“Cuba beyond the Beach is one of those books that should be devoured by everyone interested in that mysterious island, and anyone else who simply enjoys a great read.”
MARGARET RANDALL, AUTHOR OF CHE ON MY MIND AND ONLY THE ROAD/SOLO EL CAMINO: EIGHT DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY
“Cuba beyond the Beach goes beyond boundaries: it’s a carefully composed mixture of travel book, city memoir, and stimulating reflections on a changing Cuba. Dubinsky succeeds in weaving together her astute observations on daily life in Havana with insights from Cuban studies, politics, and culture. This blend succeeds in explaining the bizarre realities of a complicated country in a refreshing way. By bringing Cuban approaches to social problems, such as crime, income inequality, and housing, into dialogue with outside solutions Dubinsky puts things into perspective and evades the all-too-common praise or vilification of socialist Cuba. She shows us that Cuba is neither socialist utopia nor communist hell, but an incubator for ingenuity. I recommend this book to anyone who seeks to better understand this awfully charming country and its people — and actually learn something from them.”
RAINER SCHULTZ, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
DIRECTOR OF THE CONSORTIUM FOR ADVANCED STUDIES
ABROAD, CUBA DIVISION, IN HAVANA
“In Cuba beyond the Beach Karen Dubinsky has captured the ethos of Cuba and Cubans. This work is a tour de force.”
DR. ALTHEA PRINCE, SOCIOLOGIST, AUTHOR OF BEING BLACK AND THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN’S HAIR
“Karen Dubinsky’s portraits of life in Cuba are indeed beyond the beach and other worn caricatures. Her observations provide an immensely satisfying read and still whet the appetite for more. From the first chapter, she brings the reader into an encounter with Cuba that is fascinating, intriguing, and pulsing with the beauty of life in all its complexity.”
MOLLY KANE, RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE, UQAM -CIRDIS
“Cuba beyond the Beach is the perfect introduction to Cuba for travellers truly interested in seeing the island beyond the beach and beyond the clichés. Even those who have visited before will learn more about the history and present of the fascinating, vibrant, and perplexing city that is Havana.”
HOPE BASTIAN, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
“By cutting away at the debilitating romance, clichés, and dense propaganda that often characterizes narratives about Cuba, this wonderfully rich book provides the reader with a rare glimpse into a Cuba that continues to capture our imaginations, even as we somewhat nervously witness its dramatic history unfold.”
DAVID AUSTIN, AUTHOR OF FEAR OF A BLACK NATION
Cuba beyond the Beach
© 2016 Karen Dubinsky
First published in 2016 by
Between the Lines
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.
Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Dubinsky, Karen, author
Cuba beyond the beach: stories of life in Havana / Karen Dubinsky.
Includes index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77113-269-5 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77113-270-1 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77113-271-8 (pdf) 1. Dubinsky, Karen--Travel--Cuba--Havana. 2. Havana (Cuba)--Description and travel. 3. Havana (Cuba)--Biography. 1. Havana (Cuba)--Social life and customs. I. Title.
F1675.3.D82 2016972.9›2307C2016-901831-8
C2016-901832-6
Cover photo by Ivan Soca Pascual
Cover and text design by Ingrid Paulson
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: MORE THAN A BEACH, MORE THAN A REVOLUTION
CUBANS, CANADIANS, AND AMERICANS: A PECULIAR TRIANGLE
TELLING “THE TRUTH” ABOUT CUBA
A CITY OF STORIES
ONE: GENTE DE ZONA: PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
A COUNTRY OF OLD LADIES
“THERE’S BEER AT THE HOSPITAL, BUT WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE EGGS?” OUR DAILY BREAD
BICYCLES AND BEAUTIFUL CAKES
PÁNFILO: THE JAMA JAMA GUY AS COLD WAR SUPERSTAR
PREGONEROS: THE MUSICAL THEATRE OF THE STREET
CERRO AND MY GAY TRADE UNION
WOMEN, MEN, AND THE EVERYDAY BATTLES OF THE STREET
THE FUTUROS COMMUNISTAS DAYCARE CENTRE AND OTHER ANOMALIES OF CUBAN CHILDHOOD
TWO: THOSE WHO DREAM WITH THEIR EARS: THE SOUND OF HAVANA
WALKING OUT INTO THE NIGHT MUSIC: RANDOM HORNS AND EVERYDAY REGGAETÓN
HOW CUBAN MUSIC MADE ME A BETTER HISTORIAN
INTERACTIVO AND EL BRECHT ON WEDNESDAYS
MOURNING SANTIAGO
“MUSIC IS MY WEAPON” TELMARY DÍAZ AND ROCHY AMENEIRO: TWO POWERFUL WOMEN OF SOUND
FÁBRICA DE ARTE CUBANO
THREE: LA NUEVA CUBA: LIFE IN THE NEW ECONOMY
CHOPPED VEGETABLES, RESTAURANTS, AND OTHER SIGNS OF A NEW MIDDLE CLASS
TECHNOLOGICAL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP OF THE POOR
REAL ESTATE AS MAGIC REALISM
TAXI! WHY I DON’T TALK IN CUBAN TAXIS
THE HAVANA YOU DON’T KNOW: STREET CRIME, CORRUPTION, AND SOCIOLISMO
A FEW STORIES ABOUT GARBAGE
FOUR: CUBANS IN THE WORLD, THE WORLD IN CUBA
LIFE WITHOUT THE INTERNET
THE DRAMA OF THE SUITCASES: HOW TO SMUGGLE A SALMON INTO HAVANA
TAKING CUBANS TO COSTCO
THE THERMOMETER THAT STRUCK UP MY MOST UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP
LOOKING FOR THE ENEMY IN MANHATTAN: HOW MY FRIEND EMILIA ENDED THE COLD WAR
CONCLUSION: TODO SERÁ DISTINTO? OUR UNCERTAIN FUTURES
NOTES
INDEX
Just about everyone I know in Havana made a contribution to this book, so my first thank you is to just about everyone I know in Havana. You are all in this book, and in my heart, in one way or another. Friends and family in Canada also made enormous contributions. Susan Belyea and Jordi Belyea Dubinsky lived many of these experiences with me. I am doubly blessed to share a first and a second home with such fine company. Susan Lord, my co-teacher, once remarked that Havana is just too big for one instructor. Both Queen’s University in Canada and the city of Havana are rewarding workplaces (especially Havana), and I am happy to share them with her. Zaira Zarza and Freddy Monasterio helped me cross the Cuba-Canadian border, literally and imaginatively, more times than any of us can count and they remain inspiring examples of how to keep oneself in two worlds at once.
Several people read all or part of this manuscript and offered me valuable advice, reminded me of cool Havana moments I had forgotten, caught my errors, and pushed me to express myself clearly. Many thanks to Susan Belyea, Emilia Fernandez, Sean Mills, Freddy Monasterio, Susan Prentice, Xenia Reloba, Scott Rutherford, Shadi Shahkhalili, Pamela Simon, and Ruth Warner. Michael Riordan provided some much needed encouragement at a crucial moment.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with Between the Lines. The continued existence of an independent, opinionated, Canadian publishing house is a near miracle. Long may you continue. Thanks especially to Amanda Crocker, Marg Anne Morrison, and Robert Clarke for their keen editorial eyes. Thanks also to the tremendous production and promotion team: Renée Knapp, Matthew Adams, and Jennifer Tiberio.
Havana photographer Ivan Soca Pascual gave me access to his considerable archives for the front cover image. It is an honour to share his work with a broader audience. Thanks to Ingrid Paulson for her beautiful design.
I wrote this book in Canada and in Cuba. When I was in Canada, I would e-mail friends in Havana (those with functioning Internet connections) to confirm a detail or a street name or a translation. When I was in Havana, I was usually without easy Internet access, so I would text friends in Canada to google something for me. In this makeshift way I managed to be as accurate as possible, but if I got it wrong, it is definitely my bad.
A note about the people in this book: Some of the names are pseudonyms. Most are real. I asked permission to cite all private conversations. A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to the Queen’s Overseas Student Travel Fund–The Sonia Enjamio Award, which helps Cuban students study in Canada and Canadian students study in Cuba.
MORE THAN A BEACH, MORE THAN A REVOLUTION
Over a million Canadians travel to Cuba every year. Most of them go to the beach.
Who can argue with that? Canadian winters are harsh, Cuban beaches beautiful. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it seemed no one was getting on airplanes, Cuban tourist officials worried about what would become of their industry. That fall, a leading Canadian-Cuban expert reassured a group of tourist industry leaders: “Don’t worry. They’ll be here,” he told them. “Canadians are more afraid of winter than they are of terrorists.”1
Over a decade later the Cuban tourist industry is booming and visitors are increasing. Canada tops the list of tourist-sending nations in Cuba, followed by Germany, the UK, France, and Italy.2 But when, on December 17, 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro made their surprising declaration that they would like to try to behave normally toward each other, many tourists must have begun to wonder about how this warming trend would alter their attachment to Cuba. A cartoon in the Globe and Mail summed it up perfectly: David Parkins drew a Canadian enjoying an empty beach, while just behind him a tsunami of Americans was poised to overtake the uncluttered paradise. “Better make it a double,” the Canadian says to the Cuban beachside waiter. The image is a great blend of friendship, arrogance, and insecurity. In Cuba, unlike almost anywhere else, northerners outside the United States can fantasize that these are our mojitos, waiters, and beaches.
Representatives of the US Chamber of Commerce, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and tens of thousands of US college students passed through Havana long before Obama’s surprise announcement. And shortly after “D17” (as it is now known in Cuba), everyone from Netflix to Conan O’Brien to Airbnb arrived to see (and benefit from) just what was so forbidden for fifty years. As the Americans re-assess their animosity toward Cuba since the 1959 revolution, it’s a good time for others to also look again at their relationship with the place we think we know. Countless visitors have had over fifty years of person-to-person experience in and with Cuba that Americans have generally missed. It’s one of the few places in the world where First World tourists can rub shoulders with each other without also bumping into (much less being swamped by) Americans. That’s unusual and sometimes uncanny. It’s also why people from around the world began a stampede to Cuba after December 17, 2014, to see it “before the Americans wreck it,” as I have heard many declare. Americans have definitely made their absence felt in the past fifty years and that is changing. But what do the rest of us actually know about the place beyond the beach?
Globe and Mail cartoon, December 18, 2014. Courtesy of David Parkins
Cuba beyond the Beach is one part travel book, one part city memoir, and large part reflection on a changing Havana in a changing Cuba. Havana, the “Paris of the Caribbean” as it was dubbed a century ago, is the nation’s soul and beating heart. It is a complicated, contradictory place, a combination of capitalism, communism, Third World, First World, and Other World, all at the same time.
It’s a beautiful, wounded city. It bears many scars, a good number of them from the past fifty years of battle mode. The prominent seaside building that has functioned as a US embassy since official diplomatic relations were severed in 1961 — and reopened with much fanfare in August 2015 — is a great example. The area around the building has often been a constantly moving Cold War tableau, ringed with rival flags, statues, plaques, and billboards. In the George W. Bush era, this was a site of political theatre at its Cold War/War on Terror finest. Across the street Cubans erected billboards featuring the iconic Abu Ghraib torture victim, linking him — visually at least — to Miami-based, anti-Cuban terrorism. The US responded with an electronic billboard on the top floor of their building that broadcast nasty things about Cuba. Cuban authorities tried to block this with huge flags commemorating victims of US wars. Over it all presides a statue of the venerable Cuban national hero José Martí, holding a child, pointing an accusing finger at the US. Irreverent Cubans call this area, officially known as the “Anti-Imperialist Tribunal,” the protestodromo.
All over the city signs and billboards proclaim revolutionary slogans, Che’s portrait is ubiquitous, and daycare centres have names like Futuro Communistas. If all a visitor did was read the billboards or scan the official daily paper, Granma, she or he would certainly have the impression of Cuba as a country of single-minded, ideologically over-stimulated zealots. Ideology is indeed everywhere, and at first glance, Cuba seems to exist only in shades of black and white. But first impressions can be deceiving, and ideologies are lived by people, not billboards. This book is shaped by my experiences with a wide range of Cuban people.
Former US diplomat Wayne Smith says that Cuba is to US policy makers “as the full moon is to the werewolf,” and US historian Louis Pérez terms Cuba the US’s “obsessive compulsive disorder.”3 Maybe it’s easier for non-Americans to avoid these Cold War stereotypes, to see beneath the surface. There is nothing thrilling, illicit, or even weird about a Canadian, for example, being in Cuba, because we’ve never considered it enemy territory. I’ve marvelled over the years as US colleagues — professors, usually fairly smart people — treat my frequent research and teaching visits to Cuba as something almost unbelievable, akin to visiting the moon or North Korea. “But how do you get there?” I am frequently asked by Americans who are completely oblivious that they are the only people who don’t get there. As relations between the two countries open up, US visitors are excitedly placing their toes in water other visitors have been experiencing for a very long time.
Yet Canadians ought not to be too cocky about our own understanding of the place. A Cuban tour guide once confided in me that he far prefers German tourists to Canadians because Germans are generally more interested in Cuban culture; they want to visit museums and art galleries. Canadians, he said, just want to go to the beach. Canadian airline advertisements and websites often refer to their flights to the Caribbean not by cities but as “Sun Destinations,” as though the nations are interchangeable and the purpose of all travel is tourism. Canadian pilots on flights to Havana almost always tell passengers to “have a great vacation” when they land, oblivious to the presence of business people, workers, Cubans returning home, students, and plenty of others among the tourists. Yet my experience in Havana has taught me that visitors, from Canada as elsewhere, have plenty of other interests in Cuba — histories, friendships, loves, ambitions, dealings both shady and legit — beyond the beach.
I started visiting Cuba in 1978, and have visited frequently since 2004, usually twice or three times a year. I also spent two six-month research periods living in Havana with my family. I had the good fortune to be there to witness the day normalization with the US began, December 17 2014. I come to Cuba as a visitor, but I am also a researcher, a teacher, and a friend of many Cubans. By training I am a Canadian historian, but in recent years I have done research in Cuba. I’ve written one book about Cuban child migration conflicts and another about one of Cuba’s most beloved musicians. That one has given me a great view of Havana’s contemporary music scene. In the midst of the US economic blockade, I would often arrive from Canada with auto parts for my landlord’s car, toner for a University of Havana printer, and vitamins, medicine, chocolate, and Canadian cheddar for everyone I know (including the musicians). Once I arrived with a whole fresh salmon to share with friends for New Year’s dinner. My partner Susan Belyea and I have watched our son Jordi grow up there, from barely reaching the wall of the seaside Malecón, to walking on top of it, to skateboarding beside it. He’s grown up climbing sculptures in the plazas of Old Havana as though they were playground equipment, befriending lizards, and collecting stray bits of cable and wire from the street to fashion into art. Most memorable of all, we hovered over him in his hospital bed after he fell out of a tree in a park (onto cement) near our Vedado apartment, breaking both wrists. It gave us all a crash course in the much heralded Cuban medical system, but also in a system of neighbourliness I didn’t know the extent of until we needed it.
For almost ten years I’ve brought several hundred Canadian university students along with me to learn about Cuban economic and cultural development. My co-teachers and I take them to art galleries, film schools, and medical schools, and they hear lectures from professors, curators, journalists, musicians, and filmmakers. In class they ask their Cuban teachers difficult questions and they generally receive thoughtful answers. After class, they roam around the city pretty much on their own, making new friends at the university, the seafront Malecón, and the vegetable markets. Havana permits a freedom of movement unimaginable in any other Latin American city. They discover things I don’t know, like where to get seriously cheap drinks and what the local skateboarders are up to.
There are plenty of guidebooks that explain the Havana tourist route and detail the latest restaurants. These are useful, but this book is for those who want to understand how people in Havana live and what visitors might learn from that. Along the way, it is also about the potential and limitations of relationships across the multiple boundaries that separate the First and Third worlds. How habaneros (inhabitants of Havana) live, what they eat, where they go, what they listen to, and what they think. These are difficult to get at because people in Cuba, just like people everywhere, don’t speak with one voice. (This was always one of the fallacies of US-government Cuban policy.) Foreigners shouldn’t take the slogans on the billboards or the headlines in the newspapers any more seriously than many Cubans take them, which is not very. I am persuaded by those Cubans who characterize their daily reality as more sociolismo than socialismo — more a reciprocal network of favours among friends (socios) than an abstract state ideology (socialism). It’s a system that is fascinating to see in practice.
Cubans have been formed by a society given to revolutionary hyperbole and polemical speeches. The most powerful country in the world labelled them “terrorists” and prior to that, a few decades ago, they were blamed (via the erroneously named “Cuban missile crisis”) for almost blowing us all to smithereens. What does all this political drama mean in daily life?
The years I have spent in Havana have been momentous. When I lived there in 2004 Cubans were still digging themselves out from the collapse of their main trading partner, the Soviet Union, a period of extreme deprivation euphemistically named the “Special Period” that began in 1990. The crises began the slow process of economic transformation that continues today: the state is relaxing exclusive control over certain sectors of the economy, most notably in the agricultural and tourist sectors. A parallel dollar economy had been introduced in 1993, legalizing access to hard currency. In 2004, the US dollar was withdrawn from circulation and slapped with a 10 percent surcharge, and Cuba entered a period of dual official currencies. Moneda nacional or Cuban pesos (hereafter referred to as MN) are what most people earn, and are roughly worth one-twenty-fourth of the Cuban controvertible peso (hereafter referred to as CUC), which is pegged to the US dollar. Incentives for international tourism were also introduced, including the legalization of private restaurants and apartments (both initially under extremely strict conditions.) These reforms pulled Cuba out of the post-Soviet free fall, but they also exacerbated inequalities (especially by race) that were obvious in 2004 and inescapable now. In 2006, Fidel Castro announced he was temporarily stepping down in favour of his brother Raúl. In 2008, Raúl took power officially. That same year, the country suffered three hurricanes that hit the agricultural sector especially hard, the damage from which cost the country an estimated US$10 billion, or nearly one-fifth of its annual GDP.4 In 2010, Raúl Castro announced sweeping economic reforms. The state took a further step away from being the sole player in economic life, and new opportunities for self-employment (cuentapropismo) and foreign investment have been created. In 2011, a private real estate market was legalized. And the mother of all surprise announcements came in December 2014 — that the US and Cuba would normalize their relations and work toward ending the US economic blockade and travel ban.
How have these and other big changes over the past decade played out on the streets and in the parks and neighbourhoods of Havana? The wisdom here is a compendium of what I’ve learned from Cuban people rather than Cuban politicians. I listen to music more than speeches; I watch more films than TV news. The conversations Cubans have with each other, their art, their music and other cultural forms, are intense, challenging, and smart. Opinions abound in Technicolor. The people in my Havana neighbourhood are old Communist ladies and their sceptical offspring, rock stars and peanut vendors, world famous street people, crabby store clerks, Spanish teachers, history professors, journalists, filmmakers, butchers, illegal seafood vendors, tour guides, and taxi drivers. All of them have lived this curious Cold War fault line in ways that are more complicated, subtle, funny, intelligent, poetic, tragic, and beautiful than any slogan could capture. As Cuba experiences some dramatic changes, there is much to appreciate and learn from in the unlikely world they have collectively built for themselves.
Over the past fifty years Cuba has been both isolated and cosmopolitan. It’s been closed to Americans but wide open for European tourists, African medical students, and Latin American political exiles, to take just a few examples. Zaira is a Cuban graduate student in Canada who translates for our course in Havana. She learned to speak English because her high school was located on the outskirts of Havana, next door to a farm where people came from all over the world to help with the harvest. A steady stream of solidarity visitors from Ireland, Norway, Japan, and South Africa helped perfect her English conversational skills, not to mention shape an excellent accent. The intensity of the US/Cuba relationship sometimes overshadows the multiple ties between Cuba and other parts of the world.
I’m a Canadian, and as such I have a particular relationship to the place. Canadians and Cubans have crossed paths with each other regularly over the centuries. William Van Horne, for example, a former president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a familiar figure in Canada’s past. He was present at the famous driving of the last spike that completed Canada’s railway in 1885. (In the famous photo he’s the one with the top hat who looks like a Monopoly game caricature of a capitalist.) Few know that Van Horne went on to help finance and run the Cuban Railroad Company, which connected Havana to the eastern provinces and the city of Santiago de Cuba in 1901. His observations of widespread rural poverty prompted him to offer some advice — ironic in hindsight — to the US military consul who ran Cuba when he was there in 1899. Van Horne tried to convince the US military government to enact land reform, taking untilled land away from absentee landlords and parcelling it out to Cubans. As Van Horne saw it, if more Cubans owned their own land, future social upheavals might be avoided. “In countries where the percentage of individuals holding real estate is greatest,” he wrote, “conservatism prevails and insurrections are unknown.”5
Canadian tycoon Max Aitkin (a.k.a. Lord Beaverbrook, one of the finest, or at least richest, sons of New Brunswick) also held investments in Cuban railway and banking interests. While touring the island in 1906, he encountered a number of other visiting Canadian capitalists who all, according to him, “seemed to be inclined to criticize and make fun of anything Cuban.” He did not feel the same way; he was actually very fond of the place. This is how he put it: “Cuba compares favourably with Canada in every respect barring morals.”6 A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, but it set a kind of ambivalent, two-sided tone for Canadian feelings about Cuba for decades to come.
In 1945, Cuba was the first Caribbean country with which Canada established diplomatic ties. We’ve maintained those official ties ever since. In 1953, when Cuba’s major opposition parties needed to meet safely, outside the country, to plan their strategy to topple the heavy-handed dictator Fulgencio Batista, they chose to meet at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal.7 We reprised this discreet role in the negotiations between Cuba and the US leading up to December 17, 2014, hosting both parties, secretly, in Ottawa and Toronto. Unlike almost every other country in this hemisphere, we kept talking to each other after the 1959 Cuban revolution. (Only Mexico also retained ties with Cuba.) Despite the Cold War, we didn’t see Cuba as the enemy. We didn’t join the American economic blockade. If Cuba is America’s wayward child, perhaps for ever-obedient Canadians, Cuba is that one bad friend you had in high school — the one you kept company with just to annoy your parents. Yet like all good children, we know our rebellion has limits. When Washington closed their embassy in 1961, they asked us to take their place spying on the Cubans and so we did. Former Canadian diplomat John W. Graham recalls that he outfitted himself in what he imagined to be “Soviet technician” attire at a Zellers store in Ottawa before he left for his posting in Havana in the early 1960s. The idea was to appear as Russian as possible once in Havana, in order to photograph Soviet trucks, tanks, and other military hardware, which were then sent via diplomatic courier to Washington.8
Some Canadians with sympathies toward the revolution made it their business to funnel information praising Castro’s social reforms to their counterparts in the US through the 1960s. Material that couldn’t be mailed directly to the US from Cuba was sent through Canada to various “Fair Play for Cuba” groups in the US. Ironically enough, at the same time, the Canadian embassy was sending Cuban periodicals they collected in Havana to Washington.9 Prime Minister Diefenbaker rejected John F. Kennedy’s demand that Canada fall into line with the US during the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Most famous, perhaps, was the 1976 visit of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau to Havana, the first visit of a NATO nation leader since Castro took power. It was a true bromance: Trudeau and Castro went fishing together. Fidel couldn’t take his eyes off Margaret, and neither could most other Cubans. A Cuban friend who now lives in Canada remembers this visit, which took place during his Havana boyhood, as an inspirational moment: “All those old military men who run Cuba drooling over the charming young Canadian prime minister’s wife. We loved it. It made me want to see Canada.”
There are plenty of Canadian-Cuban economic ties as well. Economic trade between Canada and Cuba runs at a rate of about $1 billion annually. Sherritt International accounts for a huge amount of that; it is Cuba’s second largest foreign investor. Sherritt operates an enormous nickel mine in Moa, on the remote northeastern shore. Sherritt, whose former CEO Ian Delany is dubbed “Castro’s Favourite Capitalist” in the Canadian media, also has oil and gas interests near Varadero, and their presence in Cuba was recently renewed until 2028. As one of Cuba’s largest foreign investors in the world, Sherritt has come under fire from the US government, and Delany himself is forbidden entry to the US.10 Cuba’s most popular beer labels, Cristal and Bucanero, are manufactured by a joint venture owned by the Cuban government and Labatt. Canada exports machinery, auto parts, electronics, and grain, and in return Cuba sends (in addition to nickel) coffee, seafood, and, of course, cigars.
As well as political ties, investment, and trade relations, Canadians have shown interest in Cuba in countless other ways. Canadian universities helped educate a new generation of Cuban engineers through a CIDA-funded exchange program that sent Canadian professors to teach in engineering schools in Havana in the early 1970s, and also brought Cuban students to Canada for graduate training. Thousands of professionals had left the country after the revolution, so international programs like this were crucial. There are currently over twenty Canadian universities with active research or teaching ties in Cuba, and at least as many have had shared research projects with Cuban institutions in the past.11
Bank of Nova Scotia building, the corner of O’Reilly and Cuba streets
Cubans are among the few people outside Canada who know who Terry Fox is.12 Cubans started a Terry Fox run in 1998, and it is now the largest such event outside Canada. There are plenty of other famous Canadians whom Cubans admire — Céline Dion and Justin Bieber being two celebrities Cubans seemingly can’t hear enough from. One tie we’d perhaps all rather forget about is the story of James McTurk. He was convicted in Canada in 2013 of sexual crimes against children during his dozens of visits. He claimed he supported the families of his sexual partners in Cuba financially. He’s the first Canadian to be convicted of child sex crimes in Cuba.
One of my favourite books about Cuban history is On Becoming Cuban, by the US historian Louis Pérez. It’s a huge compendium of how Cuba absorbed US13