Havana – Geneva
(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
After a relatively idle morning the Cuban season of the Golden Girls finished as I said my goodbyes to my three companions when their taxi (driven by a friend of the people from our casa) came to take them to the airport. Though by this point I also felt ready to depart I still had most of the afternoon to while away, and as I hit the streets for the final time I came up with a new strategy to fend off the cigar selling touts. Whenever they descended on me and called out in English “Hey, where you from?” I would at first ignore them and then give them a blank look.
After being asked this or similar questions a few more times I would pretend I finally guessed what they were asking and in my best hard Eastern European intonation would answer “Polska.
“Polska?” Would come the uncertain reply and then, after a second or two of silence, a look of recognition, “Ah, Polonia!” And then, more often than not, with no further knowledge of how to hassle a foreigner that only spoke Polish they gave up and I was able to keep walking without further discourse - until the next bloke on the lookout for a fast buck saw me. The very last thing on my agenda was the Museo de la Revolución, located in what was the palace for the twentieth century leaders before the revolution, and which displayed the history behind, and success of, the 1950’s revolution in only the most glowing terms.
The reason given for the Castro brothers’ failed assault on an army barracks in Santiago in 1953 was not that they were out-manned, out-witted or out-gunned, but was only down to “unforseen causes (that) frustrated the success of the actions (sic)”. That following his subsequent imprisonment after this defeat and while in exile in Mexico, Fidel Castro met Che Guevara and organised the guerrillas that were to be more successful from late 1956 onwards, I think they could have twisted the reason behind this initial failure into something even more flattering. Perhaps “this small defeat was completely necessary in order to go on and fulfil their destiny” would do the trick.
The picture of life under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista was illustrated in the bleakest way possible, with much made of the necessary reasons for overthrowing of Batista’s regime: Shortages of goods, substandard housing, the island having turned into a fantasy playground for rich foreigners and the shameful necessity for women to turn to prostitution to survive. This left me terribly, horribly and utterly confused - it sounded like the Cuba of 2007 just as much as that of 1957.
Perhaps the most entertaining era of the museum was the high-handed condemnation of the US (aka the ‘Bourgeois Imperial Empire’) for their generally subversive, but sometimes outright aggressive, attempts at regaining political control of the island since the 1960’s. On this point I can’t help but admire the current regime for standing up in the face of the United States’ egocentric, arrogant and downright bastardly interventionist foreign policies, when so many other places in the region (Panama and Nicaragua to name but two) and many more across the globe (most recently of course Afghanistan and Iraq) have fallen victim to their destabilising meddling for personal gain. But given the blatantly partisan view on display within the museum I can’t for a second believe that Cuba always responded to these invasion attempts as blamelessly as is made out either, and the last thing I saw before leaving the building made me question this skewed representation even more. Three large and rather unflattering caricatures of Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior and Fulgencio Batista were placed side-by-side on a wall entitled “Corner of the Cretins” with wording addressed to each in Spanish, English and French to the effect of “Thankyou, cretin, for making our revolution stronger.” For mine, while the various roadside propaganda posters we saw throughout the country contained a degree of wit and artistic merit, this exhibit was nothing but tacky and juvenile and extinguished any hint of credibility to Cuba’s claim of the moral high ground in the diplomatic struggle against their near neighbour.
My head was heavy with contemplation. Despite its consistently bloody history of wars against colonial powers, the Cuba of today is an incredibly diverse place of ethnicities living together in what appears to be social harmony and equality, and the education, arts and health systems are the envy of the region. Is this as good as it could get for the standard of life for most Cubans? Even if it is, this is a time after the fall of communism in Cuba’s previous allies in Eastern Europe, and the country is now more reliant on other foreign investment than ever to keep afloat. So is there enough strength in the revolution to endure in its current state after the last of the revolution’s surviving heroes head to that big idealistic regime in the sky? Will the Castro brothers be idolised in death in the same manner as their comrade Che Guevara, or like José Martí before them? Or, conversely, is it very soon inevitable that the country will rapidly evolve into a more open, free and capitalist market where the gap between the rich and the poor will inescapably widen?
In my last hour before going to the airport I needed a quiet spot to sit, ponder and formulate some kind of answer to all this, but I spent it continually brushing off guys trying sell me cigars to make a quick peso. And that, perhaps, was all the evidence I needed.
My parting feeling was then one of incredible good fortune to have been able to witness Cuba while in its current state of being, irrespective of whether that be good or bad, before it crumbles completely and the country transforms into something more akin to every other Caribbean island - complete with Fox News and the Golden Girls filling the airwaves. Viva la revolución!
