Martin Henry THE REVOLUTION is in your face - everywhere - from the billboard slogans and the ubiquitous presence of Che's face, to the patriotic choral recitations rendered by secondary school students for their visitors.
Surprisingly, it is the image of the Argentine Ernesto 'Che' Guevara which is the most popular and visible symbol of the Cuban Revolution, not that of Fidel Castro the Leader of the Revolution whom everybody simply calls Fidel. Fidel's face is simply not profiled on the streets, on his instructions, we are told. Invisible, except for strategic appearances, powerful, god-like.
One quickly senses the popular mood that the state is embodied in the revolutionary heroes, and particularly in the Leader of the Revolution. Quite apart from any revolutionary commitment on the part of the people, it must be remembered that Fidel Castro is one of the world's longest serving heads of state/heads of government. He is in his 44th year as Leader and the vast majority of Cubans know no one else and nothing else.
A study tour organised by the University of Technology and led by Bramwell Shepherd's Centro Latino allowed the fulfilment of a life-long dream to visit our neighbour next door. There was a healthy traffic of people and of goods between Jamaica and Cuba in pre-revolutionary times. I have family in Cuba with whom we have long lost contact. We met two people in Havana with Jamaican roots: a school teacher whose husband's grand-parents are Forbes and a man on the street who proudly displayed his national identification card, which all citizens must have on their persons at all times, with the name White-horne. His paternal grand-parents were migrants from here.
The Revolution converted a mere 100 miles of Caribbean Sea, which separate us, into thousands of miles of space between our peoples. There is a growing tourist traffic, like us. The major Jamaican hotel chains, Sandals and SuperClubs have properties in the fabulous north coast tourism strip of Varadero, which is not unlike our North Coast except on a bigger, grander scale.
JAMAICAN STUDENTS
Jamaican students are in Cuba among 50,000 foreign students generously offered scholarships from 92 countries. We met two of them at El Instituto Superior Politecnico 'Jose Antonio Echeverria' (CUJAE) de la Habana. Both are in Telecom-munications and Informatics. Raphael Emmanuel is from Constitution Hill in St. Andrew and Damion Fagan is from Top Hill, St. Elizabeth. Damion is set to marry a Mozambican girl whom he met in Cuba, and the wedding will be in Africa!
Cuba is a land of sharp contrasts. The egalitarian society has not arrived, 44 years into the Revolution. Class and race stratification is obvious to any visitor with only one eye. Poverty and wealth rub shoulders and the dark-skinned segment of the population is disproportionately at the bottom. Our tour guide, an articulate, bilingual, multi-racial university student spoke of the persistence of racism. Begging and prostitution, tacitly tolerated by the authorities, are indices of the economic pressures on the Revolution.
We were the victims of harassers who way-lay tourists near the hotels to offer all kinds of services most tenaciously but not as aggressively as Jamaican harassers. On the positive side, it is remarkable how many of these people and other Cubans can speak passable English. Second-language education is treated seriously in the Cuban education system while we joke around with teaching Spanish, dwelling in a sea of the language. I envied our bilingual tour organiser from UTech, Bradna McLaren, on whom we depended so heavily to navigate the Spanish sea.
The streets are clean. They are largely pothole-free and are lined with trees everywhere and have well groomed verges and medians. The houses mostly have not been painted in decades and even the large, gracious pre-revolution upper-class properties now inhabited by the proletariat are badly stripping and peeling.
SENSE OF ORDER
There is a sense of order. There is an armed police officer on every street corner and several other categories of security people everywhere present. Unarmed army personnel, men and women in their bright olive green uniforms, mix freely with the population. Two of us walking came upon a heavily guarded facility with soldiers 10 paces apart all around it. We were politely but firmly directed to walk on the other side of the street. We later learned from our tour guide that the unsigned building housed the American interest section.
I had to check my own observation with colleagues that there seem to be an inordinate number of people just hanging around on the streets of Havana. Residential areas are closely mixed in with commercial, administrative and hotel areas and there is just a very large number of people around who seem not to be gainfully employed. Just before we got there, El Commandante himself, throwing aside the niceties of diplomatic protocol, led a march of hundreds of thousands against the Spanish embassy on June 12 to protest "European interference in Cuba's internal affairs" over the execution of the ferry hijackers. His brother and First vice-president, Raul and old Majors of the Revolution led a parallel march on the Italian embassy.
It is easy to see how these people can be so readily mobilised. The Plaza de la Revolucion, ringed by Government and Communist Party offices, the Ministries of the Army and the Interior (police, etc.) and the National Library and Arts Centre, is designed with a huge pavement to accommodate over a million people, and Castro often speaks for hours from a raised dias near the monument of National Hero Jose Marti.
The love/hate relationship with the Yanqui imperialistas is palpable. Cuba lives in a state of perpetual siege and defence of the Revolution. Yet surprisingly there is a distinct US dollar economy as one of at least three economies. There is also a formal Cuban peso economy and a vast underground economy. We made no exchanges in pesos. Even in the craft markets sellers roll out bundles of US dollars to make change. The Cuban Government mints fake US coins to provide change in the US$ economy. In an economy where official salaries are running between US$10 and $20, there are a lot of US dollars around in the hands of ordinary people, indicating the strength of remittances and the black market.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
