September 15

Necesita escriber mi historia. o’ blog post, pregunta, as it’s probably distinct enough to be a loan word. Anyhoo.

What a wonderful day. We woke at eight in preparation for our eight-thirty brekkie at Casa Eduardo, which was a grand affair composed of sweet bread, eggs, sausages, coffee, juice, fruit and honey. I was still feeling a little off from last night, but my mild fever had broken to leave me with a little shakiness and a diminished appetite, so I ate what I could and Tom ate what I couldn’t. We then set off- into La Habana!

Our first stop was to Museo de la Revolucion, which turned out to be basically next door in a grand old building of immense proportions. It was, however, still only nine-thirty and the museum didn’t open ’til ten, so we took a distracting walk past a large black-and-white reeling-horses type monument to the waterfront, where we spent a few minutes on the pier. The water was calm and blue, the start of a short canal, I think, and was relatively free of rubbish. Across the water was a peninsula that had the look of being man-made, with a huge lighthouse and walled castle giving way directly to the sea on three sides. The armed patrolman put us off going over there, though. On our way back we poked our head into a maritime museum with an open, solid-oak door, but the guards chatting idly at the entrance told us it was shut until tomorrow, so we continued back to the Revolutionary Museum, which was now open.

After checking our bag at the door we went straight up to the third floor where the exhibition began. The museum was ordered chronilogically and consisted mainly of black-and-white photographs and historical artifacts, starting from just before the Ten Years’ War in the 1860s when Cuba were trying to free themselves of the Spanish. In the years following the country dove, and US companies invested heavily, insuring the dependence of Cuba on US money, and driving the Cuban elite to support US annexation. The Spaniards surrendered at the very end of the nineteenth cenutry and the Americans staged a miltary occupation, eventually using this as means to secure the right to intervene whenever they saw fit and thus grab Guantanamo Bay in 1903. Nobody ever consulted the Cubans in this process, and a heavily US-dependant government resulted from interference. The coverage of these early years was a bit thin, but included some interesting political cartoons, including a particularly passionate drawing of Uncle Sam holding the chain of a Cuban slave against the protesting crowds. The names of the revolutionaries from this era were wasted on me as I didn’t know enough about the history.

The museum mentioned in passing the boom US prohibition brought to the gambling, drinking and sex tourism industries in Cuba, before skipping quite dramatically to the 1940s, when Batista was elected president out of the army’s chief-of-staff. The majority of the exhibition was based between 1953 and 1959, when Fidel Casto, Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos (meaning “one hundred fires”, the coolest surname I’ve ever heard) and Che Guevara led the modern revolution against a series of corrupt governments. The displays were again mostly captioned photos, showing the evolution of Castro’s appearance from the start to the end of the war and the rather good-looking Che Guevara and Raul Castro (now president, or acting president, at least, due to his brother’s illness) in military outfits and underground meetings. There was also an array of artifacts that made me feel incredibly close to the history: Batista’s ornate, gold-plated and engraved pistol, Fidel’s revolutionary pants, Che’s favourite smoking pipe.

The revolutionary governement took hold in 1959, pissing off a lot of landowners, the vast majority of which were US companies, by nationalising any landholdings over 400 hectares. The US then backed and cultivated a counter-revolutionary force, which was foiled by some relatively small military actions and a retraction and reprinting of currency, which lost the counter-revolutionaries, who had fled earlier to Miami, a total of over 400 million pesos (I’m not sure how much this was at the time, but using today’s exchange rate it’d equate to around 20 million US dollars).

The museum then covered the beginning of the US trade embargo of 1960, centring around the refusal of US companies to refine Soviet-supplied crude oil, and the consequential Bay of Pigs conflict in 1961. The US loss there prompted a full trade embargo. There wasn’t much about the Cuban Missile Crisis (perhaps it wasn’t such a crisis from the Cubans’ point of view, as they’d again not been consulted in talks with the Soviets about dismantling), and the displays passed on to the policies Castro’s government had enacted in its time, medical programs, literacy prgrams and the like. This section turned a bit propagandistic for my liking, and we skipped through the photos of people getting their teeth examined and so on for the most part.

Out the back was a pavilion of vehicles important to the revolution, including a tank that Castro sat in to shoot to missiles at American war ships in the Bay of Pigs conflict (only to realise his reach wasn’t long enough and to move to something bigger), the wrecked back fin of a plane disguised with the Revolutionary insignia (it was found with the remains of two pilots, whose bodies were not recalled by the US for thirty years so as not to admit involvement in the conflict), and the yacht “Granma”, built for twenty, that carried eighty-two revolutionaries from their base in Mexico to Cuba to start the revolution. It was really bizarre to touch a tank that Castro himself had shot from over forty years ago.

I was a bit dizzy after so much walking around, so we retired back to the casa for an early afternoon rest. By two thirty I was feeling fine, so we took back out to get some pesos (the local currency, as opposed to convertibles which are the hard currency and used mostly by tourists) allowing us to get access to street food and other such small-denomination joys. We immediately gave in and got two hamburgers and two refrescos (basically cordial) for lunch, costing a sum total of one dollar.

The dual pricing system here is the most bizarre of any I’ve come across and is, like many things, a response to the continuing relationship with the US. The US dollar has been in and out of legality here, its presence allowing an influx of cash and its absence resulting in, I guess, ethical superiority, along with a country without economic development. The convertible was introduced as a counter force- the US dollar can now legally be changed to convertibles, but is taxed at a massive ten percent. Prices for local people are in pesos (twenty four pesos is equal to a convertible), but for unwary tourists can be charged in convertibles. For entry to museums, the official prices are the same, but again tourists pay in convertibles and locals in pesos. Both currencies are displayed using dollar signs, so you have to think very hard before purchasing, and if you’re eating out it’s necessary to confirm beforehand whether the prices displayed are in pesos or convertibles, else you can end up paying twenty four times the price that you expected.

After the Casa de Cambio, we took up a walking tour suggested in the guide that Eduardo graciously lent us, which took us past some very interesting, elaborately decorated and above all expensive-looking buildings before leading us to the Capitol, the old parliament building in use back in Batista’s day. No disrespect to my countrymen, but these guys knew how to do a parliament house.

We entered into a grand foyer composed of a central domed chamber and two halls extending eighty-five metres to either side. The dome was as tall as those we’d encountered in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and the ceilings of the halls were curved and at least eight metres tall. Directly opposite the entrance was a giant statue of a women warrior holding a shield and staff/spear, who we assumed to be Athena. The ceilings throughout were six metres high and all elaborately decorated with plaster mouldings in gold and pinks, blues or greens, the floors tiled with pale marble, the halls lined with tall, green marble columns. There was a beautiful ballroom two-storeys tall, lined to one side with french doors onto a balcony, and on the other with tall mirrors. It currently houses a celebration of the 60th anniversary of North Korean government, including a number of paintings not to my taste and photographs of various soberly besuited Asian government officals in a line with Kim Jong-Il wearing a khaki safari suit and looking a little unhinged.

The best rooms were definitely the Presidents’ suite, which was entirely decorated in gold and cream and had a desk that made me look small and insignificant sitting behind it, and the parliamentary chamber. The chamber was of a typically semi-circular fashion, with plush burgundy leather and mahogany seating behind desks that centred around an impossibly large raised podium. The podium was backed by a giant marble slab into which was cut a small door leading directly to the Presidents’ office. The ceiling was domed and had light bulbs set behind small stained-glass panes to give the impression of a beautifully sculpted skylight. The effect was marvellous and incredibly belittling. It certainly helped me undertand why a revolution took place, when the wealthy lived and worked in buildings like this whilst the poor relentlessly starved.

We spent the rest of afternoon wandering around Habana Centro, which is an amazing place, before ending the night with some impromptu Spanish revision over a few rum and citrus on the terrace at Casa Eduardo.

This place is an absolute mystery to me, and it’s hard to match up what I’ve read with what I see. In Russia, there’s a despondency and kind of nationalised depression that seems to come from losing their Communism and thereby admitting they were wrong. Of the people we met there, however, there wasn’t a great disparity between living conditions, some people were better off than others, everyone tried to make money everywhere, but there was some sort of obscure sense of everyone being the same. Strangers, but similar. Cuba is a different kettle of fish. For instance, housing is nationalised and free (and therefore, I assume, assigned by the government), but there’s a huge difference between the quality and maintenance of different buildings. So how can someone come to live in a three-storey terrace like Eduardo’s while someone else lives in a crumbling three-room apartment above a seedy shop? If people can find a way to earn convertibles rather than pesos they increase their income twenty-fold, but when food is rationed and housing nationalised, how does this translate to a change in lifestyle? And how do Cubans get food? We went to two different supermarkets today, not tourist affairs, in fact it was hard to get in as we had to check our bag at the door, and in order to do that we had to present our Cuban National ID, which took some talking around. Each, though in a big building, had lines of empty shelves, and the things available were only luxury items (though you might object to my use of the term)- pasta, sauces, UHT milk, flavouring, juices and alcohol. There was no rice, no corn, no flour, no sugar, no eggs. The milk we bought alone cost the equivalent of three Australian dollars. Where do the staples come from? I’ve a lot to learn here.