The Longest Romance (4 page)

Women's prison conditions were described by former prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure three feet wide by six feet long. The toilet consisted of an eight-inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter; especially in cool temperatures the rats come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies, and we were often bitten. For week's we'd be locked up in total darkness with a little cup of filthy water daily to drink. Nothing to wash or to flush the excrement and vermin-crammed hole that passed for a toilet. Nothing to wash away the menstrual fluid that caked to our legs. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

Indeed a study found that, by 1986, Cuba's suicide rate reached 24 per thousand—making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, and with Cuban women the most suicidal in the world.
⁴

How these women survived years and even decades of such horrors, then “taken charge of their lives” and “gotten their groove back,” might seem newsworthy and inspirational. Indeed, their stories fairly epitomize the most popular themes of women's chat-shows. You can almost hear Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive” as Joy Behar, Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg greet these long-suffering but somehow-surviving Cuban ladies on stage with a standing ovation, sniffles and teary hugs.

Instead, “the national media have never shown the slightest interest in any of our stories,” shrugs Caridad Roque from Miami today. Ms. Roque was arrested by Castro's KGB-trained police at the age of 19 and suffered 16 years of prison and torture in Cuba.

Her torturer, on the other hand, has been fawningly interviewed by feminists from Barbara Walters to Andrea Mitchell,
from Maria Shriver to Oriana Fallaci. On a visit to Cuba in 2002 feminist pioneer Carole King sang Fidel Castro a personal and heartfelt “You've Got a Friend.”
⁵

The Stalinist regime Fidel Castro imposed on Cuba stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 per cent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. The Castro regime also tripled Cubans' pre-revolution suicide rate. The editors of
Newsweek
—the defenders of Cuba as the land of opportunity in which “to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life”—might take note.

Fidel Castro converted a nation with double Spain's per-capita income, with the 13
^th
-lowest infant-mortality rate in the world, whose industrial workers earned the eighth-highest wages in the world, whose peso was valued higher than the U.S. dollar, into a pesthole that repels Haitians.
⁶

“I can see that Cuba is much more impoverished than Haiti,” observed Gelsy Leveque, a recent Haitian visitor to Cuba. “People here in Cuba are all sad. I watch on Cuban TV how they say Haitians are all poor. But in reality we're less poor than Cubans. Yes, my family is poor but we have a car. We're never hungry and we're free and generally happy. Cubans, come to Haiti, we have a country much better and happier than yours.”
⁷

And this after the Soviets lavished Castro's Cuba with subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (into a nation of seven to ten million). This Castroite economic feat defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the laws of physics.

This revolutionary process also graced Cuba with a lower credit rating than Somalia, fewer phones per capita than Papua New
Guinea, fewer internet connections than Uganda, and 20 per cent of her population gone—all at the total cost of their property and many at the cost of a horrible death by exposure, drowning and/or sharks. This from a nation that formerly enjoyed a higher influx of immigrants per-capita (primarily from Europe) than did the U. S.
⁸

Who knew? Certainly no one who relied on the mainstream media for news about Cuba.

“But come on, Humberto!” you might retort. “If everything was so hunky-dory and peachy-keen in Cuba, then how on earth did Castro manage take over? Why did so many Cubans initially back him? Huh?”

Thought you'd never ask.

Upon its release in 2006 Andy Garcia's Movie
The Lost City
ran into a media buzz-saw for failing (in media-critic eyes) to answer that very question. “In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought,” sniffed Peter Reiner in
The Christian Science Monitor.
“
The Lost City
misses historical complexity.”

Actually, what's missing is Mr. Reiner's historical knowledge. Andy Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera-Infante knew full well that the working poor had no role in that part of the Cuban revolution. The anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba's middle class and, especially, upper class. To wit: In August 1957 Castro's rebel movement called for a national strike against the Batista dictatorship—and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The national strike was completely ignored.

Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their liberators, reporting to work
en masse.

“Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few,” harrumphed Michael Atkinson in
The Village Voice.
“Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and [screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera] Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason—or at least no reason the moneyed one per cent should have to worry about.”

What's absolutely absent is Mr. Atkinson's knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that “moneyed one per cent” and especially his “peasant revolution” epitomize the clichéd idiocies still parroted by the media about Cuba.

“The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips,” snorted Stephen Holden in
The New York Times.
“Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high-school variety.”

It's Holden's education on the Cuban revolution that's of the junior high-school variety, probably thanks to colleagues such as Herbert Matthews, Tad Szulc and Anthony DePalma.

“It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution,” complained Rex Reed in
The New York Observer.

Here we see the effectiveness of a 50-year-long propaganda campaign. You're generally better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat Earth Society, but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by the mainstream media and Hollywood. Here's a report from the International Labor Organization on Cuba circa 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U. S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. Forty-four per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S.”
⁹

In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Spain, Austria and Japan.
¹⁰
Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950's Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933—five years before FDR's New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn't manage this till 30 years later.

These labor-friendly policies naturally had their cost; chiefly in moderately high unemployment. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that Batista, during his second period of power, ran Cuba by means of an alliance with organized labor,” writes Hugh Thomas in
Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom.
“In return for the support of labor, Batista underwrote the vast number of restrictive practices, the limitation on mechanization and the bans on dismissals that were such a characteristic of the Cuban labor scene.”

“It's easier to get rid of a wife than an employee!” was a lament said to be heard in the Havana Yacht Club during those years. So Cuba's pre-Castro economy certainly needed tweaking. But hardly because a handful of “billionaire oligarchs” controlled the island, as
The Atlantic's
Jeffrey Goldberg claimed in an article after interviewing Fidel Castro in September 2010, wherein this newly-minted Cuba expert denounced “the thugocracy of Batista, who was a friend only to a handful of oligarchs and American mafia leaders.”
¹¹

Granted,
The Godfather II
is a superb film. But better educational sources on pre-Castro Cuba
do
exist, though the fact seems to be lost on Jeffrey Goldberg of
The Atlantic
, among most other self-appointed Cuba experts. Batista, the alleged friend of oligarchs, was the mulatto grandson of slaves, born on the dirt floor of a palm-roofed shack in the Cuban countryside. Cuba's oligarchy in fact denied Fulgencio Batista admittance into their Havana Yacht Club and largely bankrolled his violent overthrow. From Cuba's richest man, sugar magnate Julio Lobo, to Pepin Bosch of the Bacardi dynasty, and hundreds of oligarchs in between, the very people whom the learned Mr. Goldberg claims were Batista's friends were funding Castro's July 26 Movement.

In fact—contrary to the propaganda-fueled superstitions of most academics and pundits—the economic adjustments needed in Cuba at the time were more along the lines of what Governor Scott Walker recently achieved in Wisconsin than what the “Occupy” movement prescribed.

“A new hour has arrived for the world,” wrote Communist poet Pablo Neruda in 1944 as Batista stepped down from his first term as Cuba's president. “The hour of the people, and of the men of the people, the hour of figures like Tito,
La Pasionaria
[Spanish Stalinist Dolores Ibarruri] and the important American figure Fulgencio Batista, who included two Cuban Communist party members in his Cabinet.”
¹²

In fact, despite the media's universal and Pavlovian response of“U.S.-backed” to any mention of Fulgencio Batista, this backing amounts to another Castroite fable spread by his media auxiliaries. If Batista was a U.S.-backed dictator, then Yugoslavia's Tito was a U.S.-backed dictator squared, receiving over $3.5 billion in U.S. economic aid during the 50's. Communist Tito was receiving essentially free U.S. arms shipments at the same time that anti-Communist
Batista was denied delivery of U.S. arms his government had actually bought and paid for.
¹³

Given that Cuba always maintained a favorable balance of trade with the world, and that the Cuban peso was equal (and briefly more valuable) than the U.S. dollar during Batista's term, this (black) Cuban dictator never saw a need to step and fetch or roll over and beg in front of U.S. officials. Obama's bowing to Hu Jintao just wasn't Batista's style, or remotely called for in view of Cuba's economic condition during his term. Since 1933, when he took over Cuba's military at the age of 32, Batista had been known as
El Hombre
—the man, after all.

Batista's trouble with the State Department actually started with some of his nationalist (in the liberal sense of the term) policies of import-substitution and trade diversification, which is to say the precise opposite of lackeyism. The contract to build the Havana Tunnel in 1956, for instance, was granted by the Cuban government to a French engineering firm, though several U.S. firms were bidding. In the late 1950's Batista's government was also shopping around for locomotives and General Motors assumed they had a done deal.
¹⁴

Instead Cuba bought the locomotives from a West German manufacturer. The U.S. farm lobby got up in arms when a wheat mill was planned for construction in eastern Cuba, accompanied by higher tariffs on U.S. wheat. U.S. paper mills grumbled when Cuba instituted a process for converting bagasse (the residue from sugar-refining) into newsprint. Cuba had 58 daily newspapers and 126 weekly magazines at the time. So the eventual loss to U.S. paper suppliers would not be paltry.
¹⁵

The anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) of the late 50's was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals—and financed by Cuba's wealthiest men, sugar magnate Julio Lobo and rum magnate (Bacardi) “Pepin” Bosch among them.

Here's the makeup of the supposed peasant revolution's first Cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the anti-Batista fight: seven
lawyers, two university professors, three university students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor and a colonel who defected from the Batista army. A notoriously bourgeois bunch, as Che Guevara himself put it.

By 1961, however, workers and
campesinos
(country folk) made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. So Andy Garcia showed it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a
rebellion
, not a revolution. Cubans expected
political
change and economic tweaking, not a socioeconomic cataclysm and catastrophe. But most film critics and reporters still rely on boneheaded clichés.

Oh, and as previously asked—during the past half-century, has anyone noticed those people, whom
Newsweek
termed the world's luckiest, acting in any matter which might call that label into question? Let's look further into it.