The Casa Grande Hotel sits on the corner of Parque Cespedes in the very centre of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's second largest city. The hotel was built in 1914 to cater to wealthier Cubans from Havana and visitors from the United States. It is also rumoured to have hosted its fair share of Mafioso in its 1950s heyday; until, that is, Fidel Castro came down from the mountains and drove them out at the barrel of a gun.
Fifty years of Communist revolution having passed, and aside from what would once have been American accents today being distinctly European – ‘Ein Cerveza por favor’ - the dynamic is very much the same: one marked by a distinct separation between those who have and those who have not.
For a society that supposedly abolished racial discrimination some half a century ago, the patrons of Cuba's hotels are overwhelmingly white and foreign, even if the ‘tourism apartheid’ that previously prevented Cubans from sleeping in them was recently abolished. While I sit in the Casa Grande's balcony restaurant and digest my meagre lunch, I notice several thin and mawkish faces looking up at the terrace begging for change. I also notice that almost all of those begging are black.
Blacks and people of mixed-race officially make up a third of Cuba’s total population of 11 million, according to the latest census carried out in 2002. Cuban academics, however, estimate that between 60 and 70 per cent of the population is black or ‘mulatto’ (mixed race). The Cuban cultural journal
Temas published studies by the Government's Anthropology Centre in 2006 which showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad, and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism. White Cubans of Spanish descent also often have relatives in Miami from whom they receive remittances (the vast majority of the wealthy who fled Cuba in the early 1960s to Miami were white), leaving, as during Batista's day, the Cuban blacks and Mulattos to cut the sugar cane and roll the cigars.
All over Cuba right now there is very much a sense that people are waiting. Waiting for what exactly, nobody seems to know; but everywhere you go people seem certain of one thing: things cannot go on as they are. In the early 1990s the Cuban economy was in trouble. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw a 35 per cent decline in the country’s GDP almost overnight. Shops were increasingly bare and food was scarce. Stories abounded of cats and dogs being cooked and eaten in central Havana. Rolling blackouts became the norm and many factories were closed through want of raw materials. Onlookers spoke of the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro and his Communist regime, not least the Miami exiles, many of whom were salivating at the prospect of their nemesis finally being swept from power in a popular uprising.
At the time of the last Communist Party congress some 14 years ago, the Government grudgingly introduced a series of market reforms in an attempt to stave-off economic collapse. New hotels financed by Canadian and European companies went up, and Cubans were granted licenses to rent rooms to foreign tourists. People were also for the first time permitted to turn their homes into Paladares (small private restaurants). The reforms were modest, but gave the country the necessary economic breathing space the Communist system simply could not provide.
A decade on, and coming on the back of reports that Cuba is in dire economic straits after the global financial crisis, President Raul Castro is attempting to free up Cuba's sclerotic economy once more, with plans released by the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) - Cuba's only legal trade union - detailing the lay-off of up to a million workers from the state payroll.
Since taking power in 2008, Raul has implemented modest reforms at a typically Cuban pace. A recent well publicised change has been the hand-over of a number of state barbers to their employees. Not everyone in Havana has jumped at the chance to embrace the private sector, however. Socrates Barrero, a 65-year-old barber, decided to remain on the state payroll at his shop in Havana Vieja, remarking: 'I'm too old and have been around too long to want to go to bed every night worrying about where the next meal is going to come from.' Others, such as Migdalia, a 50-year-old resident of Havana Vieja, were more enthusiastic: ‘I would like to begin a restaurant business in my home’, she said, ‘I have four grown-up children who are just hanging around the house most of the time, and together we could really make it work.’
While Raul Castro is reportedly an admirer of the Chinese model, the Cuban leadership are said to view Chinese and Vietnamese reforms as having gone too far; and like Gorbachev some 25 years earlier, are looking to tweak and improve Socialism, rather than do away with it. Reform, however, has brought with it its own share of problems. During the ‘special period’ in the 1990s when the country modestly opened up to the market, corruption became endemic. Anyone who has visited Havana in recent years will tell you that this is a city where everybody is on the take. The legal economy barely functions; improvisation is how people survive. ‘No es facil’, you will often hear Cubans saying; it’s not easy. Prostitution has also resurfaced on a disturbing level; and the economic lifeline provided by the tourist industry has considerably increased domestic resentment, as ordinary Cubans come into contact with westerners whose ostentatious wealth has created new and visible inequalities on the island.
The modest economic opening led to an improvement in the country's financial situation as the country entered the new millennium. Towards the end of the decade, however, the global economic crisis and the damage wrought by hurricanes Gustav and Ike contributed to a worsening economic picture once more. Wikileaks cables sent by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana in February 2009 detailing discussions between some of Cuba's main trading partners, including China, Spain, Canada, Brazil and Italy, as well as France and Japan, said diplomats agreed that ‘the [Cuban] financial situation could become fatal within 2-3 years’, with the country becoming ‘insolvent as early as 2011.'
On the back of last week’s Party Congress, the first since the mid-1990s, the Government announced that it is planning to lay-off around 500,000 state employees and open up the economy further to private enterprise. There are also plans to make cuts to the social safety net, eventually eliminating the ration card and large food subsidies altogether. The question now is whether economic transformation will bring with it a degree of political change. Cuban labour rights are virtually non-existent. There are no independent unions; and aside from the mention of co-operatives in some areas of the economy, there is little talk by the regime of an increased role for workers in the running of their enterprises - even less about the right of workers to organise independently of the state. Nor are there any plans to open up the media, its printed organs being most accurately described by the late Argentinean editor and dissident Jacobo Timerman as ‘a degradation of the act of reading’.
Judging by the two million tourists who flock to Cuba every year, the allure of the island to outsiders appears not to have worn off. Many visitors are indeed attracted by the time-warped element of the place, summing up their desire to visit with the phrase ‘before it changes’, as if talking about a laboratory experiment. Havana itself has become a virtual living museum, its citizens being at times little more than artefacts with almost no chance of interfering in their own internal affairs until the Curator kicks the bucket. Real change would probably bring with it a trashy and course influx of fast food and consumerism. Right now, however, Cubans would probably very much like a McDonalds in Havana. After all, plastic food is better than no food.
