This Is Cuba: An American Journalist Under Castro’s Shadow

285 Pages·2018·5.8 MB·English

by  David Ariosto

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Photos
Copyright Page

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To Steph, Bel, Elizabeth, Mom, and Dad
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book encapsulates nine years of reporting on Cuba, a year and a half of
which I spent living and working as a photojournalist in Havana. It is based on
my own story and the stories of others, drawing on a mix of interviews,
memories, and experiences meant to elicit a better understanding of a nation that
has so often captured imaginations and been thrust—or has thrust itself—onto
the global stage. While officials cited in this book are usually identified by their
full names, in some cases I use only the first names of people who expressed
concerns for their own safety and well-being. In keeping with the Cuban
tradition, I also refer to former presidents Fidel Castro and Raul Castro on
second reference by their first names, Fidel and Raul, respectively.
This book is not intended to be a comprehensive portrayal of the island in all
its facets and complexities but rather a glimpse of Cuba through my own eyes, a
once-naïve American journalist who, after years of reporting on and about the
island, has hopefully wised up … at least a bit.
This is Cuba.
1
LAST CALL WITH CASTRO
I sipped an amber rum. Habana Club. Seven years. No ice. He palmed a
Bucanero beer, half wrapped in a flimsy white paper napkin. Curls of Cohiba
smoke wafted between us, giving the room a translucent look and an acrid taste.
Castro was having a drink. And so was I. It was a Friday evening in late
November 2010, and we were ensconced on opposite ends of a small
subterranean saloon on the western outskirts of Havana. It was my last night in
Cuba.
Jammed in the crevices of my back pocket was a one-way ticket to Miami,
scheduled for the following morning, the first leg of a connecting flight to New
York City. For the past year and a half, Havana had been home during my stint
as a photojournalist for CNN on an island still forbidden to most Americans. But
now I was ready to leave—forever, I thought. My father, who lived in the
pinelands of southern New Jersey, had been sick following acute kidney failure,
which punctuated my own recognition that life in Castro’s Cuba didn’t much suit
me anymore. So I had found a job as an editor in New York, exchanged my
house on the Caribbean for a studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,
and traded the guayabera for a suit and tie; Cuban heat for a wintry chill. Crazy,
it seemed, but Gotham was beckoning.
Then again, this was my last night in Havana. Better make the most of it.
“Do you know who that is?” whispered Antonina, a server in La Fontana, the
private, family-run restaurant, or paladar, to which that smoky bar was attached.
“No,” I replied. “Who?”
There was usually a breezy familiarity in the way she spoke, imbued with a
Caribbean warmth and that marbles-in-your-mouth accent for which much of
Cuba is known. The banter was usually light. The topics rarely serious.
But tonight was different. Antonina seemed different, the burden of her words
a bit heavier than usual. Inside that paladar, a steady crop of regulars had
shuffled in. Rum and cigars, coupled with a live singer or guitarist, usually
helped to lighten the mood. But tonight, a palpable tension gripped the air. And
the staff seemed to feel it. It was a sensation to which many had grown
accustomed.
Situated on a leafy street a few blocks from Havana’s rocky northern coast,
La Fontana had opened in 1995 when authorities still investigated private
restaurants for their numbers of tables and chairs (more than twelve could
provoke a raid). Its clandestine feel—there was no sign outside and a
surrounding stone wall all but hid the restaurant from view—was part of a
broader bid for its very survival. And it looked it. The Castro government had
almost never regarded privatization kindly, granting business licenses only when
economic forces compelled a drip of liberalizing reform. But in the aftermath of
the Soviet collapse, a financial crisis had ensued. For decades, Cuba had relied
on subsidies from Moscow. In their absence, it teetered on the brink of collapse.
Absent his old Kremlin ally, Fidel looked inward for answers and reluctantly
allowed a few private restaurants to surface in a fraught attempt to gin up local
commerce. La Fontana’s two owners, Horacio Reyes-Lovio and Ernesto Blanco,
were among the beneficiaries of the new tone and would soon become successful
restaurateurs—a dangerous prospect on an island dominated by Communist
hard-liners who had spent their careers fending off “yanqui capitalists.” New
concentrations of wealth were forming that could undermine the Revolution. So
the two businessmen kept their profiles low and were quietly, if not
begrudgingly, allowed to thrive. Perhaps even government officials were loath to
shut down one of the few haunts where they could still score a decent meal.
By the time I arrived in Havana, in June 2009, that old paladar had been
transformed into a favorite hangout for politicians, their staffs, and foreign
businesspeople alike. It was a place to eat, drink, and—in my case—write,
mostly from the vantage point of a still somewhat naïve American journalist. A
fixture there, I’d often scratch out pages alone atop one of the few polished
wooden tables in back, filling a leather-bound notebook with run-on sentences,
notes, and smears of blue ink. They were random observations, mostly. A sort of
blind attempt to piece together this confounding puzzle of a nation that I now
called home. His approach. Her look. Their meeting. A dribble of insight that
seeped through the censors of state-run newspapers.
After a few months and what amounted to a few notebooks full of mostly
useless pages, I had gotten to know the restaurant’s staff. One was Antonina,
whose frankness and sharp tongue seemed matched only by her curiosity. It was
the former that made us friends and the latter that would drive her to leave the
island as a refugee. But before she did, her occasional rum-topped whispers
would help fill in my own knowledge gaps, chasms really, when it came to
Cuba. Men like Ricardo Alarcon, then president of Cuba’s National Assembly,
were among La Fontana’s well-heeled patrons who often chatted and sipped
mojitos with a hardy crop of familiar faces. I’d try without much luck to listen
in, attempting to discern with whom he was meeting and what they were
discussing. Business could be conducted this way, and the eavesdropping went
both ways.
But tonight, my last night, I wondered why Antonina was so serious and to
whom she had so subtly pointed. Passing behind me with a tray of empty
glasses, she leaned into my ear.
“That’s Alejandro,” she whispered, brushing back the unkempt strands of
raven-colored hair that dropped in front of her face.
By “Alejandro,” Antonina had meant Alejandro Castro Espín, a colonel
within Cuba’s powerful Interior Ministry and a member of the Castro family,
whose inherited importance seemed to be outpacing much of the rest of the
Castro clan’s. It was President Raul Castro’s only son who now sat across from
me at the bar. How could I not have realized that before? Of course, in
November 2010, the extent of Alejandro’s importance was not yet clear. He had
yet to broker secret deals in Ottawa and Toronto with top Obama advisers Ben
Rhodes and Ricardo Zúñiga, nor had he presided over a spy-for-spy negotiation
that would lay the groundwork for détente. What was clear was that Alejandro
was already a player and a de facto top adviser to his father. More importantly,
he was rumored to be gaining in power atop the senior echelons of the very
agency tasked with Cuba’s surveillance and counterintelligence; his ministry
spied on journalists and dissidents alike. And by apparent coincidence, in my
final hours in Cuba he sat across from me, slouched over a beer.
“Coño!” exclaimed Rafa—employing his favorite Cuban expletive—when I
later told him of the encounter. Rafael, or “Rafa” for short, was a driver at CNN,
and his eyes bulged as he pronounced just the ño in that typical Cuban habit of