to La Casa de la Musica, where the music was great fun but the dancing was extraordinary (and my son was scandalized when one of the dancers in the audience was invited up on stage to dance with the lead singer and wound up literally straddling him). We visited Cienfuegos and Las Terrazas; we did a little hiking, a little kayaking, a little snorkeling. My son even convinced me to jump off the rim into a cenote—twice.

All of this was interesting and enjoyable, and we were able to tour the country without Cuba’s troubles affecting us directly. There were power outages, but the places we stayed—small inns that were officially home stays where the proprietor lived on site—all had generators. Food was abundant and generally delicious, as we were protected by our tourist bubble; the only time we really got an inkling of the more general situation was on our first night there, before the tour began, when we went to a restaurant near the bed-and-breakfast where we were staying, only to discover that they didn’t have 90% of what was listed on the menu, because too many basic ingredients had run out. People were extraordinarily friendly, and eager to demonstrate their resilience.

But I couldn’t put their troubles out of mind. That’s partly because they were so visible: on the streets, in the general listlessness, in the lack of tourists and of regular vehicular traffic; and in the decrepit state of so much prime real estate. Dozens of buildings along the Malecón right in the heart of tourist Havana were practically in ruins, and had been so for decades, waiting for the state to find the funds to repair them as the salty sea air eroded them further. In the countryside, we drove past seemingly endless acreage of land left fallow because it was no longer economical to farm it—meanwhile the country is suffering from food shortages.

It’s also because our guide—who was wonderful—was not shy about telling us what she thought of the people governing Cuba (which is one of the ways she was wonderful). In its way, this was encouraging. I had been expecting her to be the voice of officialdom, spouting the party line for fear of losing her job, or worse. But while people are still rotting in prison for political offenses in Cuba (though not in the numbers that they once were), the sense I got was that most people’s despair stemmed less from the intensity of political oppression than from the feeling of being trapped, and the conviction that the government simply didn’t care what happened to them, that their lives were simply being squandered.

Cuba’s leadership has in effect seceded from the people, has kept themselves afloat above the crisis with the help of money skimmed from deals with foreign companies from Spain to Russia. They therefore view domestic issues solely through the lens of maintaining control, not only without regard for the people’s welfare but, indeed, for the ultimate viability of the country. And that, it seems to me, is the difference between a regime that can command respect along with fear and one that inspires contempt. Whatever else you say about the CCP—and it’s worth noting that the Chinese have been pushing Cuba to do more to marketize their economy, with minimal success—they care very much about their country’s economic power. Cuba’s leadership, not so much.

I wish we’d gotten to spend time with more Cubans, that we’d gotten to know our various hosts better, had been able to wander among them and hob-nob. I found myself dreaming about the jam sessions of our trip to Nepal. I know it’s possible to do that kind of thing in Cuba; multiple friends have gone to the island and spent extended time with groups of artists: musicians, filmmakers, sculptors, etc. This wasn’t that trip, and that’s fine; I can always go back if I want to. But I can’t really imagine going back until there is some kind of fundamental change, and I do wonder whether hanging out with a bunch of artists at this moment in time wouldn’t only have deepened my sense of a country in depression, spiritual as well as economic. Art is a great source of nourishment, and it can thrive in times of oppression. But it can’t really thrive in the absence of hope.

As for the Cuban regime, when you’ve lost Silvio Rodriguez, you’ve lost whatever was left of your soul. You can blame the embargo all you like—for the record, I supported President Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba—but at this point anyone has to ask themselves what the Cuban revolution even stands for, how it can defend itself as anything more than a racket. The country survives on remittances and tourism, and the latter has collapsed in part because of government economic and managerial mismanagement (tourism is soaring all over the world post-Covid, but not in Cuba). What is free healthcare worth when you can’t get your hands on antibiotics except from relatives in America?

Those old cars are pretty cool, I’ll grant you that. But a country needs a future, not just a past.