Читать книгу Cuba Then, Cuba Now - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

For a man long said to be the only Cuban who didn’t dance, Fidel Castro always had a stellar sense of timing. Before he died in 2016 at age ninety, Cuba’s leader for half a century was also a bogeyman for six U.S. presidents, a hateful villain to Cubans in Miami whose island he “stole” in 1959, and an outsized hero across what was once called the third world. As a politician who was also his country’s foremost celebrity, the bearded icon known to his countrymen as “Fidel” grabbed every spotlight he could—whether by turning up, in his revolution’s early years, just in time to be photographed helping his troops repel invaders at the Bay of Pigs or by appearing on a ferryboat in Havana’s harbor, decades later and after that revolution had soured, to remonstrate with fleeing countrymen trying to hijack the vessel to Florida. But as the survivor of hundreds of attempts on his life, he had a keen sense—his fondness for hours-long speeches notwithstanding—for when to seize or exit a stage. Which is perhaps why the timing of his death, which he managed to effect on his own terms and as an old man in bed, shouldn’t have been surprising. His younger brother, Rául Castro, Fidel’s successor in power, announced the “physical disappearance” of Cuba’s eternal comandante on November 25, 2016—mere days after the nearby nation that served as Fidel’s bête noire elected Donald Trump president.

This coincidence didn’t go unnoticed on the Internet. One meme that went viral after Fidel’s death recalled that he had promised, long ago, that he’d only let himself expire when el imperio—the United States—fell apart. If the ascent there of a vain buffoon who won the White House by tweeting lies from his phone signified to Fidel that this day had come, he wasn’t alone. Either way, that momentous month in the northern hemisphere saw the demise of one figure who symbolized an era and the rise of another who may do the same. The nearness of events felt dramatic indeed, in two countries long joined by what a leading scholar of U.S.–Cuba relations termed “ties of singular intimacy.” And especially so, given some dramatic recent changes in their bilateral ties.

Those changes would have been quite unimaginable during the Cold War, to Fidel and everyone else. They saw Rául Castro respond to historic entreaties from Barack Obama in ways Fidel never could have—and take significant steps, after his and Obama’s joint announcement of détente in late 2014, toward burying the mighty hatchet that had for sixty years defined U.S.–Cuba relations.

Among the resultant shifts was a lifting of limits on Americans’ ability to visit Cuba. By late 2016, these changes had already allowed a million people—curious tourists enticed here by Buena Vista Social Club and also Cuban Americans thrilled to be able to visit kin as they wished—to board new direct flights to do so. They also allowed me, days after Fidel’s death and as a devotee of Cuba who for twenty years had grown used to traveling here as a journalist and researcher only via Canada or Mexico, to have a novel experience: I called up JetBlue and booked a simple forty-minute flight from Fort Lauderdale to the provincial town of Holguín, in Cuba’s rural east, to catch the end of a funeral cortege that saw Fidel’s cremated remains driven the island’s length in a little green jeep. The solemn procession ended in the city where Fidel first made his name, Santiago, and where he’s now interred in a grave marked by a twenty-ton granite boulder hauled there from the nearby Sierra Maestra and affixed with a bronze plaque inscribed with a single word: FIDEL.

That funeral, and a fateful election in the United States, is what November 2016 will be recalled for by historians. My closer relations and I will also recall that month for the publication of my book, Island People. That book, many years in the making, comprised a portrait of the Caribbean that approached the region’s islands—from Cuba to Puerto Rico, Jamaica to Trinidad, Barbados to Martinique—not in the way they’re often imagined these days: as “exotic” spots to vacation. Island People, rather, understood the nations of the Greater and Lesser Antilles as places that belong at the center of any story we tell ourselves about the making of our modern world.

These fertile islands, long before their shores became famed for sun and sand, were the rocks into which Columbus bumped on his hunt for Asia and “where globalization began.” They’re where the Triangle Trade was then centered, for three centuries, by colonial powers who brought six million enslaved Africans to the Caribbean to grow sugar for European tables. In that trade’s most lucrative and brutal plantation colony, the French sugar island of Saint Domingue, a half million slaves rose up to kill their masters and ask the West, in 1791, if human rights applied to black people, too. The triumph of Haiti’s “Black Jacobins” birthed modern politics. The Haitian Revolution, contended its great chronicler C. L. R. James, also shaped the emergence of a new Caribbean civilization. That civilization spanned the French and English and Spanish islands alike, and its members—C. L. R. James included: he was born in the English crown colony of Trinidad in 1901—were destined to have a unique role in world history over the span of time implied by the title of James’s seminal essay, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” His arguments, in that piece, shaped my approach for a region whose plurality of islands—including Trinidad—won self-rule in the years after World War II.

The Caribbean’s uniquely modern societies were built by people who moved vast distances, centuries ago, to toil at industry; who lived in societies shaped by global trade and cultural mixing from the start; who were forced, long before the subject nations of Africa and Asia became part of Europe’s empires, to learn Europe’s languages and make them new. Among the hundred-odd erstwhile colonies, worldwide, reborn as nations in the postwar era, the peoples of the Caribbean were “the most highly experienced in the ways of Western civilization,” wrote C. L. R. James in 1963, “and most receptive to its requirements in the twentieth century.” They were the best placed among all the world’s once-colonized people, in other words, to shape culture everywhere in our era.

In Island People, I traversed the region to explore how and why they’ve done just that. I immersed myself, in Jamaica, in the story of how the reggae legend Bob Marley became “the first third-world superstar.” I explored the life and legacies, in Martinique, of the philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose ideas about violence and freedom became gospel for would-be revolutionaries around the globe. I explored how, in recent decades, several brilliant writers from the region—from Jean Rhys to Jamaica Kincaid to V. S. Naipaul—became leading figures in the world republic of letters by visiting the “small places” they’re from. I traced the current politics and deeper histories of Puerto Rico and Dominica and the Dominican Republic. I also explored how the rhythms of daily life on these nations have fed musical idioms—from reggae to hip-hop to salsa to zouk—to which people far beyond them now move. But nowhere did I spend more time doing so, or writing the book those explorations became, than in the atmospheric city of Havana, which has been the Caribbean’s de facto capital since colonial days—and whose island’s role in the larger story of the Americas, since long before Fidel Castro turned up, has always been outsized.

The greatest of the Greater Antilles drapes across the region’s northern rim, fully eight hundred miles in length: Cuba’s sheer size has always shaped its self-image, for devotees who love debating the meaning and contents of cubanidad (Cuban-ness), as a singular land. Cuba is a bridge between the United States and the lands and peoples to its south that also functioned, for centuries, as an essential node in Spain’s New World empire: it was in Havana’s harbor that Castile’s treasure fleet convened to bring the Americas’ gold back to Seville. As that empire declined and a new power rose, Cuba was gazed at longingly by U.S. presidents and treated, by occupying yanqui soldiers and rum-swilling fun-seekers alike, as a plaything with which to do what they wished.

But then in 1959, Fidel Castro’s barbudos seized Havana. Cuba took on new roles—as the unofficial capital not merely of the Caribbean but of the Nonaligned Third World during the Cold War; as putative threat, in the same era, to U.S. dominance of Latin America (and rather more serious threat to the world for some tense weeks in 1961, after Castro welcomed Khrushchev’s nukes); and as a kind of historic curio, decades later and after the Soviet bloc’s fall, as a still-communist state that Americans, in the 1990s, were still banned from visiting.

When I first landed in Havana late in that decade, with the help of a travel agent in Toronto practiced at helping determined Yanks outflank the U.S. bloqueo, I was a young student fascinated by the island’s history and its music. But I quickly grew just as enamored with simply being there—with walking Havana’s streets. All revolutions frame themselves as radical breaks from the past. Cuba’s was no different. After Fidel’s shaggy comrades seized power from the corrupt Fulgencio Batista and then began seizing the property of foreign mobsters and local grandees, they spoke in the ’60s of building a new society—a socialist one, rational and just, that would banish old superstitions and create what Che Guevara called “the New Man.” By the time I turned up, four decades of socialism had certainly changed a city filled with peaceful blocks dotted by schools whose devoted teachers taught all its citizens to read—but where those citizens lived in disintegrating homes and had few opportunities for advancement once they graduated from those schools and unless they worked for the state. Such were the changes. But just as palpable, on those jangling streets, were the many aspects of life which one sensed hadn’t changed at all since 1959—and not merely because of the ’57 Buicks rumbling down them.

The unique Caribeño Spanish that people spoke, tuneful and loud and full of only-in-Cuba slang; the complex and eloquent rhythms they played on drums brought here from Congo and Calabar but made, in Havana, to speak a new rumba-tinged language in conversation with instruments from many lands; the all-white clothes and colorful beads sported by devotees of the Yoruba-cum-Catholic gods of Santeria, the faith of many Cubans with brown and light skin alike. Such “superstitions” and habits remained at least as important to life here, it was plain, as any of the ideas of Karl Marx—or of a revolution that had long ago abandoned its idea of the “New Man” and slouched, all too human, into a stolid middle age.

As I returned again and again, increasingly as a journalist covering changes underway in a revolution its leaders insisted was ongoing, I grew only more entranced by the traditions and innovations shaping a culture that has always been, as the island’s foremost scholar of cubanidad, Fernando Ortiz, put it, “creative, dynamic, and social.” And I grew ever more determined to understand, from Cuban experts like Ortiz and my own experience alike, the varied wellsprings feeding the culture that continued, even and especially amidst the political tumult of recent decades, to shape Cuban life.

The first three chapters in this ebook, taken from Island People, represent that determination’s results. The last, covering what’s happened in the two years since Island People appeared, is new. It’s an edited version of an essay I recently published in The New York Review of Books on a period that’s been nothing if not eventful. With Fidel’s death followed, eighteen months later, by his brother’s handing-off of power to a handpicked party apparatchik, Cuba is now being led by a man not named Castro for the first time in six decades. As Miguel Díaz-Canel directs new constitutional reforms with Rául’s backing and that of the army, Cuba’s politics have been further roiled by a new decline in relations with the United States. This decline, prompted by the mendacious policies of Donald Trump, has been worsened by a bizarre diplomatic kerfuffle in Havana involving a mysterious “sonic weapon” rather scarier than the drums with which Cuba’s congueros still slay dancers. Alleged attacks on U.S. diplomats, using this weapon or agents unknown, caused a range of ailments among officers and staff at the U.S. embassy in Havana—and saw the embassy all but shuttered by the end of Trump’s first year in office, as Cuba recalled most of its own diplomats from Washington D.C.

My reporting on the current situation, together with the foregoing chapters on the decades and centuries leading to now, is intended for anyone, whether a first-time visitor or already intimate, interested in Cuba and how it got that way—and in where the island may be headed now that Fidel’s revolution has not only survived his death but passed through the other side. There’s an old saying: one writes the books that one wants to read. This one contains much of what I wanted to know when I first arrived to Havana and what I’ve learned since about an island that remains—for all its old challenges and current uncertainties alike—my favorite place to spend time, and to listen to, on Earth.

J. J. S.