The New York Review Abroad (51 page)

She went on. A few days earlier, her husband, who suffers from chronic heart problems, had spent five days in intensive care at the local hospital, undergoing treatment for severe hypertension. Even though she was wearing her hospital uniform and carrying her physician’s credentials, she said, the guards at the door to his room did not allow her to see him, or even to deliver a basket of food. I could picture her giving the guards several pieces of her mind, loudly, and I decided that what I liked best about her was the sense that she did not feel impotent or inconsequential, the way so many people who disagree with the Revolution seem to. Of course, she had never spent any time in jail, but the fact remained that she was still trying to drive a hard bargain with the people in charge of keeping her husband behind bars.

“I tell them, you let him free and I won’t say another word,” she
said in her exclaiming way, after mentioning that the State Security people had recently suggested that she might want to drop by their offices for a “constructive conversation.” I asked her why she thought Dr. Mendoza had not been freed after the Pope’s visit, and she said, for the first time looking worried and pained, that she didn’t know. I thought to myself that it might have something to do with the fact that he will have to serve three and a half years of his sentence before he is eligible for the parole that authorities choose to present as “amnesty.” If this is the case, he has more than thirty months to go.

I stared at the rain pouring in through the roof of the room where we were sitting while she saw to some urgent request of her youngest child. Everyone in the family looked healthy, and I wondered what miracles of thriftiness and hard barter were involved in making that possible. I had seen some ration cards for Santiago and other provinces, with the blanks showing that people had not received their allotted quotas of cooking oil, soap, or toothpaste for weeks on end; they were allowed, I saw, ten ounces of beans and one pound of meat substitute per person per month. Whatever food Caridad Piñón managed to acquire on the free market, at dollar prices, had to be stretched to provide for her husband as well; prisoners’ ration cards are suspended, on the grounds that they are fed in jail. It was all so difficult it was a wonder that she did not throw up her hands in despair, or blame her husband for the mess he had gotten everyone into. I asked her if she thought Dessi Mendoza knew that he would pay for his statements about dengue with an eight-year prison sentence. “Are you crazy?” she said. “He wouldn’t immolate himself like that. He’s not crazy!” It had simply not occurred to him that talking about a public health epidemic to an unauthorized audience could be so wrong.

Later I sat on the terrace of the pleasant turn-of-the-century hotel where I was staying, which overlooks a leafy plaza and the Cathedral
of Santiago. At the Cathedral the outspoken bishop of Santiago, Pedro Meurice, holds weekly support meetings for the relatives of prisoners. The hotel terrace, too, is a sanctuary of sorts, because on the streets that surround the hotel unaccompanied men or women like myself (and even, a Spanish couple told me, men held firmly by the hand by their wives) are targets for relentless hustling by women—or, in my case, men—hoping to obtain a few dollars in exchange for a little adventure. But because the money-seekers are not allowed on the terrace unless they are in the company of a hotel guest, a kind of tranquillity prevails there.

The just-formed Cuban-foreign couples who occupied so many of the tables around me were at peace: both partners had what they had come to find. And because Cuba is a place where fantasy and idealism and the pursuit of exoticism have always been intertwined, and because the women are so cheap that they are usually rented by the day, and because it is the hope of so many of the women who rent themselves out that one of their customers will want to keep her for good, the nature of the relationship between prostitute and customer was also different, I thought. A certain amount of trust had time to develop, along with the quest for romance and salvation involved on both sides. It seemed absurd that Dessi Mendoza should be in jail for talking to the foreign press while on the terrace hesitant conversations were taking place between the new couples—in sign language, or pidgin Spanish, or in whatever common language the two people had found.

I had spent some time talking with Bishop Meurice, and been struck by his arguments against the United States trade embargo, which he, like so many other Cubans, refers to always as “the blockade”—perhaps because the word more nearly conveys the besieged feeling of the island. “The Cuban Church has spoken out against the blockade in the past,” Meurice said. “It is unjust. But the fact is that
there are other realities that also affect the anguish lived by our people: unjust inequalities, state paternalism and centralism, limitations on civil society’s ability to participate. The blockade depends on the United States, but the rest of it depends on us. In a situation as hard as the one the Cuban people are living, the truth must be said: the blockade doesn’t help. On the contrary. It may prevent us from seeing those other realities.”

—June 11, 1998

Ian Buruma

1.

THE FIRST TIME
I visited Tibet, in the fall of 1982, scars of the Maoist years were still plain to see: Buddhist wall paintings in temples and monasteries were scratched out or daubed with revolutionary slogans. Now that new winds are blowing, these offending daubs have been scrubbed out in their turn. Chinese were around then, though not in large numbers, and almost all of them in military uniform. But the early 1980s were a time of relatively liberal policies. There was little sign of terror. And Tibetan towns still looked entirely Tibetan. Han Chinese influence was mainly confined to the barracks. Hotels hardly existed; restaurants were few and mostly bad. Even in the main cities of Lhasa, Gyantse, and Shigatse, there was little evidence of a modern economy.

Things have changed a great deal since then. Modernization replaced class struggle as the main form of propaganda, even though revolutionary dogma has not disappeared. Modernization is how many colonial powers before the Chinese justified their imperial rule in Asia, and elsewhere. And it is to a large extent how the Communist Party of China justifies its grip today. A huge amount of government money is being poured into the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” and Chinese fortune hunters are flocking there in ever larger numbers. Stories I had been hearing of the results, from travelers and reporters, were disturbing and often a little fantastic: gambling casinos, gigantic discotheques, four-story brothels. These are not uncommon establishments in the wild frontier towns of Chinese-style capitalism, but it took some imagination to picture them in front of the Potala palace or the Tashilhunpo monastery. When I decided to have a look, it was less in a spirit of outrage, however, than of curiosity about who, among the Tibetans, might be benefiting.

I did not see a gambling casino in front of the Potala, but it is true
that the road into Lhasa is lined with shabby little bordellos masquerading as karaoke bars, which means that customers are given the opportunity to sing before moving on to the main entertainment. That same road passes by a large, ugly sculpture of two golden yaks, which stands where the old West Gate of the city used to be until it was smashed by Red Guards in the 1960s. The golden yaks were a gift from the Chinese government to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of “peaceful liberation.”

Orville Shell complains in his book
Virtual Tibet
that Lhasa looks “drab.” I am not sure I agree. Much of the dilapidated charm of the old Tibetan city has gone, to be sure. Lhasa looks more like the market towns one finds around the borders of Thailand or in southern China—the East Asian versions of Dodge City in the old Wild West—teeming with Chinese carpetbaggers, hucksters, hookers, gamblers, hoodlums, corrupt officials, and other desperados lusting after quick cash. At the same time, as though from another planet, there are the Tibetan pilgrims, fingering their beads, spinning their prayer wheels, and moving their lips to endless prayers, and nomads with silver daggers and long hair tied up in red silk, and countrywomen in long skirts and striped aprons, and monks dressed in saffron and red. There is the constant din of Chinese and Hindi pop songs, market salesmen pitching their wares, and rattling machine gun fire from the video arcades (I saw a group of young monks staring in rapture at Tom Hanks stopping a tank in
Saving Private Ryan
). Weaving their way through all this hurly-burly with an air of imperial swagger are riot police in their green uniforms and the regular police in white—country boys with almost unlimited power speeding along in white jeeps, or cruising very slowly in unmarked Chinese-built Volkswagen cars. The general impression, then, is noisy, vulgar, raucous, and a little menacing, but drab it certainly is not.

One quickly gets a sketchy idea of the general divisions of labor.
The stores, restaurants, and most other forms of commercial enterprise are in the hands of Han Chinese, mostly from Sichuan, to judge from their accents and the preponderance of Sichuanese food. Petty traders, market salesmen, money-changers, and so on are often Muslims from the poor western provinces, such as Qinghai. They wear white caps and you see them hanging around the central market. Tibetans themselves tend to fall into two categories: country folk in traditional dress, who have come to the city to visit the holy places, and middle-ranking government employees, who sit around the Chinese fast-food restaurants, wolfing down plates of rice or noodles. Like many colonial people dependent on government jobs, they tend to run to fat.

I tried to see how the Tibetans fit into the brash new economy. At first sight it seemed that they did not, or at least only very few of them did. The pilgrims, nomads, and country people walked the same streets as the Chinese hustlers and traders, but they might as well have been in another country. They were also in a minority. More than half the people in Lhasa are Chinese, even though few of them stay there for very long, and almost none speaks Tibetan. This constant
va-et-vient
of fortune hunters is what gives Lhasa the impermanent, feverish atmosphere of a typical cowboy town. What makes it look more and more Chinese, apart from the people, is the new architecture, much of it gimcrack, most of it hideous, but of the same type you see all over the modern Chinese empire: squat white-tiled buildings with blue windows and kitschy, Chinese-style roofs.