Here Come the Yummies

By CATHY BOOTH/HAVANA

He pedals to work on his purple Phoenix bicycle dressed in jeans and a T shirt, with an amiable bodyguard tailing behind on another bike. At the office, he changes to his dressed-up look: a suit with a black T shirt. He says he wouldn't be caught dead in a guayabera, the traditional tropical shirt favored by older Cubans.

With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh wondering how Robaina might dress for an appearance at the United Nations. But Castro was clear about his reasons: "We needed someone young."

Robaina's appointment marks the rise of a new breed in Havana: the young upwardly mobile Marxists, or yummies. They were just babes in arms or school kids when Castro's socialist revolutionaries swept down out of the Sierra Maestra mountains 34 years ago. Now in their 30s and early 40s, educated and ambitious, the yummies hold the key to Cuba's future.

The island is facing the ultimate hurdle of a revolutionary society -- whether its ideals can survive beyond the first generation. Subsidies from the former Soviet Union have been slashed, and the U.S. embargo continues to strangle trade, pushing Cuba's economy into an ever deepening slump. Castro's young successors know change is inevitable, but they are determined to control that change rather than let the country fall into the hands of the capitalist exiles in Miami, 90 miles away. The yummies want the best of both worlds: the health and educational advances of Castro's revolution and a good meal.

In a country of 10.8 million people largely dispirited by the daily grind of finding enough to eat, these young careerists seem energized by the challenges. Whether they prove to have staying power remains to be seen, but there is no doubt they are currently gaining favor. In the past two years, at least half the new positions in the Politburo and Castro's Cabinet have been filled with young comers. The economic czar is another bike-riding yummie, Carlos Lage Davila, a 41-year-old pediatrician who is credited with designing Cuba's aggressive new policy to attract foreign investment. He may be the most important man in Cuba after Fidel and his brother Raul. A 28-year-old mechanical engineer, Felipe Perez Roque, serves as Castro's informal chief of staff.

The list of influential yummies includes Concepcion Campa, a 41-year-old biochemist who runs the Finlay Institute, where she helped develop a new meningitis vaccine. She serves on the Politburo along with Abel Prieto, 42, whose casual long hair belies his importance as head of the Cuban Writers and Artists Union. At the communist newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the 35-year-old director Jesus Martinez has tried to inject a livelier style for its young readers.

Ask them outright if they are Marxists, and these young people admit that the definition is undergoing refinement. They embrace a kind of fuzzy, New Age Marxism. The word communism has disappeared from their vocabulary, but the idea of profitmaking capitalist bosses is still repugnant to them. They are nationalists first, ideologues second. "I refuse to accept the idea that there is only one way or one model," says Robaina. "We're living in extremely complex times for which no one has an exact recipe."

As Cuba's economy is decentralized, hundreds of young Marxists are ) experimenting with modified capitalism. Two young women lawyers run Cuba's biggest consulting firm, which encourages foreign investors. Cubanacan, a successful tourism company, is managed by youthful entrepreneurs who speak English as if they were brought up in Miami. No one can get an appointment with manager Carlos Garcia; he is always off to Mexico making deals to build hotels in Cuba. Octavio Castilla Cangas, 44, an expert in semiconductor electronics, promotes foreign investment for the ponderously named State Committee for Economic Collaboration. Its new 75-page book lists 130 industries, from telecommunications to oil, open to foreign investment.

The dollars brought in by foreign investors are not enough to jump-start Cuba's domestic economy, but they are having an effect. "There's been a massive change of mentality with the inclusion of the dollar," explains Pedro Monreal, 35, an economist recently elected to the 589-seat National Assembly. "Foreign investors are now the most dynamic factor in the Cuban economy, and this is just the beginning."

Young Marxists like Monreal see no irony, only necessity, in working with capitalists to learn what the older generation remembers: how a free market operates. "We have to play by the rules of the capitalist game to survive," says Patricia Arango, a 34-year-old economist who compiles information for foreigners on Cuban products. "Before, with the help of the Soviet Union, we were freer to apply our socialist theories," she says. "Now we have no other alternative."

There is no ignoring Cuba's abysmal state. In the three years since Soviet aid was virtually eliminated, the island's overseas buying power has dropped from $8 billion to $2 billion. Food, fuel and consumer goods are in critically short supply. Blackouts darken the capital 16 hours a week. Bicycles are the principal mode of transportation. Anything edible is rationed: for adults, there is virtually no meat and only the occasional egg.

People learn to develop a taste for concoctions like sugar pizzas, herbal coffee, potato-based mayonnaise. Hospitals are jammed with patients terrified by an outbreak of ocular neuropathy, a disease exacerbated by vitamin deficiencies that so far has affected the eyesight and nervous system of 30,000 people. "You see people literally starving themselves to give to their kids," says a weary man who supports eight households in Havana.

The few goods available are prohibitively expensive. A bar of soap costs a quarter of a month's salary. Women are supposed to get one dress a year, but there have been none to buy for two years. Prostitution is growing: young women in skintight skirts sell themselves to Italian and Spanish businessmen for meals at tourist restaurants.

The safety valve is Cuba's surging black market, conducted in both pesos and dollars that often come from relatives living in the U.S. In Havana vendors go door to door selling meat and milk at 40 to 50 times the official cost. Imported TVs, priced at $150 apiece, slip out the back door of government warehouses for an additional $10 bribe. Illegal antennas bought with dollars pick up U.S. channels. So pervasive is the dollar that workers in the beach resort of Varadero are now permitted to use their dollar tips to buy imported goods at an experimental store. Later this year, the government will open two more dollar-only stores for Cubans in Varadero, plus one in Havana. There are even rumors that the dollar will be made legal tender.

At the same time, the dollar economy is giving rise to a privileged class increasingly independent of the government. Cuba's newest companies are state enterprises with quasi-private stockholders: foreign partners can repatriate their profits, but Cuban stockholders must plow any gain back into the company or it goes to the state. Harvard University professor and Cuba expert Jorge Dominguez notes, however, that it is just a short step to total privatization. Many older Cubans see the yummies as mere opportunists in this process. "The yummies want to be the new political and economic power," says a Havana businessman who discovered that only Communist Party members were allowed into the vibrant private sector. "They're Marxists now, but they'll be big capitalists when the time comes."

For now, the young Marxists are advocating economic change before political change -- the path the Chinese insist they are taking, in contrast to the approach favored by Mikhail Gorbachev when he ran the Soviet Union. "Communist parties around the world have faced our same dilemma, the sequence of reform," says Monreal. "In Cuba's case, the choice was to promote economic reform first. That will transform the state." The yummies admit that major alterations in the political system are unlikely anytime soon. "How can you open up political reform while the economy is a mess? It's suicidal," argues political scientist Santiago Perez Benitez. "Gorbachev did that, but now there's no one in Russia to make the economic changes."

Havana is haunted by rumors of a massive shake-up in the coming months, with young Marxists taking over more ministries. "Many people see the economic crisis in Cuba as an opportunity," says a Communist Party insider. "Robaina and Lage are Castro's natural inheritors. They realize they will have to open Cuba, but they want to be in power before they negotiate an opening." The yummies, however, are in a race against time: in the post-cold war world, turmoil could sweep Cuba before they are ready to take over.