Jon Lee Anderson: Cuba After Obama Left

In the first hours after President Barack Obama’s address to the Cuban people last Tuesday, which he delivered on the main stage of Havana’s impeccably restored nineteenth-century Gran Teatro, several Cubans I know told me how moved by it they had been; some confessed to having wept. Many quoted specific lines from what was a carefully nuanced piece of speechwriting: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas” was one. There were mentions, too, of Obama’s story about himself as the son of an African student and a white American woman, and of how “democracy” had made it possible for him to become President of the United States. These Cubans, who were from all walks of life, were impressed, too, by Obama’s easy charisma and his use of Cuban catchphrases and witticisms, and a couple of them recalled his praise of Cuban resourcefulness when he said, in Spanish, “el cubano inventa del aire”— roughly, Cubans are able to make things out of nothing. Obama also deftly balanced appeals for greater freedom in Cuba with acknowledgements of endemic American ills, such as racism. Raúl Castro’s presence in the theatre audience seemed to signal his endorsement for much of what Obama said—or at least a certain acquiescence to its spirit. When Obama left the stage, Castro stood alongside Cuba’s ancient prima ballerina, Alicia Alonso, held up both hands in clasped fashion, and grinned broadly. Cubans in the audience shouted “Viva, viva,” as if to acknowledge the shared triumph of Obama’s visit and the reconciliation under way between the two nations.

Or so it seemed. Later that day, in a meeting with a friend who is a longtime loyalist of the Revolution, I asked her what she had thought of Obama’s speech. She wrinkled her nose. “Well,” she began. “He said a lot of nice things, and he was very polished, but let’s see what the reality is.” I noted that Raúl himself had applauded Obama in the Teatro. He hadn’t signalled any doubts, and indeed he had accompanied Obama to the Cuba-U.S. baseball game afterward; we had all seen the two of them chummily seated together, talking animatedly. Later, Castro, who had not been at the airport when Obama arrived, had seen him off, walking him to the foot of the stairway of Air Force One. So what was the real issue worrying her? My friend shrugged. It had all been a bit too much, she said. She couldn’t really explain.
My friend’s reaction was an early hint that Cuba’s deep state, in the form of its Communist Party hard-liners, was unhappy. Their pushback came swiftly, during that evening’s televised broadcast of a program called “Mesa Redonda” (“The Roundtable”), in which several apparatchiks sat around humorlessly dissecting the implications of the Obama visit. On Wednesday, Granma, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, ran an editorial titled “What Obama Says and Doesn’t Say,” in which the writer pointed out that Obama had used a teleprompter during his speech—“something the people can’t see”—and questioned the sincerity of his intentions.

The mood in Havana over the next couple of days was strangely moody. Most habaneros, when asked about the Obama visit, spoke with a careful neutrality. A few, talking privately, expressed their chagrin at the churlishness of Cuba’s Party apparatchiks, and worried that, after all of Obama’s effort, his overtures were being spurned. “Nothing will change this place, ever,” one friend grumbled. Another apologized for what she saw as the vulgarity of it all: “You don’t invite someone to your house and then criticize them when they leave,” she said.

Then came the Rolling Stones concert, last Friday, at which Mick Jagger told the crowd that he was pleased to be playing in a country that had once banned the group. With good-natured complicity, he quipped, “But I think change is in the air, isn’t it?” Many in the crowd roared their assent, but I saw a few Cubans around me throwing up their hands and raising their eyebrows theatrically, as if to say, actually, Mick, I’m not sure about that.

Over the weekend, I met with another friend who works with Cuba’s government. He remarked that Obama’s speech in the Gran Teatro had been extraordinary, but added that it had seriously rattled a number of people he knew. One had compared it, in terms of its subversive impact, to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He was waiting to hear how Raúl’s older brother, Fidel Castro, who is rarely seen in public and who had kept a low profile during the Obama visit, reacted. He said, “Everyone here knows Fidel doesn’t much like this opening with the gringos. Raúl wants to go a lot faster, but if Fidel decides to kick up a real fuss, the process could grind to a halt.”

And, on Monday of this week, Fidel broke his silence in the form of a full-page letter published in Granma. It was titled “El Hermano Obama,” or “Brother Obama,” and in his punctilious fashion, Fidel made it clear that he had written it the previous day, signing it and dating it with a precise hour and date: “March 27, 2016, 10:25 P.M.” What followed was a critical rumination that began with a comparison of contemporary tourists and gold-seeking Spanish conquistadors. Then, quoting Obama’s line about the common slave heritage of Cuba and the U.S., Fidel took issue with this cozy rendition of a shared history: it was the revolution that had done away with racial discrimination in Cuba and fought against white minority regimes in African nations, he said, while the U.S. had stood with the racists. He pondered what Obama thought about that, and went on to question Obama’s appeal to “forget the past and look to the future.” Fidel’s point was that the past was full of American-inspired or -conducted acts of violence against Cuba and could never be forgotten. “Let no one succumb to the illusion that the people of this noble and self-abnegating nation will ever renounce the glory, the rights, and the spiritual bounty won with its achievements in education, the sciences, and culture,” he wrote. “We don’t need the Empire to give us anything.”

So, what happens next? For now, things are carrying on as they have been. Tourists from dozens of nations are crawling over every inch of Havana, its hotels and casa particular pensiones are full, and American cruise ships are due to begin docking in Havana in May for the first time in five decades. The Hollywood action franchise “The Fast and the Furious” is scheduled to begin filming its latest feature in Havana. An all-new Musicabana festival will kick off in early May, bringing a host of Cuban and American musicians together in a series of big public concerts. At around the same time, Chanel is to hold a fashion show on the legendary Malecón esplanade. Before that, though, in mid-April, is Cuba’s seventh Communist Party congress, a hallmark event for the island’s socialist stalwarts. There, any differences of opinion about the direction of la coyuntura, as the present moment of change and reform is euphemistically described, will likely become clearer.

With Obama’s visit, the United States played its maximum hand for the moment, and it played it well. The most prudent move for the Americans now, in light of the reaction by Fidel and the Cuban hard-liners, is probably to stand back and watch and listen and make an effort to demonstrate that the words in President Obama’s speech that day in Havana’s Gran Teatro were sincere, especially when he said, switching pointedly into Spanish, “El futuro de Cuba tiene que estar en las manos del pueblo cubano”—“the future of Cuba must be in the hands of the Cuban people.”