Castro's Cuba Has Fine Music, Dancing Waiters, Brussels Sprouts

Castro's Cuba Has Fine Music, Dancing Waiters, Brussels Sprouts

Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Shortly after the Cuban revolution ended in 1959,
Fidel Castro gestured to a Havana crowd and announced, ``In 15 years,
all of these people will have cars.''

Almost half a century later, not only has that prediction failed to come
to pass, but most of those Cubans who do have a car -- it is a land
remarkably free of traffic -- are driving an automobile approximately 50
years old.

The youthful Castro, cited in that anecdote by Ann Louise Bardach in her
book, ``Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana,''
would have been amazed to learn that the veteran vehicles of Havana now
rank high among the country's tourist attractions and that his workers'
paradise has become dependent on the tourists who admire them.

Cuba, where I have just spent a couple of weeks on a family holiday, was
intended to function according to the principles laid down in Karl
Marx's ``Das Kapital.'' Instead, as so often in human affairs, the law
of unintended consequences has intervened.

The country is in a time warp, with 1950s transportation and a
1960s-style Soviet regime. Consequently, it's a living laboratory for
studying the interaction between politics and culture. Why, for example,
has communism had a catastrophic effect on gastronomy (as was
notoriously the case in the old Soviet Bloc) while the same system
allows music to flourish in profusion?

We experienced both on our first night in Havana. The location was the
beautiful cathedral square. The food was awful (every unappetizing dish
came, mysteriously and untropically, with Brussels sprouts). The band,
like more or less every band in every bar in town, was magnificent. The
waiters danced.

Salsa and Rumba

The Cuban educational system turns out plenty of highly trained
musicians, who then have nothing to do except perform in restaurants in
hopes of tips. I have never been to a city with better live music.
Historically, Cubans say, their country has been the birthplace of many,
indeed most, forms of Latin music including salsa, son and rumba.

Admittedly, the bands in Havana Vieja play mostly to tourists. I
nonetheless found the music at the Cafe de Paris, Calle Obispo, for
example, highly entertaining and the venue atmospheric. In comparison
with music in bars and restaurants, the all-singing, all-dancing cabaret
at the Hotel Nacional -- like dropping in on a Carmen Miranda movie --
struck me as less authentic, more exhausting, and, at 70 convertible
pesos a head including dinner, pricey. The rival Tropicana costs even
more. (One convertible peso equals one dollar, though the dollar is no
longer legal currency in Cuba)).

Private Dining

Good food, unlike music, seems to require the discipline of the market.
We might have concluded that Cubans just weren't great cooks had it not
been for a visit to one of the private restaurants that are grudgingly
tolerated by the authorities. (Most hotels and eateries are state-run.)

It was like entering a speakeasy. La Guarida is in an apartment on an
upper floor of a crumbling block in Havana. The meal we had, including
Spanish dishes such as peppers stuffed with tuna and more local
delicacies like fried yucca, black beans and rice, and plantain, would
have been outstanding in London or New York. The price was also
equivalent. Two courses without wine but with sublime cocktails cost 100
convertible pesos for four. This may be an augury of the Cuban future.

Castro does have achievements to boast of, and many terrible deeds to
gloss over. He was visible on July 26, Cuba's national celebration of
the day of rebellion, listing the high literacy rate, low infant
mortality and so forth; and not mentioning the opponents he has shot and
imprisoned. This may or may not prove to be his last such appearance.

Che's Monument

It was a blisteringly hot day. We briefly left our air- conditioned
hired car to view the monument to Che Guevara in Santa Clara, a town in
the center of the island where his ashes are laid to rest. Nobody else
was there except for some Italian tourists.

This underlined another irony: Guevara, the great revolutionary
ideologue, has become a logo for souvenirs. Those postcards, tee shirts
and cups that don't have ancient Dodges and Buicks on them bear
photographs of Che.

The monument, by the standards of revolutionary sculpture, is not
successful. Guevara's flowing locks and loose fatigues translate badly
into bronze, giving him the disheveled air of a homeless person.

Much better is El Tren Blindado on the other side of Santa Clara. This
is the armored train, full of government troops, that was derailed by
Guevara's guerrillas and has been left just as it lay -- except for a
few concrete spikes indicative of explosion -- beside the road.

Green Economy

Damien Hirst would be pleased with the effect, though contemporary art
doubtless wasn't what the authorities had in mind. Many of the charms of
Cuba are unintended. Castro and Guevara didn't expect to produce a green
economy. Yet the effect of four and a half decades of Marxism has been
to divert the energies of Cubans into prodigies of recycling.

You even see perfectly preserved and functioning specimens of the Ford
Edsel, a model notorious for its poor workmanship when it was first
launched in 1957. This is a triumph over capitalism of a sort. This was
precisely the generation of cars intended to embody built-in
obsolescence. But it isn't the victory Fidel foresaw.

(Martin Gayford is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story:
Martin Gayford at martin@cgayford.freeserve.co.uk.

Last Updated: August 11, 2006 01:04 EDT

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