Cubans Never Had A Chance Without Vote

1958, when I turned 8, a television appeared in my family’s rec room.

Three faces most often filled the Huntley-Brinkley nightly news.

I remember them because each eventually became a president: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro.

When I turned 13, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

At 24, after landing my first newspaper job in Idaho, I sat in the now-leveled Hiawatha Hotel in Hailey to watch President Nixon resign after the Watergate coverup.

And Fidel?

Strangely, we dined together just last week.

Forty years after he took power in Cuba as a romantic revolutionary who overthrew a dictator, Fidel lives on, a fossil of a former time.

When a group of American newspaper editors asked whether they might come to Cuba to see what Fidel had wrought over these four decades, he surprisingly said come on down.

So we did. The American Society of Newspaper Editors delegation included only one person who was old enough to drive when Castro swept into Havana in early 1959.

We could all drive this time, but what was the use?

In Castro’s Cuba today the only automobiles are rusty, big-tailed Chevys from the pre-revolution and undrivable Russian Ladas that make you want to walk.

As you walk you see evidence on every corner the revolution didn’t work out quite the way Fidel promised.

Cuba today looks as if it were a Disneyland ride gone bad. Hundreds of once-beautiful estates in the heart of Havana are best suited for a lifetime of Bob Vila’s fix-up specials on “This Old Cabana.”

Even rice and beans have become casualties of a bad drought, Hurricane Georges, and not enough hard dollars to buy imports.

The fall menu looks like this for a typical Cuban: 1 kilogram a month of yellow peas (no beans), 1 kilogram a month of rice, plus one half liter of cooking oil.

We ate better than that.

Fidel and his best and brightest ministers wearing Italian sport coats and smoking Cohiba cigars took us to resorts built to attract foreign tourists.

We ate lobster at the Bay of Pigs.

Everyday Cubans cannot visit these resorts. They could not afford them, either.

A Cuban doctor earns $17 a month. A waitress at a resort hotel earns $80 a month in American dollars. Could this inequity foment a revolution?

Not anytime soon.

As Jaime Ortega, the Catholic cardinal of the Archdiocese of Cuba delicately explained, there is no organized resistance to Fidel.

He has evicted everyone who might oppose him. He began the evictions in 1962, when 100 Cuban children came to Spokane through Catholic Charities. He continues to allow more than 20,000 discontented Cubans to leave each year, if they can pay. Ironically, the expatriates send $800 million a year back to Cuba to support their families and keep Castro afloat.

Fidel still speaks of the wonders of the revolution with its centralized system that provides all with free health care, food coupons, free social security.

The press reprints his speeches in full and radio broadcasts them without interruption. Always Fidel blames his troubles on the United States trade and travel embargo.

When the American editors asked whether he might retire, he said only that his work isn’t done.

Yet only one event will revolutionize Cuba: the passing of Fidel.

He is 72. His beard has grayed, though bad hair treatments have dyed it a soft purple that was clearly visible as he entered the Council of Ministers chambers on the day we met.

His pressed green fatigues leave no doubt that his image of revolutionary has not gone the way of Brooks Brothers.

We missed lunch and rescheduled dinner.

Fidel began speaking at 11 a.m. and was still going strong six hours later.

I asked him if he thought the revolution was being served by building tourist hotels for Europeans when the houses of his own people were so run down.

“What would you have me do?” he boomed.

I thought for a moment, then said, “Buy paint.”

He laughed. The observers who tailed us the entire trip laughed. I doubt the people of Cuba would have laughed.

One week later I am back home with a handful of cigars and this frustration.

It is election season.

People with full stomachs and full gas tanks in their new cars could drive to the polls on Tuesday to cast unencumbered ballots for their political leaders.

Already, the grousing has begun over the media, the TV ads, the lack of a people’s voice in how things turn out.

Fewer than half the eligible adults will vote. Fewer still will have paid attention to the issues.