DIVERSITY IN CUBA

By Leonardo Padura Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Dec 15 2008 (IPS) - The image of a single, homogeneous Cuba is increasingly the stuff of dreams. The single-party, command-economy socialist island of the Caribbean with a monolithic society and politics is giving way to a Cuba of social diversity moving towards a plurality that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, writes Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages. In this article, Padura writes that since the 1990s and the profound economic crisis that the Cuban government dubbed the \”special period in times of peace\”, the protectionist ceiling that the state tried to extend over every inhabitant of the island shattered, and there was an emergence of a variety of ways of seeing reality, interpreting it, and living it. Since that period Cuba has turned into a country of many looks and many faces: in addition to the official Cuba of the television and press, there is an underground Cuba, beset by marginalisation of both areas and people; and then there is the mirage of tourism, exclusive beach resorts and clubs only for foreigners, among other Cubas.

A few days ago, this diverse Cuba revealed itself in a highly symbolic way thanks to the Festival of New Latin American Film (2-12 December). One of the classic auditoriums of the capital showed to a packed house the film Che of Steven Soderbergh, an epic presentation of the life and death of the Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, his Cuban epiphany and his Bolivian sacrifice. Yet the same night, less than two kilometres away, in another historic auditorium of Havana, it was the sold-out premier of The Horn of Plenty by Juan Carlos Tabio (co-director of the acclaimed Strawberry and Chocolate), a tragicomic story (based on real events) about Cubans today, a community of regular people in a state of despair who hold on to the dream of an inheritance that will solve all the unmet needs and demands of their daily life.

Better yet is the fact that this very night, not far from these screenings of two critical and distant moments in Cuban life, on a street in Havana called the Avenue of the Presidents, hundreds of young Cubans got together as they do every Saturday to sing and talk and drink until dawn, all with their particular yet interchangeable affiliations with the most varied and strange urban tribes of postmodernity: frikis, emos, rastas, rockeros, etc., all lovers of music, levity, nonconformity, and even distress and depression, and almost all of them far removed from philosophy or politics.

Since the 1990s and the profound economic crisis that the Cuban government dubbed the “special period in times of peace” , the protectionist ceiling that the state tried to extend over every inhabitant of the island shattered, and there was an emergence of a variety of ways of seeing reality, interpreting it, and living it.

When the almost ‘model’ society of the 1980s collided with the reality of the crisis and chronic shortages, illicit activities that had been little seen for decades -drug addiction, prostitution, pimping, more corruption- sprung up. There was a resurgence of religious sentiment in every possible manifestation, and a gap opened up between those who had access to dollars and its privileges and those who had to get by with only Cuban pesos, for whom survival was much more trying. It was in these years that the fever of escaping spread across the island, especially among the young, who were open to seeking a better life elsewhere.

Since that period Cuba has turned into a country of many looks and many faces: in addition to the official Cuba of the television and press, there is an underground Cuba, beset by the marginalisation simmering in certain neighbourhoods and small towns; and then there is the mirage of tourism, exclusive beach resorts and clubs only for foreigners, among other Cubas.

It is no accident, then, that on the island today, one of the models of success is the regatonero -a musician who plays regueton, a sort of Spanish-Caribbean rap- aggressive figures that cultivate being cultural outsiders, who sheathe their bodies in gold chains, bracelets, rings, even teeth, thanks to the economic power of the music, which is usually coarse and insipid. Many of them, flanked by beautiful young women and even grim bodyguards, bellow to the four winds how mediocrity and skill can be very profitable ways of life (even in Cuba) -far more so, of course, than a career as a doctor or an engineer who, in practice, must live on the meagre state salary.

To what extent Cuban society is aware of the tectonic shifts taking place in its depths is a mystery. In this country the culture of debate is practised little and badly -though there is more and more talk and even writing about the new diversity of opinion- and social critique is poorly digested. It wouldn’t be surprising, for example, if someone accused me of being an Enemy of the People for writing this column, still today. What has become clear is that thousands and thousands of Cubans are growing dissatisfied with the methods, policies, and realities that they have been living under for years, and that they are demanding the “structural and conceptual changes” that were beginning to be introduced but now are slowing down, to the despair of many.

Cuba’s social diversity is a reality beyond the reach of official slogans and the desire for conformity. In the age of the Internet, there is no longer a monopoly on information for anybody, and the world is now within reach. Cuba seems to be, despite its periods of paralysis, a country that is in motion and trying out many paths to meet its many built-up and emerging needs. The many faces of the country are an expression of multiple realities and the result of social searching in response to necessity, shortages, and heterodoxy -like the young nocturnal crowds of the Avenue of the Presidents who call themselves emos, frikis, and rastas while on the screen of a nearby cinema the epic of Che Guevara is being shown and in another that of a few Cubans seeking salvation in a giant inheritance they hole will simply fall from the sky. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)