year’s stay aimed not at touring the revolution’s official showpieces but at living its daily life. I’d won a fellowship to study language and culture and also to forge “people to people” ties, however I might, by researching and perhaps helping out with a number of what were here called “popular education” projects—sundry community development efforts, run not by the state but by private citizens with initiative. Aimed, for example, at helping older people to read more or young people to make art, they were led by people I’d met through the lefty priests.
Less grandly, I wanted to live in Havana to see what it was like. My first brief visit had included, alongside the official hospital tours, enough long walks through the city—one—to convince me that walking around Havana, tuning my ear to its Spanish and its ways, was about my favorite thing to do in the world. That visit had also included a brief stroll by the grand main campus of the University of Havana, a neoclassical Parthenon set atop a low hill dividing the pleasantly noisy streets of Centro Habana, the city’s treeless but jangling core, from the leafier district of El Vedado—once Havana’s first suburb, now an urban zone of mossy mansions and elegant apartment houses that since the 1930s had hosted most of the city’s cinemas and jazz and modern hopes. It was in this area that I had decided, or fantasized, that I’d like to live. In returning to Havana now, it was to the university and a contact in its school of architecture that I went to see if I could.
The University of Havana was founded in 1728 and moved to its current location in 1901; it’s an institution through which very many of Cuba’s historical notables have passed. Like many landmarks here, though, even and especially the older ones, its resonance in the cityscape has a way of according with its role in the revolution—or with moments in Fidel’s younger life, more specifically, to which it played host. There’s a reason that, when climbing its great granite steps, you may call to mind the young Fidel, back when he was a prolix law student here in the 1940s, haranguing his peers about one or another constitutional abuse by some corrupt senator. Once the strapping first son of a rich landowner from the countryside, the onetime law student now ran a country that’s full of billboards praising his revolution but whose only piece of lasting graffiti—at least that I’ve ever seen—is a red scrawl on a wall across from the university steps. The graffiti, in a city where such spontaneous expressions from the young aren’t much tolerated, is carefully preserved from the era of Fidel’s own youthful rebellions. It reads “Batista Asesino”—Batista is a killer.
What Batista’s deposing by kids like Fidel, back in the ’50s, had now led to was a society with its own contradictions. But among the most vexing when I arrived in the fall of 2002, not too long after the end of what Castro had dubbed the “Special Period in Peace Time”—the lean season of scarcity after the fall of the USSR—was a whole set of problems arising from allowing U.S. dollars into the Cuban economy. Fidel’s government, needful of cash and having to pursue it from foreign sources, had recently made it legal for Cubans—people whom they directed to hate the United States and its capitalism with a passion—to possess and use U.S. dollars themselves. What this policy had meant, in the few years since they took this astonishing step, was the emergence of a bipartite economy. While state salaries were paid in Cuban pesos—a currency still usable here for unpackaged staples like rice and eggs and Chinese bike parts—the packaged goods and bottled sodas and TVs that everyone really wanted, so that they might live like their cousins in Miami, required dollars. (A few years later, the U.S. dollar would again be outlawed and replaced with something pegged to it but called the “convertible peso”; the dual economy remained.) What it also meant was that people like the gray-haired architecture professor whom I went to see at the university, a man with an advanced degree and an air of authority befitting his station at the nation’s top institution, was earning a state salary worth the equivalent of maybe twenty dollars a month. But when I asked him if he knew anyone with a room to rent, he didn’t pause; he scrawled an address on a torn edge of that day’s Granma, the official communist daily that was many Cubans’ best source for scrap paper. He sent me, a ready source of dollars, to an old student of his who he thought could use them.
Address of former architecture student in hand, I walked past the Habana Libre and the great Coppelia ice cream park, where many Cubans had spent much of the 1990s queuing up to consume the cheap calories, four and five bowls at a sitting, of state-funded sweets. Continuing down 23rd Street into Vedado, I passed its iron statue of Don Quixote, and turned off 23rd onto F. I found the address in my hand and called up to a third-floor balcony until my soon-to-be host, Carlos, leaned over its rail. His third-floor flat had high ceilings and chipped-tile floors and a terrace with a view over terra-cotta roofs, downhill. Carlos was a gentle round-faced man with gold-brown skin; he may have earned a degree in architecture, but his worn-in flip-flops and shirtlessness indicated a fellow who’d realized, like many Cubans by then in a broken economy, the rather large disincentives to holding an actual job. He welcomed me to his home and accepted his old mentor’s regards just as his wife, a determined-looking woman with freckles and bright blue eyes, cut in to betray her glee at having an unexpected yuma—the Cuban slang term for Americans (perhaps deriving from the popularity here of the old Western 3:10 to Yuma)—land at their door. “You can pay for a room?” she asked before saying hello.
“Dagdelay,” he said, “es muy capitalista.” Carlos apologized by way also of introducing a woman whose typically unpronounceable Cuban name took me weeks to learn. Dagdelay, I’d later learn, was from way out in Villa Clara Province—Cuba’s Kansas. She came from a farming family whose roots, like many of those in the Cuban campo, were in the Canary Islands; she couldn’t pronounce my name, either (it came out sounding like “Jax”). But the price she quoted was more than fair—$10 a night, for a comfy bedroom in the back of their flat along with hot milk and bread in the morning and rice and rich beans at night, often supplemented with a fried egg or tomato from the farmers’ market down the block. And the months I spent with them there (especially after I seized on the necessity, during a quick trip to Mexico to renew my Cuban visa, of bringing back a bottle of hot sauce to liven the bland Cuban palate) were almost euphorically happy.
Apart from their yuma boarder—to whom it was made plain straightaway that, if any nosy parties wanted to know, I was Dagdelay’s cousin visiting from the Canarys—their household included their demonic little son, Carlitos, and Carlos’s aging mother, who suffered from dementia and shuffled from her room only at mealtimes. Some nights Carlos’s brother Gustavo, a charming malandro who usually lived with his girlfriend across town, would bunk here too: on nights when the girlfriend kicked him out or he came this way looking for other action, in scenarios that perhaps weren’t unrelated, he would crash here solo or with some stiletto-wearing conquest, in the spare room off the balcony.
The only member of the household with a job was Dagdelay. She did regular shifts in a state-owned cigar factory whose primary utility for her, to judge by the raw brown tobacco leaves she brought home and stacked in boxes by a table in the living room, was to furnish the material she’d use to roll her own cigars, sometimes in the shape of baseball bats, to sell to tourists. Dagdelay was a hustler to her core, a capitalista indeed—a striving provincial who’d come to the city with the hope not merely of making it in the capital, but also of getting out of Cuba. Carlos was different; he’d grown up playing baseball on Vedado’s peaceful blocks. He loved both his neighborhood and reminiscing about the good old days of his youth, in the ’80s, when there was a Russian-bought chicken in every pot. Now his passive role in their home economy was to put on a shirt, sometime past midmorning, and wander out in his flip-flops to buscar el pan (look for bread) at the state-run shop-cum-supply-depot down the street. Here payment was made by getting a little check in your libreta ration book, and here he’d also use the passive phrasing of communists everywhere—“Hay huevos?” (Are there eggs?)—to ask whether the rusted works of Cuban communism had managed, this day, to get any foodstuffs, beyond the cooking oil and sugar one could always count on, to this corner of the realm. Carlos was no party-line naïf. He just traversed both the mellow indignities and the small benefits of his country’s system with a wry sense for humor: raising his fist with a wink, as he passed by a billboard bearing a familiar bereted
