I ran into my old friend Pete Shattuck the other day. We had a Guinness or two and he told me about his latest adventure, which was a trip to Cuba.

But Pete, isn’t it illegal to travel to Cuba?

Yep, but I heard the place is full of tourists, including a lot of Americans, so I figured it couldn’t be that big a deal. And it isn’t. I don’t want you to tell all the details and mess things up, but let’s just say you have to be incredibly stupid or incredibly unlucky to run into trouble.

So how was it?

My wife and I had a great time. By the way, don’t go in the summer; it’s hot and sticky. Go in the spring or the fall.

Did you go in a group?

Not in a group. But we spent a lot of time with a Cuban friend of a friend. He was a great guy and an incredible source of information. Without him-let’s call him Pedro-we would have bumped from one tourist spot to another and never had a sense of what’s going on. But Pedro was a goldmine. He’d been a government functionary until he got weary of that.

Learn anything new?

Castro isn’t loved by everybody, but he’s still very popular. Pedro, who is not a great admirer of Castro’s, said that in an honest election for president he would probably get 60 percent of the vote, maybe more. And that’s way more than Bush ever got for president of this country. Also, the U.S. embargo is both a disaster for the Cuban people and a big help for the Cuban government, just the opposite of what Washington likes to think.

How so?

Except for the Old Havana section that is being restored, the country is pretty much a shambles. But the hardships are blamed on the embargo, not on any screw-up by the Cuban system itself. Pedro said if the embargo was lifted tomorrow it would be amazing to watch government officials try to cover their asses for their failures, without being able to blame the embargo. So in a way, Bush is propping up Castro. Very strange.

Castro is 78 years old. One of these days he’s going to die. What then?

Not much, at least at first. Castro did a very clever thing some years ago. After the revolution in 1959 the government took over all the property. So one of those Cubans who bailed out in 1959 and was living fat in Miami could theoretically file suit against the government some day to get his land back. Who knows what might have happened? So Castro did a big switch. Suddenly everybody was granted title to the place where they were living. They couldn’t sell it but they could pass it on to their children. And an underground real estate market sprang up. People trade one house for another and extra cash evens out the difference in house value.

What’s so clever about that?

Now there are 10 million Cubans who have a stake in their own home. Their house may be a crappy place to live, by our standards, but it belongs to them. So that’s a huge obstacle to any big change in the social system after Castro kicks the bucket.

Everybody works for the government, right?

Yes and no. Virtually all official jobs are wired into the government, but there are a few government-approved private businesses, like tourist restaurants. Plus there are quite a few joint venture businesses with foreign companies, especially Europeans. And Pedro estimated that maybe half the Cubans also have a little business on the side, where they sell stuff illegally to tourists and each other.

How does that work?

Maybe you work in a cigar factory. It’s hard to steal cigars for private sale, but it’s not hard to make illegal cigars at home at night, from tobacco your uncle Louis sets aside, illegally, from his farm in the country. Or you may work in a hotel and take home some towels for resale. It happens all over the world; in Cuba it’s a mainstay of the economy.

What about the people?

They are great, just great. They’re incredibly warm and outgoing. Things are pretty stressful in a lot of ways, but they have excellent free medical care and good education is free all the way through professional schools, like law and medicine. Nobody goes hungry. And they are very much aware of “The Revolution.” They measure tough times against what it was like before.

How so?

We Americans talk like their revolution happened in 1959, when Castro kicked out Batista. But they date the start of their revolution to 1492, when Columbus arrived. The four local Indian tribes were wiped out by the Europeans, completely wiped out. Not a single person survived. So all the Cubans today are descendants of Europeans and African slaves. There are no indigenous people, like there are in Central and South America.

What’s your point?

That from 1492 until 1959 Cuba was never run for the benefit of all the Cubans. Pedro told us that about 70 percent of the land was owned by foreign corporations and of that, half was owned by the United Fruit Company. So for more than 450 years it was mostly foreigners plus a few Cuban plutocrats who were the big winners in Cuba. Cubans today don’t want to head back in that direction.

By
Steve McNamara

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