It's tricky being a Cuban American in Cuba. The Cubans don't know quite what to make of you. Take this incident from my trip to the island in March:
One sunny day in Gibara, a seaside town in eastern Cuba, my family and I climbed to a hilltop cafe where a handful of locals nursed cold beers in the afternoon breeze. When I asked for a menu, the man behind the counter announced that the place was closed. Perplexed, I asked him to recommend another seafood joint.
"Everything's in dollars," he warned. "That's fine," I replied. Whereupon he took us up some stairs, to a second-floor restaurant with a menu boasting fresh shrimp and lobster at prices only tourists could pay.
"I thought you were closed," I said.
"I thought you only had pesos," he replied.
That was a typical exchange wherever I went. When people thought I was a foreigner, they kept a wary distance even as they courted me for my money; when they took me for one of them, they hardly gave me the time of day. But that meant that I could go behind the scenes of Cuban life for a look at a reality most visitors never see, and get a sense of the power of my hard currency.
It was my second visit to Cuba, the land of my birth; I had been once before, in late 2003, to visit relatives. This time, I'd come to report on how tougher U.S. sanctions against the island are affecting ordinary Cubans. Like the four-decade-old trade embargo against the island, tighter sanctions imposed by the Bush administration last year are intended to stanch the flow of U.S. dollars, estimated at as much as $1 billion a year, that helps keep the gasping Cuban economy afloat.
I was lucky. If I weren't a journalist and eligible for a special visa to travel to the country, I wouldn't have been able to see my relatives again. The new sanctions prohibit visits from Cuban Americans who don't have "immediate" family members on the island -- meaning that aunts, uncles and cousins no longer count. Those who do have parents, grandparents, siblings or children may now visit only once every three years. That's a long wait for someone like my mother, who desperately wants to see her sisters and brother again. Last month, she missed her favorite nephew's graduation from high school. Even so, she has come to think that the pain of separation just might be worth enduring if it could ensure Fidel Castro's downfall. But will it?
I came away from two weeks living on the Cuban inside with the feeling that on the whole, our Cuba policies have served only to divide families further, increase Cubans' misery and provide another excuse for Castro's failing regime. Some Cubans told me that they were willing to suffer any hardship if it helped end Castro's reign. But most simply felt squeezed by the new measures, often blaming the United States -- not Castro -- for constant food shortages, frequent power outages and Cuba's stagnant economy.
My relatives offered me an intimate look at life in the country my parents fled a quarter-century ago with a year-old baby in their arms. My aunt's split-level apartment in Havana, in the center of a converted mansion subdivided among four families and a butcher shop, has no hot water, no air conditioning and, until last month, no access to a phone. I could have grown up right there. My parents spent their last few years on the island restoring that apartment. But before we could move in, my father, who had been jailed for nine years for opposing Castro, learned in 1980 that he could finally leave Cuba, and my parents gladly turned over our unfinished home to my uncle and his young family. My uncle's widow now lives there alone.
I entered her hardscrabble world. I learned to fill a bucket of water to flush the toilet each time I used the bathroom. My aunt would heat a large pot of water on the stove to warm my bath. In the room where I slept, a portrait of Jesus hung on one wall, while a procession of empty hair-dye boxes decorated another, the smiling redheads and blondes serving as art. Cubans can find a use for anything. When I threw away a toilet paper tube, my aunt bent to retrieve it from the trash. "I use them as hair rollers," she said. A stick and a ball of rags are sufficient for a baseball game. A broken street lamp becomes a hoop for three boys with a basketball.
No es facil -- it's not easy -- is life's constant refrain. Despite a revolution that promised equality for all, many Cubans say they feel like second-class citizens in their own country. There are beaches they can't go to, hotels they can't enter and certain things most people just can't do. Like activating a cellular phone line. Only extranjeros, or foreigners, can do that, which is why my cousin asked that I go along with him to the phone company. He didn't need my money; he gets cash from his sister in Miami and had already bought a phone on the black market. But, for reasons the government doesn't bother to make clear, he needed my signature.
