May 24, 1999

By John J. Putman
National Geographic, June 1999

I remember my first trip to Cuba just days after Fidel Castro and his guerrilleros seized Havana in 1959; I remember how young the guerrilleros looked, how exuberant, and how they smiled and waved their weapons. Last year I returned to Cuba and found not exuberance but uncertainty, struggle, change. Fidel Castro, comandante en jefe, (commander in chief), still dominates the island, his hand everywhere. But he is aging, and people wonder who will replace him and when. And the end of economic and military aid from the old Soviet Union cut Cuba's income by a third and has led the island to search for new sources of money, new friends, new ways of doing things.

The shortage of money is everywhere apparent: The magnificent city of Havana is dimly lit and filled with crumbling buildings; government ration books provide one bread roll per day per person; shortages make it hard to have chicken more than three or four times a year; government stores often lack potatoes. Soap, shampoo, deodorant, detergent, and cooking oil are hard to find. Well-trained, hardworking doctors earn 200 pesos [U.S. $20] a month from the state and often moonlight to make ends meet. Medicine is lacking, equipment is old, even aspirin is difficult to find. And old socialist controls remain in force.

But there is a second Cuba, the new Cuba. It focuses on tourism and the global market. Shiny new hotels dot the island, offering abundant food and drink to visitors from Europe, Canada, Latin America. New Korean tourist taxis seem to outnumber the vintage American cars for which Havana has long been famous. The historic heart of Old Havana is being restored to attract more tourists. To increase foreign sales and investment at home, Cuban companies seek partners from capitalist countries. The U.S. dollar is the de facto second currency, wielded by all foreign travelers and flowing in by the millions as remittances from relatives in the United States and other nations. These dollars have created a second society, able to buy more, live better.

The two Cubas, old and new, seem in conflict.

So what will the future look like? I went to the University of Havana to ask students. "About the same," some said. "Much different," others replied. A graduate student said, "We are living in an age of reorganization. We see it every day in class and in daily life. The Cuban economy is going to be restructured, decentralized, become more spontaneous, and Cuba will be inserted into the global economy. I hope we can survive." Would these economic changes lead to political change? "This is not the current tendency."

Castro was one subject the voluble Cubans were hesitant to discuss. Should he retire, I asked one young man. "To retire would be cowardly," he said. Later he added, in the words of an old Spanish proverb: "No hay mal que dure cien años ni cuerpo que lo resista—There is no illness that lasts a hundred years and no body that could endure it." Cuba's ideological guide remains, a Communist Party official told me, "the ideas of Fidel, the example of Fidel." The comandante ends many speeches: "We will never surrender. Socialism or death!"

So Cuba's future remains an enigma. Possibilities include, a U.S. State Department official said, "a gradual, peaceful transition to democracy, or chaos, or something else. No one knows." Meanwhile the U.S. embargo, forbidding commerce with Cuba, continues. But visits between the two countries by artists, scholars, and baseball players have created informal links. The future of the relationship remains, as does the future of Cuba, unclear.

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