CUBAN POLITICS: LIVING WITH THE LIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190005-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 19, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190005-5
TTLE AITEARED.
PAGies
WALL STREET JOURNAL
19 April 1985
Cuban Politics: Living With the Lies
HAVANA ? Over long pre-luncheon
drinks in a restaurant bar, I am interview- ?
ing a Cuban official. We break briefly to ,
walk to the dining room and in the hallway '
my husband hisses into my ear, "Keep
talking like that and they're never going to i
let you meet Fidel."
In truth, Mr. Castro is not entertaining
many Western journalists these days no
matter how polite they are; doubtless he
has had enough of them snidely suggesting
that his recent talk about negotiating with
the U.S. must mean he is in big trouble.
Still, if you are a visiting newspaper writer
The Americas
by Suzanne Garment
the Cubans will give you to understand I
that Fidel may see you?but only if you be-
have acceptably in the early interviews
you conduct. I am a-certified coward, but
in response to this trick I find that every
hour or so I am throwing a rock through
the conversational window.
The main challenge for a journalist in
Cuba is to separate the truth from the lies,
tioth deliberate and innocent. The Cubans I,
have tensions with their Soviet allies but I
insist this is not so; they are in serious eco-
nomic need but staunchly deny it. Their
distinctive habits of speech pervade their
relations with outsiders down to the level
of the most ordinary personal relations.
Cuba puts on its best face for visitors
and because it is controlled can be quite
'? thorough in its deceptions. I discover that
some of these do not bother me much. For
example, the Cubans take us to their show-
case Lenin School, a secondary school near
Havana. The assistant principal in his
jeans and T-shirt says he has almost no
dropouts or discipline problems. The chil-
dren in their uniforms are an ethnic rain-
bow, each one beautiful and shining.
I scan the happy crowd of students look-
ing for the ugly kids?you know, like the
ones at the Bronx High School of Science
no one ever talks to and who go home,
lock themselves in their antisocial little
bedrooms and invent fusion. I do not see
them and give a mental shrug at the Cu-
bans' display.
? The mixture of messages is harder to
deal with when our hosts put us up against
their charming and formidable minister of
education, Jose Fernandez Alvarez, who
looks and talks approximately like John
Wayne. He was an officer in Batista's
army, a prisoner in Batista's jail, a fighter
in the revolution and a hero of the Bay of
Pigs. He also trained at Fort Sill, Okla.
Commiserating With us overthe dearth of
taxis in Havana, he says: "Our cabs are
very shy. When they see you they swerve
to avoid you. They have more curves than
Johnny Sain," who pitched for the old Bos-
ton Braves.
The U.S. government, with evidence,
has recently accused Cuban officials of
aiding criminals who smuggle drugs into
the U.S. Mr. Fernandez says this is a vi-
cious lie. I do not see how such a patently
honorable man can be wrong. He says that
none of the refugees sent to us through the
Cuban port of Mariel in 1979 were known to
be psychopathic, and I start wondering
whether there has been a misunderstand-
ing between the two countries' psychia-
trists.
Then he begins to speak about Cuban
education. He always needs more money,
he says; as Fidel once said to him, "You
should be education minister of Saudi Ara-
bia." Then why does the country send so
many children to relatively expensive
boarding schools instead of leaving them
home? Cuban families are very united, he
explains, and overprotective? a virtue to a
certain extent, but the children "have to
learn to make their own decisions."
I am brought up short. Nice Mr. Fer-
nandez is telling us that a major goal of
Cuban education is to weaken the power of
the Cuban family. Our talk becomes less
cordial. Cuban Communist officials are dif-
ferent from you and me. ?
? More difficult than any interview,
though, is the morning-to-night time we put
in with the Foreign Ministry official shep-
herding us around and the translator as-
signed to us. Both should get merit badges
from their government for .softening up
U.S. hawks. We find our Foreign Ministry
guide attractive and funny, with just
enough of a dissolute air to assure you that
he will not disapprove if you want to order
another beer. The translator is a small,
brown-haired, pretty woman of 28 who ex-.
plains with her sincere eyes that she
"grew up with the revolution." '
As the days go on, they show more h?-
-mor and irony. Our guide tells about the
time he was assigned to Ottawa, traveling
on a Canadian aircraft, and suddenly
heard -the pilot announce over the loud- .
speaker that the plane had been hijacked
to Cuba. Another time I laugh to him abottt
how the airport police are all confusingly
dressed in army-style fatigues. "But you
see," he says, his eyes lighting up. "all our
army is dressed up as police. This is tolool
thr_cdA,artmtltures are therefore com-
pletely wrong." On the airport tarmac be-
fore our departure I notice furniture being
unloaded. I have seen fine Cuban wood-
working and ask the translator, "Why are
you importing furniture?" "This is known
as Latin American friendship," she re-
plies.
Yet when we ask to see the largest syn-
agogue in Havana, our guide says he does
not know where it is and forgets to find
out; we discover it on our own, a large
modern building now no longer function-
ing, a block away from one of our sched-
uled interview sites. When we talk about
U.S.-Cuban relations he always cites U.S
abuses, in the same words, from the time
just after the revolution: destabilization,
infiltrations, crop bombings, assassination
attempts. This is not a list to encourage
the conversation he clearly wants, but he
cannot dispense with it; it stands at the
center of his political analysis.
We ask repeatedly about Cuba's rela-
tionship with the Soviets: Why are talented
people like you hanging around with losers
like them? They will not say a word:
against their Soviet allies. Neither do they,,
say anything substantive in the Soviets' be-
half. Mostly when we mention the Soviets':
they fall prudently silent. ?
On our final night, the plane at the Ha-
vana airport is announced as landing in 10,.
minutes, then no word for an hour and a,
half. It sits on the ground another tw&
hours before boarding begins. An Ameri-
can travel guide would have been accost-.
ing bureaucrats to get an explanation. But' -
.our government hosts sit
tor sighs about the unreliability of charter
flights; I snap at her that it is the Cuban ? .
government that will not get the plane,
turned around. She falls into one of the 517,
lences that have punctuated our time to-
gether and I know what she is thinking:1:
four days of exhausting work down the',
tubes.
She is no more tired than we are when',
we finally reach our seats on that airplane,
The hours of carefully chosen words, of.
falsehoods not responded to, of periodic si-
lence, of alternating cordiality and aliena-,.
tion rob a human being of energy. I imag,,
ine what the cost must be for Cubans living
indefinitely under this constraint, claiming
to the world that they need nothing from us
while they shuttle to the airport to meet.-
their relatives from Miami. The island is:.
clearly no large and self-contained Soviet
Union; it is impossible to think that the Cu-''
bans can bear these contradictions indefin-
itely.
Ms. Garment is associate editor of the
Journal's editorial page. This article and ?
her column, which appears nearby, are the
, last in a series on Cuba. .
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190005-