Cuba: The Petrified Forest

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To the Bureau. Nowhere does the decay show more vividly than in Fidel Castro himself. The old Castro was a swinger, an extrovert who enjoyed yakking with Western newsmen or moving along the embassy cocktail circuit. He gunned around town in a souped-up Oldsmobile, showing up everywhere for spur-of-the-moment rallies, TV talkathons, hilarious games of beisbol in Havana's public parks, spearfishing at Varadero beach and interminable gabfests with the students at Havana University, where he would often hold court until 4 or 5 a.m. No more. Today's Fidel Castro has a dull, grey look about him. He goes only to Iron Curtain receptions, talks only to Communist correspondents—and then only out of duty. "The heady days are over," notes a resident in Havana. "All you hear of Castro these days is in the newspapers. He's suddenly started behaving like a bureaucrat. We've been told he often doesn't stir from his desk all day."

And like Castro, everybody else in Cuba is getting dull. Younger Brother Raul, Cuba's armed forces chief, who used to give a pretty noisy speech, now works in the background as quietly as any Russian general. President Osvaldo Dorticos sometimes does not even bother to accept the credentials of new ambassadors, shunting the chore instead to an assistant. As Russification grows, Cuba's bureaucracy is now overlaid by yet another bureaucracy. Two years ago, the P.U.R.S., Cuba's Communist Party, organized a special branch to provide political commissars in the military, factories and national education system.

The Happy City. In the early years of the revolution, Havana retained much of its irrepressible, boisterous humor. Four years after Castro, the place still bustled, its hundreds of bars thronged with noisy knots of people guffawing over the latest rumors, its streets snarled with ill-tempered, horn-honking traffic jams. Today there are hardly any rumors, and the streets are so empty that even impoverished La Paz, Bolivia, teems with traffic by comparison. The armed militiamen and -women once standing guard in truculent excitement before virtually every public building have disappeared. Life has become predictable, its Latin impulse governed by ration books, arbitrary government edicts and complex forms to be filled out in quadruplicate.

The regime tries valiantly to convince Habaneros that their city is still the same old fun town it always was. A sign in one hotel proclaims: "Let's tour this happy city at night." But people stay away from nightclubs, theaters and restaurants. The thudding propaganda in the shows is one reason; the food and drink are another. A daiquiri runs $1.10, and the once-famed Cuban rum approaches the undrinkable. A sinewy little beef filet goes for $10 at the official exchange rate, and red snapper for $4.50 a plate. "It's Stalin-style economics carried to the ultimate," says one foreign visitor. "If you can strip the consumer economy of its buying power, then you can plow your resources into heavy machinery and infrastructure."