After 25 years, a visit to a different Cuba

After 25 years, a visit to a different Cuba
By Stephen Kinzer
February 16, 2010

VISITING ANY country after an absence of 25 years naturally offers a
host of then-and-now contrasts. In Cuba they are especially stark. Much
of Cuban life remains the same, most notably the stifling restrictions
on private enterprise that guarantee the nation's permanent poverty.
There is, however, one striking change: the freedom with which people
talk about the failings of their regime and its leaders.

Two facts shaped Cuban life during the 1970s and '80s, when I visited
regularly. The first was lavish aid from the Soviet Union, which allowed
Cubans to live reasonably well despite the fact that their government
was following economic policies that have been proven failures in every
country where they have ever been applied. That aid has now evaporated,
meaning that doctors must drive taxis to survive, much medicine is
unavailable, and all but the most basic foods are imported and sold only
for hard currency, to which most Cubans have no access. In material
terms, life in Cuba is palpably worse than it was a quarter-century ago.

The other dominant fact of Cuban life in the bygone era was fear. Social
control was tight. No one knew who to trust, and people kept their
mouths as closed as their minds were supposed to be.

That level of control is now just as distant a memory as Soviet aid.
Dissidents are still stigmatized and persecuted; I wished to visit the
valiant blogger Yoani Sanchez, for example, but was warned that if I
tried, police agents who watch her home day and night would intercept
me, escort me directly to the airport and put me on the next flight out
of the country. On the streets of Havana, though, ordinary people feel
free to criticize their government in ways that would have been
unimaginable a generation ago.

I was astonished at the freedom Cubans seem to feel to criticize their
revolutionary icons. At an open-air market, a bookseller asked if I'd
like to see some books about Che Guevara. When I asked him if it was
true that Guevara had ordered critics of the regime shot without trial,
he replied, "He sent 150 people to the firing squad on one night!''

The same revisionism has reshaped the story of another mythic hero of
the Cuban revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos. The official version of his
death in 1959 is that he was lost when his small plane crashed into the
sea. Every one of the half-dozen Cubans I asked about him, however, said
they believed Castro had feared his popularity and ordered him killed.
There is no evidence for this theory, but the fact that people dare to
express it reflects Cuba's changing public consciousness.

There has also been a dramatic reversal in official attitudes toward
homosexuality. In the 1960s and '70s gays were persecuted, arrested and
herded into detention camps. Today the Ministry of Health distributes
posters that say: "Homosexuality is not a crime, homophobia is. Do not
insult, degrade or isolate people because of their sexual orientation.''

A new age of freedom is not about to dawn over Cuba. When Fidel and Raul
Castro die, they will not be replaced by radically different figures. If
political and social change begins in people's minds, though, it has
already begun in Cuba.

Stephen Kinzer is author of "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime
Change From Hawaii to Iraq.''

After 25 years, a visit to a different Cuba - The Boston Globe (16
February 2010)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/02/16/after_25_years_a_visit_to_a_different_cuba/