Fifty years of Castro

Cuba
Fifty years of Castro [Castro's Communist Revolution]
10:56AM Friday Jan 02, 2009
By Leonard Doyle

It's been 50 years since Fidel Castro declared victory over Cuba's
ousted Batista dictatorship. Photo / Supplied

With a nose ring and a mop of black curls, Gorki is an unhappy child of
Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution. The punk rocker, who is passing
into middle age, sat in his sparsely furnished flat in Havana yesterday
contemplating the viciousness of his recent punishment: four years of
hard labour for irritating the neighbours by holding band practice at home.

Gorki, who has been released on probation, is a model of good behaviour.
His flat is bare boards and unadorned. There are no instruments around
and the ashtrays are overflowing. The single couch is ripped at every seam.

He tips back and forth on a wooden rocker, trying to make sense of his
predicament: as an enemy of the Revolution he is now forbidden from
performing in public.

The 40-year-old musician mimes with an air guitar how he and the band
practice as silently as possible.

"I am being slowly suffocated by this regime," he says with a look of
desperate hopelessness.

A four-year jail sentence was lifted after a global outcry in August.

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But the threat of prison still hangs over him. "Cuba is just like Alice
in Wonderland," Gorki says.

"Everything is upside down, nothing makes sense. I'm not into politics
but my songs are deemed politically incorrect and I get sentenced for
practising! It's absurd."

He survives as a silkscreen artist making rock band tribute T-shirts.

As he described his predicament, on his flickering television set play
scenes from an invitation-only birthday party honouring the 50th
anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.

On the screen, Raul Castro, 77, the author of Gorki's misfortunes,
intoned that many difficulties and much work lay ahead in the
never-ending Revolution.

"There are many positive things, but at the same time there are new
problems that we have to confront. We haven't had peace, we haven't had
tranquillity," he told the assembled party apparatchiks.

Later last night, Castro was due to speak from the balcony in Santiago
de Cuba where his brother, Fidel, declared victory over the ousted
Batista dictatorship on 2 January 1959.

Gorki snorts in derision.

Havana woke yesterday from a night of New Year celebrations without much
of a hangover. There was a brief flurry of fireworks as midnight struck
and sound trucks dashed around the city extolling the virtues of the
Communist Party. Most families gathered for loud celebrations in their
apartments but ignored the official events.

In the heart of Old Havana the fastest way from Ernest Hemingway's
favourite hotel to La Floridita, the bar where he took his sundowners,
is up the cobbled Avenida de Obispo. It is where tourists and Cubans rub
shoulders and a good place to see the apartheid system that has grown up
in 50 years of Communism.

Alberto Riojo was sipping a shaved ice cone while going though the
motions of celebrating.

"Welcome to our Socialist utopia," he says with bitterness as all around
him drunken European tourists handed over hard currency for mojitos.
Each round costs more than an average Cuban is allowed to earn in a month.

The Communist state survives, nonetheless. Poor as they are, Cubans are
among the best educated and healthiest in the world. Life expectancy is
almost as high as in the United States, 76 years for men and 80 for
women. In its near neighbour Haiti, by contrast, people die 20 years
younger on average.

Raul Castro, now 77, is in charge and as dour a Stalinist technocrat as
can be found. He has little of his ailing older brother Fidel's
strategic vision and none of his genius for publicity. And now, his
Communist regime faces a time of great peril.

Three hurricanes ravaged large parts of Cuba last year and the hard
currency that pours into the regimes coffers from tourism is sharply
down. For decades, Cuba could blame its problems on the bellicose US and
the American trade embargo, in place since 1961.

But with Barack Obama heading to the White House and extending a hand of
friendship to the Cuban people, the regime finds itself on boggy ground
as it tries to whip up anti-American sentiment.

When Raul Castro formally took over in Cuba last February, he was hailed
as a pragmatist who would relax the Communist Party's grip. There was a
flurry of excitement when he allowed Cubans to buy mobile phones. But
the call tariffs, at $1 a minute, are among are the most expensive in
the world.

He also ended the ban on Cubans staying in hotels, another meaningless
gesture. A night in the Hotel Riviera, where the mobster Meyer Lanksy
held sway in the fifties, costs the equivalent of several months' salary.

Yet as masterful as Fidel Castro was at uniting Cubans against
Washington's predatory plotting, Raul has none of his flair. His
expertise instead is instilling fear.

Raul's purges of the military have worked spectacularly well. There has
never been a coup attempt, never a mutiny or even a barracks revolt in
the regime's 50 years of existence.

One of Raul's most scathing critics inside the country is Yoani Sanchez,
33, who is Cuba's best-known blogger.

She openly describes the regime as "scientific repression". Her ironic
blogs are popular outside Cuba. Inside the country they are blocked.

She lives high above Havana in a modern 14th floor apartment. Like so
much in Cuba, everything is crumbling. The lifts have been broken for
longer than anyone can remember. Infirm old women trudge up narrow
flights of stairs to their apartments, wheezing for breath. Piles of
construction materials litter the hallways.

Inside her flat, Ms Sanchez keeps up her searing attacks on the regime:
"They don't have to kill us with bullets any more, these days the regime
uses a more scientific method of killing us as citizens," she says.

"The regime understands it's not necessary to kill us physically. All
the Cuban citizens are already dead. We police ourselves and censor
everything we say before we open our mouths, we are dead men walking."

Words like those would be enough to earn Ms Sanchez a 20-year jail
sentence but she feels protected, thanks to the internet. She is often
asked why she is allowed to stay free while so many others rot in Raul
Castro's jails.

"The security services are well aware that if they so much as lay a hand
on me, the internet will explode," she says.

"They will have an even bigger problem on their hands then."

Ms Sanchez's dispatches are translated into 12 languages and available
at desdecuba.com/generationy. When she was awarded Spain's prestigious
Ortega y Gasset prize for online journalism this year, the regime
refused her permission to travel to pick up her award.

She describes the personal internal Gulag that Cubans have learnt to
construct inside their heads to survive under Communism.

"We censor ourselves much more effectively than the regime ever could,"
she says.

"We even police our brains before we even utter an idea."

Like so many in Havana, she holds out high hopes for changes under
Barack Obama and is optimistic that one distant day, the Communist
regime will collapse in on itself.

"Our society is like one of those rotten old buildings in Old Havana,"
she says.

"At some point, someone will pull out a nail, and the whole thing will
come tumbling down."

The name Barack Obama pops up in almost every conversation around Havana
these days. His charm and easy smile already herald an end to decades of
sabre-rattling between Washington and Havana. Mr Obama may be able to
disarm the current Cuban regime without another shot being fired in anger.

In May, while campaigning in Miami, he met Hector Palacios, a prominent
Cuban opposition leader just released from jail on health grounds. Mr
Palacios appealed to Mr Obama to show flexibility.

Mr Obama took a risk on Cuba in the campaign by calling for "a new
strategy" to improve the lives of Cubans.

Two immediate changes are expected as soon as he takes office - the
lifting of all travel restrictions for Cubans to visit their families,
and raising the limit on financial transfers from the current $300 every
four months.

Cuba will not be Mr Obama's top priority in office but it may be the
first test of his promise to engage in "direct diplomacy" with America's
enemies.

If direct talks take place he will be the first US president to engage
directly with Cuba since 1961.

Optimists are already building scenarios in which the 75 political
prisoners in Cuba's jails are released in return for US concessions,
followed by the return of Guantanamo as the US rids itself of the
infamous 45 acres, which have only brought it ignominy in recent years.

"Not so fast," says Ms Sanchez.

"This regime fears being swept away by the changes" and predicts that it
will keep moving the goal posts and make it impossible for Mr Obama to
come to an agreement.

Another Cuban dissident was more hopeful.

"I couldn't care less about the mafia who run this country," says Carlos
Serpa Cheipe.

"We're waiting to hear what President Obama has to say."

- INDEPENDENT

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