L.A. WEEKLY
June 1-7, 1984, Vol. 6, No. 27
Cuba at 25
A Reporter's Sketchbook
by Marc Cooper

HAVANA, Cuba — It's Saturday night and street traffic in Vedado, the restaurant and movie district, is heavy. A storm is coming in; young couples walk hand-in-hand or wait on street corners for taxis that never seem to appear, while other youths pile off the 24-hour-a-day state buses that cost a nickel a ride, the same price as in 1959.

The dancers at the Tropicana nightclub
are often rifle-toting militia members by day.

In Havana's biggest cinema, five movies are playing: two from the U.S., one from France, one from Spain, and a war epic from the Soviet Union. Lines have formed around the block; admission is one dollar.

Other lines appear in front of nightclubs, where two people can spend an entire evening for $5 a head — drinks included. Most of the cabarets are nestled inside of Havana's biggest hotels. There's the Capri, looking much as it did when George Raft built it in the late '50s with its top-floor swimming pool; its transparent walls can be peered into from the bar on the floor below. A few blocks away, the Havana Hilton — now "Habana Libre" — is also practically unchanged, as is the hotel that gangster Meyer Lansky built in the image of the Miami Fontainebleau, the elegant Habana Riviera, which is perched on the coast about a mile up the road from the cinemas and the other hotels.

There are some changes, of course, in the hotels. The gambling casinos have been shut down. The American mobsters and tourists are only ghosts now; the drug- and skin-trafficking that dominated the lobbies are no more. And today, the guests are not only Mexican, Canadian and Dutch tourists, but also newlywed Cuban couples, some of them racially mixed. A black 30-year-old-man is the maitre d' at the Riviera; his weekend back-up is a middle-aged mulatto woman.

The grey-haired bartender at the Riviera's L'Elegance club fondly remembers his former employer. "I still recall the day Meyer Lansky hired me. He was a good and generous man," he says as he mixes up another rum-based mojito. "It was more exciting here when the casino was open. But I would never leave Cuba ... Here I have guaranteed work and retirement benefits, and my children get a good education." I notice that at the table across from me there is a Cuban couple snuggling together. He is wearing a lime-green Izod Lacoste shirt; his novia has on a brown, business-like blazer. Over her left breast, she wears the shiny red emblem of the Communist youth groups.

This evening, I am joined at my table by two Cubans who are assigned to a German tour-group. There's 25-year-old Arnaldo, the Cubatur group leader; and Mario, a 54-year-old bus driver. In response to my presence, the topic of conversation becomes "el imperialismo yanqui." After Grenada, Mario argues, Nicaragua will certainly be the next country to be invaded. "But that will be a second Bay of Pigs.  And if the yanquis try that here, ay-yi-yi! Our revolution is 25 years old; we took our diapers off a long time ago!"
Mario boasts, then shifts to Grenada: "I'm afraid that I have to admit that we made a mistake there. When the Marines came in, we should have opened an air bridge and poured in 20,000 of our best troops."

Arnaldo objects: "We couldn't do that! It would have given Reagan a chant to attack us. He could send planes to bomb Havana."

Cuban teenagers during celebration of 25th anniversary of the revolution in Santiago de Cuba.


Mario still holds to his position, and then somehow slides into a long explanation of why the revolution is important to defend, "be it in Grenada or Cuba." Pulling pictures of his kids out of his wallet he says, "I have a relationship with my teenagers that is different from the one I had with my parents. My kids are out every night till one or two in the morning and I sleep soundly knowing they are safe on the streets. When I was young my narents kent me locked un: they worriedt hat anymore, thanks to our revolution."

An after-dinner walk through Havana brought us face-to-face with the modern glass building that is the American Diplomatic Mission/U.S. Interests Section. "Look how it juts out nearly into the sea," says Mario. "It sticks out so far it's almost in Miami!"

The building is, in fact, strategically situated; it is visible for miles up and down the city's coastline. Mario tells me how, on Christmas Eve, the American diplomats inside pulled back all of the curtains on the top floor of the building so all of Havana could see the hundreds, if not thousands, of Christmas lights surrounding one huge illuminated Christmas tree. "Poor Americanos," laughs Arnaldo. "Haven't they got anything to offer us except the past? Cubans stopped celebrating Christmas more than ten years ago." Across the street from the Interests Section, the Cuban government escalated the war of lights. They set up a huge billboard — a cartoon of a Cuban militiaman fending off a snarling Uncle Sam. In pulsating multicolored neon, the sign flashed, "Senores Imperialistas: We Have Absolutely No Fear of You!"

A retured farmworker poses in her rent-free apartment
under a portrait of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

The Malecon is the miles-long sea wall and walkway that separates Havana from the Caribbean Sea and Florida. At night it is a central meeting point for lovers, fishermen and black marketeers, especially in the sections that skirt the big hotels. Two young men, Aldo and Pedro, come up to ask me for a cigarette and if I will sell them dollars at four times the legal exchange rate. "I only make 130 pesos a month as a construction worker, and I want to buy some clothes i. the dollar stores," explains Pedro. He't. referring to the half-dozen or so shops, located in the major hotels, that are for foreigners only and accept only hard currency. "Why should foreigners be allowed in and not us?" pipes in his partner. Both boys have family members in the U.S. — marielitos, people who left during the' 1980 exodus from the port of Mariel. And both have just come from seeing a Burt Reynolds movie that they begin to recount to me with unbridled enthusiasm. Then back to business: a long discussion of the relative merits of "Rowbert Looese" versus Calveen Kleenay" versus "Hordatachy" jeans. Aldo say that his father in MIami can get "real Calveens" for oly $12 but hasn't figured out a way to get them to Havana yet.

"It's true that we only let foreigners into the dollar stores," responds Consumer Economy Minister Eugenio Balari to my first question. "We opened them up when we started letting the Cubans from Miami come back to visit. They exist for one reason. If the visitors want to buy presents for their relatives, we want them to buy here and leave us the hard currency." A closer examination of the dollar stores does reveal that, unlike in Eastern Europe, you do not find in these shops essential foodstuffs or common goods for sale. It is, rather, imported liquors, designer clothes and expensive electronic items that are being offered.

"For our population we have progressively opened up a non-controlled market so that today only about 30 percent of all family purchases are by the ration card," adds Balari. He goes on to explain the radical shift Cuba has made in its economic policies in the last decade and a half, though he prefers to call it a "gradual change." Whereas in the late '60s the official emphasis was on "moral incentives" and money was losing its importance, today money is the primary incentive. Productive workers were once given pennants and praise for their efforts. Today they still get those, plus a bonus or salary increase based on performance. "We are not building communism. We are only in the phase of socialist construction right now, ' and a socialist society is not a just one. But it's less unjust than capitalism," is how the minister explains the existence of wage differentials and varying levels of purchasing power in Cuba.

The wage differentials have a legal span of about six to one, though in practice the overwhelming majority of the population earns between 150 and 300 pesos a month. But the new economic policy has also reintroduced prices for goods and services

But the new economic policy has also reintroduced prices for goods and services that were once free, such as telephones, which now cost about six pesos a month. Day-care centers, once free, now charge according to a sliding scale; the maximum charge is 40 pesos a month. But food prices on the ration card remain about the same as they have been for years, with meat topping the list at about half a peso per pound.

The average Cuban, according to government statistics, now consumes 2,950 calories a day, a rate second only, in Latin America, to meat-rich Argentina. And housing costs in Cuba are the lowest in the hemisphere. In the case of older housing, rents may not exceed ten percent of household income; some Cubans live rent-free. In the case of new housing, the rent ceiling is six percent.

With essential costs so low, and with employment guaranteed, the chronic economic problem faced by Cubans has not been earning money, but having something to spend it on. The new market approach to the problem has led to what many Cubans, in private, call "the legalization of the old black market." Foodstuffs, available in strictly rationed quantities at low prices, are also legally available in the venta libre, or open-market stores, in unlimited quantities at four to ten times the price under rationing. A blossoming of those stores has taken place along Havana's San Rafael Bulevard, a street notorious in the late '60s for its utter lack of consumer goods.

"El Bulevard" today has been turned into a pedestrian mall and presents all the life and color that any major shopping street does anywhere else in Latin America. The streets here are cleaner, there are no beggars or hookers, and while the Cubans are dressed to a great degree in mismatched synthetics, they are at least all clothed and heeled, which is not the case in Lima, Santiago or Santo Domingo.

A walk along El Bulevard inevitably leads one into the colonial bowels of the old city, "La Habana Vieja." The narrow cobblestone streets that radiate from the Plaza de Armas, which is itself adorned with flickering gaslights and palm trees sweetly brushed by the ocean breeze, are lined with 16th-century palaces now being immaculately restored with support from UNESCO. The castle-like Havana town hall, with its lush open gardens and brightly polished balconies and patios, is the site of free afternoon concerts and oc- casional poetry recitations. A few blocks beyond and across the harbor stands the Moro castle, which as Cubans will proudly recount, withstood 150 years of foreign attacks with only 12 cannons, and with approximately the same number of men with which Fidel started his revolutionary war with in the Sierra Maestra. And despite the fact that Ernest Hemingway's yellowed photos in the bohemian Bodeguita del Medio tavern now have to share space with the more recent ones of Salvador Allende, and that the "revolutionary book fair" has taken over the drawing r000m of the old Spanish governor's mansion, La Habana Vieja serenely but firmly contradicts the worn stereotype of a colorless, austere Communist capital.

Jacobo Perez and Eleizer Bennado of Havana's Sephardic Synagogue. "Thank God we are in Cuba Bella!"

It couldn't be more fitting that Havana's Sephardic Synagogue be located on the ancient street called Inquisador, in the city's colonial neighborhood. After mounting a steep winding staircase, I am me', by 73-year-old Jacobo Perez, president of the Union Hebrea Chevet Ahim, along with his associate, 76-year-old Eleizer Bennado, both wearing old baggy clothes and dark berets. They offer me a yarmulke so I can tour their second-story four-room domain, including the back room which serves as a temple. They explain that Cuba's Sephardic community comes almost entirely from Turkey, where both of them were born. The Jewish community, numbering 15,000 at the time of the revolution, has now been reduced, because of emigration, to less than 2,000.

Jacobo explains that the synagogue finances itself by selling beer at a makeshift bar adjoining the temple. He immediately escorts me to the bar. "The government gives us the beer to sell, and they also give us a special ration of matzoh and wine for our needs." On the back wall of the bar is a series of aging portraits. In the middle of the display is Fidel Castro's, flanked by that of Zionist movement founder Theodore Herzl. "How do you reconcile that pairing?" I ask Eleizer. "We don't," he answers. "We don't care much about politics: we are religious."

At the bar, which is open to the public, a few workers are taking a quick beer break. I ask Jacobo, "Are they members of your congregation?" "No," he says flatly. "They are goyim." Our table is joined by another beret-attired septuagenarian, who offers to buy another round of beer. After recounting the persecution he faced as a child in Turkey, he lifts his glass and toasts, "Thank God we are in Cuba bella!"

"Even those of our young who have joined the revolution still come back to be with us here on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur," Jacobo continued, and proudly proudly tells me that when Central Committee member Fabio Grobart's wife died the year before, her funeral was held here in the temple and her body was buried in Havana's Jewish cemetery.

"But you would suppose that a leader of an atheist party wouldn't want that," I comment.

Jacobo parries: "You `would suppose or you `wouldn't suppose.' But we Jews don't suppose. We feel."

"Granma?" 'says an important Cuban artist and dedicated Communist, referring to the country's major daily newspaper. "Granma? I wipe my ass with Granma!" And if the rest of Cuban popular culture were modeled on the stultifying style of this Communist Party daily, the island would be a dreary, dreadful place indeed. But it doesn't and it isn't. The heavy Russian economic subsidy hasn't created a society in its own image. The Cubans, fanatics for cleanliness, love to joke about the way the Eastern Europeans don't wear deodorant. The resident Russians, many of them billeted in the Sierra Maestra Hotel, are not seen much on the streets, and the Cubans take pleasure in calling them bolos, a type of bowling pin. While state farms and factories often bear the name of some Soviet luminary or another, the music the Cubans dance to, the books they read and the films they watch generally owe more to Michigan than they do to Moscow. "When President Reagan invited us in 1981 to rejoin the West, we were shocked," says Armando Hart, minister of culture. "It's the first we had heard of our ever having left this hemisphere."

American-style baseball continues to be the number-one sport in Cuba, and free games are held in Havana's major stadium almost year-round. One taxi driver, after giving me a long speech on why he has encouraged all of his neighbors to join the half-million-strong Territorial Troop Militias, established right after Reagan's inauguration, excused himself for changing the subject and asked, "Whatever happened to Sandy Koufax? I faced him once in the Dominican Winter Leagues. He's the best pitcher your country ever had."

There is considerable irony in the fact that the Reagan administration promotes its new Radio Marti as a vehicle to "inform" Cubans, while at the same time maintaining a blockade that prevents Cuba from purchasing any cultural material from the U.S. But the Cubans, for years stuck with the same batch of pre-1959 American movies, have now discovered videocassettes. The Cubans take the cassettes, which are easily brought in from anywhere in the world, and — ignoring copyright restrictions — rebroadcast the grainy prints of the latest American movies on television and in theaters. Sunday nights on state TV are reserved for the latest film blockbusters, usually from the States. Before the screening, a sober cinema professor introduces the film about to be shown, subjecting it to careful political analysis. Charles Bronson's Death Wish II was introduced as a "shining example of the resurgence of fascist thought," but it was shown in its entirety and, of course, without commercial interruption.

But the biggest recent hit on Cuban television was ABC's The Day After, s  hown barely a month after its U.S. premiere. Two Cubans, upon finding out I was from California, asked me what it meant that every half hour or so during the movie the bottom of the screen would read "KABC-TV Los Angeles."

That hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left their homes to go to the United States is not news. But the story that goes untold is that of uncounted thousands of Cubans who left their political or, more frequently, economic exile in the United States to return to Cuba after the Rebel Army marched into Havana. There's Sergio Giral, who as a youngster suffered the discrimination afforded a black Spanish-speaking busboy in New York. Today, he is a top filmmaker in Cuba. There is Jose Benitez, who served in the U.S. Army and then worked at UPI's New York bureau before returning home to take a job with Granma. Marta Muniz traveled back and forth to the U.S. as a Cuban employee of the McCann-Erickson office in Havana, where she wrote advertising copy for Coca-Cola and Esso. After the revolution, she organized the worker takeover of the ad company. Today she works as a press officer for the National Assembly of Popular Power.

And then there is Pablo Armando Fernandez. After 15 years of living in New York, he moved to Havana — a week after the revolution. His novel, Los Ninos Se Despiden, ("The Children Are Leaving") has won the coveted Casa de las Americas prize, and he has published nine books of poetry. The Cuban state would not publish him for six years (1970-76), pry4 because of his friendship with ep ied vtinter Herherto Padilla.

The day 1 go to see Pablo in his Miramar home, he is angry. His steel-grey eyes are flashing and his lion's-head of silvery white hair shakes as he rails against Village Voice writer Sol Stern, who has just published a frontal attack on Cuba's human-rights record. Pablo says he is "appalled" by the way "ex-radicals like Stern," a former editor of Ramparts, now try to "overcompensate for their past."

"I have had a friend ask me if it were possible, through some magical act, to have everything in New York that I have here, would I go back? And I answer, where would my roots be? Where would all the people be who died for my country for over a century ... In my novel, there is a scene where one character says to another, referring to Cuban life in New York, `Tell me, what is it like?' And the other answers, `It is like being dead. Like being dead.' "

On the day I chat with him, he is wearing the white jeans given to him years ago by now deceased radical reporter Paul Jacobs. "I love New York. It is a wonderful city, but I no longer understand it. I think Allen Ginsberg was not mistaken when he wrote Howl and he spoke of the best minds of a generation being lost. And nothing has really changed in three generations. There are l5-year-olds in the States who are more desperate than Allen ever was."

Pablo pauses for a moment to in hale some smoke and continues: "In the United States, people feel there can be no changes in their society. They know that it makes no difference who the administrator of the great enterprise which is known as the U.S., is, because the controlling stockholders will remain the same, and they want no changes at all...Here in Cuba, we ma have problems, but we feel we can change things."

"Pablo, aren't you disillusioned by having having been `unpublishable' for six years?" I ask. "No. This revolution was made without my consent. I didn't make it. I didn't fight in the Sierra Maestra. It doesn't have to check its every move with me," Pablo counters. He adds that, during his period of silence, he continued working in the militia and continued to "raise my four children as communists ... because communism produces the only state that can be totally trusted and respected — no state at all."

Though he remained a close friend of Padilla's up until the time of his 1980 exile, Pablo has now broken off the friendship because of Padilla's attacks on the revolution. The Padilla case was one that brought headlines and led to an estrangement between Cuba and a whole flock of American and European intellectuals. "Only the uncultured of Cuban culture and the insecure of Cuban security could produce a Padilla case," laments Pablo.

"Any regrets, Pablo?" I probe.

"At this moment I only have one regret. I wish I could be 18 years old again in this magical city of Havana."

"Why?"

"For one, I'd be fucking more!"

My first day of conversation with Pablo ends with his reading his "Ode to Carmen Miranda":

... You will not need the artifices

of turbans
and stilts
that unconsciously promoted the
United Fruit Company and
other
transatlantic firms.
You will no longer ba a doll, a
tropical product, an exquisite
delicacy
If there are heavans, Carmen, in
your Brazilian heaven there
will arrive
Cesar Romero, and Tyrone Power
and Alice Fay, Don Ameche,
Adolph Menjou
And the whole entourage that
followed your goings-on from
Rio to
Los Angeles.
If there are heavens, Carmen .. .

Santiago De Cuba is the island's second biggest city, with a population of just under half a million people. It's an ordinary Caribbean coastal city, but its name and the name of its province — Oriente — have acquired the status of a political legend. This area is where Cuba's most prominent revolutionary of the past century, Jose Marti, fought and died. So did Antonio Maceo. Fidel was born nearby. The Mancada barracks, attacked by Fidel and his original 26th of July Movement in 1953, is here in Santiago. The Sierra Maestra, where the revolutionary war was fought from 1957 to 1958, is a visible backdrop to the town.

On the outskirts of the city is San Juan Hill, once Teddy Roosevelt's, and now the site of the Leningrado Restaurant. And 20 miles outside of Santiago is Playa Daiquiri, where U.S. troops landed in the 1898 invasion of the island, and where the foreign press is quartered in order to cover Castro's New Year's Day celebration of 25 years of revolution.

On the bus taking the press to the nighttime rally to be addressed by Fidel, I' began to wonder who the 3,000 "special" invited guests" — the only people who are permitted into the plaza where the speech will take place — will be. My worst visions of Stalinist bureaucracy dominate my imagination. I imagined Fidel speaking to a grey-suited entourage of aging party hacks, diplomats and special visitors from East Germany and Bulgaria. But as our bus neared the plaza, we came upon a crowd consisting mostly of middle-aged black men and women, all Cubans, all modestly dressed, most of- them wearing some sort of medal or another. Through the windows of our bus, now stalled by the converging foot traffic, we learn that the invitados are all of the local people of Santiago who fought in the revolutionary war, in the Sierra or in the city. Far from being pampered bureaucrats, they begin to heatedly accuse us, the press, of being privileged because our driver is trying to bully our bus through the dense crowd. But soon the driver is intimidated by the loudly protesting throng of war heroes, and we make the remainder of the way to the plaza on foot.

Under a steadily falling rain, the 3,000 invitados sat and applauded and cheered as the Comandante en Jefe proclaimed that the basic promises of the revolution were fulfilled in its first 25 years. Castro uses even sharper rhetoric than usual to denounce the Reagan administration as "new Nazi-fascist barbarians, blackmailers and opportunists," But he also formulates a simple policy for coexistence in the hemisphere when he says, referring to Central America, "Cuba cannot export revolution, but neither can the U.S. prevent it."

This statement of foreign policy is something that Cuba has been 15 years or more in making. While Che Guevara's ten-story portrait still adorns the Minstry of Defense in Havana, his policy of "creating two, three, many Vietnams" has long been abandoned by Cuba. In the late 1960s, while Guevara was losing his guerrilla war in Bolivia, Castro was convoking Tricontinental Congresses in Havana and calling for immediate revolution in the Third World. At those congresses, Castro would mount the podium and would heap ridicule, for example, on the Venezuelan Communist Party, which he accused of being too cozy with the regime. But now, a decade and a half later, Castro and Cuba support the noncommunist governments — not only of Venezuela, but of Colombia, Panama and Mexico — in their joint efforts to reach a peaceful settlement in Central America. And it has been Castro who has counseled the Salvadoran guerrilla movement to seek negotiations, advice that has run up against some serious objections from within the guerrilla coalition itself.

The evolution, then, of Cuban foreign policy has, since the '60s, undergone a moderation parallel to that of economic policy. Castro will not get up in the plaza and renounce national liberation movements, as the White House asks. That was as unlikely as Ronald Reagan's appearing on national television to renounce free enterprise. But the Cubans continue to make it clear that they are willing to talk and negotiate on regional questions; they feel that now it is up to the U.S. to respond constructively.

"What is truly amazing about Cuban policy on Central America is just how prudent and moderate it is," Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia-Marquez tells me over dinner, back in Havana. "Even more amazing is that the United States is not listening to Cuba." Garcia-Marquez takes another belt of Passport Scotch and says, "Fidel has told me very clearly that he knows it makes no difference what he says or does; the Reagan administration is not going to change its policy on Cuba."

Pablo Armando puts it another way: "The Americans have a long-standing mania. You see it in Mailer's Armies of the Night and in Melville's Moby Dick. It's the maniacal need to have a Hunted and a Hunter. The Reagan administration needs to hunt us. Or worse, it deludes itself into believing that we are hunting you!"

For a few days after Fidel's speech, many of the American reporters still in Havana complained that his relatively short, low-key address was boring, that it said nothing new, that its sober and stiff style proved, in the words of Time magazine, that "the revolution has reached middle age and lost its spontaneity." I wondered what the same reporters would have said if Castro had spoken for seven or eight hours, pounding and slamming the rostrum and calling for a Third World gotterdammerung. And then I understood what Garcia-Marquez meant about the Reagan administration's not altering its view of Cuba. I think it is safe to say much the same thing about the U.S. press.

But not only the press. One evening, while looking out at the city from the Havana Libre, a teacher from Berkeley, having just completed a two-week "education tour" of Cuba, remarked on the fashion tastes of Cuban women: "I feel sorry for my Cuban sisters...having to wear those short skirts and ruining their feet by walking on those pot-holed sidewalks in high heels. With all of them wearing tight blue jeans, how many of my sisters are suffering from vaginitis?"

Cuba is a deceptive place, perfectly capable of reflecting your prejudices and preconceptions. Millions of Cuban men and women get up every morning, to to work, take care of their children, attend to their civic duties, aslute their flag, and sincerely applaud their president without ever thinking that they live in the communist hell conjured up at editors' desks in New York, or in the socialist utopia described by volunteer cane-cutters from California. I don't know if it's sad or amusing to think about the "revolutionary" tourists who have to rummage through stacks of Dior shirts and Yves St. Laurent scarves to find the one small basket in the hotel store that sells political lapel pins and insignia. The same goes for the network correspondents who have to covertly interview dozens of Cubans before finding the one Cuban who will ask for help getting to Miami.

My last evening in Cuba, I had dinner at the Riviera Hotel with Pablo Armando and a stunning 57-year-old woman named Nati Revueltas, the former wife of a prominent doctor. Nati loaned her apartment to Fidel in 1952 so he could plot the attack on Moncada. She helped sew the uniforms that Castro's commandos would wear during the fighting. And on the morning of the attack, she distributed the clandestine 26th of July Movement proclamation to Havana radio stations and newspapers. This evening, as a sometime-diplomat frequently assigned to New York, she sits in front of me, a picture of elegance and refinement. In exquisitely tailored clothes, a cigarette holder in hand, she adjusts her long earrings and continues, in sparkling English, to swoon over her country and her people. As I listen, I think how ridiculous it would be for me to forward my Berkeley friend's concerns about her fashion preferences.

As the waiter clears the table, Ronald Reagan is beaming a special Voice of America speech to Cuba, but few people are paying attention.  At least we aren't, as Nati's stories mix with the strains of "As Times Goes By" coming from the piano in the corner of the restaurant. It is this combination of the old and the new that is confusing about Cuba: the revolutionary, relaxed morality of the youth coexisting side by side with white weddings and elaborate coming-out parties for 15-year-old girls; the bikini-clad dancers in the Tropicana nightclub who are often the same women who tote guns in the militia; the '58 Buicks parked next to Soviet Ladas; the commitment to build socialism and wage differentials and fee scales for the nurseries; the people who praise Fidel and the people who leave en masse from Mariel; Nati's words from the '80s and the tune from the '40s. Cubans probably don't make much of these banal ironies, but foreign reporters must come to terms with them.

Pablo senses my anxiety about having to return home and make sense of those about having to draw up on journalistic balance sheets. Pablo gives me a final piece of advice: "If you want to understand Cuba, then listen to this. Reagan sends a spy to Cuba, but after a week the agent returns and tells Reagan there is nothing to be done. His report reads: `You sent me to Cuba to provoke disorder, but Cuba already is chaotic. It is chaotic, but there is no unemployment. There is no unemployment, but nobody works. Nobody works, but all the production plans are surpassed. Production plans are surpassed, but there is nothing to buy. There is nothing to buy, but everyone has everything they need, and in variety. Everyone has everything they need, but they all sit at home and bitch. They all sit at home and bitch, but when Fidel calls them out, they applaud for him and cry for joy and are ready to do whatever he asks them. They do whatever Fidel asks them, and then they come home and bitch some more.' That, my friend, is Cuba."

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