Cuba

Before going to Cuba – in fact while sitting in the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah of Tijuana – I scribbled something for later reading. It was a short summary of what I expected Cuba to be – preconceptions I could dig up from the disparate bits of knowledge I had about that most curious of places. After rattling it off, I put it away without really thinking about it again.

While sketching out what you’re reading now, and after finding it even more than usually difficult to arrange my thoughts into coherence, I remembered the paragraph I’d scribbled while counting the hours in that abject cesspit of Mexico. And before even digging it out from the bowels of my backpack, I knew instantaneously that I’d been strangely right all along.

This is what I wrote.

From what I know of Cuba, it’s an island in more ways than one. Only ninety miles from the US, its modern history has been written as much by the now almost fifty year-old embargo, as it has by the rule and misrule of its venerable leader, the irrepressible Fidel. Despite his recent retirement from a protracted illness, and the succession of his brother, Raul, Cuba is undergoing a period of slow and steady change – a change which may be catapulted forward should there be a change in the US’ Cuba policy after the November elections, something not out of the question. It’s the only communist country in the western hemisphere, probably a mix of Soviet Russia and contemporary China with a bit of tin-pot Africa dictatorship thrown in. It’s a police state where criticism of the political system – and especially advocacy of a multi-party democracy or denigration of la Revolución – is strictly forbidden and seriously punished. I expect a vibrant culture of music and dance, I fantasise of untold fabulousness sitting in high-ceilinged bars with impossibly slow fans and dusty shards of light creeping through the wooden slats on the windows. I expect many of the economic features of a northern European social democracy along with the lackadaisical chaos of the Mediterranean. I expect a low standard of living to go with its low per capita GDP, but a general absence of a wealthy class. I expect incredible food, beautiful women and a great deal of propaganda. Most of all, I expect a population bored with the US blockade, proud of its history, and loyal to the leadership, because for whatever its shortcomings, it’s a leadership which has defied the perceived bellicosity of the big bully to the north, whose glittering lights of Miami lie a babbling brook away but whose politics are an ocean apart.


With a couple of exceptions – and I’ll get to them – I was pretty well damn right on the money. Is it right to fail to be particularly surprised by a place once arriving for the first time – especially in so singular a place as Cuba? Or does it just come from reading too much of The Economist? Whatever, it turns out I was broadly right, but came away from two weeks there more politically confused than ever before. If China elicited cautious admiration for what can be achieved by a strong State enthusiastically embracing the free market, and Bulgaria and Serbia left no doubt about the total shittiness of everything conceived, invented, designed or constructed under Soviet-style communism, Cuba just left me befuddled and bewildered.

How can there be so much to admire as well as so much to loathe – bizarrely the exact same reaction I’ve had every single time I’ve visited the United States? This is troubling.

Naturally, however, Cuba was much more than vindication of a few hastily-scribbled predictions. Once you venture beyond Nikon-snapping tourists and the wallet-relieving domestic industry that traipses around after them in every country on earth, you meet the real people and go from just seeing a place to experiencing it – actually feeling it. You sit in people’s homes drinking their tea or wine, invariably trying to swallow down some godawful local ‘delicacy’ which has the taste of peat and the texture of a condom, all the while grinning with fawning gratitude for the offering. You strike up conversations in parks, in cafés and in the markets. And if you’re a little bit ballsy, you trundle along to the universities and schools and get a feel for what the next generation of leaders have in mind. Because that’ll tell you just as much about a country’s future as sitting on a geriatric’s porch munching on a peat condom will tell you of its past.

First, the obvious. Cuba is a police state. In fact, that term really doesn’t do justice – it’s a “government” state, with the Lada-driving police merely the most noticeable organ of the State the tentacles of which include the army and many other uniformed and plain-clothed officials keeping an watchful eye on the people. The government is everywhere. Every restaurant, bar and hotel is government-owned and the manager is a government employee – with the exception, curiously enough, of the restaurants in Havana’s comically bad Chinatown. A small street cafe might be privately owned, but anywhere which sells alcohol – pretty much everywhere – is not. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Cuban government controls 90 per cent of the economy. In a world dominated by free trade, privatisation and liberalisation, Cuba is every bit the island it has been since 1959.

That most inept of explorers, Columbus, happened upon what is now Cuba, called it Juana and described it as “the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen”. As his intention was to head west from European to India, likely as not he figured he was somewhere off the coast of Japan. But he was perhaps right then, and if he came back to Havana today, I suspect he would be just as blown away.

Havana’s streets are dusty, narrow and pockmarked with holes like the surface of the moon. The decrepit old houses squish up oppressively against one another, shoulder to shoulder, never quite straight – but they hold each other up against the elements and ravages of time, a worthy metaphor for their inhabitants within. The west of the city – the Vedado – is on a grid, so the lightless alleys you wander down are less disconcerting than the strange sounds, puddles and acrid smells suggest. When you head a bit east you hit Centro Habana, home of the Politico Naçional, a building which carries an ironic but distinct resemblance to the Houses of Congress in Washington DC, only a couple of thousand miles to the north. Habana Vieja – old Havana – is unselfconsciously exquisite. The salsa, rhumba and jazz blares out all night, the Cubans dance in the streets, old bars where Hemingway grumbled into his mojito meet tiny art galleries and run-down colonial hotels. It’s worthy of any honeymoon.

The sounds of Havana are worth coming for themselves. There’s an endless background thrum of people shouting, (what is it about those with Mediterranean blood that nothing can ever be said if it can instead be yelled?) and the crash of the waves as they hit the waterfront. There’s the enormous and deafening Chevys, Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs from the fifties, a throwback to a golden age of American motoring when Eisenhower had just build the Interstate system and America emerged from the Depression and the Second World War as the world’s economic powerhouse. If you’ve never ridden in a convertible Buick about twenty-five metres long, weighing six tonnes and carrying more chrome than the QE2 (and capable of taking a gentle corner about as adroitly), I commend it. It’s like riding a trampoline converted to a stretched tractor with a small nuclear warhead under the bonnet.

For every American fifties behemoth with chrome fins and held together by electrical wire and sellotape, there’ll be three Ladas or Trabants and a couple of modern Chinese automotive atrocities – a constant reminder that Cuba has had many different friends over the years, but never very many at any one time. The police cars – and ‘car’ is charitable – are the same as those driven by the East German Stasi in the Bond films of the eighties. They have wheels the size of dollar coins, are constructed almost entirely from processed rust held together by a few pieces of steel and have the aerodynamics (not to mention aesthetics) of a Rubik’s Cube. That said, I saw a guy in a Lada drag race a guy in a Caddy the size of an aircraft carrier. Although the Caddy won, it was primarily because its chrome nose was already at the finish line before the car itself had even begun moving. The Lada was actually faster. In a relative kind of way.

But Cuba isn’t about the cars or the cigars or the rum – as pleasing as all those are. It’s about the people who live in the western hemisphere’s only communist state, and how they go about their day-to-day lives in the face of real privation and difficulty. It’s about how a repressive, revolutionary government has remained in power for a half-century – and retained the support of its people even as the Soviet Union fell apart – and it’s about how those people see Cuba with a mix of adoration and exasperation; resignation and hope.

Changes are undoubtedly afoot – particularly in the couple of months since Raul officially succeeded Fidel – so it was a fortuitous time to visit. DVD players, microwave ovens and personal computers – previously banned, ostensibly because of their drain on the electricity grid – are now allowed. Perhaps most significantly, in March of this year, Raul Castro's government said it is allowing cell phones for ordinary Cubans, a luxury previously reserved for those who worked for foreign firms or held key posts with the state apparatus.

This was the first official announcement of the lifting of a major restriction under Raul, and is the kind of small freedom many Cubans have been hoping he would embrace since succeeding Fidel in February. Cubans are nothing if not enterprising, though – something I’ll return to – and some who were previously ineligible for cell phones already had them by having foreigners sign contracts in their names. But mobile phones are not nearly as common in Cuba as elsewhere in Latin America or the world.

The telecommunications monopoly ETECSA said it would allow the general public to sign prepaid contracts in Cuban convertible pesos – the currency generally used by tourists on the island – but the prices of these contracts will still remain out of the reach of most Cubans, who earn an average salary so low it beggars belief. The average Cuban wage is aboutUS$20 per month. The UN Development Program considers a dollar a day ($30/month) to constitute extreme poverty, so on the face of it, Cubans are as poor or poorer than those on the subcontinent or in sub-Saharan Africa. But with a very important caveat.

That caveat is communism. The Cuban government controls not just the service and manufacturing industries, but provides free health care, education and housing to all Cubans. The provision of housing is one thing, but the maintenance of those houses is quite another. As Cuban architecture is stuck in a timewarp – virtually no residential construction seems to have taken place since the late fifties – most houses are decrepit. The government claims to maintain them for free as required, but the backlog is endless, and it’ll never be able to keep up with demand. The demand for housing itself is even more problematic than the demand for maintenance. Most Cuban families cram many members into a single small house – it’s the norm to see a married couple with all their parents and their children under one, two-bedroom roof. This has some very interesting consequences.

The first is something you see a lot of in Asia – the survival of the extended family, largely abandoned in the developed world in favour of the nuclear family as children move away for jobs, the elderly can afford to live alone, and young adults move in together. The atomisation of western society is something that truly bothers many people, me included. In London during the past few years, I’ve moved house a few times, each time to a different area and never being part of the sense of community you can get from living on a street and knowing everyone in the neighbourhood. What one gains in freedom and excitement, one loses in belonging, in solidarity, in support.

So the Cuban kids get babysat and taught by the grandparents every day while the parents are out at work. The kids play baseball in the street – there’s barely an intersection in all of Havana where fifteen barefoot and bare-chested young boys aren’t playing a pick-up game – and people wander in and out of their neighbours’ homes to swap hard-to-get products, or to borrow some butter, boiled water or just a few pesos. Having grown up apart from an extended family – and now living probably the rest of my life eight time zones away from my immediate one – I recognise profoundly the joy and support that comes from three generations being a part of each other’s lives.

But some other consequences of the housing shortage are interesting too. Surprisingly, perhaps, Cuba has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. A divorced mother-of-three selling coffee on the side of the road explained that the living conditions forced upon her and her husband made the marriage deteriorate irretrievably. When you share a room with your children and even perhaps your own parent, a sex life becomes nearly impossible.

A sex life is also, therefore, difficult for the teenage or post-teenage children of the marriage – who are unable to move out, and quite obviously cannot just get a hotel room. As a result, the city is full to bursting with young couples fooling around in parks, doorways, bus-stops, alleys, and most of all – the Malecon.

The Malecon, or seafront, is the true beating heart of Havana and one of the most special places I’ve ever seen. It stretches for miles along the coast, with jagged rocks breaking the violent surf and a high wall often overcome in Hurricane season, covering the coastal parts of the city in salty spray and sea slime. The slime makes the walkway along the Malecon potentially treacherous, but go to a Cuban lawyer with a tort claim against the government, and you’ll get laughed out of his office. He’ll probably close the office for the day to go and regale his colleagues. No litigation means there are about two dozen ways you can get killed every day – from uncovered holes in the street which descend metres into a stinky gloom, to workmen on scaffolding three floors up who throw pieces of rubble big enough to dent a Studebaker (or destroy a Lada) onto the pavement below.

As well as fishermen, couples making out and families taking in the sea air, Havana’s Malecon is famous for something else: more prostitutes than I’ve ever seen anywhere else on earth.

Cuban prostitution is not like the trafficking of Eastern European women lured with jobs, or crack addicts earning their next fix or the desperate fight just for survival in Cambodia. It’s more often about a small taste of a life otherwise out of reach. The girls – jinateras – are invariably young, often eye-bleedingly gorgeous, and hang around waiting for foreign men to walk past, at which point they fawn and flirt in a remarkable display of well-rehearsed coquettishness. Usually, it’s not an overt exchange of cash for sex, but rather the in the form of dinner at a restaurant, cocktails in a lounge and maybe gifts unaffordable to ordinary Cubans – designer jeans or jewellery. This begs the question of whether it’s prostitution at all – I know a few men who’d argue that getting sex anywhere at any time tends to mandate dinner, a few drinks, and a gift or three – but, unable to leave the country and able to see an MTV lifestyle otherwise tantalisingly out-of-reach, acting as a temporary girlfriend or escort for visiting foreign men is a taste of that life they see and want.

As well as the stunning and flirty freelance jinateras, there’s also a depressing prevalence of guys pimping out their own girlfriends and, one assumes, splitting the spoils. Walking home at night through the dark and garbage-strewn streets of Centro Habana, countless times I’d pass a young black (always black) Cuban couple kissing passionately against a wall, before the guy spots me, pushes his long-suffering lady aside, and whispers, “Hey, amigo, you like my girl? You want fuck? She suck good, amigo”.

This is sad, and I don’t know whether it reflects most poorly on the girl for acceding to this and staying with him (perhaps she has no choice), on the guy himself for lacking any self-respect, on the foreign sex tourists providing demand, or on a socio-economic system that makes this commonplace. UN officials working in Cuba, as quoted in the International Herald Tribune, say the girls blame the US embargo, which leaves not enough money for food. Whether it’s the desire for a D&G t-shirt or bona fide impoverishment, as sexualised as Cuba is – and it really is – this shouldn’t be happening.

So, it’s clear most Cubans live lives of real hardship – which go way beyond undrinkable tap water and cramped living conditions. As I said, the average wage is pitiful, and I spent a fair bit of time calculating the cost of goods. Not just the cost for foreigners – staying in a hotel, taking an official taxi, going to a museum or eating in a restaurant are all surprisingly expensive – barely cheaper than the West, especially when you get hit with an astronomical twelve per cent commission on all transactions. But I rooted around to find the cost of beans and rice, of cooking oil and underpants and various other things people cannot do without. And it didn’t add up. Doesn’t matter how frugal a life you use as your reference point, it’s not possible to survive on the earnings of the average Cuban. So I wandered off to the house of one of Cuba’s best-respected journalists who writes for the state-run daily newspaper, Granma.

This newspaper is worth a moment’s digression for its Orwellian hilarity alone. Astonishingly, it’s translated into English as well as a couple of other languages, and is available online as well as in hard form (not that any Cubans actually have Internet – so one assumes it’s for the benefit of people like me who want to get a feel for the zeitgeist, and is seen as an opportunity to bring us around to the miracles of la Revoluçion).

Just a brief perusal of the headlines tells you everything you need to know. Some are relatively positive but benign articles about Cuba’s involvement in the world. “Mexican swimmers are training in Cuba”; “Cuba is facing the threat of global warming with determination, the UNDP affirms”; and “Cuba exports medical equipment all over the world” are just three from one particular day’s front page. Others are more creepily manipulative: “The revolution is stronger than ever”; “Cuban exiles use lies to undermine the revolution”. It’s important to note that these are not on the comment or Op-Ed pages, but are journalistic articles in the news section. The distinction between news journalism and commentary breaks down when the paper-of-record is a mouthpiece of the government.

The most interesting part about Granma – aside from the surprising excellence of the English in translation – is the regular, lengthy pieces by Fidel himself. Assuming he is in fact still alive and actually writing these pieces (admittedly not a given), he really is a gifted thinker, and I read much of his work, coming to appreciate the fierce requisite intelligence for him holding onto power in the face of endless attempts by the outside to undermine his rule. One long piece – over two issues – was China’s place in the world. While quite obviously sycophantic towards a country on which Cuba is more and more dependent, it was an admirable wide-angle look at Chinese history, a significant academic piece of work. Whatever you can say about Fidel’s politics and his treatment of dissidents over the past five decades, absolutely nobody can argue he’s not a towering and impressive man – a father figure for all Cubans.

Digressing further if I may, the existence of a ‘father figure’ in some parts of the world is something that has struck me regularly on my travels. The Serbians have Tito, the Turks have Ataturk, Thailand has its venerable King, China – to a decreasing degree – has Mao, India has Nehru and Gandhi. Cuba has Che Guevara, José Martí and, of course, Fidel. Some of these men have been kindly and benevolent, some tyrannical and cruel. I wonder what it must be like to grow up in a country with such a figure. I find it hard to group Queen Elizabeth in that category (not just because of her gender, although a father figure is undoubtedly different than a mother figure, but because most Britons admire rather than revere her). I wonder to what extent having such a figure in a country’s past is a substitute for a deity. And I wonder if faith in a human father figure who watches over his people actually gives comfort and solace in times of adversity. My guess is it probably does – even if in many of those cases, the figure himself is a large cause of the adversity being faced.

Anyway, I was talking about the unfeasible cost of living versus earnings, so sought out the journalist at Granma. She welcomed me into her lovely home (not everyone earns less than a dollar a day, even in a communist country), and I began by launching into respectful interrogation on the subject of journalistic freedom.

“Do you think Granma is journalistically independent?” I ask. “Can you write what you want without the involvement of the government?”

She nods patronisingly at me – as if I’d just asked a question a slow-witted three year-old would come up with.

“The media is completely free, we can write what we want”. I was hanging out with a photographer from the Washington Post at the time, and he and I exchanged glances.

“So, you can criticise your leaders?” I ask.

“Oh no”, she replies, in a Kafkaesque non sequitur which makes my brain hurt.

“Why would I want to criticise the government?” she asks rhetorically. “Our government doesn’t use propaganda, that’s just what you’ve been told, because you’re brainwashed on the outside. The people using propaganda are the Americans and the western media, who believe what the exiles in Florida say, and the western governments [by which she means the US] spread lies about Cuba because they hate Fidel for humiliating them”.

I’m only able to stifle my incredulous snort because the very last part is basically true.

“Hypothetically”, I suggest, “what would happen if you did write that the government is doing things badly and you though there should be elections?”

“We can criticise the government for the way things are badly managed, but why would I criticise our leaders who’ve done so much for us?” she replies.

And suddenly, just a very little bit, the clouds part and I begin to understand. She and I were at a classical political-cultural impasse where neither understands the other. For us, government means the executive branch and the party in control in the legislature. In Cuba, the government is everywhere and it is everything. So when she says she can criticise the government, she means she can write that the potholes are getting too bad so someone at the department of infrastructure should be blamed, or that something more should be done to improve electricity supply. In other words, constructive criticism of those low down on the government ladder whose responsibility it is to attend to the day-to-day services of the country are fair game. The revolution, the one-party state and its upper echelons are firmly not.

But I’d gone to her home to ask about the economy. “Cubans are poor”, she agreed, "but there are no extreme poor. We have no homeless (which does seem to be true), virtually no HIV (also true) and no malnutrition” (possibly true, but difficult to visually verify because Cubans are naturally thin).

She pointed out that although wages are low by international standards, the government gives people a clothing and food allowance in addition to free education, housing, utilities, health care and virtually free public transport. And that people occasionally (she lowered her voice as if about to blaspheme) “sell some of the goods the government gives them in their jobs on the side”. This piqued my interest, and I made a mental note to find out more.

“Viva la revoluçion!!” she exclaimed, as I walked out the door. Well, she didn’t. But she might as well have.

More muddled than ever, and wondering if Cuba is in fact the hardest society I’ve seen to try and unravel, I wandered up to the university in search of a professor willing to speak candidly.

This was every bit as much a challenge as you’d expect. Pretending not to recognise the barbed looks of suspicion from the secretaries tapping away on typewriters and the assistants wrestling photocopiers that looked like they’ve been lifted from Bletchley Park circa 1941, I asked to see someone who could help me write a piece that would surely laud the miracle of the Cuban economic model.

This evidently passed muster, because I soon found myself in the office of an elderly professor of economics and social theory, only too delighted to shower me with talking points on the triumphs of the revolution and Marx. I got bored pretty fast – I’m already impressed with societies that manage universal free health care and education – made my excuses and left. Realising that my first approach was doomed to fail – going to the office and requesting a formal interview was only going to raise suspicion and prying eyes – I went wandering on the faculty grounds and found a lecturer in economics, a black, middle-aged woman eating a inedible-looking sandwich.

I asked her the questions I had posed to the white man in his office only minutes before. What does it mean that Cubans can now stay in hotels and own mobile phones? How do people get by on so little? What is the future of Cuba?

“Oh, what difference does it make to most people?” she sighed. “Theoretically, gaining freedoms is a good thing, and these were beyond what we’d realistically suspected. But Raul is a smart man – smarter than Fidel, perhaps. Like all communists, he understands the importance of symbolism”.

“So, this is no glasnost or perestroika?” I prodded.

“Not at all. It may appear that Cuba is in flux, and it is, but it’s not the kind which changes a system of government. People here admire their government, they support it in its provision of services to ordinary people. But most of all, they see it as a proud resistance to the bullying of the United States. The blockade and the rhetoric which comes out of Washington DC about Cuba only strengthens the status quo here. So Cubans can now legally stay in hotels they cannot possibly afford, and get a mobile phone line that costs four months’ salary. Big deal. But however slow the changes, and whatever the difficulties Cubans face, things are much better than in the 1990s. So people are reasonably optimistic about their futures”.

The “1990s” she was talking about is the “special period” and deserves some mention. After the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed during 1989-1991, Cuba’s best friend in the world disappeared overnight.

During the mid-eighties, after a quarter-century of a top-down, Soviet-style economy, it was clear that quality was suffering and production quotas were unrealistic. In 1986, Fidel introduced a ‘rectification of errors’ campaign, a process aimed at reducing malfunctioning bureaucracy and increase local-level decision-making.

Just as things were starting to improve, the Eastern bloc collapsed and US$5 billion in credits disappeared from Cuba’s balance sheet. Castro declared a five-year periodo especial (special period), an austerity program of quite stunning privations. Every person I spoke to in Cuba about the availability of goods and services refers back to that era, in which starvation and malnutrition was widespread. Only fifteen years ago, Cuba was sub-Saharan in its living conditions.

So despite the Helms-Burton Act and the repeated tightening of the noose by the Bush Administration – which besides keeping the huge electoral swing state of Florida in Republican hands, has done nothing but bolster support for the regime among Cubans – things now are pretty damn good in Cuba.

But I was still confused about the cost of living, so wandered over to the Hotel Inglaterra on the central square – a splendid, pre-revolutionary edifice which specialises in excellent mojitos, apparently drab and moth-eaten rooms, and utterly inedible food. All the food in Havana is pretty much inedible, I suspect the rooms are all moth-eaten, and without doubt the mojitos are fabulous – though sometimes with water from the taps, which anyone without a suicide wish would be well advised to avoid. While sitting on the terrace, I saw a black girl with a baby approach the front door and ask the white Cuban doorman if she could use the bathroom. “No” he shouted. Not twenty minutes later, a white girl with a baby came and asked the very same thing. “Yes” he said, waving her through. The statistical validity of this aside, I began thinking about the racial mix of Cuba – the melting pot of black African slaves, the Spanish, and countless mixes of black, brown and white blood. But the prejudice towards the blacks was something alluded to by a certain Dr Jesus Acosta Santos –with whom I lived – and I began to think about it more and more.

I spent my time in Cuba hopping from one Casa Particulare to another and ended up staying the last week in Havana with a delightful and unusual man by the name of Dr Jesus Acosta Santos – a semi-retired criminal defense lawyer and owner – if such a term ever applies in Cuba – of a Casa Particulare. (You never actually own your home – even though the middle classes do get to buy and sell them. But they’re not transferable. If you die, you can’t leave it to your children – it reverts to the State).

Staying in Cuba you have two choices. A hotel with European prices and sub-saharan standards – Hotel Inglaterra, by all accounts, being perfectly representative of them all – or a Casa Particulare, a government-licensed room rented in a local person’s home.

Jesus was a kindly and very funny white-haired old man in sandals and a neck brace, apparently from a recent motorbiking accident. It says as much about Cuba as anything else that after a successful career as a lawyer, and his own legal practice with a personal staff, he lives in what would be called ‘the projects’ in the US, or a ‘council estate’ in the UK. After 45 years as a skilled professional, he still washes himself from a bucket, and only recently has been able to afford a television, on which he and I passed the evenings watching Cuban baseball. Every morning when I left the house, he reminded me that I was his responsibility; that Cuba is dangerous. He’d grab my arm and look into my eyes with a piercing apprehension and say, “Watch out for the black man. He will steal you and kick you and try to kill you”.

I’ve been to many places in the world, and everywhere is different in many ways. But one thing which seems truly universal is the fear non-blacks have everywhere of young, black men. In Europe, North America, Australia, and even in places like India and China where there are barely any blacks at all, “Watch out for the black man!” is a refrain heard over and over. This is a topic beyond the scope of this piece. Maybe I’ll try and dig into it another time. I just wonder how much all of our African ancestry plays in this prejudice – the association of Africa with violent primitivism which we all think we’ve outgrown – and how much is because young black men, turns out, are just more violent.

Anyway, like almost everyone in Cuba, Dr Jesus has relatives overseas. Of a Cuban population of 11 million, at very least one million live outside Cuba. Some – many – are in Florida as you’d guess, but many too live in Europe, having fled for a better life. Jesus lives alone but has two daughters and a wife overseas. He’s not, as I’d originally suspected, a widower or divorced – in fact his marriage to his wife in Italy is still going strong. But twelve years ago, and completely disillusioned with the revolution, hating communism and having had enough of the Special Period, she left to Italy with their daughters – one of whom is grown up and comes to visit him three times a year.

Why didn’t he go with? I asked. What can possibly be worth being apart from your much-loved wife and children for the rest of your life and living alone?

“I love Cuba. Cuba is my home”, he answered. And that was that.

Everything was becoming more and more muddled. How does the economy work? Is there real and profound racism between whites and blacks here? Why do some Cubans appear to be genuinely rich? Why do so many love their country so passionately, yet also dream of leaving at the same time?

And after bemusing conversations with a jinatera, the well-respected journalist, the academics, with a medical doctor, an expat Canadian and various others, I ended my investigations with an evening spent with a remarkable young man called Sidney.

Sidney is 26, a black Cuban whose maternal grandmother was Spanish and whose paternal great-grandfather was a slave taken from west Africa to Jamaica a century ago. He’s lived his whole life in Havana and works as a ‘systems manager’ (the closest I could translate, he maintains the electronic systems within buildings) and – like most Cubans – has never left the island. This will change later this year, when he moved to Toronto to start a new life with Carolina, his Canadian wife. They met a year or so ago when she was here for a development conference, they fell in love and were married some months later. They’re currently in the middle of the lengthy application process for his immigration to Canada – something which ought to pose no real problems. Canada – partly I think as a fuck-you to America – has long had close ties to Cuba.

Carolina has been coming to Havana every couple of months since they got engaged, so their time apart has been bearable, but quite naturally his impending emigration looms large in his life. And not just because he’s never left his country, or because the climatic difference between Havana and Toronto will be overwhelming. Because he’s saying goodbye to the place he grew up – something I know only too well about myself.

“I love Cuba. Cuba is my home”, he said with sadness, as we drank beer at sunset on the waterfront peering over to Florida. “I will always miss it. But by far the greatest thing about Cuba is the people. There are so many problems here: the corruption, the waste, the passivity in the face of repression and the desperation” (his English was better than most native speakers). “They are warm, easy-going, and always, always make sure to take care of each other”, he added, taking the words right out of my mouth.

You really do feel it, you know. There’s a solidarity, a sense of shared adversity and – appropriate considering the politics – a camaraderie that makes me think of what London must’ve been like during the Blitz. In the face of average wages lower than virtually any other place on earth, and 45 years of US policy designed to squeeze the country into submission towards democracy and the free market, and particularly on the back of the Special Period, Cubans take care of one another. You can see it in the way a driver, unsure of directions, will flag down the very first person on the sidewalk and end up getting comprehensive instructions. You can see it in the way the elderly take care of the young children while the parents are working. You see it in the way the 17 year-old boys play baseball with the five year-olds in the street. Or the way vendors give out freebies to the neighbours.

And so it was with Sidney that I finally got the answer I wanted on how the nonsensical jigsaw puzzle that is the Cuban economy works. He’s an exceptionally smart man and he understood my question before the words had finished leaving my lips.

“Can’t you see?” he laughed. “There is a parallel economy. Of course, nobody can live on what they’re officially paid, so to call Cuba ‘communist’ is misleading and even inaccurate – it’s about the most capitalistic and entrepreneurial society you can imagine. It’s just that the capitalism exists in the informal economy. It’s the fruit vendor who’s given a weekly quota of bananas and apples from the government to sell at a fixed price. He sells some of them at that price, tells the government the rest are ruined, and gives the rest away to his family or sells them to foreigners at a massive mark-up. The guy selling shampoo does the same, and the woman in the government clothes factory is deliberately wasteful, keeps the scraps of material scraps and takes them home where her mother makes clothes out of them and sells for virtually nothing to the people on her street. The pharmacist steals medicines to give to his family and friends. The baker makes extra loaves of bread he doesn’t account for and gives them away. Everybody, absolutely everybody, steals from the government. And the government knows. This is how it has to work”.

And suddenly it all made sense. When people have their backs to the wall as the Cubans have for two generations now, and when they live in a political system where wastefulness and inefficiency is a necessary and tolerable by-product of everything, people are enterprising in their survival. The government knows very well what’s going on and quietly tolerates it, because it’s the best case scenario to have a system with a black hole of waste but which keeps people healthy and alive (the average life expectancy is the same as in the USA), and in which it gets to thumb its finger to the big bad bully upstairs and declare victory for the revolution.

“All warfare is based on deception”, wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War – and a de facto war is still going on between this rich but at the same time poor little island and a country to its north which has a reactionary bilateral policy born of the era of Kruschev and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But not all evolution mandates revolution, and I’m dying to know whether genuine ‘evolution’ in this country – a manifest improvement in the lives of its people – can or will take place without the ‘revolution’ that Washington so desperately wants. But beyond the crappy food and the falling-down houses, the music and the laughter, the entrepreneurship and the solidarity, the prostitution and the families walking together in the open air, and beyond the political repression and total state control, there is a beating heart to Cuba that is perceptible but completely indescribable unless you go yourself.

Sidney told me of a woman he met at Havana airport the week before, while he was waiting for Carolina to arrive from Canada. The woman he met was flying back from Germany where she’d spent the last ten days. She spent ten days in Germany three months earlier, and three months before that and three months before that. She earns enough money in ten days of crazy, rat-race work (I didn’t ask what she does) in Germany to afford to live for three months of a frugal, family life in Havana. Sidney asked if she’s thought about taking her family to Germany for good. But she would never emigrate from Cuba for the same reason my friend Dr Jesus would not follow his wife, and why Sidney is so ambivalent about following his.

“I love Cuba, Cuba is my home.” was her response. And that was that.