Cuba: Time in a bottle?

Islander visits Cuba, shares insights

A day or so before leaving for a weeklong trip to Cuba I realized I was humming the Jim Croce song “Time in a Bottle”. Turns out reality, like almost everything about Cuba, is more complicated than that.

What exists there today is not a frozen in time snapshot. The street scenes are not flashbacks to 1959. It’s more a case of not much has been maintained since 1959. Decay and neglect have taken their toll on the buildings, streets and other infrastructure. The “bones” are still there but the restoration task is daunting. There is however a fully restored several block area near San Francisco Plaza that offers an impressive glimpse of the future. The challenges? Money and time. Hotels in the restored area are government owned and 40% of their revenue is pumped into more restoration projects.

Virtually every man, and many of the women, in our group cited Cuba’s famed vintage American cars as a reason for their visit. No disappointment on that front. Every street in Havana is filled with classic Chevys, Olds and other American cars from the 50’s and early 60’s. Most of them probably don’t have an original part left on them but they look and feel real. And in case you think they’re a tourist gimmick, less restored but still rolling models are in wide use in the rural countryside. Havana is also full of aging East Bloc cars like Trabants, Ladas and Skodas that are relics of the Soviet influence in the 70’s and 80’s. Modern cars are mainly Korean and lots of what I discovered are Chinese models I’d never heard of.

There are plenty of new, privately operated restaurants called paradors. We visited a dozen of them and the food, décor and service was uniformly excellent…. more than a few of them could easily survive in restaurant-dense Charleston.

The streets seemed safe. We didn’t see a beggar or street con man our whole time there. We also saw almost no military or police presence. You see more uniforms in downtown Charleston when Citadel cadets are on the street and more police cruisers on Daniel Island than we encountered there.

Another thing missing is simple tourism infrastructure. There are plenty of cabs, both modern Chinese models and lots of fifties vintage American cars…but there aren’t meters. Every fare is a negotiation. Do your haggling before you climb in.

Don’t expect to pop in to the Buena Vista Social Club. It shut down back in the 40’s before becoming the icon of a revival of Afro-Cuban music with the release of the album on the same name. The famed Tropicana does still exist. After a history including a heavy American mafia presence the Castro government shut down the Tropicana casino. But the lavish cabaret show featuring Latin music and beautiful women wearing little but feathers still packs in the tourists. Only tourists can afford it with tickets at the equivalent of $75-100. The shows conjure up images of old Havana from Graham Greene novels and The Godfather II.

What isn’t ready for prime time is simple tourist infrastructure. There’s almost no retail. Need to buy aspirin? Forget your razor? Need to buy a pair of socks? You’re out of luck.

The Castro government only recently allowed Cubans to have cell phones. Among travelers in our group those with Verizon service seemed satisfied. Other customers, not so much. Our high end hotel had Wi-Fi…most do not. Forget about public hotspots.

How about “I need to find a bathroom?” If there are any public facilities, we didn’t see them in our week there. How about simply ducking into a restaurant? Not readily available. Not necessarily open to walk-ins. And even a few of the high end paradors we went to seemed to feel toilet tissue or even toilet seats weren’t necessary.

There aren’t simple explanations for most things in Cuba. Thank goodness there wasn’t a drinking game involving a mojito every time a question was answered by “it’s complicated!”

My wife and I planned this trip before the recent move to “normalize” relationships. Quite simply, we wanted to get there before Starbucks and Holiday Inn. Although the new rules are rapidly evolving, we still fell under the old restrictions of no simple tourism.

The tour we signed up for was authorized by both the Cuba and the United States as a “people to people” cultural exchange. Like much of Cuban-U.S. dealings there was a certain wink and a nod aspect to it. But there was also a pretty structured schedule of meetings and discussions with everyone from restoration planners to cigar factory workers. Organic farmers, diplomats, retired baseball players, members of an art collective and kids in an after school music program shared their perspectives with us.

The retired journalist in me will always be a bit skeptical about how “real” are the folks that meet routinely with Americans on these “people to people” exchanges. Some sort of screening and selection exists. There were certainly no sessions with political dissidents. But what came through pretty authentically is that most people think everyday Cubans are better off because of the revolution. That’s more a reflection on the old days than any rosy view of the past 50 years. People who clearly are glad the old system was overthrown readily acknowledge that 50+ years of the Castro government has produced both progress and lots of wrong turns and mistakes.

More than a few expressed a wistful appreciation of the relatively better financial conditions of the Cold War years when the Soviet Union heavily subsidized Cuba. When the Soviet Union collapsed Russia could barely pay its own bills leaving Cuba with shattered dreams and block after block of shabby Soviet era high rise housing that look eerily like bad neighborhoods in Moscow. Until the world price of oil plummeted, the Chavez regime in Venezuela supported Cuba out of ideology but also as a way of flipping Uncle Sam the bird.

Now Cuba’s on its own. China is selling them lots of buses, cars and other goods but the key word there is “sell”. The Chinese motivation is far more making a buck than any ideological solidarity.

And the Cuban economy is a mess.

Actually there are at least three economies. The official state economy is a total mess. Most Cubans work for the government. They’re extremely underpaid but in the official economy there isn’t much to buy anyway. Everyone gets a monthly food allotment. Healthcare and education are free. One of the more remarkable things you notice is there is almost no retail economy. You don’t see supermarkets or convenience stores or even neighborhood grocery stores. There are plenty of gas stations but they’re government owned. Farmers can be given land that can stay in their family’s control as long as it’s used for farming. A tobacco farmer we met with laughed that he’s required to give the government 90% of his crop but that he keeps the other 20%. And it’s not a good sign when medical doctors and college professors moonlight as taxi drivers. Which leads to the second Cuban economy. It’s built around tourism. There’s even a separate currency just for the use of tourists and tourist workers. The government owns some hotels and restaurants and is increasingly allowing private ones to open. Most of the ones we visited compare favorably to some of Charleston’s restaurants although they’re working with a much more limited palette of available foods. Appetizers and desserts were excellent. Entrees more mediocre. If you make money in this economy, it’s taxed. And your typical Cuban can’t afford any of the luxuries provided for tourists.

Which leads, inevitably, to the third economy. Not surprisingly, there’s a flourishing underground black market where Cubans of every stripe buy, sell and trade to make ends meet. For example, the hotel where our group stayed gave a gift bottle of rum to every member of the group. Most of us, rather than deal with issues of packing and customs, gave our rum to our bus driver. Apparently a dozen bottles of rum can be resold for more than his official monthly salary. You don’t see beauty salons or barber shops outside of tourist hotels but getting your hair done is part of the underground economy.

So why have Cubans put up with all the hardships of the past 50 years? First of all, pretty much everyone we met seems to think that even with current shortages, they’re better off than they were under the old regime.

There have been remarkable achievements in quality of life issues like health care and education. Cuba’s infant and child mortality rates are better than those of the United States and far better than for American minority populations. Overall life expectancy is about the same in each country. There’s universal vaccination and Cuban doctors practicing abroad frequently encounter diseases that don’t exist anymore back home.

Education was also a Castro priority and another area where success can be claimed. Cuba has an adult (age 15 and older) literacy rate of 99.8%. The U.S. by contrast has been stuck at 86% for more than a decade.

So what do Cubans want to see post-Castro brothers? Not surprisingly they want it all. They want to hold on to what they consider gains of the revolution in areas like healthcare and education while enjoying more consumer comforts and political freedom.

Change is coming and most people we talked to (remember there is some screening involved) seem optimistic. They’re also aware of the hardships Russia and other former Soviet countries endured when their state centered economies collapsed with the communist governments. The parallels are striking. The opportunities are great…and so are the dangers. As our tour guide put it “Change is coming. We hope progress is coming. They aren’t always the same thing or a straight path.”

How soon does the future arrive? It’s already started. Our tour bus was detoured almost daily because the latest installment of Hollywood’s Fast and Furious franchise has been in town for weeks shooting their latest installment. The first Carnival Cruise ship pulled into Havana the day we left. And the enthusiasm was a lot more universal than a cruise ship arrival gets in Charleston. Cuba clearly needs American tourism. Is it ready for prime time? The infrastructure needs lots of work…and more than a few public toilets complete with seats and tissue.

But time will tell. And time is definitely not in a bottle anymore.

Bill spent 42 years building a career in television news, including 12 years on the air and 30 years in news director roles for stations in Columbus, Ohio, Tulsa, Birmingham, Buffalo and San Francisco. He was also vice president of news and programming for a cable channel based in Minneapolis. He and his wife retired to Daniel Island in 2014.

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