The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Rafael's story is one example of how the Revolución has changed lives. His wife works as an accountant in some ministry. Rafael is an official of the drivers’ trade union, bargaining on his members’ behalf with another ministry. “Whoever gets home first cooks the dinner.” One son is reading English at Havana University. Another, having failed his exams, is doing military service and expects a place in medical school afterwards. Rafael pays thirty-five dollars monthly rent for an apartment in Vedado, formerly the chic section of Havana, and soon will own it. Rents pile up like down payments year after year, until the sale price of the flat is reached, whereupon bingo, you become an old-fashioned capitalist owner. Mrs. Thatcher's vision of a home-owners’ society coming true in communist Cuba.

  Rafael left me strictly alone whenever we stopped. I stayed in several sumptuous hotels; these were the Mafia's legacy to Cuban tourism, built with Mafia money because they included casinos, now closed. It was all new to me; I had never bothered to travel in Cuba when I lived here and had no sense of its size—730 miles long by an average of fifty miles wide—or of the variety of the towns and the landscape. We drove without any previously arranged plan—wherever I felt like going—and covered 1,500 miles in the backbreaking Lada, a partial look at about a third of the country. Our first stop was Trinidad.

  Trinidad is a beauty; Cubans are very proud of it. It is an unspoiled colonial town, most of it late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, but inhabited from the sixteenth century. The streets are cobbled, the houses one story high, with vast, handsome wood doors, wide enough for a carriage, and bowed iron grill-work on the front windows. Every house is painted, and paint makes the difference—pale green, pink, blue, yellow. The Cathedral, at the top of the town, is yellow trimmed in white, and fronts a flowery square that descends in steps to the houses.

  The Museo Historico was the home of a nineteenth-century sugar baron. The enchanting girl in charge, aged around twenty, with blonde hair in a pony tail, wore the museum uniform, immaculate white shirt, dark blue jacket and mini-skirt. “He had thirty slaves,” she said. “Thirty. They lived in that one big room at the back.” The idea of slaves horrified her. Earlier, when she had collected my entry centavos, she said, “Cuba was under Spanish domination for three centuries, until 1899. After that, it was under American domination until 1959.” It had sounded pat and off-putting, straight Party line, until I thought it over and decided it was true, no matter how it sounded.

  The U.S. actually ruled Cuba twice, and the Marines had been around in the usual Monroe Doctrine way. Until 1934, the United States government had the right by law to interfere in internal Cuban affairs. But American domination was mainly felt through its support of whatever useless Cuban government protected American investments. In my time, no one ever talked politics or bothered to notice which gang was in office and robbing the till. I cannot remember any elections, though I think the government did change, perhaps by palace coup. One day driving in to Havana, I heard shooting and Salomon or the street boys advised me to settle in the Floridita and drink frozen daiquiris until it was over; the noise was farther down toward the harbor. This was taken lightly as a joke: who cared which crooks got in, the results would be the same. The poor would stay poor; the rich would stay rich; a different bunch of politicians would grow richer. After World War Two, during the Batista dictatorship, apart from the standard horrors of such rule—arrest, torture, executions—corruption must have been out of control, thanks to Batista's faithful friends, the Mafia.

  At the Museo Romantico, said to be the former home of a Count, a bunch of noisy young people was clattering up the stairs to the salons and bedrooms. In the hall, a white-garbed nun waited, saying that she had seen it before. “If you have lived in Spain,” said the little dark Spanish nun, “there is nothing to look at in this country.” She seemed about thirty years old and had a sharp, severe face. She had come to Trinidad from Cienfuegos with the young people to attend the cathedral wedding of two of them, tomorrow. Her order has two houses, in Cienfuegos and Havana. There are eight Spanish, three Mexican and three Cuban nuns in all.

  “People must be very brave to go to Mass,” she told me. “We do not go out in the street with the young for fear of compromising them. There is much fear.”

  “Fear? You mean fear of prison, fear for their lives?”

  “No, no,” she said impatiently. “Fear of losing their jobs or not getting a good one, if they are seen to be practicing Catholics.” Mass is celebrated here in the Cathedral and in another church “down there,” twice on Sundays and that is all. She felt outraged by this. “No, nuns are not molested in any way but we are not allowed to do our pastoral work in the streets.” As far as I am concerned, that was great: I don't want anyone of any religion, secular or spiritual, haranguing me in the streets. “Still, people do talk to us.”

  I pointed out that she had come here with these young people, a whole band of them, to take part in a church wedding.

  “Yes, they are very loyal,” she said.

  The stern Afro-Cuban museum lady, the ticket collector, stared at us with plain dislike. The nun remarked on it. “She does not want me to talk to you.” Even so, it did not stop the nun from talking to me, an obvious foreigner.

  Cuba is awash with museums. Museums for everything, past and present. The museums are scantily furnished—no great art treasures—and are visited with interest by all kinds of Cubans, young and old. I don't think I've ever raced through so many anywhere and I think I understand them. This is consciousness-raising on a national scale. The mass of Cubans had no education and no real sense of identity. Being Cuban meant being somebody else's underling, a subordinate people. I knew a few upper-class Cuban sportsmen; they spoke perfect English, had been educated abroad, and were considered honorary Americans or Europeans, not in words, nor even in thought, but instinctively: they were felt to be too superior to be Cubans. Now, through these innumerable museums, Cubans are being shown their history, how their ruling class lived and how the people lived, the revolts against Spanish “domination,” and everything about the Revolución. They are being told that they have been here a long time: they are a nation and they can be proud to be Cubans.

  Between Trinidad and Sancti Spiritus, the country looked like Africa: hump-backed, bony cattle, like Masai cattle; palms and ceibas, the handsomer Cuban form of the African baobab tree; jungle-green hills; brown plains; but where were we going to sleep? We had been turned away at two hotels, full up with Cubans, who travel joyfully and constantly. We set out again, hunting for rooms.

  Suddenly loud horns and sirens. Motorcycle cops pushed the traffic to the roadside. Ten first-class buses flashed past, filled with excited kids, singing, shouting, waving. “Pioneers,” Rafael said. They were primary-school children, the baby Pioneers of the light-blue neckerchief. “They are going to camp at Ismaela. They go for a week with their teachers and continue with their lessons.”

  Not that bunch, far too elated for lessons.

  “Fidel started the idea of camping,” Rafael went on. “Nobody in Cuba ever did that, live in a tent, cook over a fire. Now everybody does it. It is very popular.” Cubans have two paid vacations a year, two weeks each, and alternate full weekends. Besides camping, many new beach resorts dot the coasts. These resorts are simple, rudimentary—I don't want to give the impression of places like luscious photos in travel brochures—and so inexpensive that most Cubans must be able to afford them. And there are town parks with children's playgrounds, swimming pools, sports grounds. I like the government's decision in favor of pleasure: Cuba's Revolución is not puritanical. Outlawing drugs, gambling and prostitution eradicated crime as big business, hardly a bad idea. But there remain the delicious beer and rum, flowing freely, and cigarettes and cigars, since Cubans haven't yet heard of the horrors of smoking. But I think that the main cause of a different, open, pleasurable life-style is the change in women. The old Hispanic and Catholic custom of the women at home—isolated, the daughter gu
arded, the stiffness of that relation between men and women—is truly gone. Women are on their own at work, feeling equal to men, and showing this new confidence. Girls are educated equally with boys and chaperonage is dead. There is a feeling that men and women, girls and boys are having a good time together, in a way unknown before.

  Bayamo, said the tourist map, offered historical sights; the church where the national anthem was first sung and other episodes of heroism against the Spanish overlords. I was not interested; I was interested in food. The food is ghastly, apart from breakfast. If Cuba means to earn millions of tourist dollars, it will have to make a culinary Revolución. On a corner of the main square, I saw an ice-cream parlor and bought a huge helping of delicious chocolate ice-cream.

  I was enjoying this feast at an outside table when a boy came up, said his name was Pépé, shook hands, sat down and asked my name and where I came from. I thought he was eighteen; he was twenty-four, good-looking with light brown hair, blue eyes and a summery smile. He wanted to buy a pack of my cigarettes, Kools from a hotel Duty-Free; I said he could share mine. He wanted to see what a dollar looked like; I showed him. He wanted to know the price of cigarettes, gas lighters, dark glasses and trousers in England. He then brought out of his wallet a small color print of a beautiful little bejeweled and bedecked doll, the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre, patron of Cuba. He handed me this as if he were giving me a family photo.

  A young Afro-Cuban in a dark business suit lurked nearby, listening. I said, “Why do you stand there with a look of suspicion? Sit with us.” His presence at first annoyed Pépé, then he ignored the newcomer.

  Pépé wished to talk about religion, absolutely not my subject. ‘Are you a believer? Do you go to Mass? Do you believe in Jesus Christ?’ By now we had another member of the seminar—an older Afro-Cuban—and slowly the waitresses pulled up chairs around our table.

  Hoping to bring an end to this topic, I said, “In our country, people are Protestants.” Easy misinformation.

  “What religion is that?” said Pépé. “Protestante?"

  “They are not loyal to the Pope,” the older Afro-Cuban said.

  “But you believe?” Pépé insisted.

  As an untroubled unbeliever, I could not go into a long thing about Jesus as a man and a teacher, so I said, “De vez en cuando"—which comes out as “sometimes” and satisfied Pépé.

  “There are churches in Bayamo?” I asked.

  “Four,” they said in unison.

  “People go to Mass?”

  In unison, “Yes.”

  “They have trouble if they go to Mass?”

  Again in unison, “No.”

  “I want to see a capitalist country,” Pépé said. “I want to go to France. I met some Frenchmen here.”

  “You want to leave?” the business suit asked, scandalized.

  “No, not leave,” Pépé said. “Visit. To see. But they will never give me a passport. Only to the socialist countries.”

  The older Afro-Cuban said, “Artists can go. Musicians, people like that.”

  I didn't want Pépé to cherish hopeless golden dreams and could imagine the Frenchmen talking about France as the French do. “You know, Pépé, everything is not perfect in our capitalist countries. We are not all rich and happy. We have great unemployment. There is also much crime.”

  “There is no crime here,” said both Pépé and the business suit.

  “No unemployment,” said the others.

  Cubans believe that there is no crime in Cuba. They feel safe in their homes and on their streets. You see very small unaccompanied children going about their business in Havana, and women walking alone at night wherever they wish to go. No one fears mugging. Rape is too unimaginable to think about. But of course there are crimes since there are jails for common criminals.

  We were now talking about education and the main members of the seminar, Pépé and the business suit, agreed that education was very good here. “And free,” Pépé added, “everything is free, even universities.”

  Business suit, who was a serious young man employed as health inspector for hotel and restaurant kitchens, now departed: end of the lunch-hour. The rest of the seminar drifted back to work.

  Pépé, it developed, was a night-watchman at a cement factory, scarcely a demanding job, and had only completed two years of secondary school. I began to realize that he was twenty-four going on sixteen, but no less sweet and interesting for that. “Do people have servants in England? Not here, there are no servants here. Could I come to England and be your servant, chauffeur or something? I wouldn't want any money.” How he longed to see the mysterious capitalist world. “If I was going about in France, just looking, doing nothing wrong, would they give me difficulties?” Cuban police are notably absent everywhere, and as Pépé had talked openly in front of his compatriots, strangers to him, he must have picked up some ominous news about police in the free world.

  By now we were great friends and he said confidentially, “I don't like dark girls.” I thought: gentlemen prefer blondes. But no. “I only like girls with light skin.” He now produced two photographs from his wallet, almost identical Caucasian Cubans with a lot of brunette hair.

  “Two novias, Pépé, isn't that one too many?”

  He grinned, then said in a low voice, “I have a brother who is a racist. He told me.”

  I imagined an older brother and said, “There is nothing much he can do about it, is there? You don't have to marry a dark girl. You aren't obliged to make any friends you don't want, are you?”

  “No. Clearly no.”

  “Well then. How old is your brother?” I disliked this tedious dummy brother, a bad example for young Pépé, and remembered the Afro-Cuban poet and the prejudices of the heart.

  “Thirteen,” said Pépé. I shouted with laughter. At first he was bewildered; racism is no joke, an offense in law; then gradually he understood and the summery smile appeared.

  I wandered into the square: live oaks, Ali Baba flower jars, benches of bright patterned tile, a design in the paving bricks—the Cubans had luck, architecturally, to be colonized by Spain. No sign of Rafael, so I sat on a bench in the shade, and an elderly lady sat beside me. She wore a neat, rather prissy cotton dress and a hat, unheard-of, a proper lady's hat; I felt she should have gloves. She said her husband had gone to the “office” to speak about their pension. “We are retired. Our pension is fifty-two pesos monthly. What can you do with that? Some people get seventy pesos. If you have children, they could help. Or else you must do work at home, little work.” She was very worried and indignant. “Ridiculous,” she said. “Impossible. I hope they listen to my husband.”

  In the car I asked Rafael about this. He said that pensions depended on how long you had worked. His mother got sixty pesos a month, from his dead father's pension. I pointed out that his brother lived in the same village and would help her and so would he. “Surely it is a bad system, Rafael, if people must depend on their children for money in their old age. It would be a reason to have as many children as possible.”

  “But people do not want many children; they want few and to give them more. People do not have big families now. Every woman, girl, can get birth control assistance, whether married or not. There is no sense in big families.”

  I abandoned pensions.

  “Stop, Rafael. I want to take a photo.” This was a picture of rural poverty. Everywhere, in the villages, along the roads, the sign of new private prosperity was paint. If they could afford no more, people painted their door a brilliant color and painted a band to outline their windows. Here three small, crumbling, unpainted wood houses stood on bare treeless ground in the middle of nowhere. They were typical peasants’ homes; painted, beflowered, they would be picturesque cottages. They are box-shape, one room wide, with a porch on wood pillars. If very poor, the roof is palm thatch, less poor, it is corrugated tin. I chose the worst of the three.

  “Did you see that?” Rafael pointed.

  I had not
. Each of the houses had a TV aerial.

  “Marta,” Rafael said, “have you seen anyone without shoes?”

  “No.”

  “You say everyone is too fat. When you lived here, how did the campesinos look?”

  How did the campesinos, the peasants, look; how did everyone look? They looked abjectly poor or just everyday poor. Except for us, the narrow top layer. You could live in princely comfort on very little money in Cuba.

  There was a farmhouse, barely visible beyond our land, east of the driveway. It was a bit larger than these houses, with peeling paint. The farmer was a bone-thin, unsmiling man; he kept chickens. If I saw him I said good morning. That is all I knew about him; I don't even know if the cook bought eggs there. The village below our place was a small cluster of houses like these; I knew nothing about the village except that it had a post office. The children waved when I drove by, I waved back, lots of smiles. They were in rags, barefoot, and everyone was unnaturally thin.

  I did not say to myself: it isn't my country, what can I do? I didn't think about Cuba at all. Everything I cared about with passion was happening in Europe. I listened to the radio, bought American newspapers in Havana, waited anxiously for letters from abroad. I wrote books, and the minute I could break free, I went back to the real world, the world at war. Rafael had asked the wrong question. The right question would be: who looked at the campesinos? Who cared? Nobody, as far as I knew; including me.

  “I know, Rafael. They were hungry and miserable.”