Nadine Gordimer: Atlantis (comment on Cuba) from her book TELLING TIMES

Atlantis

If there was one thing I knew about Cuba. it was as a country .i. emerged from the staggering burden of a colonial past and a dictatorship — Batista's, as we emerged from apartheid's white minority one — but Cuba now, uniquely, subjected for more than forty years to a USA blockade. If Castrds regime. as long as Soviet Communist power existed, was a launching pad against the USA, militarily and ideologically, neither threat has any existence today. 1 I am a signatory to the international protest demanding than the

USA G& On bknkadn,..nal aware that in the USA there is a
considerable body of opinion that wants it abolished.

I am a member of the African National Congress in South Africa, but nor of the South African Communist Party, one of its alliance partners. I didn't go to Cuba prepared to celebrate uncritically what the Fidel Castro regime has achieved, nor rejoice in Western glee over its failures to provide important freedoms.

Culxins are poor, yes. Even the writers. academics and cultural administrators I spent time with are poor by the modest standards of people working in the arts in Europe, the USA and even my own country. In the crowds at the opening of the Havana International Jazz Festival, pelvis-to-buttock, breath-to-breath in standing room

only, there was a calm equilibrium that could be sensed. A Cuban companion joked, 'We aren't jealous of the ones who found seats. We don't own property. There's no keeping up with the Joncses. you sec. We don't have any Joneses;

Storming the bourgeoisie is the convention of revolution; taking over its ruin there is a reality. Creating a new and more just life may take longer than the forty-four years since the beginning of the Castro regime. This reality of taking over the grandiloquent ruins of colonio-capitalism in economic circumstances brought about by factors in the present is nakedly in your face as you drive along the sweep of the ancient fortressod harbour towards old Havana. Here are the empty hulks of a long facade of vast mansions that must have been merchants' headquarters or sumptuous residences - but no, our empty. WItcic oven three walls stanel at one of the jagged. roofless levels people are bravely living. Glimpse of a table, bed. Terrible living conditions, comparable to those in pares of Johannesburg where illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries in conflict, squat. In a shopping alley that runs off a grand square of exquisite seventeenth- to nineteenth-century buildings. I was among dignified people, wearing the T-shirts and jeans of our international uniform, buying pizzas from hole-in-the-wall vendors. The minimum wage in Cuba is twelve dollars a month. How dues one subsist? Education and medical care are good and free, and here are shed-depots where everyone exchanges their ration tickets for basic foods at low prices payable in pesos. A wartime measure - but then the USA blockade is a wartime action against a country where no one is at war with anyone.

I was driven more than ;so kilometres from Havana to a resort of the Caribbean Paradise style dating from Batista's time, available in dollars only. It was uncrowded, since tourists - unfortunately for the island's economy - due to the USA's ban on its citizens' travel to Cuba, were confined to a Canadian party and several French people. USA 'exemptions allowed 176.000 Americans to visit in 3001, and 25.000 came clandestinely; but I encountered very• few anywhere.

Everywhere royal palms are watchtowers over the Cuban

landscape. The roads were walled with sugar cane interrupted by villages. I had the displaced feeling I was in the old Deep South of the USA; these rows of cabins, with someone sitting out in a rocking chair. But this wasn't the Deep South, it was rural Cuba 2003. The poor in their rocking chairs had big cigars in their mouths. Almost the only cars and buses were on the single highway: there are few private cars in Cuba, these mainly vintage Oldsmobiles, de Soros and Chryslers. The weekend family outing was measuredly taking place by horse and cart.

In Havana t had asked a writer why there were no independent newspapers in Cuba, no freedom of expression, stressing the difference there is between a press seeking to bring down a regime and a newspaper advocating reforms within it. Money, rather than fear of state retribution, he said. The only funds available to any reformist group for paper and printing would come from the Cubans in Florida whose sole intention is to topple Castro, and the importance of whose vote in USA elections keeps the blockade in force. But I knew that dissident Cuban journalists land in prison ...

I see Cuba as a place of symbols. An Atlantis risen to confront us. The fall of the Soviet Empire drowned the island in our time as a relic of twentieth-century power-politics. To visit it is to come upon a piece of our not distant past, significantly surfaced.

Here 6.11 drat is left of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of our twentieth century, in the form it took as the utopian dream for a just world.

Here is the flotsam of vulgar capitalist materialism: the forties and fifties cars with their airflow flourish, fishtail embellishments, somehow kept running!

Two features from our past: the once great solution to an unjust world, Marxist-Leninism, become another kind of honourable folk-wisdom to follow, rather than the unquestionable solution to that world: and the trivial values of that world: they seemed shockingly reduced to the same level against the realities of our twenty-first-century survival. One of Cuba's intellectuals asks 'Cuba: socialist museum or social laboratory?' Could it be the latter? A social democtacy of the Left already showing a tendency to follow the