The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  “Those people own their houses and prefer to stay there, not move themselves to a new co-operative building which is like an apartment block.”

  “So would I.”

  “Good, if they prefer television to making their houses beautiful, that is their business. When they get more money, maybe they will improve their homes. My mama lives in a house like that. I was born in a house like that. Clearly it is better repaired.”

  “What is that thing, Rafael?”

  He slowed the car.

  “Back there, a sort of monument.”

  It looked like a little cement obelisk, standing by the empty road among the hills, not a house in sight. I got out to read the inscription, MARTYR OF THE REVOLUCIóN. TEACHER KILLED IN 1960. All those who were killed in the years of rebellion against Batista are called Martyrs of the Revolución.

  “How can this be, Rafael? The Revolución won in 1959.”

  “He would have been a volunteer teacher in the literacy campaign. Killed by the campesinos who had crazy ideas, maybe from propaganda by the priests. The campesinos thought the literacy campaign would take their daughters away and ruin them. Many young volunteers were killed at that time. It is very sad, very stupid.”

  We were on a winding road, in pleasing green tree-covered hill country, that led down to a hotel by the sea. This hotel was post-Revolución, built for Cubans and lesser tourists. The site, on a bay surrounded by mountains, was lovely and the architects merit high marks. Otherwise, it had little to recommend it. The manager was always absent at Party meetings. They ran out of bread, and never had butter; when I ate the fish, I knew I was doomed. The bath towels had been washed to fragility. The front fell off the unwanted air-conditioning and barely missed my Russian vodka, the only booze I had left.

  I settled grumpily at the snack bar which had nothing to offer except Cuban soft drinks, far too sweet, and had a heart-to-heart with the Afro-Cuban lady in charge. We shouted at each other over the din of the whiny-sugary anti-music that Cubans love. She was thirty with three children, divorced. The oldest, aged fourteen, was at school in Havana with his father, the others at school here. “Oh compañera, life has changed much, much. We have things we never had before. Furniture, frigidaire, television, and the right to work which women never had. We work, we have our own money.” And the pay? “Women are paid equal to men, igual, igual.”

  At lunch, a group of Polish tourists murmured to each other in whisper voices. They were the only non-capitalist tourists I saw. They looked bemused and pitiful, dressed in shades of grey, a non-color, with grey skin. Lunch finished, their guide-nanny, a young, pretty Cuban woman, came to talk to them in Polish, no doubt the day's agenda; she raised a timid laugh. She had well cut and well set black shoulder-length hair and wore tight yellow pants, a brilliant poncho, big gold loop ear-rings, and lots of make-up. What on earth could these sad Poles think of communism, Cuban-style?

  A man was watching TV in the hall; Fidel on the box. At this time, Fidel had been giving one of his marathon interviews to the Washington Post and it was broadcast like a serial on TV. The front desk receptionist beckoned to me. “You should talk to him, Marta, the doctor on horseback.”

  A fair-haired young man, with specs and a beard, tweed jacket, jeans, was telephoning. I waited and latched on to him. He had just finished his medical training, six years, and was now stationed in the mountains. “They asked for volunteers, for two years. It is very dynamic work.” He lives alone in the Sierra Maestra and visits patients on horseback if they cannot come to his consultorio, a room in his three-room house. He is in charge of 117 families. This is a new idea, a doctor who stays in close touch with the same families over years, urban as well as rural preventive medicine. “The main complaint is high blood pressure; maybe too much salt, maybe overweight. There is no tuberculosis, no cancer, no diabetes. Sometimes parasites. My work is to teach hygiene.” The people raise coffee and cattle in the mountains. The children go to primary school up there and come down to rural boarding schools for secondary education. I had seen a few of these, large buildings planted in the fields.

  “Older women had as many as twelve children. Now women have two or three at most. There is every form of birth control, it is the physician's task to find what is best for each woman.”

  “Don't you think the women are much too fat?”

  “Yes, but it is the custom of the country and men like women to be fat. It is slow education, to teach them to eat less starch and sweets. They enjoy eating; you know, to be fat here was a sign of wealth. No, I am not lonely. I have many books and I like the people very much.”

  Fidel announced somewhere, sometime, that he wished Cuba to be “the greatest medical power in the world.” I dislike the form of words but applaud the ambition. The rule-of-thumb gauge of public health is the nation's infant mortality rate. I am using the figures given in the World Health Organization Statistics Annual for 1985. These figures are their estimates, arguably more accurate than the figures supplied by the nations concerned, and more recent. In 1985, Cuba's infant mortality rate was 19 per 1,000 live births. (Great Britain's was 11 per 1,000 live births.) No other country in Latin America compares with Cuba by this standard: Mexico, 47; Guatemala, 57; Argentina, 32; El Salvador, 60; Chile, 36.

  For a population of almost 10 million, there are 260 hospitals, of which 54 are rural. Public health depends on preventive medicine and quick early care, so they have 396 polyclinics—an outpatient service. General practitioners, neurologists, gynecologists and pediatricians work in polyclinics, with X-ray machines and laboratory facilities in the building. There are 158 rural medical stations (the type I had seen in the villages) and 143 dental clinics. Most of the doctors and dentists, middle-class professionals, emigrated after the Revolución, but the number of physicians had tripled from 1958 to 1983 (increasing every year), the number of dentists quadrupled, and nursing staff, less than a thousand in 1958, numbered over 30,000 in 1983.

  Apart from the grandiose hospital in Havana, which is Fidel's monument, hospitals and clinics are basic like everything else, but they are there, fully and willingly manned. They have eradicated malaria, polio and diphtheria; no deaths from tuberculosis since 1979 and the incidence of the disease in 1983 down to 0.7 per 100,000 population. Maybe they have finished it off by now. Tuberculosis, a poverty disease, is endemic in this part of the world. In health, as a single indicator of progress, Cuba is unique in Latin America. Ordinary people, which means the vast majority, from Mexico south to Tierra del Fuego would weep with joy to have the medical care that is free and routine for Cubans. Millions of North Americans would feel the same.

  For a quarter of a century, everybody has heard how communism works in Cuba from successive American administrations. I do not believe anything that any governments say. Judge them by their deeds, by results, by what you can observe yourself and learn from other unofficial observers. Apart from Jimmy Carter, all American presidents have hated Fidel Castro as if he were a personal enemy. They have done their varied powerful best to destroy him, and failed. Since it was politically impossible to accept that the monster Castro might be popular, even loved by his people, he had to be oppressing ten million cowed Cubans.

  Whatever it is, Cuba is not a police state ruled by fear. You can sense fear at once, anywhere, whether the police are communist or fascist, to use the simplified terms. Fear marks the faces and manners of the people. It makes them suspicious, especially of strangers. And it is catching; fear infects the visitor. I know, for I have never been more frightened than in El Salvador, and I was shaking with relief to be safe inside the airplane leaving Moscow. No government could decree or enforce the cheerfulness and friendliness I found around me in Cuba. I haven't space to describe all the people I met in all the places but this is what matters: none of them was afraid to talk to a foreigner, to answer my questions, and they spoke their minds without hesitation.

  The undeniable shame of the Cuban government is political prisoners. Sources tha
t I trust estimate about one hundred men in jail for political reasons. The trials were secret, neither charges nor evidence published. The sentences, dating back to the early years of the Revolución, were crushing, twenty years and more. These prisoners call themselves plantados, firmly and forever planted in their loathing of Castro communism. They refuse to wear prison uniforms or be “re-educated” politically. Defiant to the end of their tremendous jail terms, released plantados—now abroad—have reported atrocious prison conditions, brutality from jailers, denial of family visits and mail, appalling malnutrition, periods of solitary confinement and barbarous medical neglect. These are terrible accusations and there is no reason to doubt them.

  A book called Against All Hope by a former plantado, Armando Valladares, has recently appeared. Valladares served twenty-two years in prison and is now happily alive and well in Madrid. His charges against the Cuban prison regime are frightful, including torture, biological experiments, lightless cells and murder. The book should be studied with dispassionate care, especially by medical experts. The immediate question is: why did none of the many freed plantados—among them writers—provide such information earlier?

  Amnesty has this year adopted five Cuban prisoners of conscience. Apparently four are long-term prisoners and one, a teacher of adult education, was arrested in 1981. Three of them are dissident Marxists; I don't know about the others. Amnesty is absolutely reliable. But whatever the remaining political prisoners are, I cannot understand why Fidel Castro does not release them all and allow them to go abroad. Or publish the charges and evidence that would justify the sentences. The secrecy about the plantados and the conditions of their imprisonment damage Cuba irreparably in world opinion. And, in the end, the plantados are released anyway. So what is the point? What is the Cuban government's need for this self-mutilation? The Revolución has triumphed. It has gone far beyond the threatened inexperienced violent early years. It has made an admirable record in social reform, in education, in public health; and, in its own way, it is an upwardly-mobile society where anyone can better his life through individual ability. Why spoil that record, why disgrace the Revolución by holding political prisoners?

  You can name in minutes the few governments which hold no political prisoners. This ugly fact does not condone Cuba but puts it into perspective. My sources did not suggest that political arrests were a continuing frequent process in Cuba. But a small country existing under a relentless state of siege, persecuted by the strongest nation on earth, is not in the best shape for flourishing freedom. If any American administration truly cared about Cuban political prisoners and Cuban civil liberties, it would let up on Cuba, leave Cuba alone, give Cuba a chance to breathe for a while and feel secure enough to afford more and more freedom. I hope for the arrival, one day, of a sensible U.S. administration which will come to sensible live-and-let-live terms with Cuba. I hope this for the sake of both America and Cuba.

  I returned to Havana from Santiago de Cuba by air; the Lada had destroyed me. As I was about to leave Cuba, the sky cleared. On a sunny morning I collected Gregorio and we went to visit my former home, the Finca Vigía, fifteen miles outside Havana, now a museum or indeed a shrine. Gregorio is eighty-seven years old, the only link to my Cuban past and the only Cuban repository of Hemingway lore, as he was the sailor-guardian of Hemingway's boat, the Pilar, for twenty-three years. People come from far and wide to hear his verbatim memories, which he quotes like Scripture. Hemingway and he were the same age. His devotion to his patron-hero is genuine and time has added luster to that devotion. The Pilar years were surely the best for Gregorio. He is a tall thin weather-beaten man, with calm natural dignity. He was liked and respected—thought, typically, to have the finest qualities of a Spaniard. Not that anybody troubled about his separate existence; I had never seen his house.

  The Museo Hemingway, temporarily closed to the public for repairs, is wildly popular with Cubans. They come again and again, bringing picnics to spend the day, after a respectful tour of the house. The long driveway is flanked by towering royal palms and sumptuous jacaranda trees. I couldn't believe my eyes; I remembered nothing so imposing. The driveway curved to show the house, now glaring white and naked. “It looks like a sanatorium,” I said. “What did they do to the ceiba?”

  Forty-six years ago, I found this house through an advertisement and rented it, for one hundred dollars a month, indifferent to its sloppiness, because of the giant ceiba growing from the wide front steps. Any house with such a tree was perfect in my eyes. Besides, the terrace beyond the steps was covered by a trellis roof of brilliant bougainvillaea. Flowering vines climbed up the wall behind the ceiba; orchids grew from its trunk. All around the house were acres of high grass, hiding caches of empty gin botdes, and rusty tins, and trees. The house was almost invisible but painted an unappetizing yellow; I had it painted a dusty pale pink; the Museo changed it to glaring white. The great tree was always the glory of the finca.

  “The roots were pulling up the floor of the house. The Museo had to cut it down,” Gregorio said.

  “They should have pulled down the house instead.”

  I never saw a ceiba like it, anywhere. The enormous trunk, the color and texture of elephant hide, usually dwarfs the branches of a ceiba. But this one had branches thick as other tree trunks, spreading in wide graceful loops; it was probably several hundred years old. The house is a pleasant old one-story affair of no special style; the six rooms are large and well proportioned, full of light.

  The members of the museum staff have their office in the former garage; they are earnest, devout keepers of the shrine. I recognized all the furniture I had ordered from the local carpenter, and lapsed into giggles over the later addition of stuffed animal heads and horns on every wall. In the master's bedroom, the biggest buffalo head I had ever seen, including hundreds on the hoof, glowered over the desk. True, I had never been so close to any buffalo, living or dead. “He did not write here,” said one of the staff. He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls at this desk, but that was pre-buffalo.

  The house depressed me; I hurried through it, eager to get back to the trees. How had I taken for granted this richness? Then it struck me: time, the years of my life at last made real. The trees had been growing in splendor for forty-one years—the immense mangoes and flamboyantes and palms and jacarandas and avocates were all here before, but young then like me.

  I had definitely forgotten the size and the elegant shape of the swimming-pool. Gregorio was interested in two large cement cradles, placed where the tennis court used to be. The Pilar was his inheritance, he had cared for it and given it to the state, and it was to be brought here and placed on these cradles.

  “Like the Granma," I said, and everyone looked slightly shocked at the irreverence. The Granma is the large cabin cruiser that bore Fidel and his followers from Mexico to Cuba in 1956: the transport of the Revolución. It is enshrined in a glass case in a small park in Old Havana. As an object of patriotic veneration, a lot jollier than Lenin embalmed. It seems that Granma, now the name of a province and of the major national newspaper, is simply a misspelling of Grandma, which is delightful.

  The visit was as fast as I could make it—handshakes, compliments standing under a beautiful jacaranda by the garage—and we were off to Gregorio's house in the fishing village of Cojimar. The visit to the Museo had been a duty call; it was expected. I wanted to listen to Gregorio.

  In the car, I began to have faintly turbulent emotions. I remembered with what gaiety I had come to this country and how I had left, frozen in distaste of a life that seemed to me hollow and boring to die. Looking after the finca ate my time, but was worth it because of the beauty. Then Cuba became worth nothing, a waste of time. Cuba now is immeasurably better than the mindless feudal Cuba I knew. But no place for a self-willed, opinionated loner, which is what I suppose I am. Never a team-player—though I wish this team, this people, well, and hope it improves, as it has, year by year.

  “Gregorio, it is a comfort t
hat nobody is hungry.”

  Gregorio looked at me and smiled. “You remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  "Pues sí, Marta, nobody is hungry now.”

  Gregorio has owned his small cement house since 1936 and it is freshly painted, sky blue and white. Gregorio was still anxious about his wife, mi señora he calls her in the old way, who fell off a ladder weeks ago and broke her thigh. She was waiting for us indoors, in a chair, her leg in plaster. She kissed me, told me I was “very well preserved,” and they both recounted the saga of the leg. They have a telephone; the ambulance came at once; she was taken to hospital and operated on.” ‘A big operation,’ the doctor said.” Gregorio's turn: “Very big. He said at our age the bones are like glass.” She stayed twenty days in the hospital, then the ambulance brought her home. The doctor from the local polyclinic came every day to check her condition, now he only comes once a week. “Not a cent, Marta, you understand. It did not cost even one centavo.”

  Gregorio has a monthly pension of 170 pesos (call it pre-inflation dollars); actually a large pension, due to his long work years. Still, I thought this a skimpy sum until they told me the price system: six dollars a month flat for the telephone, which is a luxury; three dollars flat for electricity—and they have an electric fridge and cooker and water heater; the color TV is bought on die never-never, at ten percent a month of salary or pension. The food ration is extremely cheap.

  “Is it enough food?”

  “Yes, yes, more than enough, but if you want different things you buy them. It costs more.” Clothes are also rationed and cheap; they would not need or want more than the yearly quota of shoes, shirts, underclothes etc. “Young people care for clothes, they buy more off rations. And education is free too, Marta.”

  His middle-aged daughter now arrived; she is volubly enthusiastic about the new Cuba. Then his grand-daughter appeared with a pink and white baby in her arms, Gregorio's great grandson, on her way to his weekly check-up at the polyclinic. Each generation owns its little house in this village.