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How I Found the American Dream Alive and Well in Cuba of All Countries
By Mattea Kramer [1] / TomDispatch [2]
April 11, 2017
Ill tell you up front that my personal vehicle has crowns of rust on the
rear wheel wells and an interior that smells vaguely of dog puke. Its a
2006 Mazda3 with 150,244 miles on it and it gets me around my modest world
well enough, but I sure never considered it the stuff of headlines -- until
I went to Cuba, an experience that tuned up my feelings about several
American phenomena.
Id booked the trip because I wanted to get out of this American time. Cuba
seemed like a prime destination for escape: a nearby yet isolated island
where the culture had developed without... well, us. But after United Flight
1502 had touched down in an airfield where lush green hangs over the
encircling chain-link, and a rusted sedan dropped my husband Fletcher and me
in trash-strewn central Havana, I began to understand that Cuba isnt so
much a great place to get lost in, as a place to get found in.
Why are rich countries rich? Alexander asked us, from the front seat of
his 1955 Easter-egg-pink Ford Fairlane. He glanced our way in the rearview
mirror, beneath which a huge yellow TAXI sign rested on the glossy pink
dash. His tone tipped us off that his query was rhetorical, so we waited
patiently for the answer. They suck something from somewhere else, he
said. And thats why Cuba is poor. We never suck nothing from no one.
What little we knew about Cuban history confirmed this, so Fletcher and I
nodded.
Alexander wondered aloud about the U.S. embargo [3] -- el bloqueo [4], as
its called here. How could Washington still be afraid of Cuba? He gestured
at the scenery, mostly vegetation punctuated by the occasional lone roadside
vendor selling ropes of garlic or handfuls of potatoes. "We have nothing
here," he said.
You know what the Cuban dream is? he continued. To own a car.
We hadnt, in fact, known this. And while Alexander himself was apparently
doing well by this metric, most of his country is not. Cuba is famous [5]
for its antique American cars, a favorite attraction for tourists. But to
Cubans, those ancient vehicles -- whose only original parts are their steel
bodies, welded together and repainted untold numbers of times -- are just
evidence of their islands pervasive scarcity. There certainly arent enough
cars, or buses, or motorcycles, or motor scooters, for all the people who
want them. This was a fact with which I became personally acquainted on my
second day in the country when Fletcher and I tried to buy bus tickets out
of the capital city. Everything, we'd discovered, was booked. Everything!
And the bus stations were mobbed with people trying to get their hands on
tickets.
I was learning that Cuba is a lot more complicated than it appears from the
north side of the Straits of Florida. In the U.S., we generally only talk
about Cuba since 1959, when Fidel Castro [6] came to power, publicly
renounced U.S. imperialism, declared his communist intentions, and cozied up
with the Soviet Union. Washington responded first with the embargo, now more
than half-a-century old, and later with several attempts to topple or simply
assassinate [7] Castro. No dice on unseating or killing el líder (despite
the CIAs [8] poisoned cigars and exploding seashells), but the embargo,
which prohibited trade with Cuba and made it illegal for Americans to visit
-- and which surely hurts innocent Cubans far more than any government
official -- has stuck. In 2016, President Obama relaxed [9] some of its
rules so that Americans can nowlegally visit [10], subject to certain
limitations; our new president could rescind that freedom on a whim.
But theres another part of the Cuban story, the part where American
corporations expeditiously capitalized on the destruction left behind by
Cubas long war for independence from Spain, buying up land and taking over
much of the islands lucrative sugar industry at the turn of the twentieth
century. The United Fruit Company, more famous for inflicting lasting damage
[11] in Central and South America than in the Caribbean, ran a titanic sugar
operation [12] in Cuba, and did the same thing there as in other Latin
American countries: it extracted wealth and funneled it to American bank
accounts. When Castro came on the scene with plans to overthrow U.S.-backed
dictator Fulgencio Batista, he was successful in part because that grim
history of American exploitation helped make his revolution popular. In the
U.S., we generally omit [13] this part of the story.
And once youve glimpsed that fuller picture, it sure seems like Castro had
justice on his side when he emerged victorious on New Years Day 1959,
although things soon grew complicated [14] for the Cuban people. Its true
that Castro would orchestrate certain genuine social achievements like a
national health care system and near universal literacy, but he also set
about executing [15] his political opponents and closing down radio and
television stations that werent controlled by the state. Over the ensuing
decades, large numbers of people were imprisoned [16] for political crimes,
and others starved [17] for lack of basic foodstuffs under the communist
regime. Things got especially tricky when the Soviet Union, a crucial trade
partner for the little country (given the U.S. embargo) imploded. Millions
of Cubans fled to the U.S. and elsewhere. Like so many other struggles in
human history, what had begun as an uprising against an oppressor became a
new form of oppression. And despite its embargo and its past acts, the
United States, the former oppressor, became, for many Cubans, a sort of
savior.
In the backseat of Alexanders 1955 Ford, we toured the Bay of Pigs [18],
the very spot where thousands of CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed under the
cover of darkness in 1961 with doomed hopes of overthrowing Castro, and
where American B-26 bombers (slyly repainted to look like Cuban air force
planes) flew overhead on orders from officials in Washington who hoped for
the installation of a pro-U.S. government. Washington wasnt motivated by a
desire to help the Cuban people, naturally, but rather to refashion this
Caribbean island into the American toy that it had for so long been.
Today, around that same bay, theres a string of quiet beach towns where you
can buy fruit from a horse-drawn cart -- not because horse-drawn carts are
quaint and charming, but because the fruit vendor couldnt get his hands on
a car.
Two Cars in Dallas
Cubans dont chat about the matter casually, but there were 7,900 [19]
reports of arbitrary detention of Cuban citizens by their government in just
eight months in 2016, according to Human Rights Watch. Those detained are
regularly accused of counter-revolutionary, or anti-government,
activities. Its common [19] practice for detainees to be beaten and held
for days without access to a phone or other means of communication. At the
same time, the government maintains control of all sanctioned media outlets
and blocks access to nearly all others, so information is scarce.
Independent journalists are routinely jailed.
As it turns out, just a few days before I landed in Cuba a journalist was
arrested [20] while en route to Havana, where he planned to cover a ceremony
in which political dissidents would present an award to a Uruguayan diplomat
who had spoken out against the Cuban government. The journalist, who had
previously co-founded a magazine thats critical of living conditions in
Cuba, was charged with fomenting enemy propaganda. He never made it to
Havana to cover the ceremony, but that didnt really matter, because the
Uruguayan diplomat was denied a visa to enter the country, and the whole
thing had to be cancelled.
I was still only becoming acquainted with such facts when I met Cedro, who
gave Fletcher and me a brief walking tour of sewage-scented central Havana.
We quickly began to chat and soon our conversation strayed into his personal
life, including the fact that both his children had left Cuba in search of
opportunity elsewhere. His older son had gone to Costa Rica and then
traveled north until finally crossing the U.S. border. Now, the son and his
wife live in Dallas, where they own two cars. Cedro emphasized the part
about the cars. So they were finally living the Cuban dream -- in north
Texas.
Cedro was a lot more delicate when it came to discussing Cuban politics.
Dancing around my questions about life here, he finally shook his head and
said, One president all these years? One person cant do it. And here, the
president also controls the army. He pantomimed getting shot.
One afternoon in Havana, while I was walking along a promenade that
stretched from the capital to the coast, I passed a group of police with two
muzzled German shepherds. Milking my foreign innocence, I went up to them
and asked, What are the dogs for? I figured they might not be too
forthcoming, so I offered a possible answer: Drugs?
One of the officers, a woman, nodded. Then an officer by her side made a
gesture Id already seen several times: the right hand closing over the left
wrist. I wasnt sure quite what it meant in this context, but it didnt seem
impossible that it was the fate of nosy foreigners, so I nodded, smiled, and
continued on my way.
In Plaza Vieja, in Havanas most touristy neighborhood, I met a kid named
Alex who works as a bow-tied waiter at an open-air cafe. We first spoke in
Spanish, but when I faltered he switched to flawless English, explaining
that hed taught himself the language by watching old American movies. A
self-starter, you could call him. He told me that he has family in Nevada,
but when I asked if he was considering emigrating, he shook his head
ruefully. He has to keep working to support his family here, he said. But if
he could, he went on, he would head for the U.S. and go to college.
Brief though my trip was, I met many Cubans like Alex. And each of their
stories was a reminder of the pull of the superpower to the north, whose
economy is still a magnet for the rest of the planet. Despite deplorable
American politics, past and present, the U.S. still glowed with the promise
of something better.
Hitting the Road in a Mazda3
From the Bay of Pigs we took a shared taxi through Cienfuegos, a city in
central Cuba, and then south toward the coast again, speeding through
Jurassic Park-like terrain in a 1948 DeSoto as the wind blew my hair. We
hiked a damp forest in a mountainous region and spotted a Prairie Warbler, a
yellow songbird that migrates thousands of miles to nest in the northeastern
U.S., often in trees outside my home.
When only a day remained before our flight back to the States, we climbed
into another shared taxi, a 1990 Peugeot, in which Fletcher rode shotgun and
I sat in the narrow backseat with a French couple. On our way to Havana, we
soon got to chatting with the driver, Jimeno (also not his real name), who
looked to be in his early thirties. This was not, he told us, his car.
Rather, he works for a company that pays him peanuts to spend 14 hours a day
shuttling tourists between the coast and the capital city.
For a while, we drove on in silence. Then he said something I hadnt heard
from anyone else. Perhaps, he commented, sometime after 85-year-old Raúl
Castro, the countrys president, passes away, there will be an actual
election in Cuba.
Do you think that will happen in your lifetime? I asked.
Dont know, he said.
Since Fidels reign began 58 years ago, the Cuban people have not had a
meaningful say in their countrys future. Over the same period, the U.S. has
elected 12 different presidents.
I had come here because I wanted to escape the newest of those presidents
and this fearful time in the United States. In choosing Cuba, I had
exercised a small, touristic freedom that we may soon lose, depending on how
our new leader uses his considerable, though not limitless, power. But I had
escaped nothing, it turned out, in part because in our present world of
intricate and intricately connected troubles, a world in which vast
population transfers [21] are becoming commonplace and in which literally
millions of people are crossing borders in varying states of desperation,
its an illusion to think that anywhere could be an escape.
Instead of leaving my country behind, I spent two weeks in Cuba
rediscovering it. I grew intimately familiar with some of the worst of our
history, which so many of us are quick to ignore or elide, but also with
some of the best parts of our national identity. For all our screw-ups, and
even as we continue to create disasters around the world and deny our
responsibility for them, were still a place of possibility. It turns out
that even my rusty Mazda is evidence of that.
And here was the secret prize in my box of Cuban crackerjacks: our new
leader and his benighted crew in Washington suddenly looked so much smaller,
shrunk to the size of a half-forgotten island, shrunk to the size of a
single episode in an endless history. I had glimpsed some of whats bad
about my own country, but also what remains hopeful, and both are far bigger
than Donald Trump and will surely persist long after hes but an unsavory
page in history. More importantly, each of us here in the U.S. has a small
yet crucial role to play in what happens next. Its something I think about
every time I put the key in my Mazda3 and hit the road.
Mattea Kramer is a research analyst at the National Priorities Project [22].
She co-wrote the soon-to-be-published book A Peoples Guide to the Federal
Budget [23], and co-hosts weekly two-minute Budget Brief videos on YouTube.