The next day, on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 — exactly three months after we arrived on the island — we filed aboard a small, rickety prop plane, and forty-five minutes later we landed at Miami International Airport.
At first it was strange to be back, and for a time I went about marveling at relatively normal things: showers that could be relied upon to quickly deliver hot water; billboards that did not feature the word “revolution”; restaurant entrees that did not involve pork. But I was not in Cuba for time enough for these things to be very foreign. This was always my home, and things in Cuba only seemed strange because I was comparing them to here.
I talked about Cuba quite a bit in the months after I came home, and at some point the conversation would inevitably turn to the future. And while I don’t know better than anyone else what the future holds for the island, I have seen things that give me some hope.
Raúl’s appointment as the President of Cuba is a temporary measure; at seventy-seven, it’s unlikely that he’ll govern for long even given Fidel’s seeming immortality. So far his tenure has been mostly unremarkable, and his reforms – like allowing Cubans to purchase cell phones or stay in hotels formerly open only to tourists – are mostly symbolic, given the prohibitively high cost of those items to normal Cubans. But for his whole life Raúl has inclined toward pragmatism. As a commander in the army that pragmatism earned him a reputation as being cold-hearted and cruel, but now, as an old man, it could serve him better in his negotiations with the United States.
As I write this, Barack Obama is twenty-seven days away from being sworn in as President of the United States, and whatever that means for the country as a whole, it will probably signal a shift in policy toward Cuba. During the campaign Obama made cautious overtures toward repairing ties with Cuba, including calling for unrestricted travel for Americans with Cuban relatives and a loosening of the restrictions on remittances sent back to the island. The fact that he won Florida (and in particular Miami-Dade County) in the election is indicative of how much attitudes there have changed toward Cuba, and in general support for the embargo seems to be waning across the board.
I think, then, that we’re going to see a major change in the next five years with regard to Cuba, and it would not surprise me if by 2015 the Communist government had fallen (or at least undergone serious changes) and U.S. – Cuban relations had been normalized.
Formal diplomatic relations, though, will not be sufficient to fully heal the rift between our two countries, and I worry that many Americans expect that, when the Communist government falls, the situation will return to where it was before the revolution. This is simply not so, and the expectation could prove harmful.
In 1959, Cuba was the most American country (outside the United States, of course) in the world. Business interests controlled the country so completely that we may as well have annexed the thing. Havana got color TV well before most of the rural United States. American movies opened simultaneously on the island and on the mainland. Habaneros drove cars as nice or nicer than their American counterparts.
This, more than anything else, explains why the Revolution succeeded so completely. Since 1492, Cuba had been ruled by others – the Spanish first, and then the Americans. Before he was a Communist, Fidel ran on a strongly Nationalistic platform, and to the people he was speaking to, the words he used – independence, patriotism, self-determination – were unfamiliar, and exciting. And when the Revolution went south (as it was doomed to from the start), most Cubans recognized it. How could they not? But they thought: it is a mess – but at least it’s our mess.
The Cubans I spoke to are decidedly ambivalent about the future. They realize that their government can’t – and shouldn’t – last for much longer, but they’re worried about what normal relations with the United States will mean. They’ve been told for years that their long-departed family members have been gathering in Miami, scheming, waiting for the embargo to fall so they might return and take back their houses – houses that might have been assigned to others, houses that might have been occupied by the same families since the Revolution. And while that doesn’t seem likely, no Cuban has any information to the contrary, so their suspicion grows.
But they’re most worried about their culture. Cuba has been defined, for as long as they can remember, by Communism and by the embargo. With the floodgates open, will any of that survive? How hard will people work to keep the Packards and the Buicks running when they could just go buy a Ford Focus? Will anyone listen to son when Kanye West is on the radio?
The answer is: of course these things will survive. Because societies don’t die; they adapt. That adaptation will be a painful process, and it is one that Cubans are taking on with no small amount of trepidation. But they are preparing to take it on nevertheless.
So I tell people: I’m optimistic. I tell them: change is coming. Now, it’s just a matter of time.