Searching for Fidel: In Cuba, chasing dreams of salsa socialism

The Karachi sounded like a happening place. You could hear the salsa riffs from a block away, filling the sweltering Havana night with possibility. It was a perfect tropical dream. But in Cuba, things are never quite what they seem. When I stepped inside, the night club was empty except for a couple of German tourists playing pool under the aquamarine flicker of a television baseball broadcast. The Cuban team had just trounced the United States 6–1 in the first round of games at the Olympics. The bartender dried some glasses with a white towel, glancing at me indifferently.

I was disappointed to see the place so empty. But then again, I wasn’t really there to dance. I wanted to know why a disco in the Antilles had come to be named for the city of my father’s birth. The bouncer considered my query. “It’s the capital of Paquistan, no?” He thought about it a little while longer and then ventured an answer: “It’s called Karachi because Karachi is a very exotic city.” By now, a waiter had joined us. “The way I imagine it,” he added, “Karachi is a place where people are always having a lot of fun.”

Walking along the windswept Malecón seawall that morning, I’d run into a group of young Pakistanis who had recently fled the shaky economy and the random violence of Karachi. They were in Havana with a fantasy of their own: Cuba’s proximity to the United States has turned the island into a popular destination for illegal South Asian immigrants. Middle-class men with bachelor’s degrees, the Pakistanis had paid an agent something like $30,000 apiece for safe passage to the golden cities of North America. (They would probably end up as undocumented workers at newsstands, restaurants, or gas stations.) An Indian diplomat in Havana told my friend Anjali, “At any time, there are five or six Patels and Singhs sitting in Cuban jails, charged with overstaying their tourist visas.”

* * *

But who was I to shatter anyone’s illusions? A grandchild of Jawaharlal Nehru’s utopian vision, I’ve spent the last decade nostalgic for the time when world leaders demanded freedom for people, rather than markets. At Independence in 1947, Nehru had promised that we would “build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.” I passed my teenage years secure in the knowledge that the best mansions were built by the visible hand of a centrally planned economy. India, after all, was attempting to negotiate a Third Way. American-style capitalism, which maintained that the rising tide of commerce would lift all boats, ignored the fact that millions of people didn’t even own a raft. Soviet-style communism, on the other hand, smothered its adherents with Red tape and dispatched its critics to the gulag. Nehru argued that the Indian state could best serve its poor by taking control of “the commanding heights of the economy,” with the central government carefully distributing scarce resources in the national interest.

At the same time, the Third Way was international, an attempt to steer the whole Third World between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Our schoolbooks told us how Nehru, Tito, and Nasser had led 25 newly independent nations to form the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961. The membership soon quadrupled. In the 1980s, it was still possible to believe that we, the little guys, could find strength in our idealism—and our numbers.

But the Cold War certainties of my youth crumbled with the Berlin Wall, and I bought a piece of it—mounted as a handsome paperweight—when I visited the Brandenberg Gate. Across the globe, nation after nation has let the “dialectical” slip out of dialectical materialism. Marxism is on the decline, Marks & Spencer is on the rise, and India is more than a decade into its effort to replace Nehru’s Fabian vision with “liberalisation” programs. Only Cuba still “believes in dreams,” as posters around the island proclaim. At the end of my trip, I hoped that I would, too.

I still remember the moment that I fell in love with Cuba. I was 14 years old, transfixed by the television screen as Fidel built to a crescendo. “Together we have striven and struggled and together we have achieved victories,” he thundered. “In this same spirit and this same determination we must be ready to wage the most colossal, legitimate, worthy, and necessary battle for our people’s lives and future!” By the end, I seem to remember, he was pounding his fist on the lectern.

There was a split second’s silence as the interpreter finished parsing these lofty sentiments. Then the cheers began to bounce off the walls of New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan convention centre, and the hero of the Revolution raised his arm to acknowledge the applause of the other heads of Non-Aligned Nations. Indira Gandhi, host of the summit, extended her hand. El Líder Máximorefused to take it. A paralysing moment of awkwardness. Then, suddenly, he wrapped her up in the hugest hug Doordarshan had ever broadcast. Indira and a whole generation of young Indians disappeared forever into the embrace of Fidel’s rumpled fatigues.

I’d already discovered little bits of Cuba long before Fidel’s visit to Delhi. A Xavier Cugat LP from an uncle’s collection grabbed my tender ears, setting me on a mad search through Bombay’s flea markets for more Cuban records. Alas, all I could dig up was Trini Lopez doing “Guantanamera.” (It wasn’t easy to find non-Indian music in the India of my youth, because the state saw little value in importing records.) The Cuban who made the deepest impression on me, however, was a sportsman: the heavyweight boxer Teófilo Stevenson. India has never won many Olympic gold medals; those few we have won are for field hockey, and Cuba’s constant stream of champions was a source of bafflement and shame. Still, a sense of Third World solidarity allowed me to bask in the thrill of Stevenson’s three incredible victories. After he had won his second gold in Montreal, he refused an offer of $5 million to fight reigning heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. The Cuban famously had retorted, “What is $5 million against five million Cubans who love me?” Then there was Che. In college, everyone was reading the Argentine doctor’s tracts. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to embrace his sophomoric prescriptions. Che’s overwrought prose style was widely imitated on college campuses across India; it is surely one of the main reasons that pamphlets published by Indian leftists are almost unreadable.

Seventeen years after Fidel’s Delhi speech, those black-and-white images of his performance ran through my head as my turistaxi sped past giant billboards admonishing Cuba’s people to be like Che, exhorting them ever onward to victory. My ruminations were accompanied by the dull ticking of Radio Reloj, one of the most popular radio stations in Havana. Reloj means watch, and the government-run channel broadcasts snatches of news, interrupted every minute by a cheery beep, and the host announcing the time—in Cuba, it’s cheaper (and more entertaining) for a family to own a single radio than to buy each member a watch. With each beep, Radio Reloj seemed more and more like an ingenious attempt to remind Cuba’s citizens that history hasn’t actually ended, even if the rest of the world thinks Castro’s salsa socialism is a hopeless anachronism.

Maybe the rest of the world is right. After all, everyone’s seen pictures of the Havana streets, a rolling junkyard of Plymouths and Studebakers and Chevrolets imported just before the 1959 revolution. But under the hood, those colossal American automobiles are powered by pistons cannibalized from Russian engines, retooled by canny Cuban mechanics who’ve coaxed incompatible parts to work together. No mere symbols of a sequestered society, these stately machines represent Cuba’s extemporaneous genius: Cuba is a hybrid assemblage that’s been fine-tuned to stay functional long after its contemporaries have collapsed.

I caught a whiff of this spontaneous grace when I went out to listen to Los Van Van, the island’s most popular band. The exuberance of Cuban dance has long driven outsiders to frenzy. During the Inquisition, Alejo Carpentier noted, church officials took testimony from a priest who found its motions “alien to propriety . . . and a terrible example to those who witness it.” Another found that “the dance is performed with gestures, shaking, and swaying contrary to all honest intentions.” As Juan Formell, Los Van Van’s legendary leader, began to weave his spell, the couples around me twirled and spun and whirled, dancing the mambo with breathtaking dexterity. Unlike the free-form dances that have dominated Western clubs since the 1960s, the mambo has a leader and a follower, each sensing the other’s reflexes and reacting. Americans make terrible mambo dancers, an instructor once complained to me. “American women think it’s demeaning to take cues from anyone,” she explained, “and American men seem incapable of leading their partners subtly.” But to Latin Americans, the mambo articulates the complexity of relations between the sexes. It’s about retaining your independence and balance while living in the moment. It’s about allowing yourself to be led by another person while keeping your centre of gravity.

* * *

Preparing for my trip to Cuba, I’d enrolled for a course in basic Spanish at an institute on New York’s affluent Upper East Side. I found myself in a class with four women. Three said they were there because they wanted to converse with their children’s Hispanic nannies. The fourth was an executive who spent a lot of time out of town and had a live-in nanny; she said she wanted to understand the Spanish words her two-year-old son often used.

Our teacher was jolly Cuban exile named Pedro Ruiz. The first verb he taught us to conjugate was amar. “To love,” he explained. “It’s the most beautiful word in the language. It should be the beginning of everything.” He launched into an elaborate description of Latin American courtship rituals: coy senoritas giggling out from behind their fans at the young men paying them obeisance after Sunday Mass, starry-eyed Romeos serenading their beloveds at twilight. But many of Cuba’s visitors, it would seem, don’t have the patience for such gentility. In a chapter titled “Dating and Romance,” the Lonely Planet’s Latin American Spanish Phrasebook instructs its readers in the essentials.

Would you like a drink?
Quieres una copa?

Would you like to do something tomorrow?
Quieres hacer algo manana?

I really like your eyes/hair/skin/breasts/ass.
Me encanta(n) tu(s) ojo /pelo/pechos/culo.

Do you have a condom?
Tienes un condon/ preservativo?

I have to leave tomorrow.
Tengo que irme manana.

I want to remain friends.
Me gustaria que quedaramos como amigos.

* * *

This utilitarian attitude has marked the West’s relations with Cuba almost since Columbus stumbled upon the island in 1492. The carnage perpetrated by the Spanish was impressed upon me one sweaty afternoon, as I sought comfort in a bottle of Hatuey beer. The beverage is named after an aboriginal chief who resisted Diego Velázquez de Cuellar’s 300-man colonization expedition in 1512. When Hatuey was finally captured and sentenced to be burned at the stake, a kindly priest offered to baptize him in order to save his soul. But the troublemaker would not consent: there were probably Spaniards in heaven, he said, and he never wanted to see one again.

The official narrative of Cuba’s ordeal is laid out in intricate detail at the Museum of the Revolution, housed in a grand, colonnaded building that was once the presidential palace. The exhibits start with 1898, when the US military vanquished Spain and occupied the island. After three years of martial law, Cuba was granted the right to self-determination, although the US army was authorized to intervene in the island’s internal affairs. The navy established a base in Guantanamo Bay, on the southeastern tip of the island, a possession it still retains. Washington continued to meddle in its neighbor’s affairs for half a century, propping up a series of corrupt leaders and securing concessions in mining, tobacco, and sugar farming for American business. In the 1950s, gangsters from the mainland had a lock on tourist trade; by the time Fidel Castro, the Argentine doctor Che Guevara, and their comrades took power in 1959, Havana was notorious for bacchanalian sex shows known as las exhibiciones.

The tale of Cuba’s struggle unfolded in a series of fading photographs, fraying uniforms and battered pieces of war equipment, all accompanied by captions that could have written by Che himself: “neo-colonialists,” “fraudulent business deals,” and “Yankee imperialists” danced across the placards. The artifact that most fascinated me, though, was the battered motorboat that Fidel and a small band of followers used to return to Cuba from exile in Mexico in 1956. The thirty-eight foot yacht, which had been purchased from an American expatriate in Mexico, was named Granma, after the owner’s grandmother. The Granma eventually lent its name to Communist Party’s daily newspaper, and then an entire Cuban province.

Washington immediately set out to undermine Castro’s popular new regime, and in 1961, the US financed a band of exiles to stage an invasion at Playa Giron, the Bay of Pigs. The failed invasion tipped Cuba into the orbit of the Soviet Union; days after the mercenaries had been routed, Fidel used the word “socialist” to describe his Revolution for the first time. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis put the planet on the brink of nuclear war. An American diplomat once noted that Havana has the same effect on Washington that the full moon has on werewolves. “Rational behavior ceases at the very mention of the place,” he admitted.

This American lunacy weighs on Cubans every day. My first night on the island, I rented a room in an airy apartment owned by Armand R., a retired architect. When he learned that I’d come from New York, the first thing he wanted to know was, “When will the norteamericanos end the blockade?” (Like many Latin Americans, he refused to allow U.S. citizens proprietary rights over the entire continent.) The blockade began in 1960, when certain American businesses on the island were nationalized. For Armand and his wife, Teresa, the blockade has meant endless mornings lining up with their libertas—ration cards—to obtain staples like sugar, bread, and flour.

In Cuba, the endless Cold War is both high drama and low farce. Across the street from the de facto US embassy on the Malecón, I came upon a billboard depicting two cartoon figures facing each other across an expanse of ocean. At one end was an angry Uncle Sam, spittle flying from his mouth. At the other, a cheery Cuban in a green beret was calling out, “Señores Imperialistas! No les tenemos absolutamente ningún miedo.” We have absolutely no fear of you. Earlier, in the Museum of the Revolution, I’d stumbled into a gallery with gigantic caricatures of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat and George Bush sporting a Roman toga and laurels. It was called The Cretin’s Corner: “Thank you, cretins, for helping us consolidate the Revolution.”

And the Revolution has been consolidated. There is Castro, of course—still in power, despite the US’s best efforts. And many of his achievements are impressive. There is no homelessness in Cuba, and families pay no more than 10 percent of their wages in rent. “Every night, 200 million children around the world sleep on the street,” posters on Havana’s walls proclaim. “None of them is Cuban.” In 1999, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, Indians could expect to live to the age of 62.5, and the literacy rate was just 52%. By comparison, Cubans have a life expectancy of 76.21, and the nation boasts a literacy rate of 95.7%—among the highest in the world.

Unfortunately, these educated Cubans have little to read. Browsing through the offerings at the secondhand book market in Havana’s Plaza de Armas, a pretty cobble-stoned square that dates back to 1582, I found that most of the titles for sale were tracts by Fidel, Che, and Lenin. There was almost no poetry or fiction. One vendor explained that this was because Cuba doesn’t have enough paper to print many new titles. (He failed to mention the strict censorship laws, which have driven many of Cuba’s most talented writers into exile.) The scarcity has meant that even Granma has become much thinner over the decade. As for the celebrated health care system, patients complain that doctors are everywhere, but aspirin is scarce. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba has struggled to keep its anemic economy from going under. The bureaucrats have labelled this parsimonious decade “the Special Period,” but in Cuba, frugality is business as usual.

Cubans sometimes joke that they live on fe: “faith,” literally, but also a sly acronym for familias extranjeros, the foreign family members whose remittances help many Cubans survive. Only a few years ago, in the heyday of Soviet subsidies, Cubans who turned their backs on the Revolution were called gusanos, worms. Now, wire transfers from Miami and New York are often their families’ last defense against deprivation. As part of Cuba’s effort to revive its economy, the government has opened well-stocked stores that accept only dollars. The hard currency my hosts Armand and Teresa earn from renting out a room in their apartment allows them to supplement their rationed supplies with meat and eggs bought in moneda dura markets, where peasants sell their extra produce.

One afternoon as I retreated into the inviting shade of the Showers of Gold Bar in Centro, I ran into Nelson, a Ghanaian who was studying medicine at Havana University. Over a tall mojito—a revitalising rum concoction garnished with a sprig of mint—Nelson laid out his grievances with Cuba. He spoke of outdated laboratories with faulty equipment, explicit and implicit racism, and of being forbidden to bring George Orwell’s 1984 into the country. His Cuban friends resented the fact that they couldn’t go to hotels and restaurants reserved for tourists—a situation that’s popularly described as tourist apartheid. “It’s pretty fucked up,” Nelson concluded. “It’s even more fucked up than Ghana. I can’t wait till I’ve finished my degree, so I can go home.”

Still, Fidel soldiers on. Pico Iyer once wrote, “The other one-name icons—Madonna and Prince and Cher—had at least to keep changing their acts to keep themselves in the public eye: not Fidel. He just fixed the public’s eye to keep it on himself.” Many Cubans still claim that El Jefe’s legacy is untarnished. Or at least that’s what they tell inquisitive tourists. I asked one taxi driver where Fidel lived. “In the hearts and minds of all Cubans,” he replied. Even my host Armand said he was proud of his country, and its leader. “We would be nowhere without Fidel,” he explained one evening as we sat in his living room. It was littered with Mexican curios, Czech statuettes, and Russian crockery—souvenirs of travels in friendly nations. “Before the Revolution, the situation was much worse.” El Líder is always a presence in Armand’s home. The room in which I was staying had a small sign: “Please don’t lean out of the balcony between 3 pm and 8:30 pm.” It turned out that Armand’s apartment was only a block away from the television studio where Fidel recorded his daily address to the nation. Armand and his neighbors didn’t want anyone in their homes to be mistaken for a potential sniper.

* * *

The closest I ever got to Fidel Castro was a warm September night in New York. In town for the Millennial Summit at the United Nations, he stopped by a church near Harlem to address supporters. There had been a lottery for tickets weeks in advance, and the sanctuary was packed, so I waited on the street with about three hundred young people who carried red banners and Cuban flags and chanted his name. “Viva Fidel!” they were screaming. “Viva Cuba!” There was an hour’s worth of introductions, and it was ten o’clock before Fidel took the podium. Over the loudspeaker, he had the assured tone of an old man, but his voice was leavened with the enthusiasm of a teenager. “The worst thing that can happen to a speaker who takes too much time is to suffer the restlessness of the audience,” Fidel chuckled. He complained that he’d been given only five minutes to address the UN. After three minutes, he said, a green light had gone off. An orange bulb started blinking after four. After five, a red light came on and stayed on until he finished his speech, which ran seven minutes and thirty seconds.

But here, at Riverside Church, among the believers, there were no warning flashes. And Fidel took his time to make his case. “Yes, we are poor,” he said, in Spanish so simple even I could understand it. “Yes, we are running short. But we’re trying to distribute our resources fairly.” He paused for breath. “Yes, we have ration cards. But that means that no Cubans go hungry.” The crowd roared. Fidel plowed on, talking about Cuba’s low infant mortality rate, about its high literacy rate, about his efforts to diversify the economy. I waited for him to tell us that his people were contentos, satisfied. But all he gave us was statistics. By midnight, I decided I’d had enough.

The next day, I read that Fidel had spoken for four hours and seventeen minutes. Then he cheerfully wished the audience good morning and drove off to the airport, where an airplane was waiting to take him back to Havana.

A version of this article first appeared in Transition.