On the other hand, we may be new to Chicago, but it’s still fundamentally our culture. It’s less a foreign locale than a new neighborhood, so it’s not clear to me what I might have to say, other than, “Hey! Cool new neighborhood, amiright?” It just doesn’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about Chicago.

As it happened, I was having this very conversation with my sister, Nef, and my niece, Amber, as we walked to a downtown protest about Trump sending ICE and troops to Chicago. Spoiler: the demonstrators were opposed. I basically laid out the argument above, to have them push back that they thought the blog was about something else entirely. I don’t remember what, exactly, as I was confused as to whether I was supposed to be offended that someone else was defining my intentions as a writer or chagrined that I didn’t seem to be doing what I thought I was doing. Regardless, their contention was that their interpretation of the blog’s focus permitted plenty of Chicago reportage.

Then we got to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive, the gathering spot for the protest, and I realized that they were right. Maybe not regarding my objectives in blogging, but they were certainly correct that Chicago would offer ample blogging opportunities. Looking at the crowd gathered there, I felt as much confusion as to what the natives were doing as I did in any of the more credibly “foreign” places we’ve visited. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how comfortable I felt now that I was baffled. It’s the place I’ve been living the past couple of years, and it feels like home.

As with everywhere else we’ve been, I was struggling to understand the purpose, meaning, and intention of what I was seeing. It just wasn’t clear what we were there to do. Protest, sure, I got that part, but to what end? The desired outcome of this activity wasn’t at all obvious to me.

Which is not to shit all over protests and demonstrations. They’re all we have. But they’re inherently performative, which is why I’ve never attended one before. They’re about expressing anger and outrage, and while I’m certain that expression feels cathartic, it’s not going to directly lead to anything changing. Unless we deploy the Kathmandu method, which didn’t seem to be on the menu. Absent that, which I’m also certain was cathartic, the best a protest can do is let people know that other people are outraged. And if enough people know that enough other people are outraged, A Change Is Gonna Come, I guess. It all feels very abstract.

This particular protest also felt super chill. As this was Baby’s First Protest, Amber prepped me on the walk over, letting me know that I would be seeing more police than I had ever seen in my life.

Or not.

This was about it. There was no presence at all at the plaza, and maybe a couple of bike cops at each intersection on the march, clearly meant to manage traffic rather than keep the peace. No riot shields in phalanxes, no truncheons at the ready, no water cannons poised to gently nudge miscreants back to the path of righteousness. Just… traffic control.

It was, if I’m being honest, a little bit of a letdown.

I think maybe it was because, in an alignment unlikely to reoccur, the cops and protestors were on the same side. Nobody wanted a massive ICE presence or troop deployment. The citizens because, “How dare you?” and the cops because, “Hey! Brutalizing Chicago’s citizens is our thing! Stay in your lane.” Still, the absence of water cannons and beatings was probably a net positive. However it came about.

The result was a vibe more Lollapalooza than Watts Riots. There was marching and chanting of slogans and waving of signs. One of the chants sounded like “Trump loves donuts,” which, sadly, it was not. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have a bullhorn, as that’s certainly the chant I’d have led. So many great reasons for me to not have a bullhorn.

The signs, however, were 100% the highlight of the experience. If you’ve been following along, you know that we always document entertaining examples of local graphic design, and this place was a hotbed, from hand scrawled to elaborately printed. Many of them were clever and funny, but quite a few seemed not fully on point. While the ostensible purpose of the gathering was to protest the Trump administration’s plans to send the military to Chicago to assist ICE deportation efforts, the signage reflected a less focused umbrage.

And there were a ton of signs that just seemed hilariously off the mark. Calls to release the Epstein files. An earnest young woman carrying a handmade sign with the reproductive rights slogan, “Keep Your Hands Off Our Bodies.” An obviously unassailable sentiment, just not particularly related to the stated purpose of the demonstration. And this:

OK.

But my favorite was this:

I apologize for truncating the sign. The full quote is, “First off, fuck your bitch and the clique you claim.” At the time I thought, well, you’re just angry, aren’t you? Not sure about what, but that’s not a happy sentiment. Then I looked it up, and it’s a lyric from a famous 2Pac dis track, Hit ‘Em Up, and that rabbit hole left me more confused than when I thought it was just random.

Hit ‘Em Up is about the West Coast/East Coast beef that eventually took 2Pac’s life, among others. He specifically called out East Coast rappers such as the Notorious B.I.G, Diddy, and Mobb Deep. For being, you know, bad people. And suggesting that the appropriate response to their badness was to fuck they bitches, to be followed by stabbing and shooting. Not of the bitches, of the bad people. Bitches are for fucking, not stabbing and shooting. Go down that path and soon enough you’ll run out of bitches to fuck. No one wants that.

Anyway. A measured, thoughtful, reasonable position. Hard to argue.

But harder to find the thread that connects the quote to the event. Is it a metaphor? Are we 2Pac, and is the Trump administration East Coast rappers? Are we supposed to fuck they bitches? Before stabbing and shooting? If that’s the intention, does the sign carrier understand that we die in the end?

This was more targeted to the rationale of the gathering, but so telegraphic I had to decode it for our group.

I can’t begin to tell you how I knew this, but the sign refers to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defines the requirement for soldiers to follow orders, but provides an affirmative defense for failing to do so if the order was illegal. That’s a subtle, perfectly targeted argument that, maybe, could have been made a tad more obvious.

And these are just funny.

I’m glad I went, because we brought the Trump administration to its knees, and about damn time he faced the consequences of collective action. Next up: climate change. Or vaccines. Or tariffs. Or extrajudicial killings.

No wonder those signs were stuffed.

Taken in total, Vietnam’s economic system feels like Western capitalism with some of the Darwinian struggle for survival shaved off. It’s tough to argue that that’s an inherently bad thing. You can debate the particulars, but it hardly seems like a system that threatens our way of life.

Where capital C Communism is felt most strongly here is in the political system, rather than the economic structure, and in a post-colonial nationalism that is the primary justification for that political system. Much like in Cuba, the single-party system is a bulwark against Western fuckery. That’s not a convenient justification, that’s a fact. Multiple political parties would permit dark money to flow in from Western actors who have an economic stake in a compliant government. We may not be blockading Vietnam, as we are Cuba, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t fuck it in a heartbeat if we could.

Economically, the difference between the US and Vietnam is a values-based fork in the capitalist road. We favor rugged individualism, and we’re happy to let you die to prove the point, while Vietnam favors the collective good. That’s on Vietnam’s side of the ledger, in my book. But what about the distinctions between our multi-party free-for-all and Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party rule? It’s not clear that we win that duel, either.

The purported virtues of our system are: transparency – the ability to see and understand how our government functions and makes decisions; accountability – a free press that exposes our government’s failings, allowing voters to hold politicians responsible for their actions; and competition – a marketplace of ideas that allows debate and an informed electorate.

That all seems positively quaint now, doesn’t it? Transparency and accountability have always been in conflict, with government trying to shield its inner workings from prying eyes. That’s been turned up to 11 lately, but it’s hardly new. And we seem out of the habit of holding politicians accountable for their sins. As for the marketplace of ideas, there hasn’t been any genuine conflict since FDR, with both Democrats and Republicans alike faithfully representing the donor class. An oligarchy that cosplays as a Free Market is still an oligarchy.

So how about the evils of Communism? Vietnam’s government criminalizes dissent and has no free press. It is notably corrupt, both at the petty greasing-palms level and at the senior abuse-of-power level. And it makes decisions that have broad impact without input or oversight.

We’ve had the luxury here, as we did in Cuba, of having more access to locals than in many of our destinations. We’ve been able to have pretty frank conversations with our host’s daughter, An Binh, and our guide in Lan Ha Bay, Ryan. An Binh and her mother have been by twice to cook us traditional meals, and on their second visit we asked An Binh if she was comfortable discussing her government. She was.

We asked her about the whole notion of dissent or disagreement, and she seemed genuinely puzzled. Her position was that her government was responsibly acting in its citizen’s interest, so there was no need to disagree or protest. The government passed the laws and it was every citizen’s duty to obey them. Failing to do so is, and she had to look the word up to make sure she got the right English word, reactionary.

There’s a number of ways to look at that belief. You could claim that “Vietnam is just an obedient culture,” but a) there’s no metric you could use to validate that statement, and b) it’s pretty fucking reductive. Like “China has been ruled by emperors for centuries, they’re used to being told what to do.” Kind of insulting, so I’m not inclined to go there. It would be like claiming that the current situation in the US is because “we’re just a lawless culture.” Maybe, kinda, but also, shut the fuck up.

You could claim that it’s the result of lifelong educational indoctrination, and the use of the specific term “reactionary” gets you at least part of the way to that explanation. But it’s not like we don’t use our educational system to indoctrinate the young with specific values. In fact, we fight over what those values should be all the time.

You could chalk it up to a genuine credulousness, but that doesn’t square with the rest of An Binh. She’s a bright, articulate young woman with a good head on her shoulders. I’m hesitant to lob “credulous” in her direction.

Which leaves one with, à la Occam’s Razor, that she was expressing a genuine, considered belief. I’m inclined towards this explanation, as we pushed back gently, explaining that US politicians often acted in self-interest, rather than for the good of their citizens, and that’s why we needed a free press and the right to protest.

We also asked about urban renewal and relocation. Some of the denser parts of the cities lack adequate public services and can only be brought up to safe, modern standards through demolition and rebuilding. Residents get relocated, and we asked An Binh about the tradeoff between the individual right to stay with their communities vs. the state’s right to rebuild according to plan. She explained that in those situations families were compensated, and if you thought your compensation was unfair you could petition for an increase, and even be represented by a lawyer.

But at no point did An Binh question the right of the state to take actions it deems fit for the greater good. And, again, we do the exact same thing. Eminent domain.

Our other data point was our Lan Ha Bay guide, Ryan. We had a discussion with him about the government’s mandated changes to the historic floating village way of life. He was less “everything they do is for our benefit” and more “they make the rules, what are you gonna do?” There’s a little daylight between his position and An Binh’s, but certainly not enough to drive a protest through. We suspect the difference is that Ryan, as a member of the floating village community, has felt the impact of the state’s decisions in ways decidedly less abstract than An Binh, who’s college educated and solidly middle class.

When you look at the scoreboard it’s hard to give a definitive W to the US of A. We have a theoretically vibrant information economy, whose openness makes it prone to propaganda and exploitation. Vietnam has state-owned media that serves as an organ for government propaganda. If that’s not a tie, it’s 51-49 for the US.

Vietnam jails protesters and dissenters, and we practice extraordinary rendition on the street. That’s just a straight-up tie. And, “Yeah, but we just started” is a pretty lame defense.

Economically, we have late-stage capitalism’s death grip on our institutions, while Vietnam has a centrally planned economy. I think that’s a point for the visitors. Also a point, I think, for their stronger commitment to their social safety net. Their system has holes, but so does ours.

Vietnam is noted for its corruption. Thank goodness that never happens in the US. Tie.

Vietnam has single-party rule and the US has multiple parties. But do we? Really? Sure, right now there’s a bigger gap between the Anarchist Party and the Institutionalist Party than we normally enjoy, but over the last almost 100 years they’ve oscillated mildly around an agreed upon middle. If it’s not an actual tie, it’s another 51-49 win for the US.

That scoreboard just isn’t the smackdown we’ve been promised in the Manichean struggle of Light over Dark. It’s just another system, another way of solving problems, the political manifestation of a difference in values.

At the end of the day, while I actually prefer Vietnam’s values over ours, I’m not sure I’d want to live under Vietnam’s system. But I also don’t want to live under ours, as currently configured. The benefits of free speech, a free press, and the right to assemble and protest may seem a little abstract these days, but they’re also the tools we’ll use to put out democracy’s dumpster fire. So I’m kind of attached to them.

I also wouldn’t care to live under a monarchy or a theocracy. But we’ve spent time in both, and they each have something to offer, to teach us about how different approaches can lead to solutions that seem out of our reach. It’s not like demonizing the other has gotten us anywhere useful. Perhaps it’s time to listen instead.

All Things Ho

The story of Communism in Vietnam is the story of Ho Chi Minh. Unlike Castro, who was pushed to Communism by American fuckery, Ho was dyed in the wool. The precursor to the current CPV (Communist Party of Vietnam) was Uncle Ho’s Indochinese Communist Party, which he founded in 1930. A unified Vietnam with a Communist structure was his lifelong dream. He died in 1969, just a few years short of that dream being realized when Sài Gòn fell and the Americans fled in 1975.

Ho is still a revered figure here, for his tenacity in ousting the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for his humble lifestyle and his teachings. More Ataturk than Pol Pot. No one refers to Uncle Stalin. Unless Stalin was their actual uncle.

I’m not an apologist for brutality. In Vietnam’s case, both North and South engaged in repression, assassination, and ruthlessness. Ho’s struggle was both a revolution and a traditional war. Eggs were broken, and I’m not arguing that the tasty omelet made it all worthwhile. Today, Vietnam is notable for both repression and corruption, not exactly a Denver Omelet of governance.

But the founder of this state is beloved. Maybe nostalgically, as an avatar of a morally simpler time, when independence was an inarguably worthwhile goal that hadn’t yet metastasized into a self-perpetuating regime. Still, it’s pretty tough to walk through a revolution without atrocities clinging to your pants, so you have to give Uncle Ho credit where it’s due. He’s a legit father-of-our-country hero to the Vietnamese people.

Visiting With Uncle

All unbeknownst, we happen to be in Vietnam during the Reunification Day celebration. And not just any Reunification Day, but the 50th anniversary. Sài Gòn fell on 30 April, 1975. They celebrate, as would I, the anniversary of us running away. On top of that, the very next day, 1 May, is International Worker’s Day. We were expecting they’d pull out all the stops for a multi-day holiday. Posters all over the city strongly suggested a shindig.

Which happened. In Ho Chi Minh City. That’s where all the military parades and spectacles took place.

Hà Nội, not so much. A fifteen minute fireworks show on 27 April, and a list of all the cool cultural exhibitions in the city, none of which were staged especially for the holiday. We felt a little gypped, Hà Nội being the capital and all. Admittedly, it’s the celebration of Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn falling, but that was kind of the North’s handiwork.

This was as close as we got to a parade. Which is nothing to sniff at. I just think it would have been enhanced with a phalanx of tanks and soldiers. So sue me.

It was especially disappointing after working so hard to get to Cuba for International Worker’s Day in 2023 only to have the parade cancelled due to gas shortages. Whatever. We were in Ho’s home town, and we’d make the most of it. His mausoleum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the restored stilt house that he lived in are all located together in a lovely park. If there weren’t going to be parades, we’d pay our respects in person.

As it happens, the grounds are really beautiful, which is a good thing, as both the mausoleum and museum were closed. The museum because we went on a Monday and we’re stupid. The mausoleum is also closed on Mondays, but we asked, and it wasn’t going to be open Tuesday, either. We’d read that Uncle is shipped to Russia for a couple of months every year to have his oil changed and tires rotated before going back on display, and that’s what we think was going on.

At least Uncle’s residence, the stilt house, was open. We would not leave empty handed.

The residence is gorgeous. Beautiful hardwood construction, open and airy and light, with the pond right beside it. I’d live in that house in a heartbeat.

The grounds also included the Presidential Palace. I’m not sure if that was also closed on Monday or if it’s just not open to the public, but it was off limits while we were there. There are gardens, all ridiculously well manicured, food stalls, and souvenir shops dotted about. We saw this in one of the gift shops, which briefly inspired in us a desire to be grandparents. I think it’s gone now. But seriously. How could you not crave a small creature to wear one of these?

The other highlight was a series of cartoons explaining the concept of karma. This one was labeled #4, and we saw another labeled #1, so we’re guessing that there were two other pentaptychs (look it up) that we missed. Here’s a full set for you. We’ll start with positive karma.

Here’s the vastly more entertaining negative karma.

I hope you enjoyed that. Vote for your favorites in the comments.

And that’s everything you need to know about both Communism and Buddhism. You are entirely welcome.

The Internet

Cuba opened up to a largely uncensored internet in 2015, with private wifi becoming available in 2019. They’re still not keen on pornography, terrorism, and, curiously, satanism, but they don’t appear to limit access to news sites or prohibit the downloading of files. It’s now possible to rent a casa particular through airbnb that includes wifi. But that doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Having a wifi router in Cuba, in either a rental or your own home, is a big deal. Not everyone can get one, as there has to be a spare, dedicated phone line in your unit, and it has to be up to ETECSA (the state-owned telecom) standards for data. If you don’t meet those requirements now, it can be a long wait to have ETECSA upgrade your line. Our local friend Jenn told us it took her four years to get an upgraded line installed.

And there’s no such thing as broadband, as the connectivity is through standard copper phone lines. What’s provided is just the pipe, not the data. It’s as if Comcast provided the cable modem and Charter provided the data plan that was available through that modem. It’s just that in Cuba, both of those providers are ETECSA.

If your apartment doesn’t have a wifi router, there are public wifi hotspots. Parks and government buildings tend to have public wifi. That’s why you often see large groups hanging out in the same location in public, all of them head down on their phones. Cuban cell phone plans, provided by, natch, ETECSA, also come with some cellular data. I don’t know how much, but I do know not a lot. Locals seem to use cellular data as an emergency.

I can vouch for that. We use Google Voice, which is VOIP, so we don’t need an actual cellular service. Instead, we use a global data service, Airalo. Except Airalo doesn’t operate in Cuba. The only service we found that does is Gigsky, and the cost difference is dramatic.

With Airalo, we get 20 gigabytes of data that we can use over a six month period for $89. We don’t use anything like 20 gigs of roaming data in six months, so that works out to a very affordable $15/month each to have essentially unfettered global roaming data, which is probably cheaper than your cell plan. The Airalo plan only covers 89 countries, so there will be times when we have to pick up a more expensive plan to close the gap. This is one of those times.

Gigsky’s plan is $24 for 200 megabytes of data over two weeks. That is not a lot of data, and a lot of it gets used just by your phone doing phone things when you turn cellular data on. It’s taken me three $24 data packs to figure out how to use it. Basically like taking a camp shower: turn the water on to get wet. Turn the water off. Soap. Turn the water on. Rinse. Turn the water back off and thank your lucky stars you got a fucking shower. Ingrate.

For the phone, that looks like: turn off Cellular Data globally, for the phone. Turn off Cellular Data for every app on your phone. When you need to look something up using cellular data, turn it on for that app only, then turn it on for your phone. Look up what you need to, and then shut off Cellular Data for both phone and app right away, before your phone does something stupid behind your back.

Our other fix has been to shift to Maps.Me for local mapping, rather than Apple Maps or Google Maps. Maps.Me lets you download full country maps to your phone, so you don’t need to be connected when you’re wandering around. Mapping is probably 90% of what we use while we’re outside (Wikipedia is the other 10%), so that’s pretty much eliminated the need for cellular data.

So if wifi is only the pipe and cellular data is, at best, an emergency method, how do you get data? ETECSA sells it. By the hour. How do you buy hourly ETECSA data? At an official government ETECSA office. Hourly data can be purchased as cards with passcodes, or loaded onto a permanent account. And it’s not very expensive: $25 CUP, about 15¢, per hour.

The permanent account sounds easiest, and our host said we could open one at an ETECSA office. Except we couldn’t. We could never figure out why. Whenever we asked about opening an account, we were just told No. Sometimes with a sad head shake, sometimes without. But always No. We don’t know if they’re not permitted for foreigners or they were just somehow unavailable whenever we asked. And we’ll never know.

The cards come in two denominations: one hour and five hour. But you’re only permitted to purchase three cards at a time, whatever the denomination, so five hours is best. If they have any five hour cards at the ETECSA office. Or one hour cards. They frequently seem to have neither. But the three card limitation is per passport, so Dorothy and I have started going together, to double up.

We’d gone to our closest ETECSA office to be told they didn’t have any cards. Tomorrow? Sad head shake. But we were directed to an office about a 15 minute taxi ride away, and jumped at the opportunity. After waiting in line, because waiting in line, I got three five hour cards. And Dorothy got… two. We appeared to have gotten the last five hour cards and hightailed it out of there before the locals noticed that we’d emptied the vault.

One of the oddities of this whole system, by the way, is the manner in which connectivity is managed. We’re used to bandwidth constraints, but I think that between the slow backbone to Venezuela and the copper to the router, there isn’t enough bandwidth to carve up for meaningful measurement. Which leaves time. But weirdly, once I’ve authenticated a single client to the wifi router, any other client that logs into that router picks up the internet connection. You’d think, since they’re metering time, that it would be device-by-device. Maybe it’s a technical limitation of their router environment, and maybe it’s that multiple clients will still be sharing the same constrained bandwidth, so who cares. Either way, it’s actually nice that we can both hop online to check email and such at the same time.

How long did it take us to figure out how to (more or less) reliably get internet access? About two weeks into our four week stay. But we’re pros now, and everything works fine. Or as fine as it actually works.

Currency

As complicated as the Internet is, it’s a cakewalk compared to Cuban currency.

Until 2021, Cuba had two currencies: the Cuban Peso (CUP) and the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC). The CUC was introduced in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the Cuban Peso had previously been pegged to the ruble), and was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. The official exchange rate for the CUP was 25 to the US dollar. While there are many reasons for and impacts of the dual currency system, one of its effects was to create a two-tiered economy. Workers were paid in CUP, whereas foreigners used CUC, putting the value of hard currency beyond the reach of most Cubanos. Businesses with a foreign clientele thus had access to the much higher value CUC.

Curiously, the elimination of the CUC didn’t change things. The two-tiered economy still exists, it’s just enforced by prices. There are goods and services priced for the local economy, and goods and services priced for the tourist economy and those with access to the hard currency associated with the tourist economy.

Taxis are out of reach of most locals, as are most bars and restaurants, although there is cheaper street food that’s pitched towards local consumption. For the higher priced services, prices are expressed in USD or Euros, although CUP can be used (at not the most generous exchange rate). Higher end restaurants will often have menus with prices in USD, and taxis will often quote fares in USD. You can’t use USD for any official business, but it’s coin of the realm in the real world.

Making matters even more complicated, as if that was possible, is the existence of the MLC: Moneda Libremente Convertible (Freely Convertible Currency), introduced in 2019. The MLC is a payment method that uses a special credit card that can be loaded with any currency, and then used to pay for goods and services with shops that accept the MLC card. Which appears to be next to nobody.  We’ve only seen one store so far that we couldn’t purchase from because we didn’t have an MLC card. It’s not at all obvious what problem the MLC is meant to address.

Hard currency is in high demand, so while the official CUP-USD exchange rate is still 24:1, the street exchange rate is about 180:1. We’ve exchanged through our host at 170:1, which seems like a perfectly reasonable premium for not having to wander about the streets hoping not to get scammed. While the disparity between official and street exchange rates would seem to create an irresistible arbitrage opportunity, the CUP can’t be exchanged outside of Cuba, and you can’t take more than 5,000 CUP (about $30 at street rates) out of the country.

In addition, the existence of the unofficial foreign currency market has forced the Cuban government to compete. The government now exchanges most foreign currencies at about four times the “official” rate, which isn’t confusing at all. The current official unofficial rate is 120:1, which closes the gap but still leaves an attractive arbitrage opportunity, mitigated in part by the 8% fee the Cuban government charges to exchange USD. All other currencies have a 2% fee. Every dollar exchanged into the unofficial rate and back out at the official rate (which is the only way to turn CUP into USD – the unofficial market has no interest in selling its USD) would yield about a 30% return.

Honestly, I think the only thing that discourages exchange rate arbitrage tourism is the per transaction restriction of about $300 USD and the long bank lines. You could come to Cuba for a 30% return on your dollars, but that’s all you’d be doing while here. Still, I’d wager that some folks come here with that as their primary goal, regardless.

The Economy

Because only some people have access to the hard currency economy (airbnb hosts, taxi drivers, restaurateurs…), inequality is seeping into the Cuban economy. Obviously, nothing at all like the gap in the US, but it exists, and it’s a relatively new feature. It’s not a positive development, and is bound to have more severe negative consequences (e.g. higher crime…) down the road.

What largely counterbalanced the US bloqueo was the economic support of the USSR. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that all went to shit, ushering in what was known as The Special Period. That special period involved belt tightening and rationing, at both the individual and government levels. Sadly, those conditions are largely the same today as in the 90s. The US embargo has handicapped Cuba’s ability to recover from the loss of their primary patron and trading partner.

The Cuban government turned to tourism as a source of hard currency and economic growth. Tourism is now Cuba’s largest sector, representing 10% of Cuba’s GDP (meaning that the pandemic and the hurricane that followed it hurt Cuba even more than most countries). There’s no small irony in a socialist/communist haven focusing on tourism for survival. Attracting tourists requires providing the basic necessities that the Cuban government has had trouble providing to its citizens. As much as there’s a general understanding that tourism is a huge benefit to the economy, there’s also a great deal of frustration that tourists are prioritized over citizens. It’s tough to live with a five egg/month ration, when every day you pass tourist restaurants serving omelets for breakfast. For more than you can afford.

Other than the bloqueo itself, the other major economic distortion is emigration. The US has created a fast track path for Cubans (as well as Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) that eases the immigration process. The net effect of this policy is extractive, and is no different than the US building a mining facility in Cuba to extract some valuable resource. It’s just that the valuable resources are people and intellectual capital, and it doesn’t require getting one’s hands dirty with mines and such. It can be done very effectively and cleanly from a distance.

What happens is that young people are educated in the excellent and free Cuban educational system. When they have their degrees, they then take the knowledge and skills the Cuban government has provided them to the US, where their entry is facilitated and they can make more money. This both wastes the investment the Cuban government has made in these people’s education and brain drains Cuba, depriving the economy of the benefit of their knowledge and abilities.

Amplifying the physical brain drain is the virtual brain drain. Professionals who stay in Cuba are moving into the service economy, for access to hard currency. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers are waiting tables and driving taxis, because it pays better. It’s a perfectly rational decision, but it just adds to the factors hollowing Cuba out.

The bloqueo is strangling the Cuban economy, and has created the conditions under which the best and the brightest want to leave. This is a vicious cycle, in which poor economic conditions induce emigration, and emigration worsens economic conditions. Both ends of this fuckery circle jerk are fueled by intentional US policies.

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.

Unquestionably, the embargo has been a policy failure. It’s been in place for over 60 years, and we’re no closer to regime change than we were. In fact, in talking to locals here, it’s very clear that the bloqueo is considered a much bigger problem than their own government.

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.

And you know what? You can disagree with those priorities. Although on the ground they seem pretty rational. But that’s no excuse for trying to destroy their government and punish their people. If those kinds of philosophical differences justified an economic embargo, we’d have to sanction Finland. And just about everywhere else that doesn’t practice capitalism as if they were cosplaying Origin of the Species.

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.