Waiting for Snow in Havana 17 Feb. 2015
On a recent morning in Vedado, a relatively well-to-do neighborhood in Havana, a group of thirty people stood in a disorderly crowd waiting for the telephone office to open. People had come as early as 7 am to be at the front of the line when the office opened at 8:30. Some were there to pay their telephone bills, others to surf the Internet on desktop computers, and still other to open cel phone lines or mobile email accounts. These are the people Obama talks about when he says he wants Cuban people to have better access to the Internet.
By the time a telephone worker came out at 9 am, the mass of people had grown, and nobody was sure exactly who was in which line or in what order. In the midst of the tumult, a middle-aged university professor jumped in to organize the lines while a telephone worker passed out numbers. Once everyone had their tickets, the telephone worker announced that they could not open because the custodian had not arrived. The custodian’s job is simply to guard the door and let people in one by one.
By 10 am, the rambunctious crowd was shouting about the lack of respect for people’s time and the absurdity of shutting down the whole office because the custodian had not shown up. The university professor volunteered to act as the custodian. One man announced that if Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Dalí had come to Cuba they would have jumped off the tallest building and killed themselves. “Tropical surrealism,” another declared. Most people laughed it off, talking about how important it was to remain patient and breathe after more than 50 years suffering through this kind of daily humiliation.
When Netflix recently announced that they had started service in Cuba, it seemed like a sign of the new opening between the US and Cuba and it signaled that Cuba would now be more connected to the world. But Netflix opening in Cuba is like opening a ski resort in Havana. It’s a nice idea except for the lack of mountains and snow. In spite of all the talk of opening and the new Cuba, Internet remains limited to privileged work centers and to tourists, and even this kind of access is expensive and painfully slow. Streaming video is simply impossible.
In 1992, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate for literature, wrote an article in which he attributed the defeat of the Incan empire to their totalitarian system. Once the Incan leader Atahualpa was captured by Pizarro in a square at Cajamarca, Vargas Llosa argued, the thousands of soldiers who surrounded the emperor were so lost and confused they simply ran away instead of attacking the handful of Spaniards who held him. For Vargas Llosa, it was the totalitarian system of the Incan empire, not the guns and disease, that explained why so few Spaniards were able to defeat so many Indians.
As the world waits to see what will happen when Fidel Castro dies after more than 50 years at the helm of the Cuban Revolution, the line at the telephone office may hold some answers. Ever since Fidel fell ill in 2006 and then appointed his brother Raul as President, the Cuban state has been skillfully managing a transition of power.
Although the Cuban state has figured out how to replace Fidel and surely has plans for succession when Raul steps down in a few years, it’s not clear that the rest of the institutions will continue to function when they stop receiving orders from the top. The shuttering of the telephone office in Vedado because the custodian didn’t make it to work does not inspire much confidence that the transition will be smooth.
By the afternoon, a different custodian had arrived and the throng of people outside slowly made it into the office one-by-one. A poster inside showed a woman sitting in a full-lotus meditating. This may be the best position to adopt while waiting for snow in Havana.
Elliott Young