WEST BRATTLEBORO — The transition of power to a new generation in Cuba last week was an important moment in history. For the first time since 1959, the island nation is led by someone not named Castro.
The generation of the revolution is not fading away quietly - Raúl Castro retains control of the Socialist party and the military. Still, his commitment to a transition to a new generation of leadership seems sincere, and also necessary, since he is almost 90.
The new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is 57. He was born after the revolution. He has left few footprints, politically speaking. Apart from his relative youth and his reputed comfort with new technologies that have come to the island only recently, it is unclear what he may stand for other than a continuation of the status quo.
The open question is: What does this new leadership and transition mean, both for Cuba and to the United States?
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Since Raúl Castro took over from his brother Fidel, Cuba has opened itself to free-market forces, though the nation's economy is still centrally controlled. Both President Obama and Pope Francis made historic visits to the nation, and for a brief time the rigid standoff between the United States and Cuba began to relax.
Internet access and cell-phone service slowly became available after Fidel handed over power to his brother, though service is still limited and expensive for most Cubans. The ability to start private businesses was expanded - in many cities, some Cubans run small tourist restaurants or rent out rooms to travelers, sometimes with foreign backing.
Regulations on money transfers from the United States to Cuba were relaxed, and some U.S. businesses began to invest there. Western Union offices in Havana often have waits of several hours as Cubans wait for remittances from overseas to be processed.
The anti-Castro community of Cubans who went into exile after the revolution, most of them settling in southern Florida, was once virulently against any hint of an opening to Cuba. This small but vocal community has played a central role in shaping U.S. policy.
Recent polling suggests that attitudes may have changed in a new generation. And under Obama, travel restrictions on U.S. citizens were largely lifted. It became possible to travel to Cuba in the same way that one might travel to the Barbados or Jamaica. The year before we went to Cuba, thousands of Americans visited as tourists without having to go through the process of finding a sanctioned travel tour.
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The opening that Obama had made to normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba was largely rolled back by Donald Trump's administration after he took office, starting with a June 2017 pronouncement.
We booked our travel before late November, when new rules went into effect, so were able to visit Cuba as free agents.
By the time we travelled to Havana in late December, the State Department had issued a warning. The country had been listed as being at “level 3” - a status that says “Americans advised not to travel or expect diplomatic assistance.”
Part of the reason for this classification had to do with an unexplained epidemic among some U.S. diplomats and dependents, who complained that some form of “sonic attack” had impaired their mental processing.
There is no question that the injuries were real, and most of the embassy staff had been evacuated by the time we got there, leaving a skeleton crew behind.
There is also no evidence that the Cubans were behind the episode. The most recent research suggested that the problem may have stemmed from misplaced Cuban surveillance devices in homes and hotels where Americans stayed - an accident, nothing intentional.
Anyone interested in conspiracy theories might also suspect rogue or third-party meddling - maybe the Russians or the Chinese trying to drive a wedge, or some faction inside Cuba or the U.S. intelligence agencies.
There is no clear evidence in any direction, but the incident placed additional strain on U.S.-Cuban relations and provided a pretext for the rollback of the diplomatic engagement Obama had begun.
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A colleague told us, before we left for our journey, that we were “very brave” to be traveling there. That never seemed true to us. Havana is the safest large city we have visited in our various travels. Impoverished as it is, one can walk anywhere at any hour without fear of physical violence.
We lived in Havana for a month. We weren't tourists, exactly - we went to the beaches only once, an old area filled with Soviet-era hotels and Havana residents out for a day of fun.
Mainly, we were focused on writing and taking photographs - the ancient American cars from the Mafia era, the grand, ruined architecture, the huge Necrópolis in the center of the city.
It took us a while to fully realize what it is like to live within a surveillance culture, or to appreciate how poor the island is, with the huge gaps in what essentially is a two-currency system.
At a certain point, we realized that we probably were being tracked in some fashion. A young soldier in some part of the military visited our casa particular, and then the power went off in our building for a few hours - something we had been told was a gentle reminder that the state was watching.
It felt odd to know that Cuba was probably watching our internet traffic and that if we were to buy internet or food from a menu in any government-owned hotel, we would be breaking U.S. rules.
We weren't on either side, and we weren't doing anything wrong. And it was strange, yet also oddly liberating, to be affiliated with no nation during our time there.
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Cuba is in hard shape. It was not as devastated as Puerto Rico was by Hurricane Maria last fall, but it did lose most of its poultry industry - a big deal in a poor country. Resources are scarce. It can take hours for the staff of a casa particular to find the ingredients for breakfast.
Two economies operate within the centrally controlled system - one, measured in U.S. dollars, one-to-one, where our landlady made $40 a night from our stay, and the second, the peso system most people use, where $1 is worth 25 pesos and where a surgeon makes about $60 a month.
Many people depend on some form of the black market to make ends meet. It's not unusual to have a cab driver whose day job is as a teacher or a doctor.
Every citizen gets a ration card - enough to eat rice and beans for a month. Education is free, and there is free medical care, but not necessarily enough to buy medicine. One friend told us about a young friend who had a severe eye infection, which was diagnosed well. The treatment offered was lemon juice.
The country is hard-pressed for foreign capital, especially because one of its main recent sources of income, Venezuela, is falling apart. As it has done in many African nations, China is poised to be a leading investor, and a grand hotel is rising along the sea wall built by Chinese funds.
But Cuba - also in arrears with China - doesn't really have a clear way to turn its economy around.
It is easy to blame the U.S. trade embargo for Cuba's economic woes, and imagining what it would be like if the United States had free travel and free trade with Cuba is an interesting thought experiment.
At the same time, most Cuban intellectuals we talked to suggested that blaming the embargo is a kind of scapegoat for ills that lie at least partly within the government itself. Most experts on Cuba from the United States would agree.
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It is easy to be taken over by traveling in and being in a new place, and we were tempted to romanticize Cuba in various ways, artistic and political. Reflection and research after returning to the States created a deeper sense of the reality of the nation and the long and tangled history of U.S.-Cuban relations.
Some of the myths we created in our earliest days - like feeling the freedom we felt as an interracial couple walking the streets of Havana and from that extrapolating a sense that everything in Cuba was right when it came to race - wound up as trial balloons on our understanding.
Cuba is as racist as the United States, though it is not apparent to the average American traveler, since brown skin predominates. The descendants of slaves who worked the sugar plantations are discriminated against in subtle ways, and have the same kind of poverty that black Americans mainly experience.
Divisions between rich and poor have grown since free-market forces became a factor in the Cuban economy. The Cuban exiles who send money to families in the island are almost always white.
In many ways the nation seems like it is still locked inside an earlier time, in ways that seem partly interesting and even quaint to a visitor.
But that also raises questions for what the future will bring.
The challenges that Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Cuban government will face are extraordinary. They might also present an opportunity.
Cuba is a society founded in deep and pervasive ways on principles of social and economic equality, but central economic control has been a dismal failure, and any attempt to introduce free-market incentives or build the tourism industry inevitably will create further class stratification. Managing this tension will be difficult.
Most observers point to China or Vietnam as models for attempting to reconcile egalitarian principles and political suppression with free-market incentives.
But Cuba is its own place. It really seems impossible to know how things will play out.
This extraordinarily beautiful island nation, with a history that runs as deep as the concept of the New World, is compounded by so many cultural inflections that its art and music are deeply powerful and influential.
African rhythms vie with Spanish and French inflections of music, and Santería gods are layered over Christian saints in a syncretic version of religion that still has persisted in a place where religion was cast aside in favor of materialism.
It was the first land Christopher Columbus saw on his voyage. A Spanish colony, it was the site of many wars and revolutions in the colonial period, until the U.S. finally settled things with Spain in 1898 and took over the Spanish colonies. The Platt amendment guaranteed that American rule was an ultimate arbiter.
There are reasons that the American Mafia hoped to take it over in the 1950s or that we love mambo and salsa here in the states.
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For the two of us, traveling as an interracial couple in the age of Trump, Cuba was a lovely, invigorating, and thoroughly enigmatic place. It is impossible to know what the new turn in its governance will take, but anyone has spent time with Cuban folks can only hope the best for them.
We traveled to Havana as artists, not journalists. The raw beauty we found there, in history, in buildings, in the savage Atlantic breaking on the sea-wall of Havana, made an indelible impression. And perhaps there is some good that can come from improved relations between our nations.
Perhaps someday there will be a new president in the United States, someone who can meet with Díaz-Canel and renew efforts at normalizing relations that had a promising start and ended far too soon.
Perhaps someday both the United States and Cuba will be free.