The Havana connection still stands

Photo: Matt Kieffer (CC) www.flickr.com

This is how I made my first journey to Cuba, which began on a moonless night in Santiago, Chile, a place even further away from European imaginations. As a break from my fieldwork for my doctoral thesis (going on for three months at this point), I was en route to Havana in order to present the initial findings of my research at an academic conference. From the outset, it appeared to be a journey like any other, with an end goal not too dissimilar from past ones. “Just another academic symposium, but in a much nicer setting,” I thought, embarking on the journey that was meant to take me to the last relic of the Cold War. Little did I know that, despite the two superpowers no longer seeing Cuba as a place of contention, I would encounter more than just the residue of their interests clashing.

Beyond imagination

Right before the conference started, I learnt that I would be one of the very few non-Cuban speakers in attendance. The prospect of presenting my research at the University of Havana, though exotic and perhaps initially niche, remained exciting. After all, the place was well-known for its outstanding research in the humanities and a high level of teaching. Largely a product of mass education introduced through the 1959 revolution, Cuba has now the world’s highest proportion of citizens with a doctoral degree and perhaps the highest literacy rates in the world. The main site of the University of Havana, a colossal, neoclassical building preceded with a highway-like wide stairway, seems to reflect both the scale and ambition of that accomplishment. Sadly, the day before the conference, we discovered that our venue had to undergo renovation and the event was moved to a brutalist hotel in the city’s more touristic district. A sudden change of venue is not atypical in Cuba, known for its deeply embedded irrationality in decision-making. Disappointing as it was, I found consolation in the fact that I would now be presenting my academic research beside a swimming pool.

I might have been one of the few non-Cubans on the agenda, but other foreign speakers were definitely worth getting to know. In fact, the whole conference had a designated co-organiser tasked with recruiting international panellists. An American social sciences professor, with a double academic affiliation from Cuba and – weirdly enough – South Carolina, was the go-to person for arranging travel details and answering all sorts of basic questions a newcomer might have about Cuba. Our email correspondence was smooth and timely – a thing not always perennial in academic communications. Upon my arrival to the conference venue, he greeted me with a warm yet solid handshake, and his appearance was not anything I imagined it would be: an oversized white shirt, a solid grey-haired ponytail, pointy glasses and a hearty laugh. Rushing through the registration process, he managed to invite me to a soirée later that day, taking place in his own flat in Havana’s old town. This small gathering, as he described it, was a way to build a bridge of connection between Cuban professors and students and overseas speakers. I nodded in agreement, confirming my presence and, again, developing an imaginary setting of the party which would later prove me as wrong as one could be.

As the evening approached, I began to make my way to the American professor’s apartment. From what he told me during the day, I gathered he was married to a Cuban woman and had been involved in Cuban-American academic initiatives as far back as 1993, the period when Cuba faced an economic disaster after the dissolution of the Soviet Union which ended an almost uninterrupted and unsupervised stream of economic and industrial aid. He had moved to Havana for good in 2011, following his retirement at a small liberal arts college in the US. He was reluctant to speak about his private life and own research, eagerly moving every conversation away to the realities of Cuban socio-economic life, which he manifested a frank, outright fascination towards.

Colourful ruins

The setting was nothing like any soirée I ever attended before in my life. My host and his wife, decades younger than him, occupied a mid-size flat in a five-storey postcolonial building, one of many in Havana resembling the city’s once glorious, colourful architecture. Most of these buildings are now half in colour, half naked-grey, with paint chipping off and balconies deprived of their railings, sculptures and, oftentimes even their floors. This particular construction was not as bad as some other corners of the city – in the literal centre of the city, called Havana Centro, virtually every alley features at least a dozen completely demolished constructions. As an American tourist pointed out to me in a café the following day, in some places the only thing distinguishing Havana from Aleppo or Mosul is that the ruins here are at least colourful.

I first entered what turned out to be the professor’s apartment, being absolutely adamant I had wandered into a completely wrong corner of the earth. An old Cuban gentleman, letting the vapour of his cigar out from the gaps of his missing teeth, sat on a semi-broken armchair in a place where the apartment’s front door ought to be. I immediately backtracked and started nervously looking for the address on my phone, when he looked at me and figured out I must be an amigo of his colleague, El Profesor – the American professor. He invited me in and I quickly glanced across the room to see the grey ponytail. The party’s host sat on the balcony (luckily not one that was falling apart) with two young Cubans – a boy and girl. I came over, sat on a vacant chair and introduced myself. Someone handed me a can of cold Cuban lager. And this is where things started to get weird.

It turns out I walked into a conversation about the structures of the communist party and the marvels introduced in its design by the one and only Fidel. The American professor was proudly leading the conversation, despite his accent in Spanish being a bit thick and his grammar far from unequivocal (“a notable achievement after a quarter of a century here,” I thought). I learned more about him in those couple of minutes than the whole day. He turned out to be an American communist – a dying breed of Cold War radicals who thought the revolution of the proletariat could also happen on US soil. His face started to take on a glow when his Cuban interlocutors asked him about his favourite Cuban things.

“Not the beaches, not the women, not the cigars. The political-economic system, always in the first place,” he proudly stated. Later the conversation moved to some perennial topics. Praise for Fidel Castro, an undisputed “man of the people” – the American professor recalled the moment he had fallen in love with Fidel’s analytical thinking while observing him deliver a critical analysis of a boxing match between Cuba and the US in the 1990s. Throughout the conversation, Fidel appeared to be everything, from a secular saint to a genius of political rhetoric, from a master of direct investment to the greatest con artist of all times, able to play the Americans like fools for decades. And when the first round of drinks became history, another guest walked in and turned the soirée into perhaps the most bizarre gathering of my life.

Upside down conversation

The new arrival was of Slavic origin, though born and raised in California. He taught international relations in Moscow and frequently travelled across the globe. At first he seemed completely ordinary – a little timid of his Spanish, much more comfortable with English in his mouth and a beer in his hand. The gentleman had made the trip to Havana for the third time, and it was him who made me aware of Aeroflot’s intensity in connecting with Cuba. He and the American professor appeared to be long-standing friends, sharing the same sense of humour and approach to academia. Their bond, however, had nothing to do with their common American nationality. They were both admirers of glorious leaders of the past and, more dangerously, their present-day impersonators.

When the Moscow-based academic joined the four of us on the balcony, the conversation turned almost upside down. We switched to English and the subject to international politics. I asked the Slavic-American about his journey from Moscow and he said it was not tiring at all, just long. He began to describe the route of his flight and that was the moment I saw the first red light. “We flew across American airspace. Do you know how I know? Because I have a certain privilege with Aeroflot and have Wi-Fi on board. Just when you enter the US, they cut off the Wi-Fi – they are afraid of the Russians,” he said and erupted in almost hysterical laughter.

The joke was half-seriously picked up by the American professor, who added that “they’re afraid you’re going to hack their election machines from 30,000 feet above!” I quickly realised they were not joking at all. Throughout the conversation both men made it obvious that they did not believe in any Russian interference in the US elections whatsoever. “The Russians,” the guest from Moscow declared, “are way too clever to do things like this. The Americans got Trump themselves, and they deserve it. There was no need for the Russians to meddle in it.”

He spared no time for other issues, focusing the conversation on debunking what he referred to as “myths of Russian interference”, and the findings of the Robert Mueller investigation. One of them was the story of a football that Vladimir Putin presented to Donald Trump during their July Helsinki Summit. Bloomberg reported that the ball had a microchip inserted inside, one that had the capacity to transmit data to mobile phones. While the chip was part of the goal-line technology used during the matches at the FIFA World Cup, it is known that previously at least one chip was used to breach a mobile device. It was a cause of concern for international security experts. For my interlocutors on the crowded balcony, during a steamy semi-tropical evening in Havana, it was merely “a ball from the shop”. The Bloomberg story, in turn, was deemed proof of American paranoia.

Recruitment

As we drank more Cuban beer, my interlocutors began to be more inclusive and asked the young Cubans for their opinion on several issues. The first was their view on Vladimir Putin – both the boy and the girl nodded in approval, highlighting that they “like how the Russian leader takes care of his people”. On Trump, in turn, they did not have much to say, visibly upset that he halted the reconciliation process, thus considerably have an impact on profits from tourism. For my Moscow-based neighbour, it was not enough – he almost forced them to admit feeling schadenfreude (one person’s satisfaction regarding someone else’s misfortune – editor’s note) towards American citizens for their current president. The two youngsters were not particularly keen on expressing themselves in English, so the two guests kept the conversation to themselves. I purposely remained silent for most of the time, trying to register, as much as possible, their views. But perhaps the most eye-opening thing was their debate on new international possibilities.

The guest from Moscow spoke at great length about his visit to “a sister university in Shanghai”, praising infinitely the Chinese development. There were talks of Beijing at the helm of the international community, with occasional criticism of Xi Jinping as too sure of himself, a mere party apparatchik. Both the American professor and the Moscow-based scholar agreed that there was something impressive about the charisma of the Soviet and later Russian leaders, lamenting that no such individual has ever presented himself in the US. Even Boris Yeltsin received an occasional compliment for not allowing an armed rebellion to succeed on his watch. There were talks of new academic connections with India and China, visits to some obscure, shady places like Macau and praise for new leaders from other more authoritarian countries. At first, it took me some time to understand why I was so disturbed, but later I realised what was so astounding about their opinions. They were, with profound certitude and great passion, discussing a world in which the US and Europe played no role whatsoever. The international order that emerged before my eyes was one fuelled by China and Southeast Asia, driven by Putin, with nations like Cuba allowed a free ride as recognition for their past merits. For my interlocutors – foreigners from outside the island – the US was an insignificant pawn while Europe was an old man deemed to die in oblivion.

The tropical heat turned into a breezy wind and we moved inside, glancing over the host’s private library. All sorts of unexpected titles appeared, including several volumes on the history of Trotskyist movements in the pre-war United States. The American professor then gave us a lecture on why radical communism never succeeded there. It left the guest from Moscow so impressed that he suggested the professor become an expert for RT (Russia Today) itself. “I can hook you up,” he said. “I have friends there, a lot of them. There is a Norwegian guy from our school who goes on RT all the time, you should go too. They would love you,” he courted the professor who, in turn, appeared more than excited at this prospect.

Hearing this I began to feel uneasy. Suddenly it was no longer a bizarre soirée for academics. It became a recruiting event, a hotbed for Russian propaganda on the other side of the world. I decided to say my goodbyes and walked home, blinded by the occasional lights from the newly opened restaurants and cafés. One of them was a canteen called Soyuz, which offered “genuine Soviet cuisine” under a proud hammer-and-sickle flag. That night I went to bed knowing that if there is any place on earth where Faulkner’s quote about the past “not being dead, not being even the past” is accurate, it is precisely here, in Havana.

Mateusz Mazzini is a doctoral candidate at the Polish Academy of Sciences and formerly a visiting doctoral scholar at University College London. His research project focuses on the collective memory of the non-democratic past in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Cuba