Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

February 1, 1998, Sunday,
Late Edition - Final

The World: Four Decades of Revolution Bring Cuba Full Circle
By MIRTA OJITO, HAVANA

FOR 39 years he has worked hard to build a better society for his own children and for all the children of Cuba. At 73 he still works as an organizer of the elections that every two years guarantee the permanence of the government he helped bring to power in 1959.

Pictures of him with Fidel Castro dot the walls of his comfortable apartment in the upscale Vedado district, and his frayed olive green uniform -- the one he wore without fail for 13 years -- hangs in his closet. He still rattles off the achievements of the revolution in health and education. When Mr. Castro speaks, he listens with pride.

Yet Serafin, the only name he would allow for publication, says he is an anguished man. "I look around and I see the needs of my people, how they must struggle to survive every day, and it fills me with sorrow," he said.

Serafin's quandary is common these days in Cuba as old revolutionaries and diehard Fidelistas come to terms with the failure of their dreams. From their posh apartments in Vedado and the area known as Miramar , those who helped make this revolution look around in horror and see what the country has come to: Many parents must scramble to feed their children, some sick people die for lack of medicines, young women marry foreigners for a chance to leave the country, old people line up in the morning to buy newspapers they can resell, and children as young as 8 gravitate to tourist spots asking for handouts.

Welcome to Latin America
In many ways, Cuba today is not unlike any other underdeveloped Latin American country. True, children go to school and do not sleep in the streets. But there is class division (those who have dollars and those who do not). There is prostitution (young women throw themselves at tourist cars). People rummage through garbage for everything from spare parts to plastic containers. Some of the potholed city streets resemble rural roads. Large families of two or three generations squeeze into tiny, dilapidated apartments. And there are a lot of needy, unhappy, rundown, desperately sad people.

In these conditions, it is tempting for Cubans to look for solace in comparisons with, say, Peruvians or Mexicans. At least here, the Government guarantees some basic needs (rice, beans, sugar and, occasionally, toothpaste) and free doctors' care for all.

But the people who made the Cuban revolution, who for the most part genuinely believed they were building a better world, know the revolution was supposed to be much more than that. The country was not supposed to just survive, but to prosper. It was not supposed to alienate its best sons and daughters, but to convert ordinary citizens into social idealists. And finally, after all the years of scarcities and slogans, it was not supposed to depend, once again, on the Yankee dollar.

This is perhaps the cruelest failure of the revolution for people like Serafin, who believed Mr. Castro could liberate them from dependence on their huge northern neighbor. That dependence was what Mr. Castro blamed for Cuba's troubles 39 years ago -- the regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the reliance on American sugar markets that kept Cuban peasants poor, and the domination of Havana's tourism, gambling and prostitution by American mobsters.

Yet today, despite the United States embargo, officials acknowledge that the economy's pillars are dollar-based: tourism and "remesas," the dollars that Cubans abroad send home to relatives and friends. Half of Cuba's people -- most of them in Havana -- have access to dollars, either because they are paid in them or because they receive them from abroad.
With the return of the dollar, any hope of achieving the old revolutionaries' tattered ideals is buckling under the weight of all the concessions the regime has had to make in order to survive since the crumbling of the Soviet bloc.

In the last few years, the hotels have filled with tourists who snap pictures of dilapidated buildings, and the nights have reverted to a debauchery that recalls the 1950's. Teachers who taught Russian have been retrained to teach English, and young doctors and engineers bribe hotel managers for jobs serving food in dollars-only restaurants.

And the schism that separates the classes is deepening: Those who have dollars eat meat and have toilet paper; those who do not go without proteins in their diet and use pages of old textbooks for their sanitary needs. There are people in Cuba who carry only dollars in their pockets. There are others who have never seen one.

Welcome to 1958
In a twist of fate or bad planning, these were some of the very conditions that fomented the Cuban revolution in the 1950's. The revolution set out to eradicate ills it attributed to capitalism: poverty, inequality, illiteracy, diseases, prostitution. With Soviet help, it made enormous strides in education and health care. But it was never able to fully accomplish all of its goals. The children of government officials always lived better than the children of ordinary workers, and the economic crisis began even before the Berlin Wall fell.

In important ways, the Cuban revolution is hardly alone. Throughout the Soviet bloc, the most common -- and, in the end, perhaps the most fatal -- failure of Communism was its inability to turn ordinary human beings into loyal new socialist citizens. Here, after almost four decades of indoctrination, most people, including the children of old revolutionaries, are dissatisfied by the government's failure to deliver material security. The welcome to the Pope last week demonstrates that Marx did not become the only source for ideals.

The desires of today's youth, it seems, are not so different from those of people who were young here in 1958. Like people everywhere, Cuba's young want to raise families and prosper. If that is impossible in Cuba, many want to leave for a land of greater individual opportunity.

Five years ago, Serafin's oldest son was sent to prison for trying to leave by boat. Serafin finally visited him after eight months. "It was very difficult," he said, swallowing hard. "I think he made a mistake."

Although pained by Cuba's situation, some old revolutionaries stubbornly cling to their ideals. Very few admit they made a mistake. And they probably cannot. At 73 or 65, to declare the revolution a failure would be to renounce their life's work.

Reality, though, is sometimes impossible to ignore. Carlos, a 65-year-old man who fought against Batista then went into exile and returned when Batista fell, cannot accept any criticism of either Mr. Castro or his revolution. He was the only person interviewed who gave his full name. But his daughter asked him to withhold it for fear of reprisal against her. A 35-year-old former biology teacher, she rents half of her one-bedroom apartment and sells cigars on the side. Both activities are illegal without licenses. She and Carlos avoid politics when they talk; yet, when she can, she drops a few dollars in her father's wallet.

Many Cubans, of course, blame the United States embargo for their problems. But even that argument rankles old revolutionaries because to hang Cuba's fate solely on its ability to trade -- and with the United States at that -- reeks of the dependency mentality Mr. Castro set out to eliminate.

Welcome to World Trade
Economists trained here now acknowledge that few countries can survive economically without trading with their neighbors. But even that simple thought has required a shifting of the collective Cuban mind. People born after the revolution never had to worry about market conditions or the value of the dollar.

Now, there is a long list of applicants for a new M.B.A. program at the University of Havana, and people flock to English and marketing classes. The dollar has become so much a fact of Cuban life it has at least eight names: fula, guano, guaniquiqui and varo (all slang for money), peso, verde (green), chavitos (coins) and, of course, divisas, the official term, which means foreign exchange.

A woman who lives in Miramar takes solace in the fact that her husband, a respected official who believed deeply in socialism, died eight years ago, right before the worst times began. Since then, two of his children have left Cuba. Two more would like to go.

" As much as I miss him, I know that what happened was the best thing that could have happened," she said, drying her tears. "If he were alive today, I don't know what my husband would have done, but I do know that he would have been incredibly sad."