One of the principles underlying this adventure is shopping. I don’t mean tourist shopping, for handicrafts and native artifacts. I mean shopping to feed ourselves, which is the activity that most ties us to local culture wherever we are.

If we were on a tourist cadence, a week or two and then move on, we could arguably survive on restaurants. But that’s not sustainable over as long as we’d like to travel, and it doesn’t sound pleasant regardless. While we can never truly be locals, the closest approximation comes when we shop in the same mercados and make food out of the same ingredients. Cooking is the great equalizer, and shopping is the common denominator.

This has never been clearer than in Cuba. Cuba’s economy is defined by scarcity, and no amount of white privilege or US dollars can turn that scarcity into abundance. Our local friend Jenn had cautioned us to bring in as much of what we’d need for the month as possible: salt, pepper, toilet paper, olive oil, dried milk, coffee, sugar… We brought in small amounts of some of those things, but not a month’s supply. Because we’re traveling with just about everything we own, we don’t have lots of unused weight allowance in our bags.

Of course, what we thought Jenn meant is that it would be hard to find these things, or expensive. We didn’t actually think it meant they just weren’t available.

Case In Point: A Humble Skillet

One of the things we do whenever we land in a new place is suss out what’s missing from the kit in our apartment and go fill the gaps. We spent over $100 on housewares in Oaxaca, which we left behind. Spread out over the almost four months we were there, it was a perfectly reasonable expense to incur for comfort and ease.

Our casa particular in La Habana is actually lovely, but there were a few missing items: a water jug large enough that we weren’t constantly filtering water, ice trays, and a skillet, as there were only two saucepans for cooking. As it turns out, we’ve yet to find a water jug or ice tray, and have just given up (although the day before we left, of course, we found the neighborhood in the Centro, between Vedado and Habana Vieja, with the housewares stores). I filter water about every other day into a constellation of small containers, and use a pair of our Ikea plastic containers to make ice. But we found a skillet at someone’s garage sale in our first few days. The challenge was that it was pretty roughly cast aluminum, and while it might be ok for sautéing vegetables, the odds of getting a fried egg out of there intact were zero.

The punch line is, those were exactly the same odds as getting eggs. Eggs are available at the government ration store, closed to us, obviously: five eggs/person/month. And while we found private stores that offered the same products as the ration shops for higher prices (rice was $7 CUP/pound/person/month at the ration shop, and $160 CUP/pound at retail), we’ve yet to find eggs that way.

So, the skillet is fine.

But the mercados do not have the abundance of choices we enjoyed in Mexico. While it was possible to have a serious discussion of the different ways that abundance and choice manifested in Mexico vs. the US, there is no comparable discussion to have about Cuba. Lot’s of stuff just isn’t here. Like eggs. And cheese. And gasoline.

If you’ve followed us so far, it’s possible that one of the things you’ve enjoyed is the relative lack of political commentary. Other than a few snarky shots at US exceptionalism. If that’s you, apologies. Please feel free to stop reading.

Because there’s no way to talk about the scarcity of goods in Cuba without acknowledging their very obvious root cause: the US embargo.

The Bloqueo

Whatever your feelings about the morality of the bloqueo, and more on that in a moment, you can’t argue that it’s been effective in its policy goals. Which have been clearly articulated as creating the conditions for regime change. The theory is that if you render the government incapable of meeting its citizen’s needs, by strangling it economically, those citizens will rise up, overthrow their government, and replace it with one we like enough to lift the bloqueo. Except that there’s zero evidence that embargoes ever lead to that result. Rather, they tend to bind people together in opposition to the outside actor and reinforce allegiance to the state that’s under attack. They have the exact opposite effect as intended.

You can see it play out in Putin’s attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Those are meant to demoralize the populace and drive them away from the government that’s brought this on them. Instead, it has created a common enemy and, if anything, drove a hardening of support for a national identity and a government that had been much weaker prior to Russia’s attacks. As a policy, those attacks have had the opposite of their intended effect.

Even more heinous, if possible, is the fact that the US embargo is directed not just at US companies, but any business, no matter where in the world it’s based. If you’re headquartered in Argentina, for example, and you do business with the US in any way, commerce with Cuba will expose you to US sanctions. The US is a much bigger market than Cuba, so multinationals have made the only choice they could. It’s not enough that America’s irrational hatred has caused so much harm to Cuba. Like an infection, the US has forced that hatred onto countries that simply don’t share it.

But it’s also been a moral failure, and profoundly so. We’re constantly asked on the street where we’re from. We’ve been taken for Canadians and Germans, but no one assumes we’re from Estados Unidos. That info is always a surprise to folks. We’ve met absolutely no hostility over that, more wonder and awe that we’d have gone to the trouble, given how hard the US government makes it for us to get here. And a shockingly consistent request, that when we get back, we please, please, please tell people what it’s like in Cuba. And how much the bloqueo is hurting them.

That pain is real, and severe. It distorts absolutely everything about life here, and is the motive force that drives daily Cuban’s behavior. And let’s be plain: we’re killing people. The bloqueo includes both medicines and the ingredients necessary to fabricate medicines. Most medical procedures that require medication, which is kind of all of them, can’t be performed now. The bloqueo also impacted Cuba’s ability to develop its COVID vaccine. This is morally indefensible. We are killing innocent Cubans as surely as if we’d put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger ourselves.

The US government would like us to think that we’re just applying a little pressure for a reasonable policy goal (winning Florida?). But we’re not. We’re fucking over an entire nation for… nothing. For a Cold War fantasy.

Neither Hellhole Nor Paradise

Look, I’m not naive. I know that there’s a history of repression in Cuba, and I’m not going to be an apologist for the Cuban government. I’m sure it has much to answer to its citizens for. Unlike the US, where the government’s hands are completely clean. But my picture of daily life under Communism had a distinctly KGB/Stasi air that simply isn’t the case here. No one is listening to conversations and reporting Enemies of the People. No one is going to prison for 25 years for criticizing the government.

Because of Jenn, we’ve had much more contact at the conversational level with Cubans than we had with Mexicans. We’ve asked pointed questions about how things work here: the economy, small businesses, property ownership. We’ve gotten honest answers, including critiques of government policy. No one has raised any concerns about voicing their opinions.

At least in the cities we’ve visited, La Habana and Trinidad, the culture here seems very tolerant. There have been plenty of same sex couples walking around holding hands, as well as lots of mixed race couples. Although at this point in Cuba’s history, every couple is probably mixed race.

There seems to be free and relatively unfettered access to information. We’ve been using the government-provided Internet access, and nothing seems to be blocked. We’re using a VPN for security, but we can use the VPN successfully…

Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, the Avatar sequel is playing at the local cinema, and there’s universal literacy. They treat their mentally ill, rather than tossing them on the street to fend for themselves. None of those are things we can say about the US. Except for Avatar, and that’s a pretty weak win. It’s not a perfect Worker’s Paradise, but neither is it the Communist hellhole we conjure up when we’re trying to scare children. What it is instead is a plausible alternative to rapacious capitalism, and as such stands as a mortal threat to rapacious capitalists.

From a governing perspective, Cuba has clearly made a different set of tradeoffs than the US has. They’ve decided that it’s better for everyone to have enough (which they would, absent the bloqueo), and no one to go without, than to accept the kind of inequality that seems sadly endemic to the US.

All of which makes me think that the US’s stated rationale for the embargo, regime change, is a fig leaf. We haven’t been blindly pursuing a failed policy for 60+ years. Rather, we’ve been pursuing a brutally efficient, highly successful policy: preventing a successful example of an economic system with fundamentally different values from flourishing right on our shores. Of course, our successful policy has been a humanitarian disaster, but hey! You have to break a few huevos to destroy an entire way of life.

Freedom To… What, Exactly?

Theoretically, with Cuba as with the Soviet bloc, we’re defending our freedoms from the scourge of Communism. But what exactly are the freedoms we cherish so deeply that we’re willing to export them at the point of a gun? So far as I can tell, the only meaningful freedom we have is the freedom to consume.

We have a lot of theoretical freedoms. We have freedom of speech. Until our speech triggers someone and we’re shut down, through either violence or canceling. We have freedom of assembly. Except that we tend to use that freedom to self sort. We have freedom of opportunity. On paper, but no one who’s thinking about it believes we aren’t as caste-driven as India, our national Myth of Upward Mobility notwithstanding. We have freedom of religion. But some religions are clearly better than others, and are favored by the state (and yes, I’m a disgruntled Pastafrian). We are guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unless we choose to exercise those freedoms in ways other people find offensive, and then we run the risk of summary execution by wackjob.

The only truly unfettered freedom we enjoy is the freedom to consume. We are completely free to spend our money so that our corporate masters are momentarily distracted, and the insatiable maw of capitalism has something to chew. Like our souls.

If that sounds bitter (there’s a reason we’ve chosen to be outside the US right now), consider this: in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks we were, briefly, united as a nation. We had been assaulted, we had an enemy, and we were ready to do whatever was necessary as a nation to both avenge the attack and prevent another. It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor, which took a nation disinterested in fighting Europe’s war and forged us into a fearsome weapon for whom no sacrifice was too much to ask, no burden too great to bear.

In that moment, when the entire nation was prepared to be united in common cause, what sacrifice were we called upon to carry, what shared service were we asked to accept?

Go shopping.

How Many Parties Is Enough?

Surprisingly, this whole experience has provided an understanding of the purpose and benefits of single party rule. I’d considered multi-party democracy as a bedrock, unyielding principle of good government. But do you know what would happen if Cuba permitted multiple political parties? US money would rush in to support the party that most aligned with our priorities, and Cuba would once again become a US vassal. “Oh,” I hear you say, “Cuban laws would prohibit foreign political contributions.” Chump.

We’ve just read a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Cuba, and that history is appalling. We have been fucking with Cuba since there was a United States to fuck with Cuba. The notion that we would let Cuba be Cuba, if they’d just permit free elections, is laughable. In fact, in the law that created the embargo, one of the conditions of lifting it is that multi-party elections be permitted. As high-minded and innocent as that sounds, it would doom Cuba’s socialist way of life. Which is, of course, the entire point.

This Was Supposed To Be About Shopping

But I have to say, the Cuban people seem unbowed by all of this. Frustrated, yes, but resourceful and committed to making the best of things, however grim they might be. I can’t speak to what Cuba was like a few years ago, but in September 2021 the Cuban government legalized MSMEs (micro, small, and medium size enterprises). The landscape now is elbow-to-elbow with small businesses. From people running little tiendas through their windows to permanent garage sales of whatever people can scrounge to sell (we found our skillet and some extra hangers at one of those), small commerce is absolutely everywhere here.

There aren’t actually a lot of traditional stores here, where you walk in, browse the goods, and check out. One pattern is Cage Match Retail, where goods with price labels are displayed behind a grille or fence, usually from someone’s home. You make your selection, pay for your order, and it’s handed through to you.

The other predominant pattern is Garage Sale, where people set their goods up in front of or just inside their homes for shoppers to browse.

As a shopper, it’s created a distinct hunter-gatherer vibe. We found a bottle of vegetable oil at a little tienda, and it felt like we’d found a muskrat in one of our traps. We were positively giddy.

The whole point of this entire adventure is to feel, as much as is possible, like we’re living as locals. And the point of visiting Cuba is much like the impulse to visit the Yanomami: to see an endangered way of life before it disappears from the face of the earth forever. It’s inevitable that Cuba will open up, and that things will change as a result. For the better, hopefully, and not just so that Americans can again treat it like their slutty divorcée neighbor. Despite the distortions caused by the bloqueo, there’s something special here that I think is unique. I’m glad we’re getting to see it before it sinks beneath the waves.