Commentary
Cuba Libre
By Erin Aubry Kaplan

HAVANA – Cuba has no paint.

It was the first thing I noticed on the bus ride from Jose Marti airport to Havana. Many of the old buildings and silos that lined the road to town stood grand but nearly naked, dressed in blue or sea-green blocks of color that had shrunk at the edges over decades to show the gray bones of concrete underneath.

To my American eyes, this was a rude but familiar shock. I immediately thought this must be a ghetto, an emblem of poverty and neglect.

I had seen this countless times before in my own country, knew it well. Minutes into this first trip to the forbidden island, I was ready to embrace Cubans as brethren in the eternal American struggle for equality in which colored people struggle most. I was home.

But I was not. The second thing I noticed was that the scores of people on foot (there are cars in Cuba , but not nearly enough) were walking past the faded buildings not with indifference or resentment or weariness, the hallmark of ghettoes at home. They were walking with a sense of recognition and expectation and ownership that I had never seen at all.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

Over the course of a week I came to realize that Cuba’s lack of paint was much less a sign of impoverishment or defeat than one of defiance, evidence that this country’s revolution had weathered time and constant attempts on its life for the last 50 years – and was still standing. This place was not perfect, but nor was it another hollowed-out casualty of capitalist ambition lying in America ’s towering shadow to the South.

Cuba manages to be something else altogether—poor but steeped in principle, small but convinced of its own potential for greatness in a way that America might have been several eras ago, before greatness and freedom came largely to mean the ratio of middle-class-and-above people to Starbucks satellites and iPod stores. Cuba was another world measured in another way, and I had much to learn from it. It was a place painted a very different color indeed.

Well, not entirely different. America is much less a country than a global culture, and despite the rigors of socialism, Cuba has not escaped its reach. Among the first people our group of black journalists encountered on the street was a couple of young black men affecting a stance that could only be described as hip-hop – they wore Chicago Bulls and Sean John jerseys. One of them wore a bright red head kerchiefs that could have been borrowed from the Bloods gang back home in L.A.

Our tour guide for the week, Abel Contreras, was completely different – serious, university-educated, fluent in four languages, well-versed in the more stirring details of the “revolucion.” But he was most animated about his favorite singers, Lionel Ritchie and Luther Vandross. His favorite hero of fiction was Tony Montana, the cheeky Columbian drug lord played by Italian-American Al Pacino in the gangsta-cult movie “Scarface.” Havana ’s shrine-size movie theaters from the days of the Batista regime – buildings as grand and worn as many others I saw – looked to be doing brisk business. Alicia Centelles, a journalist who also served as our interpreter, told me as our tour bus rumbled past one of those theaters that Cubans vastly prefer American movies and American movie stars. “My daughter and her friends all want to read about them,” she said with a mother’s indulgent smile. “For them, they are the best!”

Meaning that “Bennifer” and Brad Pitt, and all the rest, are if nothing else, superior tabloid fodder. But the fodder itself was wonderfully absent in Cuba . So were Starbucks’ awnings, and iPod billboards, and just about anything for and about advertising or selling, things that are the visual and economic core of every urban and suburban landscape in America .

Cuba ’s landscapes had no such clutter and no aspirations to it, and therefore there were no clear delineations between those neighborhoods living the good life with an abundance of lattes, and those who were not. But not knowing was bliss. The ubiquitous sights on this landscape were entirely old-fashioned – people walking one place to another or waiting optimistically for rides curbside, standing in line for ice cream, leaning on the bare concrete sea wall that lines Havana Bay . I found these tableaux, with their lack of any selling points, moving. And I thought enviously: when’s the last time I did any of this?

Americans are obsessed with how we look. And the most fundamental of those obsessions is not clothes or electronics or things at all, but old-fashioned skin color. Race in America is like money: it very often defines a person’s worth.

Communism notwithstanding, this is where Cuba and America differ most. When Fidel took over in 1959, he declared there would henceforth be no more institutional racism or race consciousness in a country with a slave past as deeply embedded in its social fabric as it is embedded in the States. This declaration struck me as either hopelessly utopian or hopelessly cynical; “colorblindness” to me is mostly whites looking to ignore race problems, not eradicate them. In my American experience, “colorblindness” long ago took the sophisticated militancy of Martin Luther King and turned it into an aggressively unsophisticated, soft-focus ad campaign for compliance.

But it was clear to me that socialist Cuba has taken its campaign for racelessness and equality more seriously than democratic America . Black Cubans living in the most tumble-down buildings have levels of education and health care that African Americans living in better circumstances in the wealthiest country in the world do not. And Cuba has made this progress in a dizzyingly short period of time. The black president of the Supreme Court, Ruben Remigio Ferro, measures that progress by the markedly different fortunes of own family.

The middle child in a family of seven boys, Remigio says that the older three who grew up before the revolution were farmers or land-workers, while the four who grew up after (including himself) became professionals. More important, the expectations for blacks changed abruptly post-revolution, whereas in America they’ve only changed glacially over generations.

Expectation is another word for political will, and America has precious little of it where its black citizens are concerned. This is because “there is not that religious difference of color,” explains Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba ’s national assembly. “Color is a continuum rather than a separation.” So who is white and who is black? “It would be unconstitutional for me to say,” he says with a smile. But Alarcon acknowledges that blacks – those who admit to it – are the worst-off Cubans in terms of employment, education, housing. But there is a kind of affirmative action to correct the imbalance. “In the matter of scholarships, we give priority to blacks and women,” Alarcon says by way of example. “Why? Because they’ve been discriminated against before.”

Simple. Cuba is officially pragmatic about race because it must be. Even if its leaders are racists, they understand that their system of government can’t work with obvious racial divisions, or any divisions, because divisions threaten collective power – and their own power. Modern Cuba was founded on the belief that individual and institutional interests are one and the same. For all our bluster about democracy and colorblindness, America was founded on racial and gender divisions that define us still, and that are still far from being redressed.

Whites remain the most privileged group, and while everybody else is welcome to aspire to that privilege, its exclusionary nature ensures that not everyone will have it. Of course, Cuba is not privilege-free either, not yet. “We do have dysfunction that’s partly a consequence of 400 years of slavery and colonial rule,” says Remigio. “Discrimination was very strong here. It’s difficult to eliminate after less than 50 years of revolution. Four hundred years versus 50 – there’s no comparison.”

Of course not. But I was still impressed at the breadth of change wrought so far, how the state of black Cuba challenges assumptions about the intimate connectedness of poverty and race that have always appeared ironclad to me.

And it also challenges the notion that to have things and live comfortably is to always be prosperous. Cuba forced me to consider that having an SUV in the driveway but not being literate, or reasonably healthy, or having a stake in society at large may qualify as ownership, but not prosperity. This is a particularly resonant and troublesome truth for African Americans, who tend to focus too much on the accumulation of things as the surest marker of progress in a country that has historically allowed them to have so little.

But the game of material catch-up consumes far too much energy and vision that we need for other things. Black Cubans may grumble about what they lack – I ran into more than a few these people in Havana – but they are more or less free of the burden of accumulation that weighs down so much of America , especially black America , and blinds us to what freedom truly is.

I found the best hope for some future American-Cuban synergy at the Latin American School of Medicine. The school trains doctors from 28 countries in not just medicine, but political and cultural diplomacy. Cuban doctors are dispatched on missions all over the world not simply to heal the sick and needy, but to represent the humanitarianism of socialist ideas on a world stage.

That’s the ideal; reality is somewhat different.

At the school, a contingent of American students is working to place their own native idealism, belief in social equality and youthful sense of adventure in the context of daily life in Cuba . That’s no easy task. The country is welcoming and plenty eye-opening, they say, but there is also not enough of, well, things.

Breakfasts are often spare. Mail is slow, and the Internet is not readily available. Thanks to an American embargo tightened over the Bush years, the students cannot get financial and other help directly from home, even though (mostly white) Cuban-Americans are allowed to send money to their relatives who remain in Cuba . But none of this diminishes the students’ determination to effect a small revolution of their own by receiving their medical education in the unlikeliest of places.

Like blacks in the 1960s, the students see Cuba has a model of freedom. But unlike many ‘60s expatriates who permanently fled a corrupt system in the States, they want to take that model back home. “This experience has really pushed me to get out into the world,” says Tahirah Benyard, a 27-year-old Howard University graduate who sees being in Cuba as part of a tradition of fighting for social justice that’s classically American. “When I saw what happened during Hurricane Katrina, I thought, ‘I have to do something for the brothers and sisters.’ The best thing I could do was come to Cuba . God gave me the courage to leave my country. Black people in the U.S. are being eliminated…I want to be part of a change.”

I am heartened by Tahirah’s passion, by the passion of all the students I meet. Feeling part of change is the kind of emotional prosperity so many of us in America lack these days, the kind that even the most well-intended consumerism can never fill. By the end of my week in this country I had almost normalized the faded buildings here, even made them beautiful; Cuba may have no paint, but it isn’t looking for cover. Americans have paint in every shade and every degree of shine, but the cover is too often an end in itself.

I am probably too wedded to that cover to ever shrug it off entirely, but Cuba has at least dispelled some of my fear of the unknown – and the unseen – if I do. I would still stand. I might even prosper. That Cuba finally made me feel more in touch with my American birthright of reinvention and possibility is just one irony among many I experienced in my brief time here. Clearly, I must return to experience more.