Professors
Teresa Meade
of history and Pilar Moyano of Spanish have made frequent trips
to Latin American cities, so when they went to Havana
last fall for a conference, they expected to see the same
kind of deprivation.
They were surprised. They
found a Cuba that few Americans have heard about —
vibrant, beautiful, and full of healthy, educated people
with great personal and familial pride. They also found a
country trying to deal with the pressure of a U.S.
blockade.
What
were your impressions of Havana?
Teresa
Meade: Unlike
other Latin American cities I have visited, which are
extremely polluted and crowded, Havana is still a
seventeenth century city. Mexico City, a city of fifteen
million, has huge shantytowns, and the downtown area has
modern architecture on top of colonial architecture.
Havana isn't like that. Much of the urban population
continues to live in the same houses they, or their
families, had before the revolution. Some of those grand
old buildings need repair, and there are simply not many
resources because of the blockade. On the other hand,
there are no homeless people on the streets.
Pilar
Moyano: In spite
of the fact that many places in Old Havana look as if
they were bombed years ago and left abandoned, Havana was
reminiscent to me of some of the most beautiful old
cities of Andalucia, the region I come from in southern
Spain. This is not surprising, given that Havana was the
capital of the Spanish Empire during the conquest and
colonial periods. Many Cubans regret the present decay of
their city but will proudly explain that, given their
limited economic resources, their priority has been to
maintain what they consider two of the great achievements
of the revolution — free education (including higher
education) and health care for all.
Did you
feel comfortable in Cuba?
Moyano: Very much so. I was able to walk
about freely wherever and whenever I wished and had an
opportunity to talk to Cubans from different ages and
backgrounds. In the United States, we have very little
access to information about Cuba, and what information we
do have comes generally from Miami. So, as I was
preparing for this trip, I felt somewhat intimidated and
fearful; I was expecting terrible poverty, hunger, and
repression but was shocked to see that, while people do
lack many things we would consider the most basic
necessitates, nowhere did I encounter the absolute
impoverishment that I have seen in many Latin American
cities, particularly in Central America.
Meade: Despite problems of political
repression, which may exist in Cuba in the form of some
censorship, we had no restrictions whatsoever in Havana.
Pilar made a series of appointments with writers who had
a range of views on life in Cuba and I had a long talk
with a bookseller at an open air bookfare who was
extremely critical of Fidel Castro, calling him a
dictator, and worse. There may very well be more
restrictions to travel in the countryside — I don't know
— but we had no limitations whatsoever in the city.
Moreover, the relative absence of crime and the extreme
restrictions on weapons meant that Havana is probably the
safest major city I have ever visited. There is a bit of
purse-snatching and minor theft now that tourism has
become more important, but it's pretty small scale. Crime
and danger is always on my mind when I travel to Latin
American cities, and it never entered my mind in Havana.
So how
does Cuba compare to other Latin American countries?
Meade: It's important to realize that
Pilar and I have traveled often to many Latin American
cities that are huge, congested, and very poor.
Therefore, we compare Havana with places like Managua,
Guatemala City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Lima, not
with cities in either the U.S. or Europe, many of which
are in better condition.
Moyano: When you go outside any city in
Latin America, you find shantytowns for miles and miles
— thousands of homes with no electricity and no sewer
facilities, where the child mortality rate is very high.
I have seen no shantytowns in Cuba. In many Latin
American cities, it is common to see large numbers of
children begging and running around during school hours,
looking dirty and malnourished. I never saw one child
like that in Cuba. To me, that was the most striking
thing about Cuba — that the children look healthy, well
fed, and relatively happy.
To what
to do you attribute this?
Meade: The free and universal education
and health care means that most people are very well
informed academically and also in terms of personal
hygiene. Nearly every block in the city has a clinic and
round-the-clock medical facilities. According to the
World Health Organization, the rate of infection in Cuba
is one of the lowest in the world because of the high
quality of health care and also probably because it is an
island and relatively cut off from the rest of the world.
On the other hand, Cuba has always been a small poor
country so there is a kind of “equality of
scarcity.” While sharing its limited resources more
or less “equally,” Cuba does give priority to
children's needs. To mention one example — through the
schools, the government provides a nutritious and
substantial lunch for each child daily.
Can
this continue, given the blockade?
Moyano: With the fall of the socialist
block and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s, Cuba faced a situation of economic emergency
that continues. Those countries had been Cuba's
commercial partners for over three decades, and without
their economic support, life in general in Cuba is
suffering. This is most evident in areas of food supply
and employment, but it also puts at risk the country's
free health care and education. Although efforts have
been taken to reverse the situation, Cuba's economy is
challenged by the North American blockade This situation
of crisis — and the Cuban government's attempts to
confront it — is called the “special period.”
What
has characterized this “special period?”
Meade: Hardship and scarcity. Cuba had
imported ninety-nine percent of its oil and most of its
medicines, technology, and heavy construction equipment
from the Eastern bloc. Now it is trying to make up for
that loss by selling sugar on the open market and by
tourism, which runs on a dollar economy. The effect of
tourism has meant that people with access to the dollars
begin to enjoy a higher standard of living, and this
might mean taxi drivers, hotel clerks, prostitutes,
people who work in resorts. So you find physicians
driving taxis at night to get dollars, or microbiologists
looking for jobs in hotels.
Moyano: Cuba has also attracted fairly
sizable amounts of foreign investment — Spain being the
largest source — and Cuba is aggressively attracting
foreign hoteliers and other tourist investors with its
highly favorable terms. Tourism, and the concessions made
to attract it, are having an effect of a different sort
among Cubans, particularly among young people, and among
women. Young people question or simply don't believe in
the values of the revolution; their desire is to eat
better, dress better, and ride in cars as those they see
in foreign movies, mostly from the United States. This
has taken many of them, particularly young women, to
become “jineteras” — young prostitutes who are
becoming increasingly more visible around hotels and
those areas where foreigners gather.
Are
there other indications of change in the political or
cultural life of the country?
Moyano: In addition to attending this
conference, the purpose of my trip was to do research on
contemporary women writers living in Cuba. Acquiring
their works in the U.S., via Spain or other countries, is
often difficult, and this must be one of the main reasons
the best known Cuban writers tend to be those living in
exile. I was fortunate to meet a number of remarkable
women writers and speak with them about their work and
the realities and complexities of the Cuban way of life.
Some of these writers claim to be very supportive of the
principles of the Revolution and of Fidel Castro; others
are or have been dissidents and, to my surprise, were
very open about their opposition to the political system.
These writers pointed out than an important change comes
in the slow decline of the censorship of their work. One
writer explained that the Ministry of Culture is opening
up to the critical attitude towards the country taken by
their artists and intellectuals, and that this is most
evident in the theater, the plastic arts, but
particularly in literature. This opening is mostly due to
the new directions taken by younger leaders in the
Ministry of Culture, which has supported the publication
of literary and cultural journals of a totally open and
critical design.
You went to a
women's conference in Cuba; what is the role of women in
Cuba?
Moyano: Revolution or no revolution, Cuba
is a very patriarchal society. Machismo is not dead, by
any means. The difference is that women will not tolerate
it in the same manner that women in other Latin American
countries might. Cuban women are very sure of themselves
and assertive. A recent study published by Spain's
“Instituto de la Mujer” (Women's Institute)
revealed that in 1992, forty percent of all Cuban
workers, sixty-one percent of the middle and upper level
technicians, half of the doctors, forty percent of the
executives in the health and education areas, and
forty-five percent of the university professors were
women. But the economic crisis in Cuba poses serious
obstacles to the progress achieved by its female
population. Many women have been left unemployed and, in
recent years, women are feeling the burden of primary
responsibility of the children.
Meade: In Cuban society, all women have
the opportunity for education, abortion is free and
legal, and birth control is widespread. Right off, you
grant women the right to control their bodies as part of
the revolutionary program. That is an enormous difference
from the rest of Latin America.
If the
United States were to lift the embargo, what do you
predict for Cuba?
Meade: First, the monopolies of European
investors would diminish. Most of the big new hotels and
resorts are Spanish and Canadian joint ventures, and it
is clear that non-U.S. financial and corporate
institutions are competing in Cuba. Secondly, if ending
the blockade means more U.S. investment, that would very
much threaten the equality that still exists in Cuba.
There would be much more to buy, and those people with
money would become consumers. Pollution would worsen,
crime would increase. But lifting the blockade would
bring in essential items like medicines and technology.
It would bring Cuba much more into the world arena.
Finally, it is often remarked that U.S. major league
baseball would suddenly get some of the best baseball
players in the world very, very fast!
Meade and Moyano were
accompanied by Patricia Acerbi '98.