Cuba’s China syndrome
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jorge Sotirios
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Jorge Sotirios' biography and other articles by this writer
‘Viva Raul! Viva Cuba! Viva la Revolución!' I awoke abruptly, stumbled over bottles at my feet and leaned over the wrought-iron balcony. A group below had emerged from the Confucius Institute, accompanied by a marching band that hit all the right notes at the wrong time. They marched in single file past the derelict El Pacifico restaurant, took little notice of murals of Dr Fu Manchu and swept past waiters plying their trade in silk pyjamas. China's middle class was a new breed. Tourism and solidarity made for a unique mix.
Bleary-eyed I slumped downstairs, sunk a guava batida from a hole-in-the-wall café and exited Barrio Chino. I enjoyed this Caribbean Chinatown, strolling past neo-colonial architecture that wasn't UNESCO-approved.
Tour groups aside, the Chinese in Cuba were declining in number. Arriving in the mid-to-late nineteenth century from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and California, they worked as indentured labourers alongside African slaves in sugar plantations. Possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit that was insufferably bourgeois, they faded once the revolution took power.
In Old Havana, cobblestone alleys led to Plaza de Armas, where I bought the daily papers. A rank smell emanated from Revolución, as well it might, given that it was published in 1959. The bookseller had piled a stack up to his waist; archives sold more copies than the official Granma. Revolución almost crumbled in my hands, but its images preserved authenticity. By all accounts, 1959 was a transitional year. Models with long legs in smooth stockings featured alongside beaches finally opened to the public: Playas Para Todo el Pueblo. Matrons at Society Balls incongruously rubbed shoulders with gun-toting rebels; Olivier's Richard III was advertised besides Fidel Castro's Libertad o Muerte.
With a slanted beret and hair beyond his shoulders, Fidel's brother, Raul, cut a dashing figure. The maligned and underestimated Raul has soft Oriental features with a homoerotic edge. Cuba's new leader is often disparaged as La China (a bastard Chinese and closet homosexual), suggesting racism hasn't entirely disappeared, nor has that most Latin of traits, machismo.
Raul's youth has always been striking. At twenty-seven, he looked fifteen. When Jean-Paul Sartre penned ‘No old men in power!' in 1960, he was smitten by revolutionaries in their early thirties. ‘Everywhere I look they could be my sons,' the philosopher said, beaming in photos taken by Korda. The same heroes shown in Granma are now closer to eighty. Greying, they blend nicely with the dilapidated architecture around them. The passage of time means buildings contain cracks and revolutionaries creases, but others have been renovated (building and revolutionary alike). None more than Raul. ‘The delegator' is not yet ‘the dictator'. Previously the hard man of the army, Raul steered Cuba to Soviet-style communism. Nowadays he's portrayed as a pragmatist, opening up the economy to private enterprise, easing travel restrictions and access to the internet. Perhaps it was inevitable. When the beards were shorn and the long hair cut, Sartre asserted, the revolution ended and administration began.
For the moment I could further reminisce about 1959 by crossing to the seafront. Car names rolled off my tongue as easily as did the vehicles from the assembly line: Buick, Edsel, Studebaker, De Soto, Plymouth, Cadillac. 1948, '55, '57 and '62 paraded by, as if in a retrospective; chrome grilles were polished like mirrors and bench seats upholstered in white leather complemented tail fins piercing pedestrians in reverse. Marxists would call this admiration a fetish. But who reads Marx? Certainly not Cubans, going by the dusty hardbacks at Plaza de Armas.
Beside American cars and the Russian Lada, a third force hurled into picture. Viazul buses ferry tourists in a fleet imported from China. Vehicles chug, rattle or roar along the malecón. Cannons poised across the harbour at La Cabana were ready to explode at 9 pm, and I made sure to synchronise my watch. Cuba still manages to echo the past of fifty years ago, timed precisely.
FOREIGN REPORTERS ONCE HAD their shoes shined at the bar of the Hotel Inglaterra, while downing a gin fizz. This morning they were surfing the net. Signals transmitted via a French satellite made them exceptionally slow, in keeping with Cuba's languid pace. Communism, whatever its faults, was a shield safeguarding the island. A country spared the frenetic pace of consumerism is paradise, or at least a Marxist utopia in the making. But I revised these assumptions once I went online.
I scrolled past bailouts, toxic debts, housing bubbles and sub-prime disasters. Capitalism's fall was on Cuban screens and, unlike Chinese censorship, wasn't stifled. A link to Pope Benedict suggested the Pontiff couldn't bring the c-word to his lips, blaming the crisis on ‘greed'. Fidel's warning in the 1980s that the IMF's ‘Structurally Adjusted Programs' were a new form of economic colonisation was proving true. Baltic States and Eastern Europe, who eagerly complied, were feeling the pinch. Free trade, no tariff barriers and reduced public expenditure didn't make for resilient economies.
With a command economy, no reckless investments by its financial institutions and no rampant speculation by twenty-five-year-old traders, Cuba has maintained a growth of 8-12 per cent of GDP since 2006. But if Cubans were revelling in capitalism's crisis, they weren't showing it. Raul emphasised ‘humility' to commemorate half a century of revolution, in stark contrast to the West's triumphalism at the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Cuba's fall was imminent, the foreign press had editorialised: ‘it was only a matter of time'. Yet Cuba's enforced isolation from capitalism suggested it could sail through the new crisis untouched.
The elephant in the room, though, was the Chinese dragon. Its favoured trading status in South America had a ripple effect through the Caribbean. China's stockpiling of minerals fuelled demand for copper (Chile), soy (Brazil), gas (Bolivia) and oil (Venezuela). It's been said the Chinese plan generations ahead (two hundred years after the French Revolution, Zhou en Lai pondered its success but admitted ‘it was too soon to tell'), and its long-term survival involved markets in Latin America. Global capitalism's crisis enveloped China, and failing prices worldwide ensnared Cuba, which exported nickel and leased arable land to secure China's food supply.
Communism wasn't much of a shield to brothers-in-arms. I had to reconsider the purity of ideology when I read that the US Chamber of Commerce had called for an end to the Cuba embargo, denounced China's ‘exploitation', attacked its human rights and defended the right to work (for Americans, naturally). But surely it's a sign of the times when the biggest communist nation appears solely in the business pages? Take, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald headlines in a single day: ‘China in talks over Pilbara push', ‘China's money mandarins take the hard line', ‘China buys up big'. China's role in the global economy has been heightened by the crisis, with an anxiety uniting Cuba to America, and likewise Australia. What kind of world power will China be in the twenty-first century? If the Dragon sneezes, will we all catch a cold?