Book Review

Forbidden Fruit

WAITING FOR FIDEL. By Christopher Hunt (Houghton Mifflin: 260 pp., $13 paper); CUBA HANDBOOK. By Christopher P. Baker (Moon Travel Handbooks: 714 pp., $19.95 paper) 

Even the pope, a preeminent anti-Communist crusader, could not resist the siren song of Fidel Castro and his island fiefdom. So it's not surprising that writer Christopher Hunt begins his downbeat travel chronicle, "Waiting for Fidel," mindlessly dazzled by the enduring star power of the aging Cuban dictator: "The gestures belied something remarkable, something I never saw in American leaders. Fidel Castro truly believed what he said," Hunt rhapsodizes,recalling Castro's televised speech during the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. "I was hooked," he gushes. "It was easy to imagine dropping all for the honor and adventure of riding with Castro." Captivated by the telegenic guerrillero dressed up in a designer suit, Hunt high-tails it south to that embargoed, forbidden island that remains a relentless American obsession. 

Hunt takes his clever title from a famous documentary about a Canadian filmmaker's hilarious travails trying to set up an interview with El Comandante (along with a nod to Beckett's existential classic). But while he chatters on about wanting to meet Castro throughout his Cuban adventure, his efforts are too half-hearted for the reader to take seriously and serve only as a flimsy construct to bookend this hobo travel memoir. Not surprisingly, with each passing day of cold showers, tepid coffee and warm Hatuey beer, the author's enamoredness with the Cuban strongman slowly shatters. Hunt writes well, but he treads familiar territory: a depressed economy and a depressed people suffocated by a bankrupt ideology. 

Cubaphiles will find little new here. To his credit, however, Hunt does hop off the familiar Cuban tourist circuit (a parallel universe that runs on U.S. dollars) and with gritty determination dives into mainstream Cuban society, living with new friends met on the road, staying in decrepit, crumbling apartment buildings or shanty homes with pre-revolutionary plumbing and bare lightbulbs, when and if there is electricity. Soap, milk and toilet paper are luxury items. 

Like swimmers treading water, many Cubans stagger through a daily obstacle course of privations and a serpentine bureaucracy worthy of Kafka. Hunt delivers a disturbing and vivid portrait of this life; the new mantras of the revolution heard muttered in the ubiquitous long lines are "no es facil," ("it's not easy") alternating with sighs of "la lucha" ("the struggle"), which once denoted the revolution but now refers to daily life. Hunt captures some of the unique characteristics--resourceful, temperamental, inventive, capable of keeping a fleet of American cars, circa 1950, on the road without any spare parts--that have earned Cubans their reputation as "los judios del Caribe," "the Jews of the Caribbean," and the irony that such singularly entrepreneurial souls would find themselves living under the stifling blanket of Communist Party ideology for almost 40 years. 

But Hunt offers little explanation of how and why Cubans survive and even, at times, thrive. We learn nothing about Cuban culture--among the richest in the Americas. There's nothing on Santeria, the Afro-Cuban national religion of the island, which is a seamless part of Cuban life and remains an even stronger force than the Catholic church. Music, as integral to Cuban life as sugar cane and heard on virtually every street corner on the island, is strangely silent on these pages. One would never know that Cuba is the cradle of the mambo, the danzon, boleros, son, la musica guajira and salsa, or the birthplace of Benny More, Maria Teresa Vera and the exquisite balladeer Miguel Matamoros and the current crop of gifted musicians--Van Van, La Banda, Chuchu Valdes, Elena Burke and the formidable Celina Gonzales--all internationally recognized. Nor do we learn about Cuban artists--the late greats such as Rene Portocarrero and Wilfredo Lam or the current diverse crop of traditional and avant-garde artists. It seems that for all Hunt's travels throughout Cuba, he never makes it inside a club, an art museum or even an artist or musician's home. 

Likewise, there's no sense of Cuba's rich literary heritage. Thus, Hunt's adventures in the city of Holguin are absent any mention of its famous native son, the late Reinaldo Arenas, the brilliant, embittered novelist who died in exile in 1990 and who wrote so searingly about his impossible childhood and his provincial hometown. Hunt's Havana is a singularly dreary affair without insight or reference to any of literary lions who thrived on what was once the most beautiful city in Latin America--Jose Marti, Alejo Carpentier, Virgilio Pinero, Guillermo Cabrera Infante or the masterly Jose Lezama Lima, Cuba's answer to James Joyce. 

While Hunt does offer us some helpful Cuban history, particularly on Castro's revolution, we get a sense of Cuban black humor punning the Spanish word for faith to mean familia exterior: an acerbic wink at the many Cubans who live on cash remittances sent from relatives living in the States. Hunt captures well the nuances of the burgeoning ranks of prostitutes on the island--many of whom are strictly amateurs fishing for a "date" to carry them away. 

Fortunately, much of what is missing in Hunt's book can be found in Christopher P. Baker's "Cuba Handbook." Although about half a dozen guidebooks have been written on Cuba, none is as comprehensive, informative and readable as Baker's welcome addition. Baker offers not only useful maps, charts, vital phone numbers and thoroughly researched chapters on the provinces, major cities and historical sites in Cuba but also crams his handbook with fascinating sidebars about AIDS, hurricanes, anti-Castro activity, cigars, beaches, sexual mores, the Cuban Cubist Wilfredo Lam, the sugar harvest (la zafra), the Bicycle Revolution and beisbol--Cuba's national pastime. 

Although Baker acknowledges receiving the cooperation of the Cuban government and is clearly something of a "fellow traveler" (there is even a chapter entitled "What U.S. Citizens Can Do to End the Embargo"), he is admirably fair to other points of view. In one case, he even recommends Andres Oppenheimer's "Castro's Final Hour," an account that savages the Cuban government for its infamous 1989 Ochoa-De La Guardia drug trials. And in his sidebar on human rights, he writes, "The regime is not above jailing even its most loyal supporters if they renege on the Revolution," citing the horrific case of Carlos Franqui, the former editor in chief of Revolucion, whose image was airbrushed out of historical photographs once he slipped into Cuban desgracia, and the hapless Olga Andreu, the former librarian of Casa de las Americas, who met a similar fate simply for recommending Cabrera Infante's classic "Tres Tristes Tigres." 

Finally, Baker explains why the majority of Cubans, no matter their travails and hardships, would never leave. For all the woes and ills, the average Cuban still fares better than his or her counterpart in neighboring countries such as Haiti, Guatemala or even some parts of Mexico. And for all the onerous state repression, Cuba has never known death squads as have Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador. Castro's greatest sin may turn out to be creating a crippling paternalistic state. 

"The loss of Soviet subsidy revealed Castro's failure to build a socialist wonderland," writes Hunt. "What he had built, however, was a safety net. . . . The state continued to provide hospitals (without medicine), schools (without books) and a subsistence diet (without meat). Cubans knew that theirs was the only country in the world where a person could do absolutely nothing and not starve to death. Blanketed by security, many were afraid of the real world." But it is the fierce patriotism of Cubans and their passion for their sumptuously beautiful country that is the glue that holds it all together. "This island is blessed," an old woman tells Hunt. "We have no volcanoes, no wild animals, no poisonous snakes. . . . Anything can grow here. I grow garlic in the dirt on my roof. In what other country could I do that?" 

One could argue that Cuba is in a civil war, struck along generational lines: the old content to live out their days in a tropical welfare state and the young--desperate for opportunity--dreaming of escape. With so many young girls intent on snaring a foreigner and their male counterparts throwing themselves on flimsy rafts, the state of marriage and romance on the island is often a sorry one. Worse, the Straits of Florida is a mournful graveyard. 

Baker has done his homework, greatly and wisely benefiting from the many writers before him. Some are acknowledged; others, regrettably, are not: I ran across several sentences of verbatim text gleaned from my own articles. But as the result is so rewarding, one forgives this unfortunate lapse. Baker cites my own favorite quotes about Castro--from Graham Greene, who called him "an empirical Marxist who plays communism by the ear and not by the book" and, most especially, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who quipped about his longtime pal, "I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser." It's the best explanation I know for the success of El Maximo Lider. In 11 months, on Jan. 1, 1999, Fidel Castro will celebrate 40 years in power, outlasting eight American presidents. For four decades, he has defiantly played David to the most powerful Goliath in the world--because he refused to lose.