Russian President Vladimir Putin was almost right when he said recently that the memory of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s revolutionary leader who died on Nov. 25, would “always remain in the hearts of Russian citizens.” Thanks to my Soviet childhood and young adulthood, I’ll never forget Fidel, but my heart is not where I’ll store those memories.
To Soviet Young Pioneers, Cuba was a romantic legend, an example of how a tiny island can stand up to American imperialism. Young Pioneer units were named after Jose Marti and Che Guevara. Those of us who learned Spanish studied it as the language spoken in Cuba. It was the country in whose honor Iosif Kobzon, the Soviet Union’s official crooner, glued on a fake Fidel-like beard, strapped on a fake submachine gun and let it loose:
“Fatherland or death! That is the vow of the fearless. The sun of freedom shall burn over Cuba—Fatherland or death!”
Even after all these years, the sounds of the best Cuban music I’ve heard in Havana and in Florida haven’t drowned out Kobzon’s “Cuba, My Love.” By the time I was out of high school, however, Cuba was a burden. Moscow stores were filled with green Cuban oranges that were next to impossible to peel and had so many pits they all but rattled. It was next to impossible to get decent cigarettes, but every kiosk had several varieties of Cuban ones with famous names like Montecristo and H. Upmann, filled with black cigar tobacco so strong one choked when trying to smoke them. The “Island of Freedom” was supposed to pay the Soviet Union back in kind for its oil, machinery and pretty much everything else Cuba couldn’t buy closer to home because of the U.S. embargo. But it had little to sell or barter.
I remember singing, to the tune of “Cuba, My Love”:
Cuba, give back our bread,
Cuba, take back your sugar.
We’re sick and tired
of your furry Fidel,
Cuba, get the hell out of here.
In 1989 Cuba imported $8.1 billion worth of Soviet goods. By 1994 that shrank to $500 million. Boris Yeltsin’s post-Soviet government wanted to be friends with the U.S., and that meant ditching Fidel. He was no longer a friend. When Russia turned capitalist, he didn’t get the hint. In 1995 Moscow reggae singer Gerbert Morales, half-Cuban and one of the new breed of musicians we listened to, sang of Cuba as a land of wasted opportunity:
Bearded Fidel has cheated
everyone:
He put a sun up in the sky,
but it won’t roll.
Only during Yeltsin’s second presidential term at the end of the 1990s, when the Moscow establishment realized the West was treating it as a bunch of Cold War losers, did Russia attempt to patch things up with Castro. But it was too late. Cuba, forcibly weaned off Russian aid, was forced to open itself in a limited way to Western business.
Cuba’s tourist industry was happy to see Russian visitors, but they no longer got special treatment. When I visited in 2007 I often heard of the “betrayal” of Cuba by my country. My euros were welcome, however. In my rented car, I drove on empty roads.
Early this year during the U.S. presidential primary campaign, I found myself in the Miami suburb of Hialeah, the most Cuban of all U.S. cities. An apparition made me hit the brakes so that the driver behind me swerved to avoid a collision: a Soviet-made Lada was parked by the roadside. The clunkers are a common sight in Cuba, and the stately ’50s U.S. sedans that ferry tourists around Havana are basically Ladas inside. In Florida, though, no one drives a Lada—except, as I soon found out, Fabian Zakharov, a Russian-Cuban entrepreneur with a thriving business selling Lada parts to Cuba.
He’d tried to make it in Castro’s Cuba and in Putin’s Russia but found the bureaucracy too restrictive, so he ended up in Hialeah. He was plotting to move his business to Cuba once the U.S. embargo ended. Now that Fidel is dead, I think he’s closer to carrying out his plan.