Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (trade policy special limited edition!)

In honor of a long, pretty good but not perfect NYT piece about the dying revolution, and because there are things going on in places other than Canada, here’s another post about Cuba!

I hate using the word “change” these days because thanks to Mr. Obama it’s come to sound like a catchphrase used by people both for and against it, but there aren’t many other ways to describe this sort of thing. Somehow, amazingly, 55% of Miami Cubans oppose the embargo. To say this is surprising news would be an understatement, but it’s a sign that despite the community’s unwillingness to elect public officials that don’t exploit their history as victims of oppression (maybe more on that later but this’ll get hella verbose if I start going on about Congress), there is some serious change going on despite themselves.

The thing about that 55 number–and while the methods seem pretty sound obviously you should take this with the same healthy skepticism as you would any other poll–is that it’s large enough to represent a monumental shift in the opinion, but it’s still an even enough split to be particularly stark. The divide is obviously generational, and as we already know when it comes to this sort of thing, the young usually tend to last long enough to eke out victory in the end.

BTW, you all do read Yoani Sánchez, right?

“Who is last in line for a toaster?” she asked in one blog entry this year, noting that a ban on sales of computers and DVD players had been lifted but toasters would not be freely sold until 2010. Now her biting dissections of the woes of Cuban life have a wide international following — to the point that “the intelligence services know if they touch me there will be an explosion online.”

Still, they harass her. When she won Spain’s prestigious Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism in April, she was prevented from going to collect the award. She would like to take up an invitation from New York University, but permission has been denied without explanation.

I asked if she was optimistic about change. She said she was pessimistic in the short term because “apathy has entered our bloodstream, and a lot of people are just waiting for a bunch of leaders over 70 to die.” Democracy, national reconciliation and change demand a new civic involvement, not apathy. But she was optimistic in the long term because we “are a creative, capable people, with no religious, ethnic or other conflict, who have developed an allergy to what we have: a totalitarian system.”

Sánchez looked at me — an intense, intelligent, brown-eyed gaze with humor twinkling near its surface. We were seated in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional, looking out over the Malecón to that empty sea. Here, I thought, is Cuba’s future, a Blogostroika, if only the repressive gerontocracy would let it bloom; a Blogostroika that will fill that sea with bright vessels.

“You know,” Sánchez said, “when a nation gets on its knees before a man, it’s all over. When a man decides how much rice I eat a month, or whether or not I can leave a country, that country is sick. This man is human. He commits errors. How can he have such power? Like a lot of people of my generation, I have willed myself to stop thinking about him, as a therapy. I think there will be relief when Fidel dies. We will breathe out. The mystical and symbolic weight of his presence is very heavy, for his opponents and even for his supporters. It’s hard to right his errors while he’s still there.”

It is occasionally annoying to read reports on Cuba policy because American outlets tend not to minimize the notion that it’s a two-way street. The Castros have as much of a stake as anyone else in keeping the Cuban economy closed.

I tend to dismiss the Castros with the sort of disdain reserved for failing dictators who spend the bulk of their time trying really, really hard to remain relevant, but it’s useful to remember that life still really, really sucks in Cuba. Maybe not “hey compadre how many dissidents do ya wanna kill today” suck as it has been in the past, but not all that great. I have little good to say about the American embargo, but lest we forget, reactionary policy, tonedeaf incompetence, and the tendency of entrenched leaders to desperately grasp at whatever straws of power they still have are not limited to one side of the Straits of Florida.