Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

hundred for a chance to spend a few pesos on a treat. As I sat at a marble-topped table, Cubans in line only twenty feet away stood with their backs turned, ignoring me and my effortlessly obtained ice cream.

Havana does not offer many diversions, even for a tourist. Cuban cooking is a lost art, which is understandable, inasmuch as food is a lost staple. Although the city is almost surrounded by water, it has no beaches of note. I had no luck finding the kind of music I yearned for, the old Ricky-Ricardo-meets-Guy-Lombardo sounds, swarthy men playing songs of love. Havana certainly has the worst shopping in the world; its downtown stores are shells.

The real attraction of Havana is the opportunity to view an incredible, tottering, real-life Communist-led Socialist state: men and women walking around with ID cards, destitute children wearing almost no clothes, ration books corroborating near-starvation diets, nonworking appliances in almost every home, and a once-admirable cuisine reduced to sandwiches for one and all. In Havana a tourist can experience the sordid thrill of dispensing dollar bills to downcast citizens, much like John D.

Rockefeller handing out Depression-era dimes. Ever since the Cuban government legalized the use of the dollar and sanctioned the establishment of so-called hard-currency stores that stock necessities 1 1 8

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unavailable for pesos, American banknotes have become the currency of survival.

The cost of my unconscionable breakfast buffet at the Melia Cohiba Hotel was twice Nilsa’s monthly pension of $7.65, calculated at the rate of twenty pesos to the dollar. While the government might argue that what a Cuban citizen pays for food, housing, and utilities is minus-cule, what makes such reasoning untenable is that everyone who lives in Havana requires dollars to live decently, and the only people with legal access to dollars are those with generous relatives in the United States and those with tourist-industry jobs that lead to tips. People in the street beg for dollars. They no longer want slivers of soap or spare toothbrushes; that state of innocence is long gone. The difference between what tourists have to spend on luxuries and what Cubans have to spend on necessities is so extreme that it seems impossible that the country can survive such seismic inequities.

The medical-school professor told me his salary in pesos was way above average, but he had difficulty living because he had no way to obtain dollars. He was wearing a ragged T-shirt, worn polyester slacks, and shoes crafted from unknown polymers. He said, “To me the end of the revolution started with the legalization of the dollar. I remember this day. On the night of 26 July 1993, Castro has spoken in Santiago de Cuba to explain the necessity of the revolution to survive. At this time, there were many people in jail because they had dollars and it is forbidden. From this time in Cuba, there are two different people: people who have dollars and people who cannot have dollars, and this is a very big difference. Today Cuba is a ghetto, enclosed not by bars but by dollars. If you have dollars, you go beyond that borderline.” I invited him to La Piazza, an informal Italian restaurant in the Melia Cohiba Hotel, where he ate pizza and drank Heineken beer ravenously and gratefully. His state of near destitution reminded me of another joke I heard—Socialist-state humor is almost always triggered by despair. The joke, told by my guide, went like this: “A guy is drunk in a public place, bragging to everybody that he is a porter at a hotel, that he has a lot of money. The police take him to jail, call his mother.

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She comes to the station, explains to the police that her son has a drinking problem. They tell her how he was shouting, disturbing people, telling everybody he is the porter of the hotel. The mother says, ‘He is suffering delusions of grandeur. He is just the director of the research center.’ ”

Everybody knows how revolutions start, with poverty, oppression, and tyranny. (Cuba had the bonus of a few too many American gang-sters in residence.) But it is less clear how they collapse. My guess is that the end of Castro’s Cuba will be the strains of tourism, the inevitable decadence that is already seeping into the most indomitable Socialist state remaining on earth.

To the hunger strikers, I was better than manna from heaven. I represented the American free press. I was exactly who they were hoping to see, even if my first question carelessly referred to their action as an

“anti-Castro protest.” To most Americans, Castro and Cuba have become synonymous. We think of him as the savior, the oppressor, the Wizard of Oz. A leader of the strike, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, gently pointed out that the five hunger strikers in the room were engaged in a “human-rights activity” condemning the imprisonment of persons who had protested government abuses.

I had telephoned the home of Biscet, a well-known dissident, and his wife suggested I visit him at the hunger strike. I took a taxi to the protest, an eight-dollar fare to go from a luxury hotel to the front lines of a nonviolent war against the Cuban political system. I arrived on the thirty-first day of the forty-day demonstration.

The small ground-floor apartment where the protest was taking place had walls covered with photos of international leaders who had refined the art of peaceful opposition: Raoul Wallenberg (who saved Jews from the Nazis), Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Andrei Sakharov, and, stretching the definition of humanitar-ianism, Jorge Mas Canosa, the late leader of the Cuban American National Foundation, an anti-Castro organization that continues to operate stridently in Miami.

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