Cuba Whispers Behind the Slogans

By Pico Iyer/Havana

"The minimizing of entry red tape reveals that you are expected and welcome to this land of gorgeous adventure and the limber elbow," notes the 1938 Blue Guide to Cuba in summoning Americans to the nearby island. Nowadays, of course, the situation is different. For more than two decades, Cuba has been virtually off limits to U.S. citizens. Recently, however, TIME Contributor Pico Iyer was able to spend roughly three weeks as a tourist on Fidel Castro's island on two separate trips. His impressions:

The studio apartment is hidden away amid the rambling old Mafia hotels and quiet leafy parks of Vedado, Havana's modern midtown district. Like many a Cuban home, it has a dusty attic quality, the poignancy of a well-cared-for poverty. The apartment's contents are fairly typical. A high shelf has been turned into a home-made altar, crowded with Catholic icons. Below is a shelf stuffed with the works of Spinoza, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler. Between the two is a huge black-and-white TV set on which, boasts its owner, he can sometimes catch programs from the U.S. All through the place a ceaseless whine crackles out of a bright red Phillips boom box, bought under the counter for $800 and tuned now to Radio Marti, the anti-Castro station run by Cuban exiles in Miami. Every now and then, the hum of the half-jammed station is drowned out by the squawks of a rooster named Reagan. Why Reagan? Because, says his keeper, his alarms, unlike those of certain local leaders, are brief and to the point.

The owner of the tiny cell, a government worker, acquired it through a bribe and maintains it with the extra money he has made surreptitiously taping and transcribing each week for five years the American Top 40 Countdown, broadcast on a commercial station in Florida. By day he serves his country; by night, like many young Cubans, he dreams of escape. "If ever I get to the U.S.," he says with a wistful smile, "I could get a job in Hollywood. All my life I have learned how to act. Sometimes I smile inside, it is so crazy."

The qualities that hit a visitor most forcibly on arrival in Cuba are its beauty and its buoyancy: the crooked streets and sunlit Spanish courtyards of Old Havana; the chrome-polished 1953 Chevrolets that croak along tree-lined streets past faded but still gracious homes of lemon yellow, orange and sky blue; the warm breeze that comes off the sea at night. In contrast to the gray functionalism of other Communist countries, Cuba is, after all, a decidedly Caribbean island of gaiety and light. On balmy nights, the sound of rumbas pulses through Coppelia, the central park, where brightly dressed teenagers strut around in love or else in search of it. On a brilliant Sunday afternoon in spacious Lenin Park, a steel band lays down a lilting beat and khaki- uniformed officials wave their caps in time to the music. Yet beneath the infectious island rhythms, there is a sad, steady whisper. "If there were no sea between us and the U.S.," says a musician under his breath, "this place would be empty tomorrow."

As Castro's Revolution shuffles through its 29th year, many Cubans are surprisingly ready to voice, however quietly, their impatience with a system that still seems stranded in its noisy infancy. Almost no one would deny that health and education, both free, have improved considerably since the days of Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Grinding poverty has been erased. Drugs and prostitution, which flourished when the place was a raffish offshore playground for Americans, have now gone underground. But in the face of those advances, the man in the Havana street is still unable to speak or travel as he pleases. Money is more than ever in desperately short supply. "Cuba is suffering an economic crisis of massive proportions," says a foreign diplomat. "Here is a country with no free press, no opposition parties, no capital flight, a controlled economy and $4.6 billion from the Soviets each year -- and they're still, in hard-currency terms, almost bankrupt."

That chaos is everywhere apparent. Though Cubans have to pay only about 10% of their salary for rent -- often barely $10 a month -- they must spend twice as much just to buy an imported deck of playing cards. Block-long lines of people wait nine hours through the night and six hours more to get into the Centro department store, still commonly known by its prerevolutionary name, Sears, where government surplus items are sold at extortionate prices ($2 for a small bar of chocolate). "We have some good news and some bad news," runs the local joke. "The bad news is that everyone is going to have to eat stones; the good news is that there are not enough to go around."

With money scarce, and goods even scarcer, a diplomat observes, "crooked deals multiply until they ensure that the economic plan can never work." Some people take photos, fix jalopies or do typing on the side; others simply try to resell the goods they manage to procure. The rampant finagling is only encouraged by a bureaucracy with so many hands that none is likely to know what the others are doing: in a Havana telephone directory, the list of ministries takes up 77 pages.

Though talking to foreigners is forbidden, a tourist alone presents an irresistible target. A phone rings in his hotel room, and a girl the visitor has never met professes eternal love, leading, no doubt, to a quickie marriage and a ticket out. A government worker takes him aside and asks, with great diffidence, if he would mind very much having his passport stolen. "Nobody is happy, but everyone is afraid to speak out," observes a habanero. "Nobody trusts anybody else. A few years ago, a generation arose that wanted reform. ( Now the main preoccupation is keeping quiet. People are waiting to see what will happen when Fidel goes."

One dissident recalls a late-night knock at the door. A mild-looking young official stood outside with a request: "We want you to come and do three months of military service." "If I do," said the dissenter, "I will lose my job." "No problem," said the recruiter. "We will take care of you." The uninvited visitor ultimately agreed to go away, indicating that some free choice still exists in Cuba. But that the summons can come at all shows just how fragile that freedom remains.

While the typical Cuban struggles to live off his various resources, he cannot fail to notice that his leader is spending lavishly on grand public relations flourishes: building giant convention centers, inviting outsiders to inspect the Revolution at government expense, sending more than 800 athletes to Indianapolis for the Pan American Games last month. Even malcontents, however, are often willing to absolve their boss of the blame. "The Bearded One is a good man," says a critic of the government. "He understands everything. But the people around him are no good." Like many comments, that implies a deep anxiety about what will happen if Castro is succeeded by his less charismatic, more dogmatic younger brother Raul, currently Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

In spite, or maybe because, of all the discordant bass notes, the government constantly tries to drum up new support. Billboards, telephone poles, even entire buildings are awash in exhortations: NOW IS THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE; THE FIRST DUTY OF REVOLUTION IS TO WORK; TODAY WE ARE PROTAGONISTS IN AN AGE WHEN EVEN THE EVERYDAY CAN BE HEROIC. Earlier this year, half a block in Vedado was given over to a multicolored Communist Youth pavilion pulsing with catchy rock tunes. More recently, small towns across the country were plastered with posters declaring, IT IS ALWAYS THE 26TH, in honor of the anniversary of the Revolution's opening shot on July 26, 1953.

Castro reserves his most strident gestures for his neighbor across the water. Immediately opposite the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a branch of the Swiss embassy staffed by 20 Americans, a neon sign featuring a caricatured version of Uncle Sam and a Cuban guerrilla still flashes the message MR. IMPERIALISTS! WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FEAR OF YOU! Turn on the TV on a typical day, and you will find a documentary about Mafiosi drug lords in the South Bronx. Go to a bookstore, and the main specimen of English literature on display is The Godfather.

Not surprisingly, many citizens feel insulted by what one calls "these prerecorded tapes the government tries to play in my head." In private, they prefer to swap rumors about their leader or insult his Soviet patrons. Asked if he learned Russian in school, a church worker exclaims, "I would rather die!" Grumbles a construction worker nearby, "I would never buy anything Russian. You might as well throw your money away !"

The flip side of that preference, and surely the most subversive fact of life in Cuba, is the simple, tantalizing closeness of the U.S. Donald Duck stickers are a status symbol everywhere in Havana, and audiences cheer on the Goonies with much more gusto than the propaganda shorts that precede the feature film. At a local baseball game a foreign service officer asks desperately for the latest about the New York Mets' Dwight Gooden. Almost everyone has a close friend, an uncle, even a parent in the U.S., whose reports of the affluent society they are not inclined to write off as propaganda. Small wonder, then, that in June alone more than 50 Cubans splashed ashore in Florida, while almost simultaneously two of Castro's top aides defected to the U.S.

Not all young Cubans are hostile to their system. "Look at me," says a nattily dressed, blond 24-year-old who spent two years stationed in Angola. "Do I look like the kind of guy you Americans call a mercenary? Do I have horns on my head? Sure, we have problems over there, just like you guys did in Viet Nam. But we had help from the East Germans and others in our Revolution, and it is our turn to help others. It is important that we repay our debts."

For such firm loyalists, ideology knows no borders. "I think Bruce Springsteen is a blind nationalist," proclaims the former trooper in the easy drawl he has copied from Florida deejays. "Sure! Just look at that title, Born in the U.S.A.!" Even here, though, things are not quite as clear as they seem. In the ex-soldier's spacious home off once splendorous Fifth Avenue, a picture of Che Guevara stares across at an equally large poster of Barry Manilow. Downtown in central Havana, a 15-year-old schoolgirl goes him one better. On top of her dresser she has carefully fashioned a collage of her three great heroes: Michael Jackson, Jesus and Che. Thus the unlikely eclecticism of Cuba's revolutionary experiment.