· · ·
In the days that followed, Europeans made many guesses as to why the Nigerians had taken the ceremony so calmly. I can bear witness that the Nigerians did, by and large, take it calmly—not only at the racecourse but afterward. An hour-long rocket display followed the flag changing, and I found that the first fifteen minutes of it were about all my enthusiasm could put up with, so I rose to leave. The last thing I heard before I departed was another exchange between the Nigerian official and the European woman from my van.
“Every time one of those rockets goes off, I shudder, thinking of what it’s costing the people,” the woman said. “It’s all got to come out of the national exchequer.”
“It is only for once in history, and they love fireworks,” the Nigerian replied, and I thought that his tone had become definitely impatient.
Jack saw me from his seat in the stands as I was going out, and came down to join me. Getting in his car, we drove into town to see what was going on, and found almost nothing. In the streets there was peace, even lassitude. The biggest excitement was provided by a couple of white-robed drunks, helping each other across the street and shouting cheerily for Independa. We went to a place that Jack was sure would be lively—the popular Island Club. Though crowded and full of brilliant cotton prints and glittery evening gowns, it was not lively. A band was playing popular “high-life” music, but nobody was dancing. People came in, looked around, greeted friends and smiled, then sat down and lapsed into silence. Our table was on a balcony over the bandstand, and at the next table a man in rich draperies removed his sandals, propped his bare feet on the railing, slid comfortably down in his chair until he was balanced on his shoulder blades, and fell asleep.
“I think everybody’s just shagged out, that’s it,” Jack said. “After all, they’ve been celebrating steadily for a whole week.”
I said that I, too, was tired, and I went back to my hotel and to bed.
One other Nigerian’s reaction to Independence comes to mind, as an Englishwoman related it to me on the day after the flag changing. “Our party was standing on a balcony of that scarcely finished new skyscraper next to the racecourse, and we had a splendid view,” she said. “Some of the builders’ workmen were still around, and they were standing near us. As the old flag was lowered—and that was beautifully arranged, don’t you think, with the light going out and all?—I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. I was expecting the workmen to behave in some wildly happy way, and I wasn’t sure I could stand it without bursting into tears. But no. They did nothing. Only, I heard one say softly, ‘Bye-bye.’ ”
Hans Koningsberger
JUNE 10, 1961
MAY 21
IN SPITE OF the headlines, in spite of all the shouting, Cuba would now be the ideal vacation country for the real snobs, for that vanishing generation of travellers who refuse to hobnob with hoi polloi from home on any terms. Because here, for the first time since the British discovered and then ruined the French Riviera, is a country with splendid beaches, good hotels, most of the comforts of home, and not a single tourist. No English-speaking guides, no shady gentlemen with dubious Parker pens for sale, no boys pursuing the visitor with the birdlike Latin-European money cry of “Mister! Hey, Mister!” In fact, one can drive from Pinar del Rio to Santiago de Cuba without hearing a word of English. Most of the familiar signs are still there—Goodyear, Sears, Woolworth—but the subtitle “Nacionalizada” gives them a darkly different accent. There are gas stations aplenty, but the Shell and Esso shields have been removed from their roadside signposts, and the empty curlicued frames are much more attractive than they were as supports for the signs themselves. Cuba may be only ninety miles from the United States, but now it seems like thousands….
· · ·
I had my first pro- and counter-revolutionary briefing on the day of my arrival—at cocktail time on the terrace of El Carmelo, still a highly fashionable café in the still fashionable quarter of Vedado. My host was a small, rather used-up old man, a retired professor at the University of Havana; his wife was much younger, and very aggressive. We spoke in French, she continually interrupting him and he almost automatically correcting her language mistakes as they came along. Against a background of waiters busy with screens to keep out a newly pouring rain, she informed me that Cuba had needed a revolution, but not this one. “Life has become so dreary,” she said.
“For instance?”
For instance, El Encanto, the most splendid department store in all of Latin America, had been burned down by its personnel to protest its nationalization.
The professor snorted. Clearly enough, he said, the store had been burned down by counter-revolutionaries with professional phosphorus bombs, not by disgruntled clerks; it had been totally destroyed.
“The owner used to live right across the street from here, but he’s now in Miami,” his wife said. “And this restaurant used to be so crowded by six o’clock.”
“Martí—” the professor began, referring to José Martí, the Cuban George Washington and Herbert Spencer rolled into one.
“Oh, Martí!” his wife exclaimed with intense boredom.
The professor became indignant. “Shall we speak of Batista, then?” he asked his wife. “This was an indecent country,” he told me, as his wife stopped listening. “It was repugnant to be a Cuban. There was nothing but deals, nothing but corruption. Two hundred thousand people holding down botellitas [phony political offices], deputies receiving lifetime pensions of four hundred dollars a month. This revolution cannot be steered like an automobile, even if we want it to be. We waited four hundred years for this, and there was no more time. I am not surprised at the invasion—I am surprised that I should live to hear people like the American President speak about it so cynically.”
I have since seen more of the professor and his wife, and have met other members of their family. He is her second husband, and she is a member of a rich family that had clearly always looked down on him as a man without means, holding a daily job for a living, and too clumsy and do-goody to get in on one of the various get-rich games. The professor’s brother-in-law is a highly prosperous-looking man, as smooth as only Latins, very rich ones, can be; he still has a car with chauffeur. He is a physician by profession but really a politician, the professor told me—a man from the in-group in the Batista era. In a way, the revolution has been a very personal triumph for the professor.
The professor’s wife lost no time getting me involved in a little plot designed to enable her to visit her nephew, who was one of the captured invaders of April 17th. She had told some official that I had come to Cuba to investigate the treatment of these prisoners for the press, and that she was needed as my interpreter, “since French is his only language.” She explained this plot to me during a visit to her house on my third day in Havana. Her sister and the physician were also present. I was very much annoyed; I had come directly from New York, and surely the Cuban government would take a suspicious view of this fantastic story. I said that she should have consulted me first. “Perhaps you’re a Communist?” the sister asked. I said no, but still…At that point, the physician tried to smooth things over by proposing that we all have lunch at La Zaragozana 1830, a wonderful restaurant. I declined, because he somehow implied that I had been holding out for just some little bribe like that. I did not go to see the prisoners with the professor’s wife (they now have permission to be visited by their relatives), but I did pay another visit to the professor’s house. It was late in the evening, and warm, and he and I sat out on the balcony together. The street lay silent below us as he spoke in a hoarse, hasty voice. “Latin America works for the United States,” he said. “That is how the Americans can maintain their celebrated ‘American way of life.’ ” He often used that expression—always in English, always bitterly. “That’s why they’re so haughty about their democracy,” he went on. “That’s why they fear Cuba’s example.” He added, in a whisper, as if to himself, “Ils vont perdre
leur way of life.”…
Obviously, Cuba’s rich are against Castro, and to me, at least, it is also obvious that the poor are with him. The middle class here has never represented a transition between the two, the way it does in the United States and Western Europe. As part of a colonial class structure, it has reached up to the ranks of the rich but not down to those of the poor. The middle class is divided about Castro, but I couldn’t begin to guess percentages, and I haven’t resorted to the usual device of polling taxi-drivers. Then there are the intellectuals—the writers and artists, who in Latin countries form a rather specific group. Pablo Armando Fernandez, an editor of Lunes, who lived in New York for many years, wrote down the names of twelve of them for me, constituting, he said, a solid chunk of the group. (It’s important to remember what a small country Cuba is. Havana is like an eighteenth-century European town, where everyone knew everyone.) All but one of the twelve had lived in exile for some years previous to 1959; under Batista, their own country had nothing to offer them. Their average age was thirty, and they had all known one another even before they converged again on Havana. Two have since turned their backs on Castro and gone into exile again. I have had talks with several of the others. Good things were being done, they assured me; magazines with sophisticated layouts were being published, and plays like Lizarraga’s Santa Juana de America were being produced. Most of these men did not believe in Socialist realism or any other dirigisme, as they called it; they did believe in the revolution, and they hoped (or doubted) that their commitment to it would carry them through the present atmosphere, which has become much more doctrinaire since the invasion attempt. One of them was the Communist political writer mentioned earlier. He started tapping his foot whenever I contradicted him, answered my questions with platitudes, and finally, when we came upon the subject of North Korea’s aggression, called me a C.I.A. agent. The leader of the group, much older than the rest, is Nicolás Guillén, Cuba’s poet laureate, a short, very dark, gray-haired man who reminded me of Paul Muni as Juárez and who is setting up a “writers’ center” in a villa in the Vedado. “Then we can get some work done,” he said. “Now we’re going in all directions.” Guillén clearly likes le dirigisme—with him doing most of it—but whether he will succeed depends on developments far from that cool white mansion on the Calle 17.
· · ·
Mother’s Day may be a Yanqui invention, but that didn’t spoil it for the Cuban government, which observed it by bringing to town for the day fifteen thousand mothers who had never seen Havana. While here, they visited their children, now attending school in the city, and stayed in private homes. All the preceding week, the papers were filled with saccharine drawings and stories about the glories of Cuban motherhood, and Havana’s telephones carried a recorded voice which, between rings, urged the caller waiting for his party to take in a madre campesina as a guest. Since Cubans are never in a hurry to answer the phone, I heard this Brave New World–style message quite a few times that week. Anyway, the mothers came, and on Sunday afternoon they were packed into the Coliseo Nacional to be entertained. I went, because Castro was to come; it would be my first Castro rally. By saying “Periodista” (“Journalist”) often enough, I worked my way up near the speakers’ rostrum, where it was quite cool; in the center arena of the huge, round building and in the lower tiers of seats the heat was suffocating. Every few minutes, a couple of milicianos would dash for an exit with a stretcher bearing a madre campesina who had fainted. I have been in Hitler’s Sportpalast, but the atmosphere here was more like Madison Square Garden: instead of speakers to warm up the audience, there was an endless succession of singers, television comedians, jugglers, guitar players, and all the other moth-eaten vaudeville acts that no war or revolution seems able to banish from this earth. The mothers and their children appeared to like it—those who didn’t faint—and the music was Caribbean and gay. After a long while, a young woman and some young men with sports shirts hanging loose filed onto the rostrum, and an equally sloppy-looking fellow sitting beside me informed me that the girl was Celia Sanchez, a secretary of Castro’s, that the beatniks were Castro’s bodyguards, and that their arrival meant he was in the building.
At that moment, there was the sound of an explosion in the distance. Then, as Castro and his party entered, there was a second explosion. This was my first (and only) encounter with violence in Cuba. A great commotion arose at the exits behind us. An Indian journalist sitting next to me turned as white as his sherwani. Castro stopped and stood still right in front of me, and since bomb throwers traditionally kill an innocent bystander, I prayed for him to move on a bit, which he did not. The audience had gone wild, streaming down into the center arena, waving and dancing and screaming “Paredón! Paredón!” (“To the wall! To the wall!”) Their emotion was a strange mixture of fear turned into defiance and verging on hysteria. They massed below the stand, looking up at Castro, and cheered deafeningly, waving little red-and-white flags. They started singing,
“Somos socialistas,
Palante y palante,
Y al que no le guste
Que tome purgante,”
which proclaims that they’re Socialists, onward and upward, and anyone who doesn’t like it can take a dose of castor oil. Slowly, some calm returned, and from a microphone on the floor the master of ceremonies, choking with emotion, reminded us and Castro that “these people [the counter-revolutionaries] do not know that he and everyone would give their lives for the revolution.” Then he anticlimactically announced a team of folk dancers.
During this incredible row, Castro had looked at once distracted and very sober. He responded to the cheering only with a smile, and not at all to the m.c.’s speech. Then he sat down in a blue chair and began talking to a neighbor. After some more dances, he took his place behind the lectern and started his address. He made no reference to the explosions or the demonstrations but spoke like an earnest school-teacher; every time he was interrupted by applause, he fiddled with the microphone. His subject was illiteracy. As always, Castro repeated each idea several times in different words—a boon to the foreigners in his audience, if not to his staff, which looked slightly bored. In the center of the arena, the women and children and milicianos sat down on the floor, and a light buzz of conversation rose in the hall. The bodyguards on the rostrum lit cigarettes. Castro was tanned, his face without wrinkles, and I thought he looked rather like Humphrey Bogart with a beard. He has the attributes of the great orator—the voice, the pleasure in hearing himself, the gift of deliberately building sentence upon sentence, like a mason constructing a wall (Churchill does this superbly, but Castro uses no notes), and the magnetism, or star quality, as they say on Broadway. He seems possessed, or obsessed, by the need to get his thoughts across. He talked to the mothers for only an hour and a half—the equivalent for him of a few off-the-cuff remarks—and vanished with a wave of his arm, without waiting for the applause. Outside, scores of buses were lining up to cart the mothers off to their next destination—bed, one hoped for their sake….
· · ·
Later, driving around in a rented car of my own wherever fate and my map led me, I came upon a cooperative I.N.R.A. farm called Mamborel, near the small town of Güines. Mamborel grows rice, cane, and vegetables. All three members of the local I.N.R.A. staff insisted on showing me around. There was the filthy old settlement—not much more than a collection of African huts—and then the new I.N.R.A. one, consisting of concrete prefab houses with kitchens and bathrooms, a school, a store, a library, and all that. The village had two teachers—one for children and the other to teach the peasants how to live in houses, for until recently these people had never seen a tap, let alone a toilet. The buildings were painted in various colors and looked fresh and charming. These farms are not true cooperatives but are closer to collectives, and if it is said that the peasants would rather receive land of their own, I am ready to believe it. We had lunch afterward, and while we ate I learned that the three I.N.R.A. men were a
ll in their early twenties—thin, eager, very hard-working. The one in charge commuted daily from Havana by bus; he was married and was waiting for a house to be built for him in Güines. I asked the two others what they did with their evenings. The movies, the bodegas, and walking, they said, and one of them had a sweetheart, a miliciana.
At about ten that evening, I got to Colón, a town in the heart of Matanzas Province. It was dinnertime, and the restaurant of the Santiago, clearly the leading hotel in Colón, was packed. I had my rum-and-soda and my chicken and rice, and then stood outside awhile at the intersection of two main streets. The air had the mildness it acquires only below the Tropic of Cancer. Couples walked up and down, as they do in all towns in all countries. Right next to the restaurant, in a notary’s office with its door and window wide open, a wedding was taking place. The bride was in white, and quite pretty; the bridegroom had sideburns and looked extremely young and frail. The room was jammed, people made jokes, and I felt sorry for the couple, sorry for the lack of ceremony. For a moment, I thought of giving them a present, but then I realized that that was exactly what a sentimental Northern tourist would do. The mother took an endless time signing the register. Afterward, the whole party was somehow packed into three taxis and sent off. The notary stood in his doorway looking after them—an old man with a Spanish name and a Chinese face. (Cuba mixes the blood of three continents.) I asked him why the wedding had been held so late; the boy had been working in the cane fields all day, he answered.
I went back to my car, which was parked opposite a cigar-maker’s workshop. The proprietor and his wife were at work there, and a child was sitting near the doorway. I watched the pair working for a while, and the man invited me in to try a cigar. Then he insisted on my taking four more. Although Colón is a town of some size, my national origin created great astonishment. The woman got up and brought a fan over to show me, on which was painted a portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos, a rebel leader who was with Castro in the Sierra Maestra in the early days; he led two columns of guerrillas down from the mountains and halfway across the island, right under Batista’s nose. He was killed in a plane crash in December, 1959, and has since become a kind of people’s hero; his portrait stands on the mantelpieces of farmhouses as if he were a saint. When it turned out that I knew who he was, the cigar-maker’s wife began to cry.
The 60s Page 35
