Cuba's leadership emphasizing revolutionary history

Laurie Goering / Chicago Tribune 2feb01

[Store Underlines Cuba's Hunger for Books, Cash - Chicago Tribune 1feb01 (below)]

The government has backed away from some market reforms and freedoms, cracking down on illegal activity and dissidents

[More on Che Guevara]

Che and Fidel

HAVANA — It is a reflection of the aging of Cuba's 42-year-old revolution that the men touting the newspaper Rebel Youth on the streets of Old Havana are mainly white-whiskered and tottering.

Seventy percent of Cuba's population has been born since Fidel Castro's historic march into Havana in 1959.

Four decades later, Cuba is awash in often contradictory changes, and despite the forest of roadside billboards insisting "We Are All Revolution" and socialism is "Stronger Than Ever," the government's grip on young Cubans has been slipping.

Explosive growth in tourism has made bellboys better paid than surgeons, diminishing aspirations to professional life.

Stipends from Miami relatives have cut the desire to work and eroded state control.

Experiments with everything from small-scale enterprise to the Internet have exposed young Cubans to new ideas.

And for many, the simple passing of years has reduced the relevance of the revolution.

Alarmed, the island's leaders have launched a "Battle of Ideas," what analysts in and outside of Cuba are calling a small-scale Cultural Revolution, similar in some aspects to Mao Tse-tung's ideological sweep of China in the 1960s.

Like that effort, experts say, this one is aimed at renewing revolutionary fervor, particularly against the United States, strengthening ideals and providing a clear warning to those who might stray from the revolutionary path.

The methods are much less extreme than in China. No wayward cadres have been led through the streets in dunce caps, nor artists executed after public show trials.

On the surface, nothing seems out of the ordinary for the groups of visiting American academics and artists filling Havana's hotels, or for the tourists flocking to Cuba from Spain and Italy and Canada to bask in the Caribbean winter sun and savor the island's fine beaches, music and rum.

Buoyed by those planeloads of tourists and growing foreign investment and trade, Cuban officials cite last year's 5 percent economic growth as evidence that they have weathered the worst of their crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and are on the right track.

"The perception that we're closed to the world is only in the United States," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said recently.

At the same time, though, official tolerance for even limited dissent is waning, and foreigners perceived as "subversive" have become a target.

Just this month, Cuba's government arrested a visiting Czech legislator and prominent pro-democracy student leader and jailed them on charges of "counter-revolutionary" plotting and inciting rebellion after they met with Cuban political dissidents and, the government charges, handed over a laptop computer and diskettes.

Cuban officials have suggested they might consider freeing the pair, but only if they and their government admit Cuba was correct in its assertions that the two are agents of Freedom House, a New York-based group partially financed by the U.S. government.

The two also must appeal to Cuba's generosity and "no longer commit the mistake of questioning our truth or putting our firmness to the test," according to a Cuban Foreign Ministry document.

Cuba's government also has aggressively attacked the work of Pascal Fletcher, a longtime British news correspondent on the island, with Castro insisting that some foreign journalists "are dedicated to defaming the revolution" and asking to be expelled.

"They have been, sometimes for years, not only transmitting lies but insults as well — insults against the revolution and against me in particular," Castro charged.

Castro himself led a million-strong march on the U.S. Interests Section office in Havana last month.

Cuba's government-run television stations have focused with renewed zeal on unveiling what officials describe as "political subversion" by the United States.

The government also has begun tightening controls on Cuban artists, closing down controversial exhibits.

Looking to the future, Castro has reiterated that his 69-year-old younger brother, Raul, the nation's defense minister, will be Cuba's next leader.

In recent remarks widely publicized by the state media, Raul, in turn, has warned President Bush to make a deal now with Cuba or things will only get tougher later.

Castro "wants to make sure that before he dies every duck is in line and Raul is respected," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of Cuba and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and a Cuban-American moderate.

"That way he can die in peace and the revolution will remain."

No one is suggesting that Castro is at death's door.

Despite years of rumors about supposed infirmities, the 74-year-old Cuban leader still manages speeches of stunning length, prompting even critics to joke that at least his vocal cords and bladder are in fine shape.

But Cuba's bearded icon appears increasingly concerned about shoring up the long-term prospects for his revolution, and he is looking beyond his own death at Cuba's future in a more public way than ever before.

The mini-Cultural Revolution, analysts say, has its roots in the Fifth Congress of Cuba's Communist Party in 1997, when Castro began talking of the need to re-establish Marxist-Leninist values on the island and appointed Raul Valdez Vivo, a staunch communist, as the party's new ideology chief.

Commitment to those values has wavered in recent years because of dramatic economic transformation in Cuba.

Since the early 1990s, the island's leaders have been forced to allow some small-scale private enterprise and have superimposed a dollar tourist economy over the prevailing socialist system to make ends meet after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The concessions have in some ways weakened state control of the economy and of Cuban workers, some of whom now draw substantial dollar salaries through foreign joint venture companies and from tourism, or survive on payments from exiled relatives in Miami.

That clearly worries Cuba's leaders.

"It seems the more they have to make structural or economic concessions to capitalism and globalization, the more they feel they have to keep ideological stiffness and vigilance so as not to be seduced by the consequences of the new reality," said Max Castro, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami and no relation to the island's camouflage-clad president.

In particular, Cuba's leaders have clearly been worried about the island's youth, many of whom respect Castro but see his revolutionary struggle as long-ago history, much as the Vietnam War is for U.S. college students today.

Growing numbers of Cuba's young are graduating as doctors, lawyers and engineers from the island's universities only to find the professional world turned upside down.

With the tourist economy booming, a bellboy at a good hotel can make $25 a day, as much as a peso-earning surgeon makes in a month.

For young Cubans, the growing disparity between professional talent and income is demoralizing, and many are abandoning their chosen careers or choosing not to work at all.

An easing of government restrictions in the last decade also has given more Cubans a taste of the world outside Cuba, from artists allowed to travel abroad and mount exhibits to aspiring entrepreneurs given the opportunity for the first time to open private, family-owned restaurants.

One unintended result of the changes had been new social trends worrisome for Cuban officials, ranging from the reappearance of open prostitution to troubling cases of official corruption within some government circles.

Party officials, afraid that the reforms had gone too far and could threaten the long-term stability of the communist revolution, cracked down, sharply increasing the police presence on the capital's streets to successfully curb prostitution and petty crime while fiercely attacking official corruption in a variety of public forums.

Some of the reforms have since been reined in.

The number of paladares, or privately owned small restaurants, has declined sharply, and top Cuban officials no longer talk, as they did just a few years ago, of a future in Cuba where foreign property ownership or private enterprise could be expanded.

"That's not the role of the private sector, to be an engine," one Foreign Ministry official said recently, emphasizing that 90 percent of the economy remains in state hands.

"It's going to be a complement. We're not growing capitalism here."

Instead the new motto seems to be the one found on an aging beauty parlor in Old Havana: "Toward Commerce That is Modern, Efficient and Always Socialist."

Although tens of thousands of Americans visit Cuba each year — most of them legally but many in defiance of the U.S. embargo against Castro's government — U.S. university officials who have maintained long cultural exchanges with Cuba say official invitations to the island are slowing, indicating a new wariness on the part of Cuban officials as a Republican administration returns to Washington.

Ironically, in this the Cuban government may find agreement with the new Bush administration, which many American analysts believe may be less enthusiastic about promoting "people-to-people" U.S.-Cuban contacts than the Clinton administration was.

How far the retrenchment on the island will go no one is quite sure.

But Suchlicki believes that the current measures are "just the tip of the iceberg before (Castro) goes. I think we'll see more people thrown in jail," he said.

The government's recent actions, he said, are "a warning to every foreigner in Cuba: Don't talk to dissidents; don't subvert the revolution. It won't be tolerated."

During the last year, Cuba's government has embarked on a major educational campaign designed to reacquaint the island's youth with the history of the revolution and rally Cubans around it, in part by beating the drum against Castro's old political foe, the United States.

The massive marches last year to demand Elian Gonzalez's return to the island were widely seen as part of that effort, as are new textbooks in schools, the creation of a nightly televised "informational roundtable" on Cuban television and a steady diet of front-page history lessons in the Communist paper Granma under headlines such as, "The CIA's bandits were decisively defeated 35 years ago."

Such efforts are part of what Castro calls a larger "Battle of Ideas," designed to expose the shortcomings of U.S. "imperialist capitalism" and highlight the superiority of Cuban socialism.

The Christmas Eve deaths of two teenage Cuban students, who climbed into the wheel well of a British Airways jet bound for London and died en route, for instance, were blamed here on a U.S. immigration policy that rewards Cuban migrants who succeed in reaching the United States by granting them legal residency.

The boys reportedly left behind a note indicating that they hoped one day to live in Miami.

Last month, Castro renewed his criticism of President Bush, questioning in a speech whether the new occupant of the White House was "as stupid as he appears" or "as Mafioso as he seems from his record."

Overall, Castro said, "the new leader of the great empire" was "very strange and unpromising."

Perhaps the key question for Cuba's government and for analysts is whether the new cultural campaign is working.

Suchlicki believes it is, at least to the extent of shoring up the regime for the near future and the immediate years after Castro's death.

"I don't think this thing is going to collapse when he dies," Suchlicki said. "He's got the military. He's got a functioning Communist Party and a very strong security apparatus. Succession has already taken place."

And either with Raul or without him, Suchlicki concluded, the government Castro put in place can survive the man who has led it for more than 42 years.

Store Underlines Cuba's Hunger for Books, Cash

Laurie Goering Chicago Tribune 1feb01

HAVANA — The decrepit old bookstore that long graced the end of Obispo Street, a tiny place stocked mainly with faded communist texts, has given way to something you probably wouldn't expect in Cuba: Borders South.

Actually La Moderna Poesia, or Modern Poetry bookstore, has nothing to do with the glitzy superstore to the north, but the resemblance is clearly intentional.

Beautifully arranged books grace the new store's huge display windows. Inside there's a coffee and soft drink bar, a CD section, a slim shelf of videos and a display of posters—mostly Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

If you have dollars—the store doesn't accept Cuban pesos—you can choose from a "Mission: Impossible" movie book, Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" or any number of Spanish bodice-rippers. There's even Amando Carranza's text on "How to Set Up a Profitable and Sustainable Business," not something generally encouraged in Cuba's state-run economy.

Clearly, the variety of books available for sale is broader than it once was, a testament to growing international trade, Cuba's economic recovery after the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosive growth of tourism.

This week, the island will host its 10th international book fair, with 1,400 titles on sale from Cuba, Mexico, France, Argentina, Spain and other nations. "In Cuba, the book is part of daily life, a treasured, invaluable item," Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, noted.

If a complete complement of titles is lacking, the article suggests, that's largely because of the economic downturn in the early 1990s and because of the U.S. embargo. "There are no banned books in Cuba. There just isn't any money to buy them," Castro once said.

But controversial titles remain conspicuously absent in dollar and peso bookstores, state and school libraries, and several dozen independent libraries. Although Cuba has no single law regulating books, general rules restrict the possession or sale of materials perceived as counterrevolutionary.

Over the years that standard has been used to restrict or exclude international texts on human rights, tomes by Cuban exiles, religious publications and novels with controversial political themes.

George Orwell's "1984," for instance, has not found a warm reception in Cuba. Nor has "Fidel's Final Hour" by Andres Oppenheimer, a Miami journalist who is banned from the island.

That doesn't mean some authors don't push the line.

Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutierrez has admitted that his novel, "Dirty Trilogy of Havana," is based largely on his own painful experiences during Cuba's economic meltdown in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. But he is not in jail, and his highly critical book is not banned.

Similarly, controversial books brought into Cuba may be seized or allowed in based largely on who is carrying them, analysts say. "It depends a lot on the context," said Max Castro, a Cuban affairs expert at the University of Miami. "The same thing that might make it to a bookstore on its own might be banned if it was brought by someone carrying stuff for Frank Calzon," a top Washington critic of Cuba's regime.

At the new Modern Poetry store, shelves are filled with the classics: Homer, Virgil, Cervantes, Dickens and Poe. William Shakespeare makes the cut, as does Khalil Gibran, Julius Caesar and even the Marquis de Sade. Modern Cuban novels, however, are few.

Numerous titles are clearly non-political, focused on everything from kung fu to tree grafting and raising hamsters. Despite the Cuban government's uneasiness with creeping U.S. culture, Modern Poetry also features books on American idols from Bruce Springsteen to James Dean.

For a high-tech touch, one can buy guidebooks to Linux, or, for the slightly less progressive, COBOL or Windows 95.

The bookstore's social and humanities section features titles right out of Cuba's most traditional political genre: "Capitalism in Crisis," "Neoliberalism in Crisis," "CIA Targets Fidel" and "Island Under Seige: The U.S. Blockade of Cuba."

But one can also buy some oddities, from the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" to a practical guide on organizing the family finances, which touches on overseeing stock funds, pension plans and loans, none of which is available in Cuba.

Private donors of books to the island have for the most part avoided stepping on political toes. Oxfam America, a relief organization better known for its food and community projects, earlier this month donated 3,000 mostly new volumes to the island's libraries, half of them textbooks, dictionaries and atlases.

The other half of the shipment included children's books and novels, from "Little Women" to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." "We didn't throw in any challenges," admits Adrienne Smith, a spokeswoman.

Instead, with many textbooks on the island outdated and novels like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" falling apart from age and use in the National Library, the group wanted to simply update collections, Smith said, something cash-strapped Cuba hasn't always been able to afford.

"We wanted to feed a different kind of hunger," she said.

Cuba, which continues to have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America, has an odd relationship with literature. For the most part, books are cheaper here than in much of Latin America and thus more readily available, especially as the nation has recovered from its deep 1990s recession.

But while most Cubans have access to public or private libraries that include at least occasional controversial texts, actually reading them is another matter. Being seen with a copy of a controversial book can earn a Cuban demerits for lack of revolutionary fervor. State libraries restrict access to certain volumes on a need-to-know basis.

In Havana, the revolutionary classics are still the books in greatest public evidence.

Around Old Havana's Plaza de Armas, book vendors set up racks of faded used books each morning and little has changed in the 40 years since the Cuban Revolution.

On nearly every rack there's a copy of Fidel Castro's "History Will Absolve Me." There is Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto." There are photo books of Vladimir Lenin. There is nearly every word that ever passed from the pen of Jose Marti, Cuba's favorite 19th Century poet and nationalist hero. There is, incongruously, a crumbling copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to Make Friends and Influence People."

Ernest Hemingway, a popular former resident, wins space for "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "To Have and Have Not." Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982 and a friend of Cuba, also makes the cut, as does Graham Greene.

But the majority of books, decades after his death, still hail the island's dashing revolutionary hero: "Che Guevara and the FBI," "Thinking of Che," "They Fought with Che," "Che—the Sportsman," the "Diary of Che in Bolivia," "Che: A New Battle," and, recalling his brief, mostly forgotten stint as head of Cuba's national banking system, the "Economic Thoughts of Ernesto Che Guevara."