Who's Hurt Most by U.S. Sanctions?
By Diana Marrero
Sunday, May 29, 2005
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.
For Cubans, access to tourists often means access to money, which can create glaring differences among neighbors. One man who lives in the converted mansion drives tourists around the island for a living. He wears a thick gold chain on his neck and is renovating his apartment, something most Cubans can only dream of doing. His life contrasts vividly with that of another resident of the mansion, a doctor who shares his apartment with his wife, their grown son and the son's wife. They rip pages out of an old phonebook to use for toilet paper.
So many Cubans lack the simple comforts I take for granted. Cattle are so scarce that most people can buy government-subsidized meat only twice a year, and then only a half pound per person. Meat is sometimes available at exorbitant prices in special stores, or on the black market, at the buyer's peril: Buying clandestine beef can fetch a five-year prison term. Slaughtering a cow is worse -- it can get you up to 10 years behind bars.
One day I savored a few bites of steak at lunch in a fancy Havana hotel, then took the leftovers to my aunt. Watching her devour the meat later, I guiltily wondered why I hadn't thought to order another one. At a Chinese restaurant, a Cuban friend urged me to take a photo of a sizzling platter of beef because she thought it was so beautiful and wanted to remember it.
Although Cubans generally distrust anything their government tells them, many still believe their leaders' claims that the U.S. embargo -- not Castro's communist government -- is chiefly responsible for their lives of penury. "Because of the embargo" is another constant refrain, shorthand for any shortage of food, any lack of services, any hardship. The price of a soda is high because of the embargo, there's not enough medicine because of the embargo, children have no milk to drink because of the embargo.
And yet some aren't sure what to think. Maria, a 46-year-old single mother, told me that, having been born under Castro, she has always known only what her government allows her to know. Many understand that they're misinformed on lots of issues, but they don't have access to outside sources of news to form their own opinions.
Some older Cubans, though, who were around before the 1959 revolution, remain steadfastly opposed to their government. Manuel, a 69-year-old Havana man, told me he believes that Castro has been propped up by the money Cuban exiles send home to their relatives. He argued for even stronger sanctions. "Even if they choke me, I'd be happy if they choke [Castro]," he said.
Still, it's hard to imagine the chokehold getting much tighter. After a week in Havana, I headed east, to stay with my mother's sister in Buenaventura, a small town in Holguin province more than 500 miles from the capital, where few if any tourists venture. The lights go out more frequently there, and poverty is more extreme.
For years, my hand-me-downs had been crossing the Florida Straits in care packages for cousins I had never met. Now, I saw old belongings I'd long forgotten. My uncle's wife was wearing my pink cubic zirconia earrings. Another aunt wore my white jeans. A cousin told me how much she loves the black cocktail dress I once sent her. I smiled as I struggled to recall it. Before I returned to Havana, I left most of my clothes behind. I handed out shoes, hand cream, hairpins. Every item was received like an heirloom.
On my last night in Havana, I took my cousins to a dance club, where the $1 cover is beyond their means. Women in miniskirts and young men in baggy jeans danced to Cuban salsa and reggaeton, a fusion of dancehall and Latin hip-hop. My 41-year-old cousin, Roxana, shrieked in disbelief when she heard the lyrics of a new song: "For me, Havana has become too small." "I can't believe they're allowed to play that," she said, detecting the song's thinly veiled reference to the desire to leave the island. As we danced, I glanced at my 22-year-old cousin, Robi, who wants more than anything to do just that.
The next morning, I did it effortlessly. As I boarded the plane, I wondered how long I'd have to wait to see my cousins again, how long it would be before this outdated cold war between the two countries I love most is finally over. It made me sad and a little angry to think that so many families are being forced apart by the new sanctions.
Perhaps those sanctions have a purpose. Perhaps one day we'll all look back and think they made a difference. But it was hard to think about that as I looked at Robi's mournful face. Saying good-bye, I remembered the joke he'd cracked two years before, as I was ending my first visit: "Why don't you take me in your luggage?"
All the way home, I wished I could.
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Diana Marrero, a former reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow writing about U.S.-Cuba relations.