Cuba Si, North Korea No

By Pico Iyer

Those geopoliticians who have been hungering for an aftermath to the cold war -- a tragicomic sequel -- have been richly rewarded over this summer, as two of the last stalwarts of communism, North Korea and Cuba, have rattled their rhetorical sabers, flourished their poker hands and roared their threats into the wind. Though both of them have something of the air of those Japanese soldiers lost in the Southeast Asian jungle and unaware that the war they have been fighting was concluded long ago, both also have the desperate -- and therefore dangerous -- recklessness of isolated dictatorships whose coffers are close to empty.

Both lonely places are in some respects still locked in 1953 (the year when Fidel Castro launched his first rebel assault and when Kim Il Sung began building his ghost republic), and both are further hemmed in by their commitment to guerrilla leaders who really did help to free their people from foreign domination. Yet beneath those surface similarities, North Korea and Cuba are as different as Doctor Strangelove and Doctor Zhivago, as different as a made-to-order Stalinist dystopia where not a thought is out of place and an unruly Caribbean island that is the stuff of Marx's nightmares. In North Korea the government tells every citizen what to wear every day; in Cuba even soldiers help streetwalkers hustle foreign clothes.

When I flew into North Korea, I felt as if I had landed in another galaxy. It was not just the spotless, carless streets, the loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda at dawn, the faceless groups of people filing silently from Kim Il Sung Stadium to Kim Il Sung University to Kim Il Sung Higher Party School (all with badges of Kim Il Sung on their hearts); it was, even more, the spooky unreality of a country that was building a 105-story tourist hotel while allowing almost no tourists, and showing off an Olympic stadium for the Games that were never held there. A typical book on sale was a biography of the new President, Kim's son, Kim Jong Il. Titled The Great Man KIM JONG IL (and boasting a picture of the Kimjongilia flower on its cover), it included chapters titled "Boundless Solicitude," "A World-Startling Miracle" and "The Once Annoying Mountains of Waste Turned into Priceless Embankment," and concluded with an account of the Christlike leader ordering the clouds to move.

Six trips to Cuba, by contrast, have brought home to me only that the country's agony lies in its proximity to the world. Nearly everyone in Cuba has close relatives in the U.S., 90 miles away, and the opportunity, increasingly, to meet (and mate) with visitors from Toronto and Madrid. Fidel Castro, if only out of shrewdness, has decreed that no school or street may be named after the living (hence Che Guevara is ubiquitous), and insofar as he has developed a personality cult, has done so mostly by default: revealing almost nothing about himself, and letting speculation do the rest. Where North Korean radios are fixed so as to receive only one (government) channel, Cuban radios are, willy-nilly, open to the world.

What this means is that Cuba, at least to some extent, is on our wavelength, as the Hermit Kingdom never could be. Castro has eaten hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, been carried by cheering students around the Princeton campus and appeared on the Tonight Show. Though none of that ensures affection and all those memories are distant, someone who spent his honeymoon in New York City knows at least a little of America. Kim Jong Il, by comparison, is famous as the one leader who may never have met an American. And, being unable to put a face to his enemy, seems much more liable to set his cross hairs on him.

It will never be easy to talk, or deal, with North Korea, an almost cultish hall of mirrors ruled by a neophyte whose only qualification for power is his patrimony. Cuba, to be sure, has many Potemkin surfaces, plus all the brutality of a police state, but its people are worldly enough at least to know how much salt to sprinkle on their slogans, and its leader, up against his ninth American President, is canny enough to adapt a little to the times. While Cuban official billboards occasionally note how "Pride" in the Revolution has led to "Upset" and "Disenchantment," North Korean propaganda manuals are still churning out sentences like "Korea has large amounts of slime in Lake Sijung and other places, which is very effective against diseases."

We are right, then, to fear North Korea, a country so far removed from us that it does not know, or seem to care about, the assumptions of the world. Yet Cuba, whose destiny has been entwined with ours for almost a century, is deserving of our respect and our sympathy. For three decades now, the U.S. has been Castro's greatest ally, allowing him to turn each bungled assault into a propaganda victory and to present himself, with some justification, as a resolute David standing up to a bullying Goliath. Now Washington has the rare chance to do with Havana what it could scarcely do with Pyongyang, which is to go the master mischiefmaker one step better -- and help 11 million hungry people -- by offering them (surprise!) a helping hand.