CUBA Notes on a Revolution

...he had to pay the Cuban printer or have it published in Spain or Mexico and imported to Cuba...

...A few weeks after coming back from Cuba I went to a party where people were playing a game that derives from the gestalt group therapy now so much in vogue...

...That game was a mask, really, for that community of helping hands dissolved at the evening's end...

...You can't help but detest this spirit of orientacion, and fear that it has become much too deeply imbedded in Cuba...

...The meeting I attended probably had less discussion than the average CDR meeting, but in microcosm it summed up a lot about some basic contradictions in Cuban life: The organization was obviously run from the top down—the "vital tasks" were assigned by central headquarters, and the people at the meeting said hardly anything the whole time...

...Perhaps the most notable thing about this program is that when Cuban city-dwellers go to field work in the cordon, everybody from a particular office, factory, or institution goes together—managers, clerks, workers, secretaries...

...Bureaucrats When you see a group of half a dozen Cubans talking, you can usually pick out the one who is a professional, middle-rank cadre member from the Party or another organization...

...Twenty-two—and we have someone check each night to make sure the member standing guard is at his post...

...They lived in a society where you could be proud of driving a tractor or building a dam...

...Yet Milton was right that people who "license" the truth ultimately ossify a country's intellectual life...

...When he was fourteen he lived for six months with peasants who believed the world was flat and that it gets dark at night because the sun falls into a tunnel...

...They taught him how to kill snakes and drain the oil, and then in the evening he taught them to read by the light of a snake-oil lamp...

...What was the purpose of the American military intervention...

...The players were a dozen or so California college students, and the game went like this: Each person took his turn at standing in the center of a small circle of others surrounding him...

...It is easy enough for us to say: All right, it's o.k...

...One of its local committees may combine "ideological orientation of the masses" with work that in the United States would be done by women's clubs, the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and the local public health department...

...But people are a bit restive now, not in the countryside, but here in Havana: food shortages, rationing...

...The telephone book still has yellow pages, but mixed with lists of dentists and barbers is one of Organizaciones Rev-olucionarias...

...This spirit was combined with one of exuberant mockery towards all officials and bureaucrats: "Meet the boys here," said one student, introducing the members of a six-man pickaxe crew...

...ADAM HOCHSCHILD, formerly on the staff of Ramparts, is a free lance writer whose articles have appeared in Midstream, Dissent, Liberation, and the Village Voice...

...Where's the trick door...

...Some neighborhood grocery stores still have faded red Coca-Cola emblems on their signs...

...One change, though, is spirit: When Fidel comes to the hotel, he often eats with the staff in the kitchen...

...How many adults on your block are studying to achieve sixth grade level...

...Perhaps even more important, there are the beginnings of an effort to spread art beyond the cities...

...There is no cult of socialist realism...

...There are no children with bellies swollen from malnutrition, nor men with that blank-eyed look that comes from years of unemployment...

...He had been on the Isle of Pines a year and a half, and said he would stay perhaps five years—until all the dams were built...

...There are political limits on what you can write, but before the Revolution there was no way a Cuban poet or novelist could get a book commercially published at all...

...He said that it was important for them to take the trick in the right spirit, and understand that this was "human" magic, something created by man, not, as they might think, something "supernatural...

...Juan here is director-general of our squad, Alfredo is the first secretary, Alphonso is the general manager, Hernando is our chief administrator...

...The fact that Cubans have such a totalitarian heritage—centuries of the Catholic Church, slavery, Spanish colonialism, and a string of unbelievably tyrannical pre-Revolutionary dictators—doesn't make it any easier...

...Even the Catholic Church never really penetrated into the countryside...

...too many other things bothered me: the absence of direct popular control over essential decision-making...

...There are 100-odd students of various languages and literatures at the University, and most of them were there, living in the same barracks and working in the same fields as their professors, who included Roberto Fernandez Retamar, a one-time Yale professor who is Cuba's leading younger poet...

...The questions and answers continued for about an hour, covering street-cleaning, vacant lot cleaning, drainage of mosquito-breeding pools of stagnant water, and drives to collect blood, old paper, and old bottles (Cuba still uses pre-Revolutionary Coca-Cola or Canada Dry bottles...

...it was a way of teaching people what the CDR's jobs were...

...One of the acts was a magician who performed a standard circus stunt: He tied a girl in chains, then elaborately padlocked her into a trunk...

...the government's strongest supporters are the generation of Cubans now in their twenties...

...trade embargo...

...And in today's world—from Berkeley to Paris to Mexico City to Moscow—that is something rare indeed...

...But the generation of middle-level bureaucrats who have reached power since then are different...

...Seven are paramount tasks...

...I hope it won't happen, and that Cuba will prove you can deal with this not by cutting down on criticism but by allowing it...

...At times there is too much community, too much prying into things that should be left private, but the sense of community is there, it is real...

...The Countryside The first big difference as soon as you get outside Havana is that the food is better...

...What I would like to convey about them—and about a number of other Cuban men and women between twenty and thirty who have also abandoned comfortable, middle-class lives to work in the countryside—is how much I liked them...

...We have to produce extra sugar and other crops that can buy machinery overseas...

...Whatever other complaints he may have, no Cuban student who spends a month working in the fields side by side with his professors is likely to consider himself a helpless statistic, an IBM card...

...But ultimately, the way you feel about another society is determined by the passing of time, by the new eyes it gives you to see the familiar things around you...

...What was the reaction of world opinion...

...But the problem is tricky...

...One of the principal nationwide organizations is the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution...

...Even the literature faculty's janitor lived and worked with the group...

...Illiteracy before the Revolution, for instance, was only twelve per cent in the cities, but forty-two per cent in the countryside...

...It suddenly struck me that probably no one in Cuba feels the impulse to play a game like that...

...In Cuba the gap is not between generations, but between centuries...

...The answer was either "correct" or "not correct," and never more than one sentence long...

...They worked hard, and they took great pleasure in getting an ailing International Harvester tractor to run properly, joking about it with that special kind of pride which only a city boy who has learned farm skills can have...

...The leeway in Cuban intellectual life is paradoxical...

...They were honorable people, friends, men and women I would like to see again...

...The force of the countryside's recent past of ignorance and superstition did not come alive for me until I visited a grapefruit farm one day...

...The inspector talked in a mechanical but emphatic way, much like a tired disk jockey repeating commercials he has said a hundred times before...

...People in this country play games like that, I think, because in a basic way there is no sense of community in most of American life...

...Movies are remarkable...

...Most writers have not joined the refugees going to Miami, and some who were in exile under Batista have returned...

...Yet literary life seems to flourish: Several respected literary journals circulate to the rest of Latin America, and leading writers from elsewhere on the continent (Cortazar of Argentina and Fuentes of Mexico, for instance) visit often...

...Most of Bergman's and Fellini's films have been here, and Morgan, despite its spoof of Marxism, was widely shown two years ago...

...I saw this in practice when I worked an afternoon with some university students...

...Except for some apartments, there have been few new buildings put up here since the Revolution: The Cubans are shifting all their construction work to the countryside, where there is greater need...

...ln Cuba the gap is not between generations, but between centuries...

...Army officers or religious missionaries...

...She was trying hard to get back to tractor driving, and she was determined to stay on the farm "because that's where the Revolution needs me...

...But in the cafeterias of the granjas, or large collective farms, the average meal is usually rice, black bean soup, a cooked vegetable, several rolls, a chunk of beef, and soda pop...

...That's the dilemma...

...There are also discussion sessions about Vietnam and Castro's speeches...

...they include imaginative documentaries, and features that deal with serious social issues at a level far higher than the simplistic propaganda in the press...

...I am afraid that the words I have used do not characterize these two people vividly enough...

...Most Cubans deeply respect their top Party officials, most of whom are veterans of the revolutionary war...

...It's just that there are a lot of nuts between me and him...

...The most important task is organization...

...Utopias are always easier on paper...

...Their mood, I think, was typical of that of the best of Cuba's young people: the feeling that despite its excesses, the Revolution is a truly epochal, commitment-demanding adventure, which by a magnificent freak of history has happened in a small country...

...back in the classroom it's the more formal "usted...

...The students I worked with that afternoon, cutting and transplanting sod, did not pretend they enjoyed it, but there was no doubt they believed in it...

...Army mess halls except that the compartments in it are beaten into shape by hand...

...The trunk was hidden behind a curtain for a few seconds, then the curtain was pulled open and the girl—miraculously escaped from the trunk—was standing there in a spangled bathing suit...

...I saw the same pattern several days later, sitting in on a sixth grade history class in a boarding school...

...Much of Havana still presents beautiful old Spanish architecture: majestic churches, sand-colored apartment houses with terra cotta roofs and wrought-iron balcony railings,, and narrow, winding streets just wide enough for buses to roar through at frightening speeds...

...Havana residents do this in the cordon, the green belt of farmland that rings the city, where every factory, office, or government ministry has a patch of land assigned to it...

...I still think Cuba could bring about revolutionary changes in the countryside without the spirit of inflsxible dogmatism there is currently too much of, but I am more humble about saying so now than before I went there...

...in one small agricultural town of 7,000, I found a new art gallery and a workshop where anyone who wanted could come in to sculpt and paint...

...The entire meeting consisted of his reading little homilies and questions off a clipboard, which the chairman (who also had a clipboard) answered with utmost brevity: "The CDR's have seventeen tasks which are vital to the Revolution...

...Could they be brought into the Twentieth Century without cadres "orienting" them, telling them that the world is round, doctors can be trusted, education for your children is a good thing...

...But the entire hour consisted of the teacher (who was twenty-one years old and the oldest teacher in the school) striding back and forth at the front of the room shouting questions at the students: "What were the terms of the Piatt Amendment...

...The Urban Intellectuals A young poet, more pessimistic than most: "In many ways things are pretty good today: I think the generation of Cuban poets now in their thirties, for instance, is the best in any Spanish-speaking country...

...In the fields and barracks the students call their professors by their first names and use the informal "tu...

...The Cordon The Cubans are anxious to prevent government officials and office bureaucrats from turning into the privileged economic class they are in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...She had been happy there as a tractor driver for a year, she said, but now she was upset because the farm officials had discovered she was a trained accountant and had made her accountant for the farm...

...About fifty people came, mostly farmhands and their wives and sleepy children...

...the tendency for people to answer political questions in terms of what "Fidel says," and the economics student to whom I mentioned that who began his reply with, "Well, Fidel is aware of that problem...

...They seldom get more critical than a Boy Scout newsletter...

...There is none of that disjointed unease so familiar to us here . . ." I remember two Cubans especially well: One was a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had left Havana to work on a cattle farm...

...There are few restrictions at all when it comes to art and literature imported from other countries—an important difference from the Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe...

...Still standing, he would close his eyes, relax his body, and allow himself to fall—forwards, backwards, sideways, remaining limp and trusting the others to catch him and toss him gently upright again...

...One of his biggest problems was that the peasants weren't sure they wanted their children to learn to read...

...Open-stack libraries in Havana have virtually all the principal European and American magazines, and there are published translations of many contemporary authors: Styron, Bellow, Marcuse, Mailer, Lowry, Kerouac, Salinger, Albee...

...The Cubans are becoming justly famous for their abstract and expressionist posters...

...Then he became a diplomat, and at the age of twenty was Cuban counsul in Madrid...

...If I ever went to Canada or Mexico, I would risk sneaking over the border illegally to see Bonnie and Clyde," one Cuban film buff said wistfully...

...In front sat two men at a green baize table: One was the local committee chairman, and the other an inspecting official from the regional CDR headquarters...

...One evening I went to a CDR meeting in Nueva Gerona, a country town...

...The meeting began at ten p.m...

...They were spending one of their two months of summer vacation hoeing and weeding at the site of what is to become the University of Havana's botanical gardens...

...Newspapers largely contain reprinted speeches cf top officials, articles explaining technical and agricultural matters, and laudatory accounts of the hard work being done at this farm or that factory...

...CDR members also check regularly to see that all children in their area are in school, and if they aren't, reluctant parents are "oriented to the importance of education...

...There are narrow limits to how far the press can criticize public policy...

...Most graduating university students have to do two years of social service work somewhere, and for literature scholars this can mean setting up cultural centers in remote villages...

...The dialogue between the two officials was a form of what the Cubans call orientacion...

...But I'm not certain this will happen...

...He had been a law student when Castro came to power, and the next year, at the age of eighteen, he was the manager of a 400-man sugar mill...

...But when I left Cuba, I felt quite critical...

...Return Postage Guaranteed...

...But as he performed the trick, the magician gave a little speech to the audience...

...Forty-one...

...He says some good things...

...Milton said it 300 years ago: "Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards...

...This is what causes visiting American correspondents to write of "nationwide food shortages...

...The Beatles and the Rolling Stones pour from loudspeakers in the hotel lobby, amidst voices paging comrade this and comrade that...

...the woman who said that now her local CDR would be inquiring why a foreigner had come to her house...

...His personality will be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time around career U.S...

...If you ask him to give you a specific example of exactly what he does, he'll tell you that he "orients the masses to the correct Revolutionary policy...

...The other person was a tall, thoughtful man of twenty-six, the leader of a group of young volunteers building some earthwork irrigation dams on the Isle of Pines...

...the sheet on a University of Havana bulletin board noting which students had and had not attended the "political orientation" lectures...

...Traveling groups of poets hold readings on collective farms...

...The producers of a new play ran into trouble with government officials over a passage that joked about the ever-present necessity to stand in line at shops...

...One of these boys was a quiet, unassuming twenty-two-year-old from Havana with an interest in early Anglo-Saxon history...

...Graphic art is the freest of all...

...Those cadres are the real tragedy of our country," one student told me, summing up a widespread attitude...

...He did not want to go back to the more glamorous life of the foreign service now, he said, because "I was out of the country when too many important things happened—the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis...

...Too much education means your son will go away to the city and wori't be able to help you farm any more...

...What about those Cuban peasants...

...It is a deliberate policy...

...In contrast is the modern quarter of sleek, Miami Beach-looking skyscrapers, built during the 1950s as offices or luxury apartments (today some are boarding schools...

...I frequently met middle-class men in their twenties who were in the great "literacy campaign" of 1961, when thousands of teen-agers went to live with peasant families in the mountains for half a year to teach them to read and write...

...Unfortunately, the whole idea that education consists of there being a correct answer for every question seems to extend, in Cuba, to much more complex things as well...

...The class was in Cuban-American relations from 1898 to 1910, and the history presented seemed a good deal more accurate than what the average American sixth grader learns about the subject...

...Vigilance is one of the most important tasks of the Revolution...

...This means being a sort of unarmed neighborhood night watchman...

...Cuba can't get American movies because of the U.S...

...to have cadres that tell people about public health measures or things like that, but no one should be told what to think...

...Even in an iconoclastic country like this, the orthodox ideology is accepted too much—the ideology that says you deal with discontent by clamping down on dissent...

...They sat on benches and chairs on the porch and in the front yard of someone's house...

...I don't think so...

...What we forget is that development in a poor country can't begin until people change part of ¦what they think...

...A Personal Postscript It is true that in Cuba there is virtually none of the illiteracy, the corruption, the beggars and prostitutes, and the enormous gap between rich and poor that you see everywhere else in Latin America...

...Men like that CDR official in Nueva Gerona who have made careers out of passing on to others a truth decreed by higher authorities are a dangerous class in any country...

...Each time, a cluster of eager hands went up from the class, and the teacher would call on a student, who would jump to his feet with an answer...

...It had never occurred to me that you could react to a trick like that other than wondering: What's the gimmick here...

...All people who live in the cities—from cabinet ministers on down—work at least three or four weeks in the fields each year...

...How many members do you have now...

...We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our wool-packs...

...How many of your members stand guard duty...

...The leeway in Cuban intellectual life is paradoxical...

...There is one point on which even most critical observers of Cuba agree: The government's strongest supporters are the generation of Cubans now in their twenties...

...Drop in Nearest Mailbox...

...His gestures will have a certain mechanical quality, and his voice will have the kind of supreme assurance that only someone who never really thinks about what he says can have...

...You eat off a metal tray that looks like the trays in U.S...

...There is none of that disjointed unease so familiar to us here, the sense that in this society you can only define yourself by rebelling...

...CUBA Notes on a Revolution by ADAM HOCHSCHILD Havana The first thing that surprises you is that no one is uptight about symbols of the old order...

...Half of the imported movies are from Western Europe, and the selection is good...

...Soviet aid is still coming but has stopped increasing, and this is a hard time...

...But the gap was, and is, much broader than that...

...Sixteen—all the ones who need to except a few with bad eyesight...

...In the city basic foods are strictly rationed, and you can sometimes go into a restaurant and find nothing available but rice and water...

...Secular Magic Cuba is two countries...

...So now I'm back in an office again all day...

...There was something sad about those California students...

...There is no need to create an artificial community when you have a real one...

...Those things still bother me...

...Most of the people who worked there were teen-age girls from peasant families, and on that afternoon they had stopped work to watch an out-of-doors performance of a small traveling circus...

...Fidel's o.k...

...The game is supposed to help you learn to trust people, to have confidence that there will be a protective community of catching hands if you fall...

...The prototypes for this kind of situation—Russia in the 1920s, China after the Hundred Flowers period —are not encouraging...

...Education is one of the most important tasks facing our country...