Photos by Grégoire Korganow, text by Antonio José Ponte
Photos are taken from Avoir 20 ans à La Havane, by Grégoire Korganow and Jean Springer, published by Editions Alternatives, Paris, 1998. Antonio José Ponte is a Cuban writer and poet (see box).
 Spend an evening in
Havana or some other Cuban town such as Matanzas or Pinar del Río and you
get the feeling time is at a standstill. The past slips away, and the future is a
long time coming, so you are left stuck in the present. To be 20 years old in Cuba
is to be 20 years old for ever. It is either a wonderful gift or a refined form of
torment. The choice is yours.Twenty is an age when you most feel the immensity of time. Young people have many hopes, but they are quickly betrayed. After three or four dreams have come to nothing, those that are left seem vain. Impatience makes you see everything that happens in the same way. You haven’t yet learned the adult art of concealing boredom. Asking young Cubans about the future, or–to put it more bluntly–about their destiny, is like asking them for a false address. They’ll say they’ve never heard of it, that it doesn’t exist. The shrewdest of them will say that the future is elsewhere, not here. When you’re 20, you want to be somewhere else, far away. Perhaps most 20-year-olds feel like that, all over the world. They certainly do in Cuba. The capital and provincial towns and villages are full–crowded and empty at the same time–of things that signify nothing. You’re at the ideal age to enter a new world, but you find the world around you has already been taken over by others who got there before you. It isn’t possible to create anything new in a country at the end of its history. Revolutions come to power to make sure that governments stand still, on the grounds that there have already been enough changes in the country’s history. When you are young, you tend to look for things that have not been fouled up by earlier generations, things that they did not know about and so are untainted by their approval. Fed up with provincial life, people can set their sights on moving to Havana, while people tired of Havana will want to leave the country. Afterwards, often when it’s impossible to return, they will want to be back in Havana, or in some provincial town or village. The reason for such wanderings is partly biological, partly political. Or rather totally biological and totally political, if we accept that in cities human biology has become political. A thirst for adventure The Cuban government has often managed to turn this desire to escape to its own advantage. Taking part in other countries’ wars, compulsory military service, schooling organized in the fields, and the mobilization of teenagers all exploit this need to leave home and slake a thirst for adventure. These are children’s crusades, exceptional intervals in the prevailing stagnation. Many are set on leaving–the youth who builds a raft and sneaks out of the country on it, those who try their luck in the U.S. immigration lottery, or sell their bodies to foreigners in the hope of getting help to leave the country. For people who live in the unending present, the best ploy is to saturate each moment with activity, until it gives way to the next. You can call that joie de vivre or a horror of the void–take your pick. Young people in Cuba are full of both. A social experiment like the 1959 revolution, which has spent so many years defying the basic laws of economics, which imposes austerity as a way of thinking and poverty as a daily routine, is bound to produce young people with an outsized acquisitive instinct. To be 20 in Cuba is to be obsessed with money. A country where wages are paid in the national currency but where you can only live if you have foreign currency, incites people to flee, to go to the place where that currency comes from. One might object that education will eventually change the situation of Cuban youngsters. But teachers’ lessons do not deal with the real world. This is inevitable. Like all education, Cuban education teaches people to aspire, to want certain things, to achieve goals. But these are verbs that cannot be conjugated when time stands still, when there is a void. If the youngsters happen to get good training, it will simply equip them to live far away, abroad. The equation boils down to shortages on the one hand, and money and beauty on the other. This is a discovery made at 20 which stays with you until the day you sink into oblivion and death. In Cuba, at 20, you discover another reality: the inability to run your own life, or to try to balance the two sides of the equation. But long before you reach 20, you discover that what’s lacking is freedom. |
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A bride at her parents’ home, just before a Havana wedding. The divorce rate in Cuba is high, and it is not uncommon for Cubans to marry three or four times. |
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A young couple and their child. |
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‘The most beautiful land’
Since the 1959 revolution, Cuba has been a communist state headed by Fidel Castro who, as well as being president is chairman of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (the only permitted party) and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Education and health care for all have been two of the pillars of the revolution for the past 40 years. As a result, Cubans have a level of literacy only surpassed in Latin America by Argentina and Uruguay, and the region’s highest life expectancy (76.1 years). Several hundred Cuban doctors are presently working outside the country. The tradition of sending doctors abroad started soon after the revolution began and peaked between 1975 and 1989. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the communist bloc plunged Cuba into a serious economic crisis. According to the Cuban government, the island’s gross national product (GNP) fell by 35% between 1989 and 1993, and then rose by 2.5% in 1995, 7.8% in 1996 and 2.5% in 1997. According to United Nations statistics, Cuba’s per capita GNP was $1,983 in 1995. Castro has cautiously opened up the country to foreign capital, allowed the free circulation of the U.S. dollar, and encouraged the development of tourism. These changes have led to the reappearance of social problems such as prostitution and petty crime which had been eradicated or had become insignificant. In the political sphere, the one-party system continues to exist, the independent media cannot develop, and international human rights organizations deplore the way dissidents are treated. An estimated one million Cubans are thought to live in exile. |
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Cuba’s new wave of writers and poets
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