Spectator's Journal / Castroville
Lynn, Kenneth S.
and the usual horde of Americans. A visitor from the East looks around and asks how the protest is going; in the spirit of the day it is explained that the boycott, like the Rapture, is expected by...
...Nor did I see, or hear tell of, any sort of public manifestation of discontent with his rule, even though it is surely widespread...
...Now, of course, he doesn't have the money, even if he had the desire, to repair its crumbling facades, or to replace the buildings that have actually fallen down...
...In a barn-like supermarket...
...The price of 'a pair of shoes on the black market, however, is 500 pesos, while a decent pair of slacks can't be bought for under twice that amount...
...a medical doctor or an eminent professor of science, 450 at the most...
...in the spirit of the day it is explained that the boycott, like the Rapture, is expected by many but has yet to arrive...
...After all, it is very hard to gauge any ill effects from A2, as the amendment was blocked by a court injunction on January 22—before it could even go into effect...
...in snow), none of the sharp-eyed Cuba-watchers in the U. S. Interests Section was willing to say to me flat-out that the fate of Castro was sealed...
...Prostitutes lounge in the lobby of the Hotel Inglaterra, while their semi-pro younger sisters (some of whom look no more than fourteen) patrol the seafront esplanade...
...Beggars are back on the streets...
...The summer season is ahead, to be sure, but few expect a drop in the usual 9 million or so tourist visits...
...Worst of all is the relationship between salaries and living costs...
...Nonetheless, the release of the cancellation figure led to a bit of crowing by the organizers: "A purpose of the boycott is to, in fact, show that there will be no business as usual in a state that actively discriminates against gay and lesbian people," Robin Kane of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the AP...
...Cuba yes...
...We're happy here," one of them proclaims...
...What is far clearer than the imminence of the Maximum Leader's departure is the fact that the system he imposed upon the populace with his arrival never worked...
...that I visited with my wife and two daughters, a half-peck of potatoes, a comparable amount of tomatoes, a few paper bags of rice, and half a dozen bars of unwrapped yellow soap represented the entire inventory...
...As for the educational system, it is gravely underfunded now at every level, and import restrictions have completely blocked off the access of university teachers and students to significant new books—as I had occasion to discover when I addressed a seminar at the University of Havana...
...Perhaps they are right...
...Thousands of phones are broken, and phone directories, like most paper products (e.g., toilet paper) are non-existent...
...But will tourist dollars ever be able to make up the withdrawal of the Soviet subsidy...
...The prospects are dim, for all sorts of reasons, only one of which will be stated here...
...The ski season saw a 5-percent increase in lift-ticket sales over last year (9.87 million, up from 9.40 million)—the biggest year yet...
...They said yes by 51 to 43 percent—a larger spread than the original vote...
...It's not known if Barbra or Whoopi are aware of that, but they may be interested in one more piece of information...
...Thanks to joint ventures that state companies have worked out with foreign investors, the industry is now doing a $400 million-a-year business, according to Granma (the official Communist newspaper, which purchasers are wont to stack in piles beside their toilets for sanitary uses...
...A common laborer earns 200 pesos a month...
...n this hour of Cuba's agony, the upbeat messages that appear on state billboards in provincial town squares and along lonely highways in the countryside, as well as in choice locations across Havana, make bitterly laughable reading...
...Power outages occur day and night...
...Visitors from the U.S...
...A new plan of attack may be in order...
...most certainly I hope so...
...References to the Revolution in this sort of propaganda testify to an aging leadership's undiminished faith in the power of class rhetoric to arouse the people...
...With the Rockies now playing in Mile High Stadium and the Pope due in August for World Youth Day, the summer season may also break records...
...The daiquiris at the Floridita, moreover, are shamelessly watered, and the revue at the Tropicana is so hilariously out of date as to make you wonder whether Carmen Miranda is really dead...
...Yet the only currency that the Melia and its counterparts accept at the desk or in their restaurants is the greenback, and the same situation obtains at the Plaza, the Inglaterra, and the newly renovated Nacional in Havana...
...It is hard to tell, but ski industry officials say the number of people boarding planes at area resorts rose 4.4 percent...
...espite these troubling facts, in D May the boycott was deemed an "unqualified success" by national gay leaders, and a few days later a group of activists gathered in New York to chant "We're queer, we're here, we won't drink Coors beer...
...E verywhere you turn in Cuba today, you are made aware of deprivation...
...The condition of Havana militates against its recovery of its magnetic reputation as a place where the good times roll...
...The crowds of men and women at bus stops, in city neighborhoods and country places alike, have that dying-on-the-vine look on their faces of people who have been waiting for an inordinately long time—for two or three hours in many cases...
...In the 1950s, Castro viewed the capital as the symbol of bourgeois corruption and decadence, and for thirty years he discriminated against it...
...Medical doctors are in short supply, as are drugs and other medicines, including over-the-counter items like aspirin...
...Yet in the course of my visit in March (during which the difficulties of life were worsened by hurricane-force winds roaring out of the same storm system that buried the eastern U.S...
...Thanks to the subsidy of $2 billion a year (in some years, the amount may have soared to $4 billion) that the Soviets were slipping him, Castro was able to get away with the fraudulent claim that it was socialism that had made decent health care and free education available to everyone and, among other evaporative miracles, had caused prostitution and beggary to vanish...
...are rare birds of course...
...are calculated to appeal to nationalistic pride...
...Maybe it has something to do with those reports, very common since the November vote, about the homosexual population being closer to one percent than to ten...
...I myself am staying," trumpets another...
...What is more striking, though, is the number of messages that reflect the rather different strategy of the men in their thirties who run the Communist Youth League...
...Sothat the state may capture the dollars that are surreptitiously passed to waiters as tips, a new law will soon enable them to exchange their tips for scrip that can be redeemed in goods in the privileged stores previously reserved for the shopping of high-placed apparatchiks...
...Andres Oppenheimer and other writers who aim their reports from Cuba at American audiences speak of the coming fall of Castro...
...for when the battered hulk of a decades-old Hungarian polluter heaves into view at long last, it is apt to be so crowded that only a few more passengers can squeeze on board...
...But now that the subsidy has vanished, his paradise has collapsed like the one-hoss shay...
...And a third insists: "To the Revolution and to Socialism we owe everything we are today...
...and "It is time to unite...
...At Varadero, to the east of Havana, the combination of an international airstrip, a string of modern hotels headed by the Hyatt-like Melia Varadero, and room prices lower than comparable accommodations command on the Amalfi Coast, say, or the Costa Brava, is indeed attracting streams of package-tour sun-worshippers from Canada, Italy, Spain, and South America...
...How many of those skiers went in-state...
...Most taxi drivers in Havana also deal in dollars exclusively, as do all the restaurants in town that are worth eating in, from the Tocororo on down...
...A dramatic scene, but perhaps not entirely justified...
...Castro is counting heavily on tourism to redeem his dream and confound his enemies...
...Robin has a point...
...Convention cancellations through 1999 are running at about $35 million, but tourism officials believe most, if not all, will be made up in new bookings (the state's annual tourist business brings in $6 billion a year...
...A couple of months after the vote, as the boycott raged, Coloradans were asked if they would vote the same way...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
