5 Bad Socialism Cuba
What could go wrong in theory with an overpowerful government like Sweden’s had gone wrong for real in Cuba—very wrong. I got my first look at Havana at dawn in March 1996, from the window of my room in the Hotel Nacional. The city was gray with the grizzled markings particular to tropical desolation. Bright colors were bleached to dirty pearl. There were ashen streaks from leaking roofs and dark whorls left over from stagnant puddles. Mildew spread across walls like a living soot. Even from ten stories up, I could see holes in everything: holes in roofs, holes in streets, holes where windows ought to be. There were holes in everything, and chunks missing from everything else. Chunks had fallen from balconies, cornices, porticoes, marble and granite facades. The city blocks were missing chunks of buildings. Some of the remaining buildings were missing so many chunks I thought they were abandoned until I saw the hanging laundry. And the laundry was full of holes. Cuba looked like it had lost a war. And it had—the cold war. But Albania had lost the cold war, too, and Tirana, as I’d see a year later, was a colorful, noisy place this time of day: Cafés were full, cars collided, street vendors shouted their wares. Havana was silent. I watched enormous breakers tumbling against the seawall of the Malecon, Havana’s oceanfront boulevard. Thousands of gallons of gray brine sloshed over the holes and chunks in its concrete pavement. Torrents of dingy sea foam flushed against the Malecon’s paintless old town houses. Very few tuberos, those brave souls who try to escape from Cuba aboard tied-together inner tubes, would be out today. They’d be washed right back into somebody’s living room. And a very crummy living room, to judge by what I could see. I was feeling pretty crummy myself. I’d arrived the previous midnight and
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