Writing on the wall

This, I thought, was a miserable way to begin my trip—but an excellent way to take Cuba’s temperature. Ever since Fidel Castro took seriously ill more than 18 months ago and named his younger brother Raul, then head of the armed forces, temporary president, the word “transition” has been on everyone’s lips.

The policeman turned us over to a higher-ranking officer who asked whether I had any papers with me. I had none. Suddenly, several officers put Manolo up against the car, patted him down, handcuffed him and stuffed him in the back seat. I wasn’t frisked or cuffed, but officers manoeuvred me in on the other side, and off we drove to the police station.

The police station had a high desk with officers milling about. I was bumped higher and higher in officialdom, each time asked whether I had any other papers with me. Finally a heavy-set plainclothesman from State Security came in. He thrust a piece of paper in my face. “Have you ever seen this?” he asked sternly. It was the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. “I’ve heard of it, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen a copy,” I said.

“Are you sure?” He paused. “We are not opposed to this document, I want you to understand. Someone fitting your description has been handing these out,” my interrogator said.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. Fifteen minutes later, I was released. I never learned what happened to Manolo.

My two hours in Cuban custody seemed to fit a new pattern. Human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez thinks that under Raul Castro, there are fewer arrests and jailings and more brief detentions. “Our day-to-day observation leads us to think that the style of political repression has changed,” Sanchez told the foreign media last month.

Raul Castro, who turns 77 in June, has surprised a lot of people. I’d last been in Cuba a year earlier, but this time there was more money in circulation, more low-end street commerce, somewhat less sense of perpetual anguish.

Cubans spoke, if not well, then at least respectfully, of their acting president. In the privacy of his living room, a writer commented on the younger Castro’s lifelong military career. “He knows how to delegate,” he said. “Things are running more smoothly.”

Fidel fatigue underlies some of this new attitude. A change—any change—is welcome, as long as circumstances get no worse. A longtime acquaintance described a devastating rainfall that had pounded the eastern end of the island weeks earlier. People had lost their homes, buildings collapsed, roads were destroyed, railroad lines uprooted.

“If Fidel had been in charge, he’d have started a speech that would still be going, and he’d blame the imperialists for the storm,” she said. “Raul devoted three sentences to it in a speech and blamed climate change. He told us that the ruin came to $499 million, and he ordered repair crews to work on the damage. I tell you. I’ve known two leaders in my life, Fidel and Raul. I’m not a fan of Raul’s, but I believe what I see.”

I got another indication of Havana’s mood when I joined a dozen artists, filmmakers and writers around a table of good cheer at a private residence, pouring glass after glass of Havana Club rum. One fellow laughed about the time years ago when culture authorities had tried to discourage him from painting a certain way because it was considered counter-revolutionary. Everyone lifted their copitas at the distant memory, and someone else talked about the difficulty the late gay poet Virgilio Pinera had experienced getting published. The table nodded, and someone piped up, “Clothes. Remember we were told we couldn’t wear narrow straight pants?” “Yes, and we couldn’t wear our hair in Afros! They said it was ideologically diverting.” More laughter. The liberating air of Fidel’s absence gave them enough freedom to indulge in repression nostalgia.

Tom Miller, the author of ‘Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba’, has been visiting Cuba regularly since 1987