Goree Diaspora Festival

As much as I hate on Dakar (like Dominicans) I love it. That weekend I went to the Goree Diaspora Festival, a series of movies, conferences and concerts in Goree, an island of Dakar famous for its colonial architecture, car-free streets (cars are illegal) and La Maison des Esclaves or Slave House. It’s a touristy place and I had avoided going because first of all, it’s expensive for foreigners to take the ferry and the slave house is not an experience I was ready to face alone. But I decided to drag myself out there for the festival, although I still haven’t gone to the Slave House. When I arrived at the port in Dakar, I was predictably approached by a tout. I told him that I didn’t want a tour as I was going to the festival, but that if he could get me the Senegalese price for the ferry ticket he could keep the $8 difference. Although he looked like an old drunk he turned out to be quite smart, speaking English and Spanish fluently. He said he had a degree in history and we spoke about slavery and the African Diaspora over beers. I argued that Africans don’t understand the true impact of slavery on its descendants, or even on them. After all—even in purely economic terms—West Africa lost the most productive members of its labor force for centuries, and that’s without even looking at the social and psychological costs. West Africa would not be in the sorry state it’s in now, being the world’s poorest region, if it weren’t for centuries of slavery. Still I have been struck by how ignorant and/or insensitive people out here are about slavery (again a problem that is just as much “ours” as “theirs”). As far as they are concerned, slavery is just another way to get “white” folks to come out here and fork over lots of money, with “roots tourism” being essentially no different than taking folks to the beach or selling them batik. Lonely Planet even warns against the fraudulent claims of the tourist guides in Georgetown in The Gambia who have created a local roots industry by renaming random old buildings to create a “slave prison,” “slave house,” “slave market” and even a “freedom tree,” which would guarantee freedom to all those who touched it; and of course a “visitors’ book” encouraging donations in the memory of slavery. While I can’t knock the hustle (50 Cent and all of them fake studio gangstas need to shut up and come to this part of the world, if they want to see real hustlers), and understand that cats are poor and Black Unitedstatesians are wealthy in comparison, I find such fabrications disgusting. It is an insult to OUR ancestors. Ultimately, these were the relatives of their ancestors who were kidnapped, dehumanized and enslaved. It’s tragic that people would feel the need to pimp the suffering of their own just to make a quick buck. Ironically just as I was telling homey about how I hate people hustling me as a “homecoming African” it was clear that he wasn’t listening still busy thinking about how he could hustle me for some CFA. Once on the island, I met Queen Mother Blakely a remarkable woman, the community mayor of Harlem and a long-time reparations activist. She has been coming to Goree since 1990 and is trying to realize her dream of turning the island into a first-class tourist resort for Black Unitedstatesians to come “home” to Africa and “heal.” I am skeptical, but will keep my mouth shut out of respect to her. While building with her about what had just happened with my “guide” she made an interesting suggestion which still has me thinking. She asserted that Africans would never understand slavery, and we shouldn’t even try to explain. This reminded me of something I remember hearing in one of the classes I took on the African Diaspora. American Blackness and African Blackness are similar, but have different roots. For those of us on the Western side of the Atlantic, our blackness was born the moment whitey threw the shackles on you and crammed you onto a boat i.e. it was born during the middle passages. Thereafter, your ethnic group didn’t matter, you were a slave cause you were black and you were black cause you were a slave. For black folks on this side, they weren’t black until the French came over and started naming streets after their generals, i.e. people saw each other as Wolof, Sereer, etc. until the French told them they were black. Thereafter, they were black because they were colonial subjects and they were colonial subjects because they were black. Now that’s two different forms of blackness, which could justify the logical implication of Queen Mother Blakely’s stance: Pan-Africanism without Africa. I am still not sure if I am ready to go that far, but I can confess that after five months in Senegal it’s getting harder to claim that I am still a Pan-Africanist.

Charity

Since being in Senegal I have had to learn to rudely and unmistakably ignore everyone who comes up to me. I hate being like that, but if you pay any attention you will soon learn that your nice new friend sells overpriced statuettes or can arrange your tour of a nearby national park or can help you find a cab or good hotel. In other words, it’s never sincere. Actually, I am sure it sometimes it’s a genuine greeting but it’s so often just a sales pitch that I don’t have the chance to find out (kinda like how most women have to set-up the surface-to-air missile defenses whenever any dude approaches them, even if he just wants to know what time it is). Sometimes it gets murky though. For example, when walking around the island in St. Louis we were approached by a nice, middle-aged Senegalese man who asked us how we found St. Louis. Immediately, I doubted his intentions but he seemed nice enough. He took us around and broke down mad shit about the city and its fishing industry since he was born and raised there and works as a fisherman. After about 25 minutes, though, the truth came out. He confessed that he had come back from asking a friend to borrow money and that he had been unsuccessful and really didn’t want to go home empty-handed, could we buy him some food? Since I fear that my heart is turning to steel here in Senegal since I have to say no to begging children, handicapped people and old folks on the daily I decided to buy him some milk and coffee for his family. But that’s the problem with charity, it depends on the mood of the rich individual. Sometimes I give, sometimes I don’t, depending on how guilty I feel for being a toubab on that given day. Still, charity is not justice and is not the solution to the world’s poverty because few give people give us as much as they should and then it depends on mood, personality and chance. I have tried being consistent with to whom, when, and where I give, but it’s hard to decide who is “worthy” and who isn’t when everyone has a human right to food, housing, education and healthcare, and when really it shouldn’t be up to me or anyone person to decide whether someone gets to eat today or not. Furthermore, I have found that the richer people are the greedier and more tight-fisted they are (duh, like my dad used to always remind me, you don’t get rich by spending) making any “more philanthropy is all the world needs” solutions laughable. I have been impressed by how even the poorest people in Senegal give regularly to others poorer than them. Although that also has a lot to do with the religion with alms to the poor or Zakah being one of the five pillars of Islam (does anyone else think it’s fucked up that Islam assumes that there will always be beggars to receive alms?) it’s still admirable.
Our fisherman friend.

George III Blvd

The three former French colonies I have been to recently have principal streets named after General Charles de Gaulle. Now de Gaulle was the French president that finally realized that the direct colonialism party was over and France would have to transition to neocolonialism and would be better off leaving peacefully and putting friendly rulers in power everywhere. So de Gaulle was the president that “granted” independence although he did so tactically and reluctantly only after it was clear that the game was over once the French were defeated in Indochina and Algeria degenerated into bloody civil war. Consequently having Avenue Charles de Gaulle in downtown Nouakchott and Dakar is like having Broadway in NYC or Pennsylvania Ave in DC renamed King George III Blvd. I mention this because we were staying off of de Gaulle in Nouakchott. At the same time the other major street in Nouakchott is named after Gamal Abdel Nasser the famous pan-Arabist, anti-imperial, authoritarian independence leader of Egypt. Two clashing personalities, one busy intersection.

Senegal>Morocco

Mauritania is a transition from “Arab Africa” to “Black Africa” in the conventional wisdom. It’s somewhere between Morocco and Senegal, but in my expert opinion having been to both countries it’s more Senegal than Morocco. Granted it’s the desert and is “The Islamic Republic of” and speak Arabic, and there are all of these Arab looking dudes walking around with those long, puffy robes with the long slits down the side, but even in Nouadhibou 50 km from Morocco I heard mbalax, saw Senegalese-looking people everywhere and it just looked like Senegal, horse-carts, mad dusty, telecentres, dibiteries, unfinished concrete 2-story buildings, and beat-up old French cars. It even smelled like Senegal. Which brings me to one of the most unsavory aspects of Mauritanian society, yup you guessed it, its deep-rooted anti-black racism. Mauritania basically has three main social groups. First there are the moors of Arab and Berber descent (the ones of “purely” Arab descent or Bidan are the elite according to many sources), then there are the former slaves of the Arabs the Haratin or “black moors” (think Othello) who have assimilated Hassaniya and Moorish cultures, and finally the Soudaniens or black Africans who are basically the same ethnic groups that live on the other side of the Senegal River, the Peul, and some Wolof and Soninke. Then again I don’t know how accurate this schematic is since I did meet a woman who self-identied as “black moor” (maure noire) and spoke Hassaniya but also spoke Wolof and French. What’s certain that this kind of ethnic mix is a explosive (just look at similar situations in Chad and Sudan). In 1989 there were race riots which almost threatened to escalate to war with Senegal as the black in the south rebelled against Arab domination of the government and economy, including for example the imposition of Hassaniya. Furthermore, Mauritania has been condemned by international human rights groups as one of the handful of countries worldwide that still tolerates mass slavery. It all just makes me wonder why God chose black people to suffer so much (but then again in Mali and Niger it’s the black folks oppressing the Moors from the desert, so I guess it really is just structural, still black folks have an awful tendency to show up at the bottom of structures worldwide, with Mali and Niger already being among the top ten poorest countries in the world).

Disputed Territory

Everything was smooth, with the bus making stops every 90 minutes for 90 minutes until right before getting to Laayoune. Laayoune is the capital of Western Sahara. There I ran into the first of six police checkpoints. After 14 hours on the bus, I had learned to ignore the stops, only this time I was the sole reason for the stop. The soldier poked my shoulder rudely, waking me up and demanding my passport. He asked me for the essentials, name, date of birth, nationality, and profession, and I felt terrible for holding up the whole bus. An hour and change later, we got stopped again. This time the soldier made me go down to his little office by the road in the middle of fucking nowhere, and took even longer in getting my info. Afterwards, the bus driver advised me to write down all of my relevant information on scraps of paper I could hand out to the soldiers as they stopped me. I thought the whole thing was so silly. The dudes were copying my information in the most random places. One dude wrote it in his planner, another on the back of some other document he had, and the others accepted my scraps with some recopying it and others just taking it as is. Why don’t they just have a form you can fill out? Well, what’s all the fuss about? I was in Western Sahara which is claimed and occupied by Morocco as part of its own territory, while the Saharawis assert that they are an independent nation oppressed by Morocco. Western Sahara was for centuries part of Morocco’s empire, but it didn’t really exist as a formal political entity (as always in Africa) until colonialism. The French and Spanish divided Morocco between themselves, with the French taking the tastier morsels and leaving Spain with the scraps: the mountains in the north by the Spanish border and a large chunk of desert in the south that the Spanish renamed Rio de Orio (Gold River) even though there was no water or gold. Although Morocco negotiated its independence from France in 1956, Spain resisted the tide of colonization and held onto Western Sahara until Franco’s death in 1975. The UN was supposed to administer a plebiscite to decide whether Western Sahara would be independent or join Morocco. King Hassan II of Morocco though interrupted the vote (maybe forever) when he ordered the “Green March” where 350,000 Moroccans marched down into the desert to claim Western Sahara as part of a historical “Greater Morocco.” Really the King just understood the value of nationalism and possible foreign war in distracting people from more urgent domestic concerns, and also the value of the phosphate deposits in Western Sahara. Mauritania was supposed to get a slice too, but quickly withdrew after a new Algerian-backed armed independence movement, POLISARIO arose and forced them to retreat. POLISARIO warred with the Moroccan government until a ceasefire in the 1991, although hostilities never completely ended. The UN has a highly visible presence in Western Sahara and they are still supposed to organize a vote on Western Sahara’s political future but there are disputes as to who is going to be allowed to vote since many Moroccans have moved in encouraged by the Moroccan governments investments and tax exemptions. Most likely Western Sahara will remain part of Morocco and the Saharawis yet another nation without a state. Again, all this meant for me was having to be woken up by soldiers several times who just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t an investigative journalist going to meet the rebels. I just wondered why anyone would fight over this territory. I mean, honestly, it’s the desert. There is literally nothing. I didn’t even see the tall dunes of fine yellow sand that is burned into the Western imaginary, rather it was all dull looking, rocky scrubland. Not very romantic at all, but still if the Saharawis want it that bad I think they have put it up with it long enough to deserve to call it whatever they want and govern themselves however they wish.

Sorry More Politics

It also annoys me that so many Moroccans refer to Moroccan Arabic or darija as argot or slang when it’s the language of the people. Fuhsa, or modern standard Arabic, is spoken only by the educated and (from what I understand, I ain’t no Arabist or nothing, or even speak Arabic except for like three words) is not really spoken anywhere with some Persian Gulf dialects just being close to it. Some Arabic speakers couldn’t understand each other, but for political reasons you can’t say the truth which is that most “Arabic” speakers don’t speak the same language. Which brings me to the other side of the language issue in Morocco: Berber. Or rather the different Berber dialects which are spoken by many Moroccans. A bit of Moroccan history: many groups have invaded Morocco throughout the centuries, the last being the French and Spanish, but before them were the Arabs and before them the Romans and before them the Phoenicians and before them the Berbers. The folks who were there before the Berbers are no longer relevant to the mix, so the Berbers get default native peoples status. The Berbers are notorious for their “fiercely independent” spirit and the Arabs, Romans and others never could quite control certain parts of the country where the Berbers were able to do their thing. Still, they were disadvantaged in a society dominated by Arabic speaking Berbers. The difference now is mainly cultural and linguistic, although some people say that Berbers are lighter than the Arabs. These are also the same people who will tell you that Berbers are from Europe and that while Europe is the head, Morocco is the roots. This self-hating, negrophobic attempt to distance themselves from Black Africa and claim an elusive whiteness (being Dominican I understand and disapprove of the impulse) is laughable. The fact is, Moroccans—including the Berbers—are a diverse bunch and I was constantly surprised by the number of Moroccans that wouldn’t be perceived as “Arab” in the US i.e. wouldn’t get racially profiled by Department of Homeland Security. Some would get away as white, but many more would be profiled for being black. Gnawa, in fact, is the subculture created by black slaves. Unfortunately, coming into Moroccan society mostly as slaves black folks have kept their low status and now traditional prejudice has mixed with modern racism to make life quite hard for dark-skinned Moroccans. Natasha lamented the racist taunts and jokes, people chasing her asking if she was from Senegal. Again I saw many people as dark as Natasha in Morocco. It’s a damn shame. I wonder why God chose black folks to suffer so. That being said, I think it’s cool that the Berbers are trying to pressure the Moroccan and Algerian governments to teach Berber in the schools as one of the main aims of a rising Berber Pride movement after centuries of repression.

Ils Sont Forts

In Senegalese French at least, to say someone is good at something you say il est fort, or “he is strong,” as in “he is strong in swimming.” Well the French were good at colonizing. As I keep seeing, they were really good at spreading their culture (although I wish they had spread some money instead so cats in Senegal could afford all of the tasty, fancy French cheeses) and their language. French takes you much further in Morocco than English in Egypt. Two Arabic countries (although the language situation in Morocco is more complicated) which strongly emphasized Arabic after “independence” but the French ils sont forts. It’s even worse in Senegal where people are always surprised to learn that French is the only official language. The only language allowed in government is French. Almost everything written is in French. Unlike Anglophone African countries, Francophone Africans have not developed their native languages into literary languages. So that some Yoruba in Nigeria write in Yoruba, while much fewer do so in neighboring Benin. It was really hard to find anything written in Wolof. Moreover, this is the same country where magazines will translate from Wolof to French when interviewees use Wolof proverbs and idioms as if Wolof were not the language of the majority and French the clearly foreign language.

Megamall

It was also in Rabat that I met Natasha and the other Peace Corps Volunteer at Megamall. Megamall is one of these high-end commercial centers for the privileged in poor countries, where you can go bowling, watch a recent Hollywood film (that is sitting in a theater and not a bootleg DVD in your home), pay a lot for American fast food at the food court, and buy expensive European name-brand clothing. It’s a perfect symbol of the inequality that chokes so many of these countries, and how their insecure middle and upper classes ape American excess and consumerism. It’s the kind of place that could be anywhere in the world where people spend themselves stupid on a weekend, and that’s the point. Of course it’s seen as progress and development and government will often laud these “developments.” In Dakar, they are trying to get into the game building their first megamall and planning on an even more luxurious second one. But Morocco is more “developed” and therefore already has a couple. Rich folks in Morocco have a lot of money, I need to look at the numbers but from my short stay there Morocco seemed to be suffering from damn near Brazilian levels of ridiculous economic inequality. You see people who have nothing to envy from North American and Western Europeans (who have been to these countries) next to people who may as well be in Senegal they are so broke. In Morocco there are places where you can forget that you are in an underdeveloped country, something that only happens in Senegal if you stand in front of the Presidential Palace and nowhere else. But the politics in Morocco are even more wack. The king, Mohammed VI, is still too powerful, being both the most important political and religious figure, in his dual role as monarch and “commander of the faithful.” His father, Hassan II, who ruled from 1961 until dying in 1999 was essentially an autocrat. Of course he was supported by the US and France, imprisoning, torturing and murdering dissidents on both left and right. He also IMF-ized the country for the benefit of the Americans and French, leading to more “development” and emigration. As it stands Morocco has one of the largest and most far-flung of the recent diasporas. Even though the current king has gotten a lot of love for democratizing the country, the government still doesn’t protect basic freedoms like freedom of press and speech and is still drinking too much of that neoliberal kool aid for the good of the Moroccan people. They need to get rid of their monarchy or at least Queen Elizabeth-ize his ass.

Pac, Che and Bob

• On Friday I visited some of the dorms of Cheikh Anta Diop University, the main—and until recently, the only—public university in Senegal. Much of what I saw was typical of students everywhere: posters of Ronaldinho, El-Hadji Diouf (the best Senegalese footballer ever, pictured above. He led the Senegalese national team, “The Lions of Teranga,” in its epic victory over the then-defending world champion French team in the inaugural match of the 2002 World Cup. It was 5 years ago and Senegal didn’t even qualify for the 2006 World Cup but they still talk about how they defeated the colonizers, even though the French team was all black and Arab. In fact, I remember my father asking me in 1998 if there were any French players on the French team; I had to assure him that there are people of color of France. He didn’t believe me until Univision showed him images of some pissed-off ghetto youth burning Paris down in 2005. The Senegalese also swear that the Brazilian team was terrified of having to play The Lions in 2002, something I highly doubt, and that they didn’t qualify for the last World Cup because the refs stole it from them. Nationalism can be a funny thing when it is not being used to exploit or murder enemies of the nation, internal and external.) and other footballers or of the Holy Trinity of Tupac Shakur, Che Guevara and Bob Marley, in addition to other accruements of student life like small refrigerators, empty trays of food on the floor, computers, unmade twin size beds, and piles of textbooks lying everywhere. But that is where the similarities ended; the beds were made of foam, the computers were ancient—nor did everyone have one—the clothes were washed by hand and there were clotheslines tied between the trees and windows in front of the dorm building (I can only imagine what the quad would look like crisscrossed by clotheslines), and there were mosquito nets knotted in bundles above the beds. The students complained about the difficult conditions. In fact, days before I came to Senegal the New York Times published a story on the poor state of African universities focusing primarily on Cheikh Anta Diop (I would link it, but the bastards make you pay).
• The school is also a lively center for politics, and I saw a lot of graffiti advertising different slates of candidates for the student union. The elections are a big deal and the national parties have proxy organizations on campus with many student leaders going on to careers as successful politicians. In general, however, the students are an anti-establishment group and are more often warring with the government than joining it. And I say warring literally, like violent armed clashes with police where people die on a frequent basis. The relationship between the government and the students has gotten so bad that on two occasions (1968, a good year for revolution, and 1984, I think) the government declared an annee blanche, or a blank year, where the schools were shut down, and the government basically “locked out” the students like an employer might do a militant union. And Republicans think that American universities are centers for left-wing indoctrination and activism.
  

Cuban Communism

I spent three weeks in Havana in April-May 2007. My comments are about what I saw there, from what I have heard and read the rest of Cuba is poorer than Havana, which explains internal migration within the country from the poorer provinces to the capital; therefore my comments are biased because I saw the "best" Cuba has to offer. I am not claiming to know everything there is to know about Cuba but I have read some about Cuban history, especially about racism and the revolution. With the caveats out of the way, my opinion on Cuba is this: it is not perfect, but it is a lot closer to perfection than any other Third World (i.e. country formerly colonized by a European power, excluding those for the settled by European majorities, e.g. the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) country I have ever been to. What it comes down to for me is this: Cubans complain that often when they go to a doctor because of the embargo and/or communism the doctors don't have the medicines they need to treat them. They complain about this bitterly, but I am just left thinking "but motherfucker, you can see a doctor!" I am American, and I am uninsured I have to pray that I don't get sick cause if I do I am going to have to pay ridiculous out-of-pocket fees. And I am one of the lucky few that can probably afford the costs provided I don't need some crazy surgery. But I think about all of the people in the world who simply don't have access to medical care, either because they are too far away from a hospital or too expensive or both. And the same principle holds for other aspects of Cuban life, where the situation is less than ideal but still better than the vast majority of world's population gets. The food in Cuba is wack, but at least they all eat. My feelings on Cuban communism oscillated violently between feeling like Cuba was heaven, and feeling like it was all a hypocritical sham. First the good stuff: Cuba has an enviable social welfare program that other should Third World countries should envy and emulate (and more than a few "developed" nations should also). Healthcare, education, and to a lesser extent sports and culture. Like I said, I think it's unfair to compare Cuba economically to the US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe because Cuba was a peripheral nation in the world economy until 1959, a product of Spanish and American colonialism that had many of the same problems of other colonies: a history of slavery, racism, and cash crop export monoculture (in this case sugar). Cuba is not a "developed" nation because it has no other countries to exploit for its own "development" as the US, Japan and Western Europe were able to do (and continue to do). The healthcare system in Cuba is awesome, however. You don't see any of the same problems with preventable diseases or random diseases (no people with crazy skin diseases, random shit coming out of their necks, deformities, lepers, etc.) that you see in other poor countries. Everyone looks healthy, and you see a lot of old people everywhere. Cuba is probably the only country on Earth where there is an abundance of doctors, so many that they can afford to "export" them. The educational system is not at the standards in terms of facilities as American or European schools, but is a lot more accessible and just than pretty much anywhere else I can think of. Again, it isn't perfect, but the educational system does provide Cubans with a more equal opportunity at a quality education than any other government provides its citizens. One aspect of Cuban society that constantly amazed me was how knowledgeable and educated everyone was. Cuban children know more about US foreign policy and the War on Iraq than Ivy League graduates. And education is generalized, I had never been to a place where so many people could speak so intelligently about so many subjects, Amdericans are ignorant buffoons when compared to Cubans. Sports are also a lot more accessible in Cuba. Up until the early 90s the Cuban government even ran a national sports program where basically every child was encouraged to pick a sport and was trained in it so that every Cuban over 35 can tell you about their days as a wrestler, gymnast, volleyball player or basketball players. All of this in addition to a basic physical education at school and the national sports college system used to train athletes for international competition. But beyond that, I was there for the Cuban National Series and I was amazed to hear that any Cuban could afford to go to a game for a nominal fee. It was nothing like the US where I would have to a be corporate executive earning several hundred thousands dollars a year or have to move some kilos on the side in order to ever afford World Series tickets. Culture in Cuba presents the same dilemma as everything else, music, painting, sculpture, theater, cinema, everything is controlled by the government and is therefore censored but the government also subsidizes much of it so that "culture" is also more accessible to the average Cuban than it is to the average citizen of any other country. In Havana you can go to a movie, a play, an opera performance, the museum, etc. for practically nothing. Again censored culture, but at least they have culture. It just feels good to be in a poor country where no one is going hungry, where you don't see children begging or working in the street (they are all busy in school!), where there are no slums, no violent crime (I could roam the streets freely, with absolutely no fear, at any time of night, how blissfully liberating, I can't even do that in the center of the empire, New York City), and more important than anything else where the government gives a fuck. Say what you want to say about Cuba, criticize the regime all you want (and I am going to start soon) the one thing no one can say is that Fidel doesn't care. How many governments can you truly say care about the people they rule? Ironically I often found myself defending Cuba to Cubans. I felt like they didn't really know or severely underestimated what they had. I and other foreigners who had traveled to other peripheral countries kept trying to convince many of the people we met that much of what Cuba was special and that they shouldn't throw out the proverbial (or maybe cliche) baby with the bathwater. Now onto that bathwater. Superficially, food, communication and transport are wack in Cuba. The food just doesn't taste good. I have tasted Cuban food in the US several times (and honestly it's not all that different from Dominican or Puerto Rican food) so I have a decent idea of what it should taste like, but the food in Cuba was just wack. I felt like there were only two flavors in Cuba, salty or greasy (if you were lucky you got salty and greasy). Because of the embargo and government priorities there is even less variety of food than you find in most poor countries. There was no pepper, no beef, little chicken, just lots of bland rice and beans and fried pork. Ironically everyone in Cuba eats, but it's easy to go hungry in Havana because there are few street vendors and there just isn't a commercial culture (few stores, but how could I forget, probably the best part about Cuba for any American tired of being bombarded with images of how inadequate, fat, or stupid we are every second and how this one product, be it toothpaste, a pair of sneakers or a car, can make us cool and happy, is that in Cuba there are no commercials! None! You can watch hours of TV uninterrupted for free, no HBO bill at the end of the month, I remember how while watching one of the National Series games I kept waiting for a commercial to take a piss, only the "commercial breaks" where too short, the only commercials are either public service announcements, begging you to "consume less" or political announcements about the May Day march and the revolution, there are also no billboards or signs, and again the few that there are either exhort education or the revolution) so you can't just wander around and hope to find a restaurant or street vendor cause you will definitely end up walking a lot.

Communication is also wack. Cuba is stuck in the 1980s. Practically no cell phones, and most people don’t even have land lines. You need a license to have a cell phone, and only certain state and joint-venture (partnerships between Cuban and foreing companies, mainly in tourism and mining) employees can have them. Otherwise you have to be a foreigner or have a foreigner get a cell phone for you. Either way it’s super-expensive from what I hear. All of this makes communicating with people difficult. I missed several meetings with people because we would make plans and then one of us would be late or would change plans, but there was no way to reach people once they had left home. The government subsidizes land line phones (and therefore you have to wait forever to get one from the state phone company, too) so the calls are cheap and everyone is happy to let you use their phone, since everyone understands how difficult everything is. That is another thing the level of social solidarity in Cuba is amazing. There is an understanding that shit may be rough but at least they are all in it together, therefore things like the phone are seen more as a community resource than a personal object. Still, if the state gave people beepers or something that would be a lot better, since it was incredibly frustrating to keep missing people cause I of a misunderstanding. It reminded me that you don’t need a cell phone to live and that there is a certain liberation in not being attached to your phone, but I would have preferred to have actually met people on time rather than wandering around, wondering if they had said 23 & G or 23 & E ? In addition, the internet is basically non-existent as the vast majority of Cubans have no access. In Cuba if you have a computer (already an impressive achievement) you have access to a Cuban intranet that allows you to have an e-mail, but you can’t just Google something. In order to use the internet as we in the US undertand you have to pay at least US$6/hour at one of the major hotels for foreigners in Havana to use a slow-ass 56Kbps connection. But it being Cuba of course, you have to hope the hotel has the prepaid cards you need to use the internet. I discovered this as I spent one whole day walking around, willing to pay $6 for the internet and being unable to find any hotels that had cards. The computers were working, but there were no cards, nor could any one tell me when more cards would come. Again more “No hay.” God bless centrally planned economies.

Finally, public transportation in Havana is no good. This is the one area where you would expect a communist government to excel, but instead the public transportation system is woefully inadequate. One of the first things you see in Havana is ridiculously long lines (20-50) at the bus stops. It being Cuba, the people take a very fair approach to it, so that one you get to the bus stop you immediately ask who is last in line and take your place. There is no line hopping or pushing. Someone always announces that the bus is on its way and then the enormity of the situation dawns on you. The bus is already packed, so how the hell are all of these people going to get on the bus? Well, I don’t know how, but they do. I have never been on buses so packed in my life. I can’t think of an American equivalent. It even made me miss the chaotic Dominican buses. I decided then and there that I would never diss MTA buses again in my life. Apart from the buses there were public and private taxis, both legal and illegal. The public taxis are known as maquinas (carros publicos in the Dominican Republic, but there are a million names for the same concept) and costs 10 pesos for every neighborhood you cross, which is a lot money for Cubans, especially considering that the public bus costs 40 cents (I think it’s 80 cents if you take one of the express buses, the camellos or camels, so called because they consist of a tractor trailer pushing a double-humped wagon that hold up to 300 people. They go longer distances, and there are two lines, one for people who want a seat and one for those who don’t mind standing for a good hour in ridiculously cramped conditions. I declined the privilege to ride one of these buses). The maquinas are the old 1940s and 50s Chevys and Fords that you see in the postcards of Havana. They are not used because they are quaint, however. Many people rely on them for their daily transportation needs. How they keep these ancient behemoths running is beyond me, but I did keep hearing that apart from having the most doctors per capita in the world, Cuba also had the greatest percentage of auto mechanics on the planet. Then there were official taxis which were mostly for tourists and therefore charged dollars and were expensive. I avoided them almost completely. Finally, many people cabbed illegally. This was the most intriguing part of transportation in Cuba. Often if you just put your hand out like hailing a cab or hitchhiking (it’s like a mixture of both) random people stop and you negotiate a fare with them depending on where you are going. It is illegal to pick up passengers without a taxi license, and unlike all other Third World governments, the Cuban government can effectively (I would say maybe even too effectively) enforce the rule of law. There is no fucking around in Cuba, so you pay the cab driver discreetly before reaching your destination. I had never seen this before, but in Cuba money is so tight that if you are one of the lucky few that can own a car you can do this to pick up a little extra money since you can definitely charge more than 10 pesos. Usually I paid a dollar or two (25-50 pesos) for rides homes. Especially late at night, this is the only transportation option. This made for many interesting late night rides especially since you get to experience the full spectrum of Cuban automobiles. Rarely you get picked up by a man (they are all men, I never saw a woman drive in Cuba) in a nice new Audi or Peugeot, but most of the time is a 1970s or 80s Lada and you get to experience the wonders of Soviet industry. Many of these cars were barely roadworthy, and it was interesting that many of the American cars that were at least 20 years older were in better shape. Still owning a car—any car—makes you the man in Cuba. There simply weren’t that many cars. I never saw a traffic jam in Havana. I wondered if the roads were so well kept because the government was responsible or because no one ever used them. Havana felt like a big village. Most of the time you could play an entire game of stickball in the street and no car would ever interrupt. The streets at night were eerily empty.

Now what do I think is the cause of all of this? The problem in my opinion is that Cuba is not really socialist or communist. It is at best a non-capitalist, non-socialist “coordinatorist” society, and at worst “state capitalism.” Socialism (in the sense of an anti-capitalist redistribution of resources, not in the European sense of social democracy) implies that the workers or producers have control over their own production and workplaces i.e. those who produce wealth appropriate, distribute and consume their own surplus value. The following is a critique of Leninism within Marxism that existed even before Lenin led the October Revolution to create the USSR. The idea—or something similar to it—has gone under various names, libertarian socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, council communism, participatory economics, etc. But the basic idea is true economic democracy. Workers decide collectively how to management their workplaces and what to do with the product of their work. The very idea of the Soviet for which the Soviet Union was named was just this. Soviets were worker collectives, where the workers sought to take over ownership of the Russian factories from the capitalists to be run and administered by themselves democratically. The problem in Cuba is that it is Leninist. Leninism is an elitist, bureaucratic, positivistic, and anti-democratic ideology. It is based on the idea of a group of “enlightened” intellectuals organizing a “vanguard” party to lead the mass of workers and foment revolution. These parties are notoriously hierarchical and dogmatic. Once in power, this party rules in the name of the workers, assuming that as superior scientists and intellectuals they can devise the best way to administer the society as it progresses from socialism to communism. This is achieved by means of a single-party dictatorship and a centrally planned economy. The end product is supposed to be a classless society where the state withers away.
The reality is very different. The party creates a class structure with two opposing classes, the mass of the people and an elite of party bureaucrats. The party bureaucrats run the government and the economy while the mass of the people take orders. The party uses corporate-style hierarchies to run all of the enterprises, so you still have a coterie of bosses and managers who supervise the workers and monopolize all intellectual and creative labor. Because they consider their jobs to be more important and they run shit, these class feels the need to compensate itself more than the average worker. The privileges enjoyed by this class, the cell phones, cars, nicer houses, foreign travel, beef, etc. create widespread resentment among the Cuban populace. Meanwhile work in Cuba is decidedly non-revolutionary except for absolute job security (in itself something that is considered revolutionary today, but was the norm in Western Europe and Japan, core capitalist countries, until fairly recently). You go to work, the boss tells you what to do, you get your paycheck at the beginning of the month and then you go home. Cuban workers are just as—if not more—alienated than workers in the US or any other capitalist economy. Your job is just a job. No one wants to go to work. No one feels like working hard, cause there is no point, at the end you still get your paycheck. Everyone complains about their bosses. If you just heard Cubans described work without knowing that Cuba was communist you would never think anything was different. So yeah, Cuban are seemingly “lazy,” they take their time doing anything at work and drag their feet, but that is because work is drudgery like work is in the US. The answer is not to threaten workers with starvation like capitalists do, but to revalue work and make it a meaningful part of human activity. That is the revolution Marx wrote so much about. Instead what I saw in Cuba was one group of people living off the work of another group of people. Sounds like capitalism to me.
The communism in Cuba is like the communism that exists in the patriarchal family. The father distributes the family’s resources so that even those family members that cannot work, the children and the retired parents, get fed and clothed. The father may even pay for the children to go to school and to go the doctor when they are sick (like when the Cuban state decides to invest in education, hospitals and pensions). The wife may get all the appliances she “needs” to do the housework. But at the end of the day, the father is a dictator. When he is fair and just, everything works, like when he decides to help his elderly parents. But if he decides to go out and get piss drunk with the rent money or decides to go out a nice new car to impress his friends even though the family can’t really afford it there is nothing anyone in the family can do to stop him (to follow the analogy like when the Cuban state decides to invest in sports in order to gain international prestige when it could spend that money on badly needed medicine or decides to have a huge military and police force, or any case where the priorities of the Cuban people differ from that of their government). If the wife protests the father just beats her (like when the Cuban police represses dissent). The point is that although the Cuban Communist Party and Fidel Castro are a better father to their family than any other family on the block, the point of socialism is that there is not supposed to be a father.
So what is the answer? The answer is participatory economics and true democracy. Cuba needs a second revolution: One with worker self-management and workplace democracy instead of corporate hierarchies. One with “balanced job complexes” or rotation of tasks at work to further avoid the cementing of these hierarchies and to prevent the monopolization of intellectual and creative labor which would enable some workers to have more knowledge and therefore more power over the democratic decision-making process. One with participatory planning instead of centralized planning with all of its bureaucratic inefficiency. In my opinion all of Cuba's famous economic inefficiencies are more a product of centralized planning than of communism per se. Socialism is anti-"free markets" and private property, but that does not imply centralized planning and government ownership. That is merely one solution for how to organize production and distribution of goods and services and the one that best suits the elitist nature of Leninism. But just as there have been different capitalisms, there can be and have been different socialisms. For a more detailed exposition of the participatory economics check out parecon.org.
Leninism has essentially left the Cuban revolution as an incomplete socialist revolution. Cuba has state capitalism with a strong welfare program. The ironic thing is that Cuba as a more egalitarian and better educated society is much closer to true democracy than any of the liberal bourgeois Western democracies. Still besides their lack of progress on Cuba I was also disappointed by the lack of progress in three other key social areas, gender, sexuality and race.
Cuba is still MAD sexist. Although important gains have been made by Cuban women like equal pay for equal work and free access to abortions, which cannot be overlooked I was mostly disappointed. Women are still objectified. Still harassed in the street. Still expected to pull a double shift, even if socialism has now “liberated” them so that they can work outside of the household for crappy wages. Still excluded from upper echelons of power. Still making less money than men because men monopolize the highest paying occupations. Basically nowhere near equality or the end of patriarchy.
Cuba is also heterosexist. Again here, as with gender, it is light years ahead of its Latin American neighbors, but the machismo and gender stereotypes are still very strong. Being gay in Cuba is still a tough road to travel. You will put up with many insults, be denied promotions at work, etc. Still a long way to go, but good progress considering they were still imprisoning gay people not too long ago.
Lastly race. Same story. Being black in Cuba is better than being black anywhere else in the world (including the US). The inequalities between black and mulatto Cubans and white Cubans are much narrower than those that exist elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. But they still exist. I got the feeling black folks got the same healthcare as everyone else, but in terms of everything else, education, housing, employment and government black folks are still under-represented at the top and over-represented at the bottom. The biggest problem is that orthodox communism defines race as being derivative of class therefore when class disappears so does race. Except it doesn’t work that way. For one, the racist attitudes remain deeply engrained in the culture. White women are still the standard of beauty and black hair is still “pelo malo.” Black folks are still mainly seen as entertainers, and over-represented as singers, dancers, musicians, and baseball players. Most of the presenters on TV are white, most of the people working in highly-visible service occupations e.g. flight attendants, hotel receptionists, bartenders at nice bars, etc. are still white (mostly women). But since race no longer exists officially the government won’t undertake the affirmative action and media campaign necessary to truly eliminate racism. The saddest things is that since the government completely controls the economy (poverty is the structural base sustaining American racism, I don’t care how econimistic that sounds, it’s the truth) it has the power to make Cuba the first truly post-racist society on the planet.
Finally (yes I am going to stop soon, I am running out of internet time) there are a lot of things that Cuba does right, but I am not sure if I should attribute that to Daddy Fidel or to the ingenuity of poverty. For instance, Cuban simply don’t consume as much as people anywhere else, even other peripheral countries. One example is that you will see places where you can repair and refill lighters. Anywhere else in the world you would simply through your lighter away and buy another one, in Cuba you can replace the spare parts. Talk about reduce, reuse and recyle. Same thing with cars, they don’t have too many of them, a good thing for the environment, and they continually repair the few that they do have rather than buying new ones. Ditto with pesticides. After the USSR fell Cuba lost its source of industrial pesticides so that, I think, most food production is organic. Cuba is also famous among environmentalists for its urban agriculture. And its true you can buy locally, organically grown produce in Havana, but whether that was a conscious attempt to save the environment or merely to prevent starvation is hard to know. Despite my criticisms of Cuba I am willing to give Fidel the benefit of the doubt, but I also know how the modernist, positivistic basis for Leninism leads to the same dismissal of the environment and view of nature as something to be conquered and exploited as capitalism (or have we all forgotten acid rain in Siberia and Chernobyl?) so I am skeptical.