Cuba day 3, part 2 - toilet seat thieves, a Mafia night out and losing three hundred million dollars

We stop for 15 minutes at a small roadside café for coffee and notice now the roads ahead are very wet and the clouds are dark and low on the horizon. We get back into the coach grateful for having had the chance to stretch our legs and visit the loo and for the first time we are driving into rain.

Oh the toilets, you need to know about the toilets in Cuba before you go.  Firstly, there must be a nationwide toilet seat shortage or else there are some kleptomaniacs in the country with very questionable fetishes.  Because, other than at the best restaurants and hotels there is never a seat to be found on the toilet.  There probably used to be one because the fittings are still there. But….   no…. seats.  After a while you get a bit fed up of this particularly because you almost invariably have to navigate past a formidable woman who is installed at a small table with her foot across the door and who asks for your money. Next to her, on the table, is a carefully guarded pile of sheets of loo roll which is heavily rationed.  When you have paid her the entrance fee which usually ends up being one CUC (about 60p) because that is the only change you have, one is presented with four, maybe five sheets of two-ply paper which is so thin as to be transparent.  If she likes the look of you, she might extend it to eight sheets.  But those are very rare occasions.  A CUC every time you go to the loo builds up over the week and, to add insult to injury, the toilets are usually grubby, loo seats almost don't exist and often there is no lock on the door either.  So you are left to assume that most complicated of positions that involves you hovering over the rim of the loo at which you chose not to peer too closely, you have one of your feet hooked under the door to stop it swinging open and leaving you in full view of the restaurant or bar and concurrently balancing your rucksack mid-air because you dare not put it down on the wetness that is the floor.  In fact the toilets are so bad when you find a good one you have to go two or three times during the course of your visit to whichever establishment just to build up some kind of lavatorial credit in your memory in order to block out the visits you need to forget.  By the middle of the week my own revolutionary zeal was on the rise and I presented at the toilet-toll-gate my own roll of loo paper and marched stalwartly passed the sentry ignoring the cries of protest.     

Back on the bus we learn that the population is about 65% white, 30% black or mixed and 30% Chinese, the last fact surprising me because I hardly recollect seeing any Orientals at all.  When I check this figure in one of my own reference books it tells me only 1% of the population are Chinese.  In the noise of the bus and with handwritten notes, I may well have just written the number down wrongly.  We are told that there is no discrimination against anyone, that 51% of Parliament is women and that unlike other nations there is no religious discrimination of any kind.  We go on to hear that there are high levels of literacy, free education for all and that everybody has access to the internet.   It’s at this point I stop writing and look up. There are no homeless people, no starving people, it’s a fair society we are told. I stop write again because I sense just a little bit of propaganda creeping in.  Now, there is a lot about the socialist model that I admire and respect and certainly under the pre-revolution Batista regime there was huge inequality and corruption.  In fact in December 1946 the Mafia convened the biggest-ever get together of North American mobsters in Havana’s Hotel Nacional, under the pretence that they were going to see a Frank Sinatra concert.  Not really the kind of tourist you want to cultivate. And Castro did pass some very good laws in the first few years of his presidency including one which abolished racial discrimination.  But the reality of the human condition is such that discrimination is impossible to eradicate, unfortunately, even in Cuba.

When it comes to the internet my research suggests that though it might be ‘available’ it is still mostly restricted to the privileged few that work in government ministries or business offices.   Cuba has, I understand, a lower internet usage than Haiti and when you can get access it's interminably slow.  I tried a couple of times myself and gave up and trying to write this blog there would have been hopeless.  On the upside the government has recently passed new resolutions establishing a standard rate for internet connections but at 6CUC an hour (about £5) it’s a price that is beyond all but the most well paid Cubans or for those tourists that just can’t do without their email.  From what I can tell, Cuba is generally considered to be internet-gagged, there seems to be censorship police and the authorities are notoriously prickly when it comes to the voice of dissent.  See the Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez,  www.desdecuba.com/generaciony , who is a rare voice of dissent on-line and who once wrote to and got a reply from President Obama.  She has been a fairly vociferous critic of the Cuban government and this has attracted their less than friendly attentions at times, I understand.  There still remains, and this is also repeated by someone else I meet later in the week, a concern about the late-night-knock-on-the-door scenario.  Cuba today is showing tentative signs of change, but some of its population still seem to be struggling to shake off the belief that they have to be careful about what they say and what they do.      

I had the impression that Cuba had been struggling every day since the revolution.  But, the guide tells us, in the 1970s and ‘80s the people were by all accounts quite happy.  The economy was being propped up by the Russians following a ‘beauty parade’ of possible allies post regime change and this continued for thirty years.  There was plenty of food in the shops and enough national income to fund the free education and medical care mentioned earlier.  The US, less than happy with these ideological bed mates used various retaliatory tactics to bring Castro to heel.  All of them failed including the notoriously botched Bay of Pigs invasion and 600-plus assassination attempts.  The bubble burst in 1989-1991 with the fall of the Soviet Bloc when Cuba lost the one million dollars of aid a day that the Russians were supplying.  When you think that means the country lost $365m a year in income and has to contend with the longest economic blockade in modern history you begin to see how things might start looking a bit shabby after a while.  There followed what Castro called the Special Period. But I don’t suppose it felt very special to most of the population as the country became increasingly insolvent and politically isolated.

But that’s enough about politics and history; let’s get back to the holiday.

See the Cuba photographs on the gallery.

Comments

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