Cuba’s Special Period: Four Years of Precipitous Decline, Near Total Collapse, and a Labored Rise from the Ashes

 

 

When the Soviet Union finally fell apart in the early 90s, most corners of the world rejoiced. People in Berlin danced as the wall crumbled around them, ecstatic citizens of Europe lined the streets of London, Paris, and Barcelona to celebrate the good news, and politicians in back rooms and offices across Washington patted each other on the back for a job well done, having felled the evil empire once and for all. Yet while large portions of the globe experienced jubilation at the news, others were gripped by a sense of panic and unease. Cuba was one such quarter.

To Cuban officials, the Soviet demise was devastating. Gone was the country's largest trading partner, one that accounted for over 85% of all exports off the island; its largest customer of sugar, tobacco, and nickel had vanished overnight. Gone, too, was the grease for the wheel of Cuban society -- without access to Soviet subsidies and supplies, its normal functioning and forward progress ground to a halt. The import-based production economy was stalled on the tracks, starved for money and parts. And perhaps most importantly, gone was the country's ideological mentor and shepherd -- without the political cover provided byy the long Soviet shadow, Cuba was exposed to the harsh light of day and the unforgiving option to sink or swim on its own as a Communist country. For the first time in a long time, the Cuban government was faced with the rude realization that it was a tiny, tiny island in a very large, and largely democratic, global community.

As the Soviet machine imploded, Cuba's economy fell apart with similar speed. The country had almost no trading partners outside the socialist network, no development deals in place or immediate prospects for new ones, and no outlets for their products or access to those of other nations – there was an almost total dependence on the Soviets to stock and subsidize their economy.  There was no one to purchase the over eight million tons of sugar produced each year, the main pillar of the Cuban economy, one accounting for roughly 80 percent of all exports and 4.3 million pesos in income, or a quarter of the country’s GDP.[1] (The other significant source of export income, nickel, was a distant second behind the aforementioned, responsible for only seven percent of the money earned each year, or 388,000 pesos.)[2] Large amounts of agricultural products and tobacco also had nowhere to go -- left without a buyer, $184 million pesos worth of the former and $114 million of the latter were stuck on the island to molder and rot.[3]

In addition to its inability to move products of their own off the island, Cuba had a difficult time bringing items in from abroad as a result of both the US embargo and the penury of the Cuban government. US-imposed penalties on nations and companies that did business with the Cubans -- either directly through fines or indirectly through severed ties or the tempered purchasing of their exports -- and the withering scarcity of funds in the central account (the government was roughly 600 million pesos in the red at the time of the collapse)[4] further exacerbated Cuba's problems and exposed the dangers of an import-reliant system. When the government failed to procure needed inputs for its industrial or agricultural machinery, production in these critical areas virtually stopped. Imports of critical foodstuffs -- annually close to 500 million pesos worth[5]  -- were also difficult to find, a reality that endangered the ability of the government to fulfill the requirements of its monthly rations.

In short, Cuba faced “two crippling blockades” -- a phrase used by Dr. Fidel Vascos Gonzalez, a professor at ISRI and an ex-economist, and all other government officials I spoke with -- one from the US policy and one from the lack of Soviet aid.[6] At the time in 1990, exports brought in approximately $5.5 billion a year -- four years later that total was down to $2.1 billion.[7] By ‘93, the GDP of the economy had contracted by over a third, inflation skied to over 80 percent as a result of the 10 billion pesos in circulation (up from the average total of 3 billion),[8] the national debt had mushroomed to $6 billion owed to foreign govnerments, excluding former socialist countries (this total had grown to over $9 billion two years later),[9] and Castro's administration was in dire need of a strategy to stop the country’s frantic descent.

His solution in ’93 was twofold -- dollarize the economy, removing penalties towards Cubans for having or transacting in American currency, and throw every available asset, be it humans, equipment, or investment, into the tourism industry. These two decisions let a pair of dragons loose in the Cuban system whose powerful legacies are still evident today and go a long way towards explaining Cubans' repeated assertions that the problems of the special period are not gone, they've simply been transplanted. With the class divide they spawned between highly educated professionals and their lower-skilled counterparts in the tourism industry and a corresponding gulf opened between urban and rural areas, these moves created a rift between the haves and the have-nots that revolved around access to the American dollar. In the short term, though, these decisions achieved their intended outcome -- they staunched the economy's hemorrhaging and allowed it to start the healing process.

Castro transformed the tourism sector from a largely domestic-oriented entity to one whose sole focus was international travel and entry into which became, with its access to seemingly infinite amounts of coveted American dollars, an unstated national imperative. Direct employment in the area doubled,[10] income leaped by a factor of eight, and the number of tourists went from 340,000 in 1990[11] to 700,000 in 1994,[12] a number that has skied to an expected two million people this year.  This set off a simultaneous rise in internal migration as people flocked to cities with tourist outlets, the population of Havana accounting for a constant 20 percent of the total population,[13] despite an average annual growth rate of 2.2 percent for the latter.[14]

            The two tines of Castro’s strategy were mutually reinforcing, as success in the tourist side of the solution led directly to more spending on the dollar side of the economy. Surpluses from the latter were immediately reinserted into the former with the building of more rooms (three thousand or so a year) and hotels (fourteen to fifteen annually) and the modernization of existing structures (converting pay-as-you-go institutions to all-inclusive resorts, for one), which started the cycle repeating. [15]

Yet while this approach alleviated some of the country’s immediate problems, it inflamed or displaced others, merely shifting the pain and hardships onto a new group of people. As a result, tensions continued to mount and frustrations in the cities intensified before erupting in ‘94 in what is universally held to be the worst year of the crisis. Here the government's inability to fix the hunger problem, the employment and production situation, or the overall state of living exploded in a series of showdowns between the citizens and the police, an exodus of desperate people on rafts off its shores, and a general displeasure that threatened to unseat the government.

 

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To listen the government’s perspective, the special period, while admittedly a difficult time, was not as serious as outsiders tend to believe and, more importantly, was nothing Castro and his officials were unable handle. For every official you get to admit the severity of a particular aspect of the crisis – food shortages, blackouts, crime, unrest -- there are three others who will skirt, soften, or scurry from the issue. Talking to Rafael Dausa Cespedes, director of the North American division of MINREX, Cuba's version of our State Department, the true causes of the crisis were wholly external, realities beyond the control of Cuban officials.

In his telling of events, the government is absolved of almost all responsibility for what occurred, a frequently voiced sentiment from the officials I talked to. "It was calm here because the Cuban people didn't believe the revolution was the cause of its problems," he said. "The revolution gave the people dignity, sovereignty, the right to self-determination, free health, education, and social security. The revolution gave other things, too. Therefore there was no reason to blame the government for what was occurring."[16] Listening to the first half of his statement, I couldn’t help but wonder why Cubans didn’t believe that – whether it was a product of years of repression or a genuine sense of unity and collective responsibility.

Castro, in his assessment, saw the causes of “the special period in peacetime, in all its harshness”[17] – a name he coined in a speech at the beginning of the struggle -- as the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, the increased strength of the US blockade, and various domestic insufficiencies.[18] (Dausa cited only the first two of these, conspicuously omitting the reference to Cuban inadequacies.) “We will have to undergo this trial,” he said. “The revolution will face this period without putting anyone onto the streets, without depriving a single citizen of his resources, and without leaving anyone unemployed…If we must reduce the working week, we will reduce it. If we cannot work five days, we will work four. And if we cannot work four, we will work three and give time off.”[19]

Castro said there were many paths out of the thickets -- by developing human resources and making industrial improvements; by reinforcing the social and economic infrastructures; by formulating a defined strategy, bolstering the people's unity and imparting authentic leadership while respecting the people's democracy -- and he implemented several strategies towards those ends, beefing up sugar, typical exports, food, tourism, and biotech/pharmaceuticals, the last three of which he deemed the most important.[20]

Dausa, a tall, tanned man with a thick mustache and a glimmering tonsure, was an interesting contradiction. Well entrenched in the Cuban way of thinking and speaking after years of service, his answers often toed the company line and echoed those of other ministers I talked to. As a man with a family and a prestigious government post living in Havana, with all the responsibilities those items imply, it was profitable for him to remain in league with the regime. Yet his years spent living in America over the past decade – he has called both in New York and Washington home – have obviously forced him to realize the fallacy behind many of his government’s professions; to realize how hopelessly unprepared the country is for the fruits of their wishes were they to come true. So his answers, while largely following the official script, often had little ad libbed flourishes at the end, a subtle insight or detail lacking from other officials’ responses. It seemed he paid lip service to things out of occupational responsibility and deviated out of experiential understanding.

In our discussion, Dausa focused on the positive steps the government took to fix the period’s problems, often sidestepping or outright ignoring questions about the negative conditions that proliferated during that time. He favored long, detailed responses for the issues of the former and quick, abbreviated ones for queries on the latter. Discussions on the problems of food shortages, electrical outages, and a lack of oil, for example, were all lightly touched on during our first meeting -- "Everyone was very skinny. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't done as a fashion statement either; " "The power was off for sixteen hours a day during the high temperatures of summer. This would cause heart attacks in New York;” or "We had no oil. No one could drive -- the streets were empty," respectively -- while responses detailing the ways the US blockade helped exacerbate the period’s problems or those trumpeting the resiliency of the Cuban people lasted for minutes at a time.

Dausa said the Soviet fall in 1990 forced the Cuban government to remove all unnecessary expenditures from the budget and forced society to revert to a state of absolute efficiency where nothing was consumed unless out of total necessity. (In reality this was something of a superfluous directive as gluttony and profligacy have never been characteristics attributable to Cuban socialism, a system of governance characterized by its relative austerity even at the best of times.) "We cut everything that wasn't basic," he said. “Absolutely everything.”

Imports were taken from $8.1 billion a year in 1989 down to $1.7 million in 1993,[21] a 73 percent contraction,[22] and government spending dropped from $14.2 billion pesos in 1990 to $12.8 billion six years later.[23] Castro warned that the coming days could be “like going back to the Sierra Maestra,” referring to the scarcities he and his rebels endured in the mountains while fighting the revolution in 1959. “We may have to begin over again in many things,”[24] he said. “We [might] have to completely stop social development…for one to five years. If we must spend five years without building a home, and that is the price we must pay to save the revolution, then we will spend five years without building a home or a daycare center.”[25]

The government concurrently opened pockets of self-employment and capitalist development with Decree 141 in September 1993, a mandate that created 117 new types of jobs, which ranged from trade positions such as plumbers, carpenters, and mechanics to hairdressers, taxi drivers, and computer programmers.[26] (This number jumped to 135 a month later with the addition of occupations like florists, bici-taxi drivers, and jewelry repair[27] before ultimately ballooning to 157 by May 1996.)[28] The decree targeted the nation’s unemployed, housewives, and retirees while excluding college graduates, business directors, and doctors – and anyone whose monthly salary exceeded 400 pesos.[29] These highly skilled professionals and their comparatively well paid peers -- not necessarily one and the same -- were to continue providing their services to state-controlled industries and profiting society as a whole, not themselves as individuals.[30] 

Castro described the move as a temporary, but necessary reversal of Cuban socialism, one inspired by the Chinese and Vietnamese models where private enterprise had innocuously nestled into those state-run economies and flourished.[31] “We are walking over broken glass and at times we don’t know where to put our feet. [Cuba] has had to make concessions and take steps backward from the construction of a socialist society,” he said. “We are doing it without fear of vacillation, and without ever forgetting the idea of perfecting this system of social justice.”[32]

Decree 141 also provided for the now-ubiquitous paladares, tiny restaurants run out of a proprietor's home and usually staffed solely by the owner themselves. Taking their name from a Brazilian soap opera once popular on the island,[33] these establishments can legally serve no more than twelve patrons at a time and previously operated under a blanket of secrecy, only found with the help of a clandestine guide in league with the owner. (This practice was a result of the paladares’ initial illegality – they weren’t permanently recognized until June 1995, the government continually altering their status to that point[34] – and was an effort to avoid paying taxes and operating fees once formally recognized. While reportedly less frequent today, random passersby will still offer to take you to a good paladar in exchange for a drink and some conversation.) These little nooks feature large, home-cooked meals for around ten dollars and are everywhere in Cuba, with some 200 existing in Havana alone by June 1995[35] and over 1,000 nationwide by March 1996, compared with over 12,000 state-run facilities.[36] (Though not technically just for tourists, the high prices, in relation to the average Cuban’s salary, prevent many natives from dining at these restaurants without a foreign escort willing to shell out for a meal or a drink.)

These capitalist openings ran on US dollars and allowed the largest number of Cubans yet to gain access to the dollar side of the economy, an opportunity that was readily snatched up despite having to pay income tax[37] and rather sizeable operation fees. Paladares charging in pesos, for example, were taxed 100 pesos a month to serve alcohol and 400 pesos a month to serve food, while those charging dollars had to pay 300 dollars a month for the right to serve food and 100 for alcohol, whether they turned a profit or not.[38] Street vendors faced taxes of 100 pesos to 100 dollars a month depending on their wares.[39] For Cubans then earning, on average, 200 pesos a month at their state jobs,[40] these fees were nothing to scoff at, yet they did not stop an estimated 100,000 people from entering the ranks of the self-employed by December 1993,[41] 170,000 by June 1995,[42] and 206,000 by February 1996.[43] What once was a labor force that had 95 percent of its constituents working for the state (in 1989) had dwindled seven years later to a total of 75 percent.[44]

 

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Dr. Vascos painted a similar picture, centering his portrayal around the economy’s metamorphosis while touting the government’s ability to maintain its social services in the face of such economic hardships. Castro faced a huge decision immediately upon the fall in 1990, one he would be forced to revisit as conditions worsened -- cut or temper the substantial spending subsidizing programs like education or health care, or stay the course and keep them free for the entire population. With an annual pricetag running in the billions -- $1.6 billion pesos for the former, $900,000 for the latter -- this was no easy decision. Cutting back on these or a host of smaller programs, instituting a small fee for access or their maintenance would bring in millions to the government coffers, money that could be used to slow the country's economic demise and jumpstart new projects and ventures. Maintaining the burn rate at its high, then unmitigated levels, on the other hand, would drag the country closer and closer to insolvency.

To understand Vascos, though, excising or shrinking these programs wasn't even an option for Castro. Changing the standing policy would violate a core tenet of the revolution -- universal education, health care, social security, etc. had been promised and implemented long ago and were one of, if not the most important bases of support for Castro in his conquest of Batista, a time characterized by horrible social conditions for all but a few in power. This initial support had carried over in the intervening years and propped him up through many difficult periods – the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the global recession of the 80s.

To cut these programs, even slightly, would contradict one of the key pillars of Cuban socialism -- something akin to the President renouncing freedom of speech or the right to an attorney in our democracy -- and been wildly unpopular.  So they bit the bullet -- the budgets for these programs remained untouched, actually growing in size rather than diminishing. The budget for education grew from $1.6 billion pesos in 1990 to $2.8 billion in 2002; health care from $900,000 to $2 million; sports from $117 billion to $200 billion; culture from $200 million to $400 million; social security from $1.2 billion to $2 billion, largely to cover salary expenses for the growing number of unemployed.  By 1993 the deficit had ballooned to roughly 33 percent of GDP as a result of all the government spending.[45]

Yet Vascos, an unimposingly stocky man with a stark white goatee and matching hair and big wide-framed glasses, said that despite all the improvements to the country’s social programs, seemingly nothing could be done to turn the economy around and solve its blossoming employment problems.  Cuban officials seemed to decide if you can’t fix society’s problems themselves, the next best option is to strengthen your social safety net to catch the citizens on their inevitable fall.

And so in spite of their efforts to the contrary, progress continued to grind to a halt -- factories continued closing by the dozen (50 percent of all industry had been stopped or slowed by September 1993),[46] those remaining open doing so in name only. The country’s GNP fell by 34 percent from 1989 to 1993,[47] the workweek was shortened from six days to five, and work hours plummeted. Stores of all types, ravaged by the devastating triangle of a lack of supplies, power, and customers, began to fall out of operation, and public transportation practically disappeared as an inability to get gas or oil prevented all but the richest (or the most heavily subsidized) from driving.

At the start of the crisis, fuel consumption was slashed for both the state and the average consumer– the former’s total by 50 percent, the latter’s by 30.[48] Car owners received forty liters of gas a month as part of the ration, less than a full tank of gas for most vehicles, but as problems persisted the same forty liters had to last two or three months. [49]Any extra gas a person required had to be purchased on his or her own, but long lines and atmospheric prices outside the ration left most unable to afford that supplement. 

Tourists could buy gas immediately and frequently at inflated prices ($3.75 a gallon in July 1992) – a perk brought on by the government’s bloodlust for hard currency – while Cubans had to wait for cash and their quota to get theirs.[50] This relegated cars for individual usage to gather dust in driveways or on the streets, left buses and taxis mothballed by the hundreds, and consigned vehicles of all kinds to swelter in the sun, abandoned on the side of the roads wherever they ran out of fuel.

Public transportation had fallen 70 percent by September 1993;[51] 75 percent of the city’s 2,000 taxis – an equal number already left to rust by New Year’s Day 1991[52] -- were limited to hauling fares to hospittals or funerals;[53] 60,000 tractors had been replaced by 200,000 oxen in the countryside;[54] less than half of Havana’s 1,200 buses were fully functioning on any given day;[55] and US diplomats in country noticed the state surveillance cars typically tailing them around town were more infrequent on account of the shortages.[56] Even the country’s dictator was not immune, as seen in the documentary Fidel, when Castro’s jeep died while giving Ted Turner a tour of the island, the kicker being the trip’s purpose was to show the American how good everything was in Cuba. 

Vascos said the only form of mass transportation that ran with any regularity was the shuttles picking up employees in sectors the state had designated key. The government provided service to certain factories and hotels around the capital, but its main recipients were those like himself working in various state ministries and offices of the government. These minibuses would round everyone up in the morning, take them to work, and then pick everyone up to go home at the end of the day. The rest of the population – the majority of the country’s labor force of four million, Vascos said -- was largely left to fend for themselves. 

To get to work these people either had to hitchhike with someone whose car was running, walk, or ride their bicycle – the government imported over a million bicycles from China as a stopgap solution, which they sold at the job place for a nominal fee (approximately 100 pesos) or handed out free of charge to students at the universities.[57] At one point in 1992, bicycles were estimated to outnumber cars in Havana 20:1.[58] Miguel Alejandro Figueras, the advisor to the minister of tourism I talked to, said he lost fifteen kilos in one year as a result of so much bicycling and so little food. He was in the best shape of his life, he said, not without a touch of sarcasm and chagrin.

An estimated 18,000 workers were relocated to jobs closer to their homes to ease travel times,[59] but Vascos said the majority of those who kept their jobs had to spend, on average, over an hour and a half each way getting to work, often for locations that previously took only a quarter of the time to reach. By May 1993, a reported 240,000 people still relied on public transportation as their primary mode of travel.[60]

Once they finally arrived at work, though, there would often be little for them to do. Estimates from the time say between 600,000 and 800,000 Cubans (of a total workforce of 4.6 million) were working at 40-50 percent capacity while still earning full wages.[61]  Vascos said they would typically complete the day’s tasks early and then sit around the rest of the time, tinker on whatever side project they could concoct to busy themselves and earn a little extra cash, or leave early for the long journey home.  Legacies of this are still readily apparent today as the number of people standing in their doorways or sitting on their porches never seems to vary, be it 8AM or 8PM, weekday or weekend. What was initially a cute and charming reflection of an apparent appreciation for the simpler things in life quickly became tiresome and revealed the holes in the government’s employment statistics – sure, everyone may be on the payroll and earning a salary from some factory or store, but what is the quality or rigor of that employment?

For those who lost their jobs, either the result of a factory’s closure or the victim of layoffs from those still active, all was not lost. At the minimum these Cubans received 60 percent of their previous salary, often receiving far more, Vascos said. Everyone earned one month of their old salary upon losing their job, a rate that continued if they took employment in areas of much needed manual labor like agriculture or construction.[62]  If the state was unable to provide a job, or if health reasons prevented a person from working, at least 60 percent of that was received.[63]

Returning to school to learn a new trade was also an option, and those taking this path received a daily stipend to live off of while completing their studies, cushioning the loss of salary and the dim prospects of future employment. (Today, this stipend is equal to 100 percent of their old salary.)[64] 30,000 Cubans had lost their jobs by January 1992, 6,000 of which the state was unable to relocate,[65] a number that boomed to between 81,000 and 140,000 by June 1995,[66] half of which were still looking for jobs two months later.[67] Unemployment, which official statistics typically declared non-existent, reached 8 percent in 1995 before dropping to 6.5 percent in October 1996.[68]

Despite all of this, for both Dausa and Vascos (and a slew of other government officials I met with -- the ministers of economic development, foreign investment, and tourism, to name a few) the special period, while difficult, was largely an economic struggle, one the Cuban government handled well. True, they were initially caught off guard – as Dausa said when discussing the clues the regime had of the impending demise, “It was very difficult to anticipate [the collapse] happening. It was a total surprise.” -- but both men felt they recovered quickly and nipped a potentially fatal crisis early on, turning things around in four short years before they got completely out of hand.

Talking to average Cubans, though, you receive a far different picture. To them, the economic aspect is only part of it. For these people, the special period was an economic crisis that had very compelling, palpable social implications, ones that while having undoubtedly improved, did not disappear in ’95 as the government contends. As a result, the tales they tell are much different than those of their country’s officials -- they have a much more human face and more tellingly illustrate the hardships endured at the time.

 

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I met Bernardo and Santiago one night as I was walking around Havana on the Malecon, the lengthy seawall that stretches along the edge of the city and is the nightly meeting place for Cubans of all ages and interests. Going fishing, I call it – walking around using my blatant foreigner aesthetic to attract regular Cubans to talk to, those living outside the bubble the government creates for tourists lucky enough to come here. (I’m a tall, scrawny kid covered in bright white skin and blond hair that sticks out like a solitary stalk of sugarcane rising from a field of shorter tobacco in the countryside.)

Both were in their mid- to late-twenties – Bernardo, a sociologist by training, but a hospital worker by day, Santiago a gym teacher by both -- and eager to talk about a range of topics – baseball, Castro, rumored invasions by the US; whatever appeared on the table was embraced and discussed, particularly the special period. These two were dogged in their determination that I see “the real Cuba” and “the real Havana.” They took me to a state hospital to observe the dismal conditions there, showed me the back streets and gathering places of regular Cubans, and even endured arrest simply for talking to me. (This last episode hammered home just how far the government will go to maintain its façade of serenity and success and to keep foreigners from peeking behind the curtain.)

“Very difficult, very difficult,” Bernardo said repeatedly during conversations on the period.  The picture these two painted was radically different than the one presented by the government officials. Theirs was of a steadily worsening situation that was poorly handled by a confused, powerless state, one of intense hardships and a countrywide crisis racing towards an explosive finish. They began by discussing the chronic food shortages and the relentless hunger people experienced during those four years.

“Everything was closed,” Bernardo started. “Restaurants, bars, clubs, movie theaters, stores – almost everything except for the racionimientos,” the tiny storefronts in each neighborhood where families purchase the items from their monthly ration allotment. “You can’t live off what you get from the ration, though. It’s a little bit of rice, some beans, some meat, some coffee, but not much. Not enough for the whole month.”

This is normal even today – people cannot subsist on the meager offerings of the ration alone, instead having to supplement their food stores with items bought at local fruit stands or farmer’s markets. (One of the last officials I met with, for example, Carlos Alzugaray from ISRI, spends up to 150 pesos a month – close to the average national monthly salary of 200 pesos and almost a quarter of his comparatively hefty salary -- for himself and his family of three to live on.) Six pounds of sugar, six pounds of rice, a half-pound of beans and meat, 4 ounces of coffee, plus one chicken, some fruits and vegetables when in season, and the occasional luxury for holidays[69] – a fish for the New Year, a cake for Mother’s Day, for example[70] -- don’t stretch very far each month.

>

Yet what is commonplace, if something of a nuisance, today was infinitely more difficult back then as both money and the food itself were exceedingly scarce. Reports tell of unbearable lines at stores that lasted for hours at a time and the need to hire people as line standers, holding your place in the queue while you worked. (Outlawed until ‘93, Alzugaray also uses this option to save time, paying a man 60 pesos a month to buy groceries for him while he works at the Institute.) As the crisis worsened, the ration expanded from an initial protection of 35 foodstuffs to 63 in October 1990, along with 180 consumer items (clothes, shoes, appliances, etc.)[71] 

First started in 1962, the ration’s food prices are heavily subsidized and kept artificially low so almost everyone can afford them, but during this period these items were often unavailable, forcing owners of the libreta to make repeated trips to acquire their entire monthly allotment and to shop on the black market as a supplement. By May 1992, Cubans were getting less than a pound and a half of meat each month and only five eggs a week, per person, less than half and a third, respectively, of what they received one year prior.[72]

As a result, the prices of everything outside the ration skyrocketed due to limited access and rabid demand, and the value of the Cuban peso plummeted to less than a penny in ’94.[73] (Officially the peso is pegged 1:1 to the dollar, but its exchange rate in the parallel economy has always differed. Now trading at 26:1, its value fluctuated wildly during this period, getting as high as 140:1 in 1994.)[74] This made affording even the most basic items extremely difficult: chickens could cost 60 pesos,[75] cooking oil 60 or 70,[76] and other staples like sugar, rice, and coffee could go for as much as 75 times their regular price on the street.[77] As a result, people had to be resourceful without resources and get creative in how they obtained that food or the money to buy it.

Bernardo, a short, skinny man with a somewhat spasmodic body language, looks like a Cuban beat with his rumpled button-down shirt, frazzled puff of black hair, and thick black frames that he constantly adjusts, squinching his eyes as we talked. He was in school at the time, studying during the day to get his sociology degree, and after school he sold mangos to get supplemental cash for his family. Several times a week he and his father rode (or walked, if they were unable to hitch a ride on one of the trucks leaving Havana on the autopista) to the more rural areas just outside the city. These rustic fields, still in view of the city center yet miles away in terms of modernization, are chock full of thick mango groves, the trees’ branches sagging from the weight of the endless fruit. Bernardo and his father would come here to pick a basket or two of fruit they could later sell back in the city for cash, and also to buy food from the farmers further on down the road.

Food in the countryside was much cheaper than what you could buy back in Havana and far more reliable, he said. Street vendors there charged too much and couldn’t be trusted to sell what they were advertising – Bernardo recounted stories of people selling rotten meat they had fried to mask the taste, selling dog as meat and salsa or tomato sauce laced with dog blood to stretch their supplies of the former. As a result, his family never bought meat at stores in the city – only from the racionimientos – instead opting to buy it in bulk from the farmers outside of town who sold ten pounds of pork they had raised themselves for a reasonable price.

Santiago, a tall, quiet man with a shaved head, soft voice, and cloudy eyes, helped his cousin Bernardo and his uncle on these expeditions and worked extra hours with his father welding and making the iron gates that are so ubiquitous in the city, covering windows and lining the perimeter of most buildings, to make ends meet. As the crisis wore on, he said things around him got progressively worse – more stores and factories in the neighborhood closed, basic things got harder to find or afford, people grew hungrier and more frustrated, and a sense of desperation crept into the city. People started selling whatever they owned for money and would put signs up in their windows announcing what they had to offer – beds, tables, chairs, books, clothes; whatever they could get rid of to gain a little extra cash for food. And what they no longer had to sell themselves sometimes got stolen so it could be. 

“People would steal from each other they were so desperate. You couldn’t trust your own neighbor,” he said. “They would take whatever they could get their hands on, no matter how long they had known you.” Theft from the workplace became commonplace with factory workers taking whatever could be stripped out and sold from machinery -- from mechanical parts and fluids to wiring and buttons -- and airport employees rifling through bags and cargo shipments for clothing and consumer goods. (A reminder of this last item exists today with the bags of dozens of Cuban travelers from the US arriving in Cuba wrapped in bright blue shrink-wrap, a service paid for before leaving the US to prevent such rummaging and theft.) Bike theft boomed, as did smash and grab jobs at houses and stores. In all, the rise of black-market trade as a result of this crime is thought to have jumped from $2 billion in 1989 to nearly $15 billion in 1993.[78]

 

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And while this portrait is ominous enough, the one my guide in Cuba painted is far worse. Lili is an interesting hybrid of the two perspectives presented thus far, a bridge between the government way of thinking and the memories of average Cubans. She now works for the state in the tourism ministry, holding down a lucrative position as a guide for large groups of foreigners like myself, taking them on long trips across the country for weeks at a time. But she also has an older brother who fled the country in the massive exodus of rafters from the summer of ’94 – “the rafter crisis,” as Dausa referred to it -- that saw over 36,000 Cubans leave illegally for the US during the four years, a wave of people called balseros for the flimsiness of the crafts they piled onto, seemingly no stronger than balsa wood.  (One man I met described the time thusly: “It was a fury. You could hear the people – dink, dink, dink – banging away in their apartments getting ready. Every night – dink, dink, dink. Everyone was leaving. My brother left and didn’t come back. There were only two ways out – marriage [to a foreigner] or rowing.”)[79] 

As a result, Lili’s point of view seems continually pulled in two directions, torn between an understanding of the government’s methods and reasoning and a sympathy for the intensity of the hardships people endured, driving some like her brother to such desperate lengths as boarding a rickety raft and taking their chances on the shark-laden sea towards America. You can almost see her mind waging war with the tiny sprites perched on her shoulders – one’s allegiance tied to her job, its color the bright green of an American dollar, the other to her experiences before that job, its tint a red of sentiment, heart, and pain.

Lili recounted the nightmares of the shortages in excruciating detail, expanding upon the bleakness of Bernardo and Santiago’s experiences over the course of my three weeks in the country. Lili, a full-figured woman with hair the color and sheen of crude, was also in college at the time of the crisis. It was from this vantage part that she could see things continuing their downward spiral and could see how the times ravaged her friends and peers, regardless of class, profession, or point of origin.

Lili’s family was luckier than most as her father owned a boat and could go fishing when times were exceptionally hard – in a land where legally owning a boat and obtaining permission to fish are heavily restricted, this was no small feat -- but she too made trips the countryside to supplement her monthly food supply. But while Bernardo and Santiago made the trek to the outskirts of Havana to retrieve fruit, Lili and her father went every several weeks to get piglets and chicks instead.

This was a frequent occurrence, she said, as people came to buy piglets from farmers paying cash or trading them their bicycles if money was unavailable. This was an acceptable offer to farmers as many were unable to buy bicycles from the government, the solution largely intended for residents of the cities (by May 1993, for example, there were an estimated 730,000 in Havana alone), despite the fact that the problem it was attempting to solve – that of non-existent transportation –was not confined solely to their borders.

Families bought the animals to raise at home in their bathtubs, courtyards, or on their balconies, Lili said, and she had two that grew to 300lbs a piece in just over a year that she kept in the courtyard of her building. Once grown the pigs were either used by the family for meat or sold to others for that purpose, a homegrown boon to the dearth of state-provided meat. (Lili opted for the latter course of action as she found herself unable to kill her “pets,” as she called them, when the time came due.)

This was an intrepid solution to the food shortage Cubans devised themselves. The government created a similar-minded program in 1991 for subsidized chickens. Here Cubans could buy live chicks, either to raise for meat or eggs, for five pesos a piece. Families bought boxes of them to keep in warm areas of their homes, feeding them what meager offerings they could muster and hoping a majority would grow to full, utile size 120 to 180 days later instead of dying by the handful.[80] The program was quite popular, and by November 1991 the government had sold an estimated 80,000 chicks.[81] Lili’s family bought dozens of them when the program first started – 50 in all, she remembers – but lost the majority in a torrential rainstorm several months later.

These two solutions  -- pigs in the bathtub, chickens in the closet -- lent a comic air to the monthly visits by the public health inspectors, she said. These agents regularly came twice a month to check residences for possible dangers to the inhabitants’ health, spraying for mosquitoes, checking for rodents and roaches, etc. and were typically extremely strict, but during this time, with people raising pigs and chickens in their houses or on their balconies as a result of their inability to feed themselves, they just shrugged and threw up their arms. “You can’t be as strict about these things when people are starving,” she said.

Castro advocated taking such innovative, irregular actions in July 1993 -- “It is our duty to be intelligent. The Revolution is not saved through determination, courage, and heroism alone, it is saved through intelligence…The special period forces us to invent things and do intelligent things for the benefit of the population.”[82]

Yet while the previous two examples heed his advice, rather decent marriages of inventiveness and ingenuity, other solutions lacked their innocence and charm and illustrate the levels of desperation coursing through the city. Animals, now as prevalent as sunshine on the island, disappeared from the streets, either eaten by the owner or sold surreptitiously as meat by street vendors – dogs as lamb, cats as rabbit. (A joke from the time is illustrative -- “Before the revolution, the signs at the Havana Zoo read, ‘Don’t feed the animals.’ Later they were replaced with signs that read, ‘Don’t take food from the animals.’ Now the signs say, ‘Don’t eat the animals.’”)[83]

People toasted beans and sold them as peanuts (this is another fixture of Cuban life, the slender cones of peanuts sold almost everywhere on the streets for a few pesos); they ate fried plantain skins and “grapefruit steaks” to stay their grumbling stomachs, scooping the white pith out from under the peel for the latter, boiling it, and then sautéing it in a pan with lemon juice, onions, and garlic. Pizza, another integral part of society here, was made (or laced) with melted condoms when cheese was unavailable. (Rather cruelly, this was easier than expected thanks to a state program targeting the spread of STDs and AIDS that subsidized the cost of condoms and made them extremely cheap. In a land where beer skied to over fifty pesos and bottles of rum jumped to similar extremes, condoms usually cost no more than five pesos a piece.) Water with a little brown sugar was drunk as a snack, water with filtered kerosene (called chispa, from chispa del tren, or spark of the train) was drank to forget.

On top of the food shortages, power outages were also wracking society and started almost immediately, Lili said, once Soviet parts and oil critical for the operation of generators and other machinery were gone. The Soviets provided upwards of 90 percent of Cuba’s oil before the crisis – 14 million tons in ’89, 11 million in 1990, and 9.5 million in 1991[84] -- but only managed 6 million in 1992 and between 4 and 5 million each year afterwards. (They finally crept under 4 million tons a year in 2001 and 2002, importing 3.6 and 2.9 million those years, respectively.)[85]  Cuba, which required in excess of three million tons each year just for electricity,[86] fell victim to the Soviets’ inability to export oil and sugar’s collapse on the world market. (Cuba paid for their petroleum through an oil-for-sugar program and did not sufficiently produce enough oil on their own until 2002 when they extracted just over 3.6 million tons, milking less than a million tons out of the ground in 1992 and under 1.5 million tons from 1995-97.)[87]

 The state treaded water for awhile -- factory managers were required to cut power at peak times, as were farmers; families were told to cut usage by 10 percent on penalty of losing service for a month;[88] theaters started opening only on weekends; TV transmissions fell to five hours or less each day;[89] the sale of air-conditioners and refrigerators was halted and cooking with charcoal was encouraged;[90] streetlights were dimmed or turned off on major roads; and entire neighborhoods were extinguished each night, cities exceeding their monthly consumption quota sitting dark for days until more oil was obtained.[91]

They published scheduled blackout times and adhered to them reasonably well at the start, by most accounts, but as stocks ran out blackouts bled over their borders and began devouring larger and larger portions of the day. Outages of four hours a day in 1992[92] grew to eight hours in July of that year[93] and ten hours by May 1993.[94] When all was said and done, power was off for sixteen hours or more a day in October 1993[95] and was so infrequent Cubans began referring to its appearances as alumbrones, or light-ups.[96]

By 1994 the country’s generating capacity had dropped to 40 percent.[97] The voltage, when it did arrive, was often irregular, frying appliances the owners could not afford to repair or replace.[98] (In a country where almost all common forms of diversion were gone, the loss of a radio or old TV could be devastating.)  So people were left by the thousands to smolder in the high heat and humidity of a typical Cuban summer, waiting in the dark for the power with no idea when it would come back on. 

Somewhat surprisingly, the people I talked to said the worst part wasn’t the lack of fans or air-conditioning to cool off with – the latter, at least, is an extreme rarity even when the power is on – but the absence of refrigeration. This meant that what little food you did manage to procure often couldn’t be kept very long before it spoiled in the summer heat. As a result Lili said they boiled their milk several times a day to kill bacteria so it was drinkable, they cooked whatever meat they had all at once so it wouldn’t spoil, and they were often forced to eat in one sitting food that would have lasted two or three days had the power stayed on. After that, a typical day’s meals consisted only of rice and a banana to last the entire day. “We were skinny. It wasn’t starving like in Africa,” Lili said, “but it was difficult.”

As a result of their irregular eating habits, both in content, timing, and quantity – doctors’ posit Cubans’ daily caloric intake fell from around 2,900 in 1990 to “critical” levels of 2,100 or less in 1993[99] -- many Cubans developed nutritional deficciencies on top of their chronic hunger. Optic neuritis, a disease whose symptoms can include nerve damage, blindness, and loss of sensation,[100] was frequent, as were beriberi and other illnesses related to a lack of B- and C-vitamins.[101] (An unheard of 50,670 Cubans came down with the former disease, with 1,500 experiencing vision loss and acute eye damage and over 2,300 suffering permanent injury.)[102] This forced the state to start a program distributing nearly 1.5 billion vitamins along with items on the monthly ration.[103] (Bottles were free at first, Lili said, but later cost four pesos a bottle when supplies ran out in ’93.)

The final major problem Lili mentioned that plagued the populace at this time – an indignity they still suffer under today – came from poor access to personal care products. There was no soap, no toilet paper, no shampoo or hot water, things I was often unable to locate during my stay as well. The ration only provided families with one type of soap a month – one month was for showering and washing their hands with, the next for doing their laundry and dishes. As the troubles wore on, they got one, maybe two bars all year long, Lili said, each allotment having to last them five or six months at a time. (Lili recalls having one or two bars provided to her in ’92 and none in ’93, only receiving what she could beg or borrow from friends that year.)

As a result people were often forced to shower with boiled water alone and wash their clothes with alcohol and water,[104] some making do with laundry detergent or leaves of aloe, when available, in lieu of soap.[105] This led to a host of personal hygiene problems, among them massive outbreaks of lice in 1994, especially in areas with high population densities like schools and the microbrigade homes. (These houses were simple, multistory apartment buildings – ten to fifteen floors, typically -- built by regular, often untrained Cubans with government money and supplies starting in the early 90s to alleviate the housing problem.) Everyone she knew was afflicted this at some point, Lili said, which caused the state to begin importing, and then producing domestically, shampoo and soap to stem the problem. (After this, soap came a bit more regularly, she said, and families would receive their regular rationed amount, one bar every other month.)

All of this uncertainty centering around the utilities led to an extremely irregular schedule for average Cubans. Lili said she would often wake up at 4AM to cook or 2AM to shower since you never knew when the lights, water, or gas would be back on again. “The lights would come on in the middle of the night and you’d wake up and go, ‘OK, time to shower’ or ‘time to cook.’ It was crazy.”

 

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This was the situation building to a head in the summer of ’94 – rampant power outages, crippling food shortages, and intensifying temperatures, both externally and internally. Frustrations began boiling over in the form of increased crime across the city and showdowns in the streets between citizens and members of the police. With the increased amount of free time people had thanks to the diminished number of hours spent at work and the closing of almost all outlets of energy and capital, it was only a matter of time before the pressure was released, especially when coupled with the dismal social conditions and even gloomier outlook. “There was no hope,” Lili said.

Pickpockets and prostitutes abounded and people would sit on the Malecon drinking chispa or rubbing alcohol to pass the time. The country was being transformed into a darkened, crime-ridden pawnshop, both in ethics and in action, as people did and sold whatever they could to survive -- be it furniture, food, or themselves. “People were going crazy,” Bernardo said. “Stealing, fighting with the police. It was bad. Police started lining the streets to try to regain control.”

The showdowns were particularly intense because they played upon longstanding tensions between the citizens of Havana and the members of its police force, Lili said, friction based upon well-entrenched lines of division between the Habaneros of the country’s west side and the campesinos who typically come there from the east. These lines span musical tastes (denizens of the west tend to prefer salsa, while traditional music still rules in the east), sports (cities from the different regions are vociferous rivals), and language (those in the east typically have thicker accents than the urban dwellers of Havana), but perhaps none of them sports as wide a gulf or bears the intensity of that revolving around law enforcement. 

As often holds true elsewhere in the world, the people living in Cuba’s cities, and more specifically the capital, tended to be better off than their countrymen in rural areas. As a result, there has been a continuous flow of people moving to the cities since the revolution triumphed 45 years ago, hoping to gain access to more lucrative jobs and better living conditions. (As mentioned earlier, Havana’s population continued to grow along with the national rate of two percent each year.)

This pattern of movement intensified during the special period as hard times in the countryside -- even harder than those wracking the major cities – forced people to move or endure the siege in obscurity.

The exceptionally poor conditions in the campo were primarily a result of two things, the first being the longer than usual wait time required to get goods to rural areas, if they got there at all (the problems of gas and access again rearing their ugly heads), that spawned crippling shortages outside of Havana. The other was the government’s decision to dollarize the economy and focus strictly on tourism as a way to end the crisis, which sent waves of people to the island’s tourist centers in the hopes of employment. To a struggling Cuban getting battered in the countryside, the possibility of a tip-driven job awash in American currency, no matter how improbable its acquisition – “It is hard now,” Lili said. “It was impossible then.” -- was the light at the end of an increasingly dark tunnel, and the dim prospect of gaining access to that industry drew campesinos to Havana and other tourist areas like filings to a magnet.

People came by the hundreds without jobs or proper housing – prostitutes, hustlers, and beggars (collectively called “palestinos” by several I talked to) along with regular, more upstanding members of society. To legally change residences in Cuba is a slow, somewhat complicated process. It requires state approval or a trade before moving, where the landlord of a home in the countryside switches with someone living in the city -- a deal akin to bartering with a car dealer for a Mercedes while offering a Gremlin in return, in the eyes of most Cubans -- you cannot just rent, sell, or buy a place on a whim. Hoping to make a better life for themselves, but finding entry into the fabled tourism industry virtually impossible, there was a dearth of options for these people to stay in Havana legally.

With no job and nowhere to live, the only door they regularly found open to them was the one towards becoming a police officer. Here, for a five year commitment they would legally be able to stay in Havana, earn decent a wage – they earned between 200 and 300 pesos a month then and around 800 a month now -- and be in a position of relative respect and social prestige.  Thousands took the government up on their offer, snatching the jobs up eagerly, with many opting to stay longer than the requisite five years, marrying while in the city and instead choosing to settle down permanently. (“They change,” Bernardo said somewhat ominously.)  For this reason the police force was (and still is) almost exclusively constructed of migrants from the provinces, a group that makes up close to 95 percent of the total membership, by some estimates.[106] (Habaneros, for their part, have largely refused to enter these positions as a result of the low pay and the predominance of people from the provinces.)

This was the historical backdrop for the steadily increasing conflict in late ’93 and early ‘94 – a homogenous police force constituted of rabidly pro-Castro migrants (the people from the countryside are renowned for their support of the regime and being extremely strong Communists) facing off against an increasingly frustrated, disillusioned city populace known for its criticism and more conditional support of Castro and the regime. (1993 election polls show 15 percent of all Habaneros voting against the regime via blank balloting or ruining their ballots, compared with 7 percent nationally).[107]  A pattern of events began to form in the city – skirmish, crackdown, brief spell of silence, then another skirmish as the cycle started anew. Things could not continue like this for long, though, and the lid blew off completely in the summer of ’94 when the country came the closest it ever has to total collapse and a destabilization of Castro’s regime.

 

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“The people from the countryside are blind,” Bernardo explained. “They don’t see what’s really going on [in Havana].” As he described it, the two groups continued clashing in intensifying standoffs until August of that year, by all accounts the worst month of the entire crisis, when Castro made a call to loyal followers in the countryside, beckoning them to Havana to help their brothers in the city put a stop to unrest. He also scoured the ranks of retired police officers and members of the army and asked them to return to service for two years in an effort to quell the unrest.  Hundreds of men from all three groups responded.

Campesinos flooded into the city armed with crude sticks (“Big stick, big stick,” Bernardo kept repeating), clubs, and stones, and were posted along the Malecon every four to five feet, a special supplemental militia that was initially a rush of oxygen to a tenuously contained blaze. Standing on the seawall, these men were beckoning targets to frustrated Habaneros and skirmishes continued to break out as people would hurl stones and bottles at the sentries, along with the occasional epithet, sparking more arrests and more resistance.[108]

The culmination came when a rumor circulated on August 5, 1994 that a stolen ferry was coming to pick up people on the Malecon near Habana Vieja to take them to America. (Three other ferries had been hijacked in the previous two weeks to take people towards the US, a change from the homemade rafts people had been using to this point.)[109] Whether desperation or hope impelled their actions, people began congregating along the shore early that morning – estimates vary wildly from several thousand to 20-30,000, according to State Department statistics[110] -- scanning the horizon for their free ridde to the golden land of opportunity ninety miles away.

When the realization dawned that the boat was never coming, the group of would-be immigrants took their frustrations out on the nearby guards, tossing stones and punching those within reach. Hundreds chanted, “Freedom! Freedom!” while attacking police, and the situation quickly escalated into the most intense standoff of the special period.[111]  As neither the police nor the special guards could regain order, the situation threatened to spiral out of control and spread to the rest of the city. And then Fidel showed up and stopped everything in its tracks.

As was repeatedly described to me, Castro himself came marching down the Paseo del Prado, one of the main streets running off the Malecon, his hands behind his back, his chest puffed and his chin firmly raised. As his security guards lagged far behind, Castro, as if in some Leone-styled duel at high noon, walked towards the epicenter of the conflict and stared down the opposition. He just stood there, Lili said, his body and his glare seeming to say, “I am here. I am waiting for my stones to be thrown at me.” Rather remarkably, none came and the situation quickly dissolved into sedation, the security troops able to reestablish calm and control over the stunned protestors. In the end 35 were injured, including 10 police, 18 storefronts were damaged, and 275 were arrested.[112] In all, it took no more than an hour or two from start to finish.[113] “People stopped out of fear,” Bernardo said, “Total fear,” but one would have to think disbelief at the sight of their unprotected leader staring them down played a large part as well.

Whatever combination of shock and fright composed it, this sense of calm and paralysis spread to the rest of the city and the uprisings and unrest stopped almost instantaneously. Order was restored, the street fights and shouting matches between police and the city dwellers stopped, and a quiet settled over the neighborhoods. The special guards maintained their posts on the Malecon for the next month, Bernardo said, but their presence was unnecessary. Reports don’t show another instance of unrest against Castro in Havana until November 1999 when two protestors were beaten for marching against the government’s policy towards political prisoners.[114]

The wind had been taken out of the sails of the agitators; a futility seemed to have enveloped them. Merely by showing up – a hint at the superhuman presence he still possesses in the eyes of some Cubans – Castro defused the most combustible situation his country had seen since the early days of the revolution, one that had been building in intensity for four years and threatened to irrevocably debilitate the crumbling nation. “We are not happy with the difficulties and we fight against them,” he said a few days later. “We make progress, but we really are going through a difficult moment. There is…dissatisfaction [and] discontent in a part of the population.”[115]

Regardless of its existence, though, its ability (and nerve) to express itself was now gone. As a result, the “immense majority of the population,” as Castro reminded the world -- that which “understands the causes of [society’s] problems…and is firm in its defense of the fatherland, the revolution, and socialism”[116] -- was left to suffer the period’s remainiing hardships in silence, waiting for the economy to post meager gains in the coming years and commence its slow rise out of the abyss.

In addition to the unrest, the massive exodus of the balseros also ended shortly thereafter, with the US government agreeing in September to annually grant up to 20,000 visas to Cubans in exchange for Castro’s putting a stop to the flow of people, patrolling the shores of such hot departure spots as Cojimar, the town just outside Havana made famous in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and the Malecon near Habana Vieja. (This is still a heated point of contention, though, as all Cubans I talked to complained that the US has failed to live up to its end of the bargain, issuing far less than the ceiling of 20,000 each year. Early INS totals rebut the voracity of these claims as 14,727 were admitted in 1994 and 17,937 in 1995 before jumping well over the limit in 1996 and 1997 when 26,466 and 33,587 Cubans were permitted entry to the country, respectively.[117] Unofficial newspaper accounts, though, are far lower and jive more with the Cubans’ assessment, with only a reported 2,700 gaining entry by August 1994 and 11,000 by April 1995.)[118]

Lili’s brother got out just before the September 13, 1994 deadline, leaving ten days prior with nine of his friends. Their raft was relatively cheap compared to others of the time – reports from the height of summer tell of stripped down rafts costing $1,500-3000 and those with motors going for far more.[119] It consisted solely of tires, rope, and empty steel water tanks pinched from a factory where one of the travelers had worked.

Armed only with a compass and a meager supply of rations, this motley crew, like so many others before it, did not make it to America. The two paths most frequently traveled by rafters leaving Cuba were to a watery grave or to the arms of the US Coast Guard -- very few actually made it all the way to American soil untouched by one of the former entities. Luckily for Lili and her brother, his group’s craft found the latter’s embrace, a path that earned all ten inhabitants a trip to the US military base at Guantanamo.

Freed after a year and then an automatic US citizen – US policy states that Cubans who set foot on US soil, either on the initial voyage or after a stay at Guantanamo, immediately become US citizens. This is the only country in the world with whom we have this type of agreement – he and his group mates spread out across the country, with Lili’s brother opting to stay in Miami. He is now married and drives a truck for a living – Lili has not seen him in ten years.

 

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Lili did not accompany her brother on their trip at the eleventh hour for two reasons – she was in school at the time, and she thought the suffering would end soon. “It was so bad, it couldn’t get much worse,” she said. “It had to end soon.” Depending on who you believe, she might be right. The government swears that the period ended shortly after the incident along the Malecon with the economy’s first posted gain – a 2.3 percent hop in the first nine months of ’95[120] – but again, the government position differs wildly from that of average Cubans who contend almost unanimously that the period has yet to end and is still thriving today.

There’s the demure bookseller at the hotel in Camaguey; the contract hotel worker in Havana; the horseman in Vinales; Bernardo, Santiago, and Lili, along with a host of others. All state rather adamantly that the troubles did not end in ‘95. From the simple “no way,” or the sigh and shaking of the head offered by Bernardo and Santiago, to the more detailed responses given by the Lili, all agree that things, while slightly better today, are still not as good as under the stewardship of the Soviets. The government disagrees.

It’s a common experience when listening to officials in Cuba talk about their problems. They all say that various ills of society, once discovered and addressed by the regime, have been solved, be it racism, class inequality, or crime. In the very next breath, though -- especially if challenged -- they will admit somewhat sheepishly that there still is a problem. The need to declare its accomplishments and its problems solved to retain (or improve upon) public support is an endless dance here, one that forces the listener to question the definition of success or the quality of the improvements and wonder whether many here do the same. A joke from the period tells it well: “In Cuba there’s no unemployment, but nobody works. Nobody works, but they always fill their production goals. The production goals are met, but there’s nothing in the stores. There’s nothing in the stores, but the people have everything they need. Everyone has everything they need, but they all complain. Everyone complains, but they all go to the Plaza of the Revolution to cheer President Fidel Castro. And then they go home to complain some more.”[121]

Economic indicators seem to bear some of the government’s optimism out: government spending was 8 percent higher in 2002 than it was in 1990;[122] the deficit was dropped from its hearty 1993 level of 33 percent of GDP to 7 percent in ’94 and close to 3 percent every year after that;[123] non-sugar exports -- primarily nickel, tobacco, and seafood – regained their 1990 levels in 1999 after contracting 60 percent from 1990-93.[124] These jumped from a meager 11 percent of total exports in 1990 to 25 percent in ’93 and over 60 percent in 2002.[125] Tourism revenue ballooned from $243 million in 1990 to an estimated $1.8 billion in 2002;[126] annual non-tourism services revenues – international telecommunication, shipping, airline, and professional services, for example -- jumped from $150 million in 1993 to over $1 billion in 2000;[127] informal tourism, in the form of remittances, donations, and other tourism-related earnings, skied from $18 million in 1991 to $813 million in 1998, a level it has since maintained.[128]

GDP, while something of a roller coaster the past decade, has grown every year since ’94 if you include the .7 percent nudge officials claim from that year – .7 percent in ’94, 2.3 percent in ’95, 7.8 in ’96, 2.5 in ’97, 1.2 in ’98, 6.2 in ’99, 5.6 in 2000, and 1.1 percent in 2001 and 2002.[129] Yet even with all this growth, GDP was still at least 10 percent under its 1990 level.[130] Sugar exports, hammered by world market prices, poor demand, and inefficiencies in the Cuban system, were only 25 percent of their 1990 levels.[131] Investment was 50 percent lower, consumer spending 23 percent worse.[132] Total exports were less than a third of their 1991 level, total imports only two-thirds their 1990 amount.[133] All of these counteract the initial optimism and pull your allegiance back closer towards the explanation of average Cubans. 

Walking the streets hastens that momentum and finishes the story. There’s the constant stream of beggars approaching you to request such oddities as toothpaste, deodorant, pencils, or pens and interview subjects who shyly do the same – Bernardo wanted reading material in English; Taty old shorts and T-shirts; Santiago vitamins and Aspirin. There’s the taxi driver outside the Nacional who asks for shampoo and soap upon completing the fare; the old woman outside Alejo Carpentier’s house, Cuba’s most prized novelist, looking for some candy for her niece; the one-legged veteran of Cuba’s Angolan missions who needs a couple of dollars to repair the gaping holes in his only shoe. Everyone wants something here, but the desires are never extravagant.

Walk more and it continues. There’s the water rationing at the Gran Hotel in Camaguey, one of the town’s nicest establishments, whose pipes are still turned off for several hours each day to conserve water; the chronic lack of toilet paper in virtually every building in the country outside the hotels, including the myriad state ministries and offices I visited; the lack of toilet seats and hot water in the countryside; the infrequent, but still occurring power outages.  There’s the endless amount of hitchhikers standing in traffic and on the sides of the roads, prevalent as the heat, waiting several minutes to several hours for a ride home as gas and the cars to use it are still something of a luxury. There’s the bloated, sagging guaguas – the camels of Cuba, as many described them -- giant converted semi-trailers now used as buses, the people crammed into the gutted interior like crayons in a box, crawling to their next destination in the stifling heat.

There’s the lack of food in the grocery stores and the monstrous prices for the basic items that are there -- canned fruits and vegetables costing four to five dollars a piece, while cookies, crackers, and soda go for less than a dollar. A bag of chips or a piece of chocolate cost mere centavos, while simple boom boxes range from $200-670 with most costing $450-500, 24” TVs go for $600-1300, and fans – simple oscillating floor fans – cost anywhere from $30 to $70.

There’s the police who move in like overbearing chaperones at the prom as soon as a conversation is struck up between native Cubans and myself and the arrests that occur when those discussions last more than a nanosecond – Bernardo, Santiago, Taty, and a few others fell victim to this during my stay. They all remind you that while the surface of things may look passable inside the government-approved tourist bubble, the reality lying just underneath is unfortunately far less optimistic.

The special period was more than a clutch of negative economic indicators and static policy decisions -- these things translated into unbelievably difficult circumstances on the ground for the average citizen, conditions that are often glossed over or completely missed when discussing this period. Not since the reign of Batista had Cuba's population been so persistently battered and faced such hardships in their daily lives.  Viewing the special period from this perspective -- from the streets of Havana itself rather than the more comfortable seclusion of the government ministries -- shows the veracity of the average Cubans’ statements swearing that things, while a little better today, are nowhere near as rosy as the government would have us believe.

“It’s not over,” Lili said rather forcefully. “Not by a long shot. We had more growth than any Latin American country in 1997, but it’s still not like in the 80s. It is not over and it’s going to get worse before it gets better, especially with the new provisions of the blockade. If it was lifted, life would be better economically, but worse politically and socially. There will be so much influence from the US. People work for pride here now. With the new salaries, people will work for money instead and want the American dream here in Cuba.” She paused and shook her head. “Things are going to change a lot.”