Stubborn pride helped Cubans endure a half century of embargo and outlast the half century of predictions by US politicians that the Castro regime was about to collapse. I talked to Cubans who still adore Fidel Castro and still believe in his egalitarian dreams.
Yet for most people, the revolution has failed. Cubans get cheap housing and free health care, but the buildings in Havana are crumbling and broken, sewage spills onto the street on every other block, and power outages are common. Cubans must work hard to circumvent the system to get money, or try to live on the twice-monthly food ration, a meager allotment of rice, beans, eggs, and a little chicken. (Here’s another dark Cuban joke: What are the three worst things about the revolution? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)
To avoid an explosion, the government has relented to experiments in profit-making. There are private markets with food; mechanisms for buying and selling homes, televisions, and new appliances in the shops; and a new sense that things are possible.
“You can feel it in the air,” says Sergio Mercenit, a lifelong Havana resident. “There is a sense of optimism, of exhilarating joy.”
These splashes of capitalism come with a dose of rhetorical double talk. Mr. Castro’s former chef from the guerrilla wars in the mountains now runs a popular restaurant in Old Havana jammed every night with paying foreigners.
Jimmy Carter and Jack Nicholson have eaten with him, boasts chef Tomás Erasmo Hernández, a lean man with a shock of white hair. But he insists his ringing cash register does not betray the dreams of his old boss.
“There is no inconsistency with socialism,” Mr. Erasmo says over coffee at a back table in his restaurant, Mama Inés. A pair of muscular young men at the door keep out the riffraff. “I still cook. In this business, nobody gets rich. We have a right to enjoy the life of the middle class.”
Erasmo hopes to start another restaurant in Miami as the embargo on business eases. Already there is a flow of US dollars to Cuba. The new paladares and hotel renovations are being financed, the word on the street is, by “Miami money” from the Cuban-American community.
That is ironic: The group that hated the Castro regime and has worked for decades to bring it down is, in one way, helping keep it alive.