It’s nearly two months since Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a total oil blockade on Cuba, and life is becoming odder. At the weekend, in a down-island town called Moron, teenage kids burnt down the local Communist party headquarters. Meanwhile, here in Havana, we’re awaiting the arrival of the Irish hip-hoppers Kneecap at the head of a humanitarian relief armada carrying solar panels.
I live in a rooftop apartment. At night, it’s a good spot from which to look out over a city that once sent up music and light but is now as dark as a desert. The oil blockade, designed to either force the bankrupt Communist government into major reform or the population to rise up against them, is worsening what were already terrible blackouts. At night, I hear the sound of banging pans drifting in on the wind, residents taking to the streets to express their misery in having no fans to keep the heat and mosquitos at bay, as their food rots in useless fridges.
My car sits empty on the street. An ex-pat friend has traded his Mercedes for a ‘moto-China’, a Chinese electric bike. Another has taken to a traditional bicycle and, with his office idle, now talks joyfully about the empty highways. He disappears for days, posting images of himself clocking 113 miles in 24 hours. Great for his fitness – but also, I think, a sign of the strain.
Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s President, has finally acknowledged that talks between his country and the US are taking place, something Washington has been leaking for weeks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has apparently been talking to Raul Rodriguez Castro, the 41-year-old grandson of Cuba’s former president Raul Castro – news of which the US hoped would cause schisms in the Cuban leadership. There’s a rumour that Rubio got the grandson’s number from a Miami-based reggaeton star and just rang him. Sandro Castro, another grandson, this time of Fidel, has been mocking this in Instagram posts, mimicking himself shouting into the phone: ‘Marco, Marco, stop calling, you’re burning my phone up.’
Cubans call Raul’s grandson ‘Raulito’, little Raul, or ‘El Cangrejo’, the crab. People love the latter term’s suggestion of creepiness, but I try not to use it because it’s due to a deformity of his hand – he was born with six fingers. Cuba is old-fashioned this way. If you are overweight, they’ll call you ‘Gordita’ (little fatty); if you have faintly Asiatic eyes you’re ‘Chino’. They also invent names when they register newborns. My mother-in-law is Yohanka, which you don’t want to shout on an English street. My favourite, though, is the quite popular Yusnavy, which could be useful if the Americans decide to go ‘kinetic’ (to use their vile euphemism). It’s adapted from ‘US navy’.
Last week, I had to go to Palm Beach, the Florida town that’s home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It was a shock going from a place where people are staggering around looking for food in the bins to somewhere the dogs are groomed at $1,000 a go. Needing supplies to bring home, I took an early walk across town to the supermarket. I was wearing my Hawaiian shirt (my wife doesn’t allow me to wear it at home) and the locals looked at me as if I might attack them. On Monday Trump said of Cuba: ‘I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it.’ Tolkien got it wrong: Mordor won’t be all dark and sooty; it will be insanely neat and everyone will be wearing Gucci.
After acknowledging the talks, President Diaz-Canel gave a long press conference detailing the actions being taken to keep the country running. A friend said: ‘I wonder if they gave announcements like this on the Titanic. “We have to go down before we can go up.”’
The Nuestra America Convoy coming to save us this week is a ‘coordinated international mobilisation to deliver humanitarian aid’. Good-hearted people are booking flights to deliver 20 tons of aid. But we have solar panels and medicine here; the problem is that few can afford them. I can actually still import a car from the US – I just can’t get any petrol. So if Kneecap came over the horizon in an oil tanker to restart the economy, I would be cheering. But they’re not. Instead they’re spending money on flights and boats to make an anti-American point. I just hope they don’t hand their donations to people associated with the Cuban government at the very moment that it begins cracking down on the teenage protestors who set fire to that office in Moron.
Of course, everyone abroad has their ideology. There are those who think that revolutionary Cuba has been bullied and brutalised for 67 years by a wicked, imperialistic United States. And there are those who think that communism never works, and that Cuba’s woes are due to a moribund central state run by authoritarian old men. But both those ideas can be true, and the one thing I can tell you is most Cubans on the island don’t care who’s to blame any more. They just want everyone’s boots off their throats. They want to breathe.
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