Celia got us there with 20 minutes to spare. We collected on the open-air platform and looked around. On the earth road alongside, we witnessed a few centuries’ worth of transportation options whiz by. A horse and cart carried a local man hauling a sack of grain; another cart hauled a tourist couple also rushing to make the train. A bicycle rickshaw scooted by, carrying a local woman dressed for the office, although looking around the very small town, it was hard to see where sh
e might be headed. A series of 1950-era Chevys and DeSotos and a couple of rusty Ford pickups also buzzed by while we waited. A mid-1960’s Soviet Lada, a boxy successor imported once Fidel shut down the supply of the U.S. cars, followed. Cash for Clunkers would be an enormous hit in Cuba if only anyone had any money or the right to buy a new car.Early that morning, after a sumptuous brunch at the hotel, Celia had urged us onto our luxurious Chinese bus for our trip into the countryside. Maximo sat at the wheel, greeting each rider with nods and a wordless smile. Maximo spoke no English, we were told. We had also been told that Celia, like all guides, would have to watch her words, as you never know who might disapprove and turn her in to the state for unauthorized opinions. That was enough to get us all to keep an eye on Maximo and his motives (How did we really know he speaks no English?), and nervous that our endearing single mother new friend Celia would overstep her boundaries.
She kept us moving all morning, afraid we would miss our connection. Today our tour was to show us the remnants of the greatest of the Cuban crops, sugar, and of the lifestyle it provided for those involved. Into her microphone, as we sped along the National Highway, she described Cuba’s relationship with sugar over the years as the lynchpin of the economy to the near collapse of the industry with the end of slavery, its transfer to the hands of U.S. companies in the years before Fidel showed up and nationalized the companies. It limped into the 1980’s, but once the Soviets collapsed themselves and could no longer be any help with fuel or machinery, it faded further.
We waited on the platform, guiltily snapping photos of modest residents’ daily lives as if we were viewing an ancient culture sprung to life. They want us here, we comforted ourselves; they want us to see how they live and take home evidence so others will know. Or at least they’d like to get a good look at some Americans, the folks they are forbidden to mix with, except on the four hours of nightly U.S. television shows. I can’t figure out the motivation of the regime to welcome Brothers and Sisters and Two and a Half Men into the struggling lives of the Cuban people. Was it to highlight the decadent empty materialistic lives of the capitalist pigs? Or to provide the barest hint of freedom, a nightly secret pleasure to keep the masses reassured that they are not so isolated after all? Even with a nightly drip of American media, how much does the average Cuban know of life outside the island? Deprived of CNN, Internet access and travel, yet taunted by fictional lives set in Malibu and Ohai, CA, what must they imagine?
But Cubans are accustomed to fiction, being raised on a steady diet of claims about the success of the Revolution despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. They receive lectures about agrarian reform while tractors rust in untended fields. They hear about the glories of the generous food rationing system while they dash out the back door to their black market suppliers to gather enough for the family to eat. They are told about the fine highways that crisscross the countryside while they congregate in intersections waiting for hours for trucks to provide stand-up rides to cities outside Havana, because no one making the monthly wage of under $20 can possibly afford a $17 bus ride to a mid-island city.
Cuba has a history of occupation and domination by outside powers. There was always someone coming along to overpower and exploit the Cuban people and strip their resources - a parade of Spaniards, English, French, and yes, Americans.
When the first wave, the Spaniards, showed up in search of gold, they managed to wipe out the indigenous population in a quick 30 years, with European diseases, overwork and mass suicide. This created an opening and a business opportunity for the African slave trade to begin, which continued to the tune of 400,000 individuals before it was done. That was the constant, while the nationality of the colonists rotated, along with the crops they worked – tobacco, sugar, whatever. There was always wealth to be had, but it seemed to slip through the fingers of ordinary Cubans and land right in the pockets of the already rich and favored families of whichever world power was in charge at the time.
When the train arrived, the locomotive chugging and belching steam, we climbed into its open-air cars and settled into polished wooden seats. Celia wrangled the last few of us who had wandered off to get just one more picture of the dusty town.
The train inched out of the station and began its slow climb up the valley that had once been the center of the world’s sugar production. As we began to build up speed, a man dressed in a striped shirt, gripping a guitar, appeared from one of the lanes. He sprinted hard after the train and leapt onto its back platform, grabbing the bar just in time. He strode up the aisle and joined his musical partner waiting with trumpet in hand, and they struck up the Afro-Cuban rhythm we could hear in our sleep.
In the back of the car, another passenger, a young Cuban woman dressed in a white blouse and flowing skirt danced in the aisle with her young friend. He soon tired and an older man stepped up, eager to match her swiveling hips to his. Minutes later, they fell into their seats, satisfied, while the musicians played on. The tourists applauded.
The music never stops in Cuba. At every venue a group pounded out the rhythm and sang until we were out of sight. From our hotels we could hear the pulse of the clubs far into the night. Sometimes there were horns, always guitars and drums, and the voices. Even if we couldn’t understand the words, we knew what they sang about - longing and heat and sex. We could tell that much.
As we proceeded up the valley we passed the occasional house surrounded by tidy garden plots. Mostly we saw expanses of untended fields with remnant sugar cane plants sprouting from dry and cracked soil. When we saw workers, they held machetes or followed oxen pulling a plow. It looked like Fidel’s grand plan for agrarian reform hadn’t quite taken hold.
It was all pretty in a sad way, crisp clouds against a bright blue sky, the hilly landscape still green but raggedy. It was easy to imagine the best years, the growers and their families traveling from their grand Havana homes to the opulent country houses, chugging up the valley to watch the harvest of their wealth.
It got even easier to imagine once we climbed off the train and walked up a slope to one of those country houses, restored to Victorian grandeur with crystal chandeliers and shaded porches. Outside, a market was set up to lure the tourists, full of embroidered clothing and linens and eager vendors chasing down tourists to view their wares. It was one of the few displays of crass commercialism we witnessed.
To escape their pleas, I wandered beyond the stalls. A tower rose from the dusty earth. Architecturally interesting, its stacks of winding staircases and arches invited picture-taking. After snappng a series of artsy shots featuring rolling fields framed by the tower’s arches, I looked up. What was this thing for anyway? Oh. Of course. A slave tower, built so that the overseers could keep track of who was working hard enough and who was not. It focused my attention on the other side of the commercial equation, and interfered with my appreciation of the wealth and luxury that had flowed from the sugar trade.
The slaves arrived from many African tribes over 300-plus years to do the work, at one point accounting for 45% of the population. About a third of them were headed for the plantations, the rest for house slave spots. Over the years, a series of rebellions broke out, the first in 1513, but the system chugged on unabated until outlawed in 1886.
Cuban slavery had some particular features that sound good: a slave could take three days off to try to find a better owner, where he could negotiate his own price and the price of his eventual freedom. Yes, the slave had a potential out, if he could raise enough money to buy his freedom. Some did, and became middle class slave-owners themselves, a spectacular failure of imagination in my book.
Before we start handing out human rights awards, the other facts scream of what we normally associate with slavery. Slaves rarely were allowed to marry, families who arrived together were torn apart, babies born to strong healthy young women were taken to be nursed by other slaves bred for the purpose.
All the success, the riches, the opulence came from a failure of humanity that allowed this systematic exploitation, a violation of decency and fairness. Did all the flaunting of wealth and competitive spending we’d seen throughout Cuba, from the marble burial vaults to the elegant carriages and fancy houses, help answer some of our questions about Fidel’s success here, and the Cubans’ apparent reluctance to oppose him? Did the long history of exploitation begin to explain Fidel’s ascendance as the hero of everybody gets the same and nobody better try to outdo their neighbors?
We climbed back on the train for the return trip, heads full of the competing agendas of the colonists, industrialists, slaves and revolutionaries. Cuba shut down the sugar mills five years ago, giving up the fantasy of reviving the glory days. It seems just as well.
CBH 08/09
