HAVANA - I called Lucio González on my first night in Havana. "Hi," I said, "You don't know me but I'm a co- worker of a good friend of yours from Miami. She told me I should stop by and see you while I'm here in Havana."
From the moment I entered his small house González had a huge grin on his face that never left him. He's a musician in his 50s who is out of work and on a disability pension. He asked about my co-worker, who he stays in contact with, and showed me the radio/cassette player she had sent him money to buy.
González gets 181 pesos a month on his disability pension, which he explained doesn't take him far. "Through the ration book we get the basics," he said, "rice, beans, a few eggs - not many, sugar, a few cigarettes and so on. I haven't had cooking oil since August though."
He thought of leaving Cuba when his friend did in 1980, he said, but couldn't do it. "We're poor here," he stated, "but things are getting better. After the fall of the Soviets we had no bread, nothing. We got by, but it was very hard. Now the lights stay on and we get more food."
González said he'd like to visit the United States sometime and see his friend and his son, who also lives in Miami. "Maybe Íd go for two months but Íd never want to stay there," he said.
My fellow worker from the garment shop in Miami had also suggested I stop by the telephone company where she used to work, on the corner of Aguila and Dragones in Havana. The massive front entrance to the building was just like I remembered it from a picture taken soon after the victory of the revolution. In that picture several armed women and men stood in front of the door with rifles in hand. They were on guard duty just after the revolutionary government had nationalized the telephone company.
I talked with Iris Cárdenas, a young worker there, and Nancy Borbones, who had worked at the phone company with my co-worker.
I told Cárdenas that my fellow worker in Miami said her job at the phone company was the best she's ever had. "There are many things, like the child-care center on the fourth floor, that she remembers fondly," I said.
Cárdenas told me the child-care center in the building had been closed a few years ago, but all the workers have child-care centers in their local neighborhoods. (The cost of child care depends on how much income a family has. Forty pesos a month is the highest amount paid, and many pay 20 pesos or less, including meals.) Cárdenas was surprised when I told her that in the United States there is little affordable child care for workers.
Cárdenas said she was the head of the information department at the phone company. At 27, she is also a leader of the Union of Young Communists and, even though the usual age for membership in the Communist Party of Cuba is 30, she has been taken into party membership because of her leadership role.
With the special period, which is how Cubans refer to the economic crisis precipitated by the collapse of favorable trade relations with the Soviet Union, "some of the workers at the phone company had to be let go but no one was left without means," she said. "After a layoff people receive most of their pay as well as aid in getting another job."
Borbones arrived and was very excited that her former co- worker had sent me. "How is she?" she asked. I told Borbones that her friend was fine but that she missed her old job.
"We work in the garment industry," I told her, "which is among the lowest paid industries." Our pay of $200 a week struck the Cuban workers as a significant amount of money. But when I explained the average rent in Miami for a small apartment is over $500 a month they began to get a clearer view.
Cárdenas told me workers at the phone company had been part of discussions in the union on efficiency. "We have a high consciousness here and good work conditions. We have little absenteeism."
Before leaving the phone company building, Cárdenas asked me, "Isn't it hard in Miami, politically?"
"I like it," I said. "There are a lot of changes there, like everywhere else, including among Cuban-Americans, especially the younger ones. They are much more open to the truth about Cuba than in the recent past. And there are many like Nancy's friend -my coworker."
I stopped near the Spanish embassy. In Miami, some of the papers had talked about demonstrations at the embassy and one Spanish-language radio station said there were 5,000 people there demanding to be let into the embassy where they thought they could get passage out of Cuba. This supposedly happened after the Spanish government announced it would open its doors to so-called Cuban dissidents.
There was a very loose ring of police surrounding the area. A few metal barricades, smaller and less sturdy than the ones I'm used to at demonstrations in the United States, partially blocked streets leading to the embassy. I talked with a few people standing by their bicycles on one of the corners, and explained what the media in Miami was saying.
A good laugh came from the bicyclers. "Nothing went on here," one of them said. "Some people interpreted what the Spanish ambassador, or whoever he was, had said as meaning that they could go the embassy to get a visa out. There might have been 30 people who came here. Ask anybody from around here and they'll tell you the same."
I asked a number of people about this in the five days I was in Cuba and they did tell me the same thing.
I asked directions from Jesús Benítez and Santos Pons near the University of Havana. Pons, 75, was one of the few Afro-Cuban doctors in the early years of the revolution, having become one in 1961. A strong supporter of the revolution he went to Santiago de Cuba to help train Afro- Cubans and others there to be doctors. His father had been a sugar cane cutter.
I asked Benítez and Pons if they knew about the hurricane relief aid that had been collected in Miami, some of it by right-wing opponents of the Cuban revolution, such as Brothers to the Rescue. Did they know that some of the aid had been rejected by Cuban authorities?
"Everyone knows that aid came from Miami and we appreciated that," said Pons. "[Cuba president] Fidel [Castro] even talked about it. People did ask why all the aid wasn't accepted, but when it was explained that there were messages against the revolution [packed along with the aid], everyone understood."
I also visited Arturo Iznaga, a Havana rail worker. A few months back he had met Seth Galinsky, a Miami rail worker, and invited him up on his train to show him the operation.
I mentioned to Iznaga that transportation in the capitalist world - by air, rail, ferry, etc. - is becoming more and more dangerous and that working conditions are also deteriorating in these industries. I told him about the last train trip I had gone on and how at certain points the train slowed to a crawl because of the poor conditions of the tracks.
"Actually, we do the same thing here because we don't have the materials to repair some of the tracks," said Iznaga. "Our rail problems are not so much on the main lines but on the secondary ones. We have few derailments but we do have some. Of course, right now we also have less trains due to the special period. But we have very strict labor laws and safety regulations. Here transport functions for the workers."
"Many of the locomotives we have are from Canada and right now most of them are out of service," said Iznaga. "And they weren't new when we got them. The Canadians helped repair seven or eight of them and then they left. We also have Russian locomotives and a few from other countries. The Russian ones are really broken. They send us parts but don't help us repair them."
Transportation in general is difficult today, he continued. "Buses are down to 40 percent of what they were before the special period. We have a lot of problems. We're an underdeveloped country but we also have confidence in our system. Compared to others we're way ahead. I was in Angola during the war where I worked in troop and cargo transport. I saw conditions there, including those of children, in bad shape."
This led to a discussion on Angola. Iznaga's wife, Mirtha, said that Cuba had given a lot for Angola and indicated there had been little in return.
Thousands of Cubans died in Angola fighting the invading South African apartheid army. After more than a decade of war, the South African military was soundly defeated with the decisive help of Cuban volunteer military personnel.
Arturo Iznaga had thought a lot about this subject and had some firm opinions. "A lot of people didn't understand. We helped Nicaragua, Mozambique, Chile, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Peru, Vietnam. Che [Guevara] died outside of Cuba and outside of his country," he said.
"Solidarity costs," Iznaga continued, "but solidarity is reciprocal. I don't know when but I have confidence. This is key to our morale."