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Soot & Soup. The face of Cuba seems to be crumbling like the sea wall along Havana's beautiful Malecon Drive. The gay city is now grey and, for a Latin capital, uncharacteristically quiet. No visitor can fail to note the soot-smudged dinginess of the Habana Riviera and the Habana Libre, once the city's flossiest hotels. Silent knots of Iron Curtain technicians, gun-toting militiamen, and bewildered peasants brought to Havana for Marxist orientation have replaced the thronging tourists who once filled their lobbies. Nightclubs like the Tropicana—still ballyhooed as the world's biggest—continue to operate, but with a Cuba socialista beat, and the leggy pony chorus now does Russian folk dances. The great restaurants have two choices on the menu —half-dollar-sized steak (at $6 a crack) and spaghetti; on the street, the hamburger stands serve watery bean soup.
Nothing seems to work. Havana's transportation system is coasting to a halt for lack of spare parts and mechanics to install them. One of Castro's captive newspapers counted 280 bus breakdowns on Havana's streets in one day alone recently. "What am I supposed to do when this thing finally goes—join the militia?" said the disgruntled driver of a 1953 Cadillac taxi. Cubans are leary of the Coca-Cola they drink—it has been known to contain cockroach eggs; in bars they pointedly order Coke "sin bacilli" (without germs). "My father would be very sad to see this," said the son of the late president of Coca-Cola in Cuba.
Bitter Harvest. What is sadly visible on the face of Cuba is clearer still in the statistics of economy. The country runs on sugar, and under Communism sugar has been ruined. Little or no cane has been replanted for three years ; most fields have not been fertilized. Many of the ex pert cane cutters who normally harvest the crop are in the militia, and the "vol unteers" who replace them have hacked the stalks so badly that normal regrowth is stopped or stunted. In pre-Castro years, Cuba could count on about 5,000,000 tons of sugar, for which it got an average $500 million, most of it from the U.S. in preferential prices. Fortnight ago, Cuba's Minister of Industry, Che Gue vara, who, if nothing else, is the most candid of Cuba's new rulers, reported on this year's crop to a meeting of sugar workers: "The first thing we must say is that this harvest has been bad."
With the rainy season beginning, said Guevara, only three or four sugar mills of 160 in Cuba were meeting what he called "conservative targets." The outlook: 4,000,000 tons or less, which, with last year's carryover, will bring Cuba only $336 million, or a bare 53% of sugar earnings in pre-Castro 1957. Even that sum will not be in hard cash, but in high-priced barter goods from the Soviet bloc, which has replaced the U.S. as Cuba's major trading partner.
Profits into Losses. At night. Havana's once bright lights are dimmed for economic reasons; each kilowatt-hour of electricity, the Communists tell the people, costs 345 grams of oil, which comes from Russia and is paid for with scarce sugar.