On the ninth of March, after four days in Santiago and six in Baracoa, the Tisch Study Abroad group boarded a small prop plane and flew back to Havana, and proceeded by bus from the airport to the Hotel Riviera.
We weren’t entirely pleased to be back. From the first we had an uneasy relationship with the Riviera: it offered just enough amenities to remind us that we were not living the authentic Cuban experience, and just few enough that we never mistook it for an American hotel. Had I been living with a Cuban household I would have eaten anything and slept anywhere, and been grateful for it, but in what was ostensibly a luxury hotel the Riviera’s many flaws (unpredictable hot water, terrible food, and, in the case of our unlucky TA, giant mushrooms growing on the bathroom ceiling) seemed like personal affronts.
It was the first time I had stayed for a significant length of time in a hotel, and it was a strange experience. We became sensitive to the number and makeup of the other guests in the Riviera; we knew that, say, this week there were a large number of Spaniards in town, and that we had to get down to dinner at seven sharp if we were to get any dessert. For ten memorable days a group of perhaps four dozen German choir boys invaded, in Havana on some kind of tour, and believe me, you have no idea what that many hungry prepubescent German schoolchildren can do to a buffet table. (Seriously. It was like something out of Shark Week.)
(The choir-boys did redeem themselves somewhat, though. On their second-to-last day at the Riviera they put on a performance for the guests of the hotel, presumably as some sort of apology for eating all our food. The performance was supposed to be in the bar (go figure) but when the hour came the conductor noticed that most of the attendees, myself included, were sitting in-stead in the lobby area. So he told the boys to, very quietly, form a circle around the seating area. They were quite sly, and no one really noticed what they were doing until they broke into ‘Silent Night’. Trust me: it’s more than a bit disconcerting to look up and find that you’re surrounded by fifty blond-haired, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old carolers. They were quite good, though their late-set covers of “Guantanamera” and “Chan Chan” were examples of creative reinterpretation gone horribly, horribly wrong.)
We also became awkward but good friends with our maids. They cleaned the rooms every day, generally waiting until we’d left for class but occasionally just wandering in. For hotel staff they were endearingly stern with us: if we left our rooms a mess, we would get chastised or made fun of. (Once, I locked myself out of my room late at night, and had to call one of the maids – the night shift, not one I knew very well – to let me back in. Per hotel procedure she asked to see my passport, to check my name against the guest list, and when I handed it to her she glanced at the picture – taken when I was maybe seventeen – and gave a small but definite giggle. I asked her what was so funny. “Oh, nothing,” she said, “You just look a little…” She trailed off. “Younger?” I said. “Fatter,” she replied.)
The other thing the maids would invariably do is ask after a guy named Dain – or, as they called him, el Chino. There were two Asian-American guys with us: Dain, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Sam, who was from just outside Los Angeles. Both of them were born in the United States and both of them were Korean, but to the maids, it didn’t much matter: they were both chinos. The maids were absolutely fascinated with Dain in particular, because he lived on our floor: if he happened to be in his room they would mention the fact to us, as if it were privileged information, and if he weren’t they would ask excitedly where he was and what he was doing.
The interest in Sam and Dain was hardly confined to the maids, though. Although Havana used to have quite a few Asians, they almost all fled following the revolution, leaving behind little more than some incomprehensible signs in el barrio chino, Havana’s Chinatown. So only the very oldest Cubans had ever seen an Asian before, and when Sam or Dain walked down the street it wasn’t unusual for them to be subjected to a strangely well-intentioned form of racism. Upon seeing them, people would yell things like, “Domo Arigato!” or “Jackie Chan!”, repeatedly and at a high volume. Small children would stare openly or, if they were particularly bold, they would pull at the corners of their eyes and stick out their tongues. None of it was mean-spirited – everyone seemed genuinely excited to see them – but coming from the United States it all seemed pretty offensive.
Race relations in Cuba are a complex thing, though – especially between blacks and whites. I was sitting once with one of the Cuban students, and we were trading jokes – I was badly translating jokes I knew in English into Spanish, and he the opposite, and sometimes we would even laugh at the punch-lines. At one point I was trying to explain to him what a blonde joke was. “There’s a stereotype,” I said, “that for whatever reason, blonde women are viewed as being particularly dumb – past the point where it’s even believable.” His eyes lit up. “Oh!” he said. “We have those too, except about black people.”
When the Communist government came to power in 1959, eliminating racism was one of their chief goals, and today they will tell you that they have succeeded. This is not really true. While it does seem that on an institutional level Cuba has made some progress – there are blacks all throughout the various levels of government – on a personal level they still have a very long way to go. Complicating the situation is the fact that few people on the island can really claim to be purely white or purely black; the population of Cuba is said to be about 70% mixed-race, but that is almost certainly too low a number. And there is still a definite correlation between the shade of someone’s skin and the quality of life that person will have, and in Cuba people who appear blacker will generally also be poorer, live in more rural areas, and will have more trouble with the police.
Much as there is in the United States, there is a tremendous amount of guilt – especially among the more privileged Cubans – over their treatment of blacks and particularly over slavery. If anything, that guilt is amplified by the sheer importance of the slave trade to Cuba’s development. In the United States, the cotton industry was a major component of the country’s economy; in Cuba, the sugar industry was the only component of the country’s economy. And the island was also the hub of the slave trade in the New World: every slave who was brought to the Americas came to Havana first. Cuba was built on the backs of kidnapped Africans, and they know it, too. “All of Cuba’s biggest problems,” one of my professors told me, “come from slavery.”