Unfamiliar falsehoods

Havana
Unfamiliar falsehoods
Dec 11th 2006
From Economist.com
Our correspondent explores the twilight of Castro's Cuba

Monday

I ONCE had a long argument with a colleague about modern advertising. I
found its catchphrases empty and ugly. The suggestion that Nike might
somehow help you "Do it", whatever "it" was, seemed to me anti-ethical
to any notion of a life well-lived. She thought "branding" an addition
to the sum of human happiness.

So I was probably better-disposed towards Cuba than she might have been.
I didn't immediately notice the absence of billboards insisting that I
would be happier wearing this shirt or drinking that cola. What struck
me instead, as I rode from the airport to the centre of Havana, were the
billboards proclaiming, "long live the Revolution", and with pictures of
the late Che Guevara below the slogan "forever", and variations thereof.

In their emptiness and impossibility―Che no more enriches the life of
the average Cuban today than Abercrombie & Fitch turns its customers
into nymph-like models―these posters seemed to me another exercise in
branding. They might linger in the memory longer than a McDonald's
poster, but perhaps that was merely their novelty. As with a branding
campaign in the West, the publicity had long since parted company with
the limitations of the underlying product.

Cuba is not wholly without consumer-goods advertising, it just has much
less of it. As I write I am looking at a neon sign, in the form of a
lifebelt, promoting Havana Club, which is quite a nice rum. There is a
choice of beers. But there is only one, local, cola. And if the places
in the world are few where one does not find a choice between Coke and
Pepsi, that testifies not to the power of the Cuban system, but to the
power of the American one.

Cuba famously lies 90 miles from the Florida coast. But it seems farther
from America than anywhere else I've been on any of five continents.
Some cultural influence crosses the strait: when I introduce myself,
young Cubans mention a recent Keanu Reeves film that shares my name―and
which was, frankly, rather terrible. But still, there is less America
here than almost anywhere else in the world. It is an absence of America
so strong that it requires a joint-venture of sorts between the American
and Cuban governments to keep it in place. Cuba's otherness stems as
much from America's wilful embargo as it does from any policies of the
Cuban state; and it is America, not Cuba, which has insisted on Cuba's
isolation.

Poverty has gone hand in hand with this isolation. But try to sort out
how much of it has been due to the American embargo, and how much to
Cuban policies, and you will quickly get lost. Unless, that is, you have
embarked on the search with a well-drawn road map of ideological
preconceptions.

I would prefer to draw my own map, but this is a frustrating place to go
exploring. I've been to see presidents and ministers in other countries
equipped with no more than a business card and a polite if sometimes
persistent telephone manner. In Cuba my calls are met with equally
polite and persistent requests to call again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow, for the duration of my stay. This would be easier to take if I
had not first spent six months awaiting a visa to enter the country, on
the grounds that this was the time needed to set up meetings for me once
I got to Havana.

It will be difficult for me to answer my colleagues' questions about who
is up and who is down in the power struggles, and what will happen when
Fidel Castro, who is clearly very ill, dies. And perhaps the government
might have equal difficulty answering my own questions on those same
subjects.

My visa arrived in time for me to watch the annual celebration of the
Cuban revolution on December 2nd. There had been some earlier talk that
President Castro might appear; he did not. We made do with a military
parade of tanks, armoured troop carriers, rocket launchers, aeroplanes
and helicopters, all converging on the Plaza of the Revolution and
diverging again.

At the centre of the day, and of the march, was Fidel's younger brother,
Raul, the country's provisional ruler. In contrast to Fidel's famous
hours-long speeches, Raul spoke only briefly. He told a crowd of
hundreds of thousands or more, filling the plaza and surrounding
streets, that "war is not the answer." But what was the question? A few
minutes later trucks laden with surface-to-air missiles paraded down the
pothole-choked avenues, presumably just in case war turned out to be the
answer after all.

In the morning before the parade I had walked by a military building.
The parking lot, which was not small, was full of gleaming Mercedes and
BMW motor-cars. Not that government officials need to circulate in
jalopies to prove their earnestness. But a few more Toyotas would have
seemed like a welcome nod towards egalitarianism.

There is plenty of hypocrisy, large and small, within the ruling class
here. A Cuban might say the same thing in America or Britain. But, as
with posters, it is the unfamiliar falsehood which catches your
attention, rather than the falsehoods you have grown used to.

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