OLD SOCIALISTS OLD SOCIALISTS IN THE NEW CUBA
GITLIN, TODD
Old Socialists in the New Cuba by TODD GITLIN The Cuban Revolution was made by young people and it is most vividly present for the young. Its prime objective is the man who makes its development...
...Let Old Socialist Man speak for himself...
...Yes...
...Some have left their country, unable or unwilling to adjust to the austerity, or to racial equality, or to the assault on old, Americanized ideas of individualism...
...I work for the government, in a warehouse, handling items that come in and go out...
...Then something goes wrong...
...So she said to the grocer, 'Why not give out the rest of the apples?' He said there was no way...
...The austerity in Cuba is real, though palpably waning...
...She expected to be admitted soon...
...Finally there was only one conclusion: gasoline had to be rationed...
...He spent an hour in a patient compiling of statistics to explain the squeeze on petroleum, blaming less the blockade and Soviet recalcitrance than Cuba's own increase in consumption...
...I would never do it...
...But the old, like the old everywhere, maintain a certain distance from the prevailing spirit, even a certain suspicion...
...Now, I don't know much, I'm a common man of medium education, I don't know what they're for but I know it's for medicine or cosmetics...
...Partly in my unfamiliarity with the language, partly because I had been waiting to hear just what I had thought he said, I had invented a counter-revolutionary...
...Before, everything was filthy...
...Either aspect is remarkable: that they acknowledged this bond as revolutionaries in common cause, and that the revolution contains room for both of them...
...The sugar ration of one and one-half ounces per week per person unquestionably hurts, not to mention the other shortages...
...It's my duty...
...his answers did not vary...
...They have their own spirit and their own disappointments, and in some cases their own nostalgia...
...Of course not," she snapped, her disdain for him undiminished...
...She granted he was a revolutionary, but disliked him because she found him mired in old habits of submission...
...Never...
...He sensed only that there were forces working in his behalf, but they were not at his command, he had had no part in making them...
...I'm a well-looking man, not starving...
...One cannot speak against the revolution...
...Walking back I asked if she thought him a counter-revolutionary...
...I go out in the fields, and at six I go to school...
...then I work in the fields again...
...He did...
...Local Government is fighting a battle—" "Is it a winning or losing battle...
...I asked the old man...
...I got one pound of pork last Christmas, one pound this Christmas, that's all...
...I asked...
...He doesn't leave alive...
...He took care that we not misunderstand...
...We took leave...
...And I get mad, and I say, 'How can you let the cane lie on the ground...
...Whose fault...
...His articles have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and Christian Century...
...They were integral to the peculiar rhythm of his manner, as if to make it clear that his being a revolutionary depended on his ability to criticize, and his criticism somehow ratified his image as a revolutionary...
...And there is the most terrible waste, I must tell you...
...Much of what has been written in the United States concerns the young, and with good reason: Their spirit begs to be spread and understood...
...One of the original leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, he is now actively engaged in racial and poverty programs in Chicago...
...He was still unoffended...
...I don't think there are solutions...
...Why is that...
...It turned out to be a bookstore, especially designed at the suggestion of bookstore workers to include reading compartments and a price-ticket system that would eliminate the need to write sales-checks...
...But for the young there is enough, and that is what matters...
...The fellow next to me goes, I take his place...
...He told me, 'Look, here are the papers...
...Her spunk qualified her no less as a revolutionary than did the complaints of the warehouseman...
...He said his friends, fishing off the embankment, shared his fear...
...Where I work, there arrived 100 bags of magnesia...
...His eyes reproached me as if I were not only ignorant but an impossible cynic...
...It is not just a matter of poor reporting, but of biases so ingrained that they refuse to bend in the face of an unaccustomed reality...
...I accept it...
...Why hasn't it docked...
...self-sufficiency in most food will soon be no fantasy...
...He turned out to be the manager, working alongside the others to rush the bookstore completion...
...I would have preferred giving them to a hospital, but it's not a matter of my preference...
...Otherwise, who knows, he might pour sugar in the gas tanks...
...We work that way...
...What I mean is: There is nothing to be said against the revolution...
...But in the meantime, the demand for foreign exchange is so great that consumption suffers accordingly...
...The old are generally given scant attention...
...Can't you go over his head...
...In one supermarket in a working-class section of Havana, scarcity was painfully obvious...
...And there's too much politics, not enough technical education...
...But if I'd made that suggestion, he'd snap it up...
...He said he was sixty...
...The young are being equipped with the appropriate ethics: production is more important than consumption...
...At last I had found a counterrevolutionary...
...When, on March 13, Castro said too many workers were deficient in the "daily heroism" of production, he was almost certainly not chiding the traditionally revolutionary cane workers...
...I like the climate here, it's a good life...
...Do you eat less than before the revolution...
...But as for the rest, the food is there on paper, but there's not enough...
...I had as yet no clear notion of the real logistical problems...
...I am a revolutionary...
...the problem of the warehouseman's son had been fairly common...
...And the Russians are preparing the worst...
...They are implanted in the course of education...
...another response to the men's grievances...
...The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Local Government —but there's nothing they can do...
...I sensed at once that our guide was disquieted, probably disliked him—whether because of his accent or his conversation, I was not to find out until later...
...He lost three years...
...When there is waste," I asked, "or when you are not getting what you are entitled to, how do you register a complaint...
...No, it should be that color...
...To compound the improbability, he said he was originally from Panama, had lived in the United States, but "I am Cuban...
...They're supposed to get twelve pounds, they get eight or ten...
...And before...
...But look at me," he said, patting his paunch...
...I'm a businessman, I hate to see anything wasted...
...Aha...
...Any other meat...
...This revolution—there is no going back...
...men should strive for the common good, not for money...
...I get up at six for work and I have breakfast, breakfast every morning...
...the "yet" is not even appropriate...
...I accept it...
...We're a rich country but I can't stand to see anything wasted...
...We were alone, and I confided that although he might have guessed me to be Russian, from my appearance, I was a North American journalist and he would have nothing to fear...
...she asked...
...There are many problems...
...she said...
...She used to go to a Catholic school and come home and prance around making the cross, and I used to say to my wife, T don't want her to be a saint.' We took her out of that...
...People I spoke to afterward considered this a great victory...
...You must write the truth, this is what we need most...
...It was clear she was exercising a right: This would be her store...
...I would die for the revolution...
...At five in the afternoon most shelves were bare...
...He had beamed: He was making the city clean, and the people healthy...
...It will be ruined.' And they tell me, 'We don't have the trucks, blah-blah, blah-blah.' And then in the mills, they don't get all the sugar out of the cane that they can...
...He leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and in a conspiratorial manner whispered, 'Wo se puede hablar contra la revolucion...
...talked...
...He pointed to a ship off-shore, which he said was a Russian tanker that had been waiting there since morning...
...It is natural, it is no crime, but if you describe only those two, you would not be telling the truth...
...The attitudes that intrigue me are far more complex than any quick introduction can convey...
...Food production is in general up and increasingly varied...
...He paused and looked out onto the Caribbean...
...Politely, without any sign of offense, he took the time to explain the future design...
...They're lying there right now...
...To make sure I had understood, I asked him to repeat...
...Dry and without slogans, requiring a definite concentration, the speech was followed line by line...
...Yes...
...He said he had read such a misleading article by a Chilean journalist with whom he had TODD GITLIN spent three weeks in January in Cuba...
...I asked...
...Our guide eyed a reading compartment and declared that it reminded her of a bomb shelter...
...He's the best boss I've ever had...
...Undisciplined...
...There is not enough food...
...I went three years without pork, as many years without seeing a chicken...
...there will be so many Cubans there...
...On this day, eggs, shoe polish, and green peppers were unrationed, and there were green vegetables, beer, canned milk, and some meat...
...Yet as revolutionaries, they faced across an abyss...
...New Communist Man, or, as Che Guevara called him, the man of the Twenty-first Century...
...It should be this color...
...I'm just one normal man...
...If anyone comes on these shores to make the counter-revolution, he stays...
...All the gasoline in Havana is gone, has been gone for two, three days...
...She disputed it: "It should be like this...
...I go, he takes my place...
...New Year's Day, on a downtown stretch of the Havana waterfront...
...But I doubt I will see you...
...Her revolutionary career had begun when she was fourteen, in the Havana 26th-of-July underground, and includes incarceration, during the Bay of Pigs, for insubordination to an officer...
...Prostitution, it was terrible...
...Having given him leeway, I asked him what he thought of the revolution...
...the revolution was grateful for this, he was sure...
...It was the manager's store too, but not possessively...
...Our guide turned away and did not speak again...
...I judged his protestations, like his contradictions, to be sincere...
...Is there something you're afraid of...
...Why don't you give them to a hospital at least, or somewhere else they are needed?' He had no choice...
...What good is that going to do her...
...But it will be like this...
...I can't say winning, I can't say losing...
...Unflagging in my quest for counterrevolutionaries, two blocks down the street I walked up to an old street-cleaner, figuring that the man with the broom and the basket is bound to be among the most alienated in any society...
...I owned a store that catered to tourists...
...This is much more than airy rhetoric...
...I said we did not...
...One hundred good bags...
...Any time of day, midnight, any time, you see everyone carrying books...
...Very good: Cuban beef...
...It's hard...
...What, I asked, was his work...
...How much do you make...
...We'll never go back to that...
...My wife, she told me she went to the grocery to get apples...
...I don't know how to explain it to you...
...You could see at my house I have everything...
...He had to throw them away...
...I'm afraid...
...My son here, he's twenty, he just got out of the army after three years in which he did nothing, nothing...
...So hard is it, so far outside our experience, for Americans to grasp the ways criticism and fervor coexist within a revolution, within revolutionaries...
...Before the revolution the boss was a son-of-a-bitch...
...How will we beat back the bureaucrats if we take that stuff...
...Now I go around trying to find a place where he can continue his training in radio...
...The subjects for living, the necessities, they don't teach them very well...
...This was my third day in Havana, and the slightest rumor was news to me...
...If I could, I would take her out...
...Before the revolution it was rum, women, all of that, and now they're carrying books...
...Its prime objective is the man who makes its development both possible and valid...
...So now I ask her what she learned, and she tells me about Lenin and Stalin...
...Having once had a bad experience with a Party official, why was he so easily intimidated...
...There are many problems, but we are making progress, and we will never go back to the times before the revolution...
...Before I earned $20 a day...
...It's hard, because he lost three years...
...It's exhausting...
...The nationalization of stores, announced March 13, aims to overthrow the bureaucratic mentality, profiteering, and the black market...
...A worker looked up to disagree...
...And I see they're all piled up and the bags are no good: too weak...
...In the Plaza the next day, Castro announced that military training would become compulsory in the schools, so that no more careers would suffer...
...One example: Two days before, we had come upon a new store and walked inside...
...He had been working in the sugar fields as a volunteer—"a few days here, a few there, sometimes for five weeks at a time...
...No, no, no...
...But the ones who were poor then, they have more now, so I am content...
...Of course it's a problem of foreign exchange...
...She said, 'You could give them out, first come, first served.' He said, 'I am not allowed.' She said, 'It is a crime, these apples just sitting here...
...There's too much politics in education...
...Look, I'm a socialist, I don't have to know all these things...
...I know of no better way to talk about them, and their Cuba, than to record here some of my conversations...
...I don't know where it's going...
...Everything is perfect...
...I had never heard a government decision so carefully explained—a tribute to the intelligence of citizens—and I imagined the warehouseman pleased...
...The revolution is good, it is beautiful...
...But it's a great thing...
...Say there are one thousand farms in Cuba...
...Did we have news of this...
...he looked a well-fed forty...
...She got our apples, everyone got the apples according to the ration, and still there were apples left over...
...He thought the Russians would dump Cuba, "and then what will we do...
...No...
...There is only one problem...
...Our guide, on the other hand, felt proprietary and potent...
...I asked...
...I go to school too, in radio, as a hobby...
...And how are your working conditions...
...Such policies are couched—and analyzed—ideologically yet there is this other dimension, the two-way contact between the acts of the powerful and the felt needs of ordinary people, a reciprocity I saw in a hundred signs and symbols...
...Who needs all this politics...
...It would be the truth, but not the whole truth...
...Five of them will be perfect...
...And if I work overtime I can make up to $225...
...You can't live on idealism, you know...
...Well," he said, "I'll be at the Plaza tomorrow with my daughter...
...Of course I don't tell her all this...
...Make no mistake about it...
...I do not know which way Cuba is going...
...My daughter comes home and she talks about Lenin...
...But I could attribute his spirit to his youth...
...I hate to see them wasted...
...See for yourself...
...In his work he felt involved, but powerless...
...I asked the same question three or four different ways...
...And then school again...
...Three-quarters of a pound of beef a week...
...everyone a soldier, everyone a worker, everyone a student...
...Do you have enough to eat...
...I received these bags and I must keep them.'" "Is he a Communist...
...And they are ratified in the common effort: first in the literacy campaign of 1961 ("each one teach one"), and now in the militia, the army, and the voluntary agricultural brigades...
...It's passive resistance, just what it sounds like...
...I told him it would be my responsibility...
...This episode seemed to both of them the most natural thing in the world...
...He was delighted to discover we were journalists...
...A footnote for the warehouseman...
...125 a month...
...Both regularly volunteered for agricultural work, though the old man, caught in a traditionally urban arrogance, too easily held the peasants at fault for a problem most likely technical, not political...
...What is it...
...We cut the cane, and there it is, lying on the ground for nine, ten, eleven days...
...He seemed a likely prospect, but I wanted to make sure he spoke freely...
...He spoke fluent English himself, though with something that sounded like a German accent...
...love of country must not exclude the willingness to help in the liberation of other countries...
...A neighbor of mine couldn't even get chicken for her child, or fresh milk...
...just where the old man uttered his ambiguous sentence...
...At this point our guide drifted into the conversation...
...It's a big problem...
...And my daughter...
...There's a lot of passive resistance...
...Don't get me wrong: To be American is OK, but 110 per cent American is too much...
...I would never go to them...
...It's remarkable, you know...
...A medical student, twenty-four, she had been kept out of the Young Communists for having wanted to attend art school at the same time...
...That they are critical yet pro-revolutionary is no contradiction...
...And I'll fight for it any time I'm called...
...In classical terms, the warehouseman was apathetic: aware of problems, but standing outside the possibility of solving them...
...Though fresh milk production has increased fifty per cent since 1962 and imports have zoomed to allow children their fresh milk ration of one liter a day, some adults go without milk as they did before the Revolution...
...The Plaza of the Revolution, where Fidel Castro gives his annual January 2 speech...
...Never...
...Perfect," he said...
...But most have remained, proudly Cuban before everything else...
...Our Old Socialist said he had worked in Detroit as a salesman, where his brother still lived, and that his brother, now a sales manager, had offered him $10,000 to emigrate to the United States...
...I went to them once, five years ago, over something like this, and they told me I'd be fired...
...So we get 100 new bags and now we have the 'That they are critical yet pro-revolutionary is no contradiction . . ." old bags, and I suggest to the boss that we give the old bags to the Ministry, or to a factory—they would kiss us...
...Food...
...He pulled back, affronted...
...But he says no, he says it cannot be done...
...He would have to be...
...I approached the hungriest-looking man I could spot, a bent old man whom a photograph, in its quick mendacious way, might have singled out as a malcontent, and asked him if he had enough to eat...
...She wouldn't understand...
...You see how I am...
...As I left the old man, I wondered how many times I had read accounts of similar conversations, flaunted with full anti-Communist certainty, stopping as if to say "You see...
...It couldn't be done...
...Shortly thereafter, the Young Communists who had rejected her application were in turn deposed—for sectarianism...
...The man must have heard my companion speaking English...
...Although an official guide to the Cultural Congress of Havana, she was no yes-girl and no petty commissar...
...Two partners were disputing the destiny of their common goods, achieved in common...
...And it's hard...
...Why didn't you go to the Party...
...They are preparing a deal with the United States...
...Me, no...
...He was to insist on this several times in the course of the conversation, and heatedly...
...I was anxious to find out why our guide had been so disgruntled...
...No...
...Education, that's another problem...
...And besides, my brother is 110 per cent American, and I don't like it...
...But I don't want you to take me wrong...
...Days before, I had asked a young street-cleaner how he liked his work...
...It is very complicated...
...Local Government is new but they can't do anything...
...But remember this: Don't just believe what I say...
...These principles are taking root in two ways...
...You will be shown, say, two of the five...
Vol. 32 • June 1968 • No. 6
