Category Archives: Third World Development

Puerto Rico builds a train in the sky

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ALEX MARSHALL
Metropolis Magazine
October 2001

The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan’s overall breadth. The bulk of the city was developed after World War II, when tax breaks and other incentive programs brought in industry. And in good postwar fashion, American and Puerto Rican engineers and urban planners heavily promoted the highway as the proper spine for development.

With the construction of the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopes to find a mass transportation solution to its dependency on congested highways.

Two generations later, San Juan has reaped the result. Although its citizens earn substantially less than stateside Americans, they actually own more cars per capita. In fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest car-ownership rates in the world. Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars.

 

Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit.

Elmo Ortiz, the urban design manager for the project, is well aware of the challenges it faces. Like most of the staff, Ortiz works in a blockish brick building located off a busy highway. “We have sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ortiz, whose face is ringed with a corona of white beard and hair. “The transformation of the geography of this place is incredible.”

Tren Urbano has a chance of working, Ortiz says, because it is intended to facilitate the development of a new type of city, not just to transport people: “We are trying to create a new urban form.” He and others envision the conversion of the rail corridor into destinations where people can live, shop, and work around the stations.

“We need to bring development back into the cities, instead of continuing with the sprawl that we have throughout the island,” says Javier Mirand’s, manager of architecture at Tren Urbano. “We need higher-density housing with minimum parking and good access to transit. This is the first time in sixty years that there will be a dependable transit system on the island.”

In this, Puerto Rico is not unlike so many other American cities trying to fight sprawl with new passenger rail systems: Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and even Las Vegas have adopted similar projects in recent years. The greater challenge is that Puerto Rico resembles other Latin American cities in its high levels of crime and general paranoid atmosphere of security. Even convenience stores often buzz in customers. Apartment towers have double-entry security at the parking lot and inside the building. Wrought-iron gates and bars, which at first might appear decorative, encase many suburban homes. Many once accessible public streets have been gated and locked, privatized by their community. “How do you create housing around stations where people want to live in a gated community?” Ortiz ponders out loud, grimacing at the challenge.

Mass transit is difficult in such high-crime, high-fear regions, because people don’t want to associate with strangers. A related problem is race: lower-class Puerto Ricans tend to be dark-skinned, and whiter upper-class citizens may shy from using mass transit if it requires them to encounter poorer commuters.

But as in other countries, Puerto Ricans are now talking about “smart growth,” environmental protection, and different living patterns. “There has been a big shift in environmental consciousness, and that is going to help us redevelop cities and control sprawl,” Mirand’s says.

A specter hanging over the project is the fate of another expensive elevated train line: in 1984 a $1 billion, 21-mile elevated Metrorail line opened in Miami. Isolated by sprawl, it has attracted few riders and is widely considered an enormous white elephant.

Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985 and a native of Puerto Rico, predicts a better chance for the Tren Urbano because it goes through more work centers, such as the university and Rio Piedras. But San Juan will have to expand its system if it wants long-term success, he says: “Metrorail in Miami is a failure because it is an unfinished system. It’s like taking a table with four legs, and only building one leg and expecting it to stand. Structurally the two are similar, but I think the one in San Juan will be more successful.”

Aníbal Sepúlveda, professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico and author of the book San Juan: An Illustrated History of Its Urban Development, is pessimistic about the project’s chances, even while he hopes for its success. “I have not seen enough effort to plan around the stations,” he says. “It will not come automatically. There is such a low density. At the same time, we are still building highways and making it easier for developers to build tract houses.”

Sepúlveda also questions the appropriateness of an elevated train line. “We chose the most expensive project for the city, but not necessarily the best one,” he says. “It’s too much money. We will not be able to build future lines with the same technology.”

Because it is a heavy-rail system, Tren Urbano can move immense numbers of people cheaply. But it will only be cost-effective if enough people actually use it. Officials project an initial ridership of 100,000 a day, which is predicted to rise to 115,000 by year 2010. At those levels, revenues from the fares would pay about half the operating costs, which is typical for mass transit.

Ironically, the key factor in the project’s favor is San Juan’s horrible and worsening traffic, which may motivate commuters to take the train. With a $2 billion investment, San Juan and Puerto Rico have placed an expensive bet on the table. They may win a city with choices other than highways and sprawl, or lose both money and hope that a sprawl-oriented city and its citizens can ever be changed.

In Cairo: A Mega City Confronts its Challenges

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With the Middle East’s martial concerns filling the news, it was a change of pace this month to visit the region’s biggest city, Cairo, and examine more quotidian concerns, namely its urban planning policies and problems.

With approximately 18 million people (estimates vary), Cairo can be seen as both a problem and a solution to the challenges of a developing country. Cairo is, in one analyst’s term, a “Mega-city” – a huge, expanding cloud of population, much of it poor, that by some estimates is adding 1.25 million people a year. Where all these people live, how to give them water, dispose of their waste, and allow them to travel, are the central questions. The challenges of Cairo are, in a word, infrastructure.

In that, it is perhaps similar to New York, a metropolitan area it will soon surpass in size. But as our region struggles to add trains to the airport and another Hudson River rail tunnel, Cairo is more akin to New York of the 19th century. It is struggling to add a sewer system, subway service and parks.

All these needs have meant enormous investments in infrastructure. They are funding it in part due to help from their past (and some might say present) Colonial masters, France, Britain and the United States. The French helped finance and build the new subway, while Britain and the United States have helped finance and build a new sewer system as well as various other infrastructure projects seen around town. (The peace settlement with Israel has provided enormous financial benefits for Egypt. Since the Camp David accords in 1979, Egypt has received about $25 billion in aid from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.) On the streets, Cairo is a bustling, lively place at all hours. Even at midnight, streets are full, with people sitting drinking tea and playing backgammon. About a third of the women wear the Hijab, the Islamic scarf or veil that wraps around the head, while a tiny percentage also wear the niqab, the veil that covers the face completely.

Long-time Cairo residents notice that the percentage of women wearing traditional Islamic dress has increased tremendously in the last decade. It is a statement now not only of religious faith, but of national identity.

Not only were the sidewalks crowded, but the streets themselves were jammed with cars, mostly tiny, box-like black and white Fiats that were usually decades old. Traveling a mile or two by car, often the only option, could take an hour.

The Metro: Tunnels Through Sand All this street congestion is one reason why the city’s new Metro has caught on so quickly. Line 1, which connected two existing suburban railways through a four-stop, center-city subway, opened in 1987. It has 27 stations. Line 2 opened in 1999 and has 18 stops, 13 of which are underground. Line 1 cost $585 million, much of it from France. Egypt financed the $3 billion for Line 2 mostly by itself.

The two lines cut across the city in a rough Xpattern, with Line 2 running beneath the Nile River to Giza, where the Great Pyramids await. Despite its newness, already 1.8 million “Cairenes” use the Metro daily. By comparison, this is almost three times the 625,000 riders daily on the Washington, D.C. metro system. People use the Cairo Metro even though its price, 50 pilasters (about 10 cents), is considered high.

In its design, the Metro is clean and neat, with wide passageways and platforms. Designing the individual stations involved factors that were more common a century ago in New York. In Cairo, much of the population is illiterate (one estimate was only a third of the population could read and write), which is why the subway designers have given individual stations strong visual identities.

At the Opera station on Line Two, for example, images of Pharonic women in ancient Egyptian dress, inlaid in tile on the station walls, greet those who pull into the stations.

“This helps people figure out where they are,” said Ezz Eldin Fahmy, a principal and architect with EHAF Consulting Engineers in Cairo, the firm that designed the stations. “When they see the triangles look like boats, they know they are in Rod El Farago station. We had the theme of boats because this used to be the only port on the River Nile.” Under design is a third line, which will cut across the city to from east to west, and extend eventually out to the city’s airport.

Waste In and, Hopefully, Out Until recently, the city’s overburdened sewer system backed up more than 100 days a year, flooding the streets with raw waste. The city’s only formal sewer system was one built by the British just before World War I for a city of about one million people. It was grossly inadequate.

Using US-AID and British money, the city over the last two decades has built an entirely new sewer system, including an enormous treatment plant north of the city. Because the old system was so overburdened, this did not mean simply expanding a new system, but building a new one from scratch.

“They had to rethink the whole network,” said Mona Serageldin, professor of urban planning at Harvard Design School and a Cairo native who teaches a course on the city. “It was a major challenge in design.” The core of the new system was a “trunk line” – the central line to which others attach. This trunk line is 5 meters in diameter, and extends in a sloping, gravity-fed descent from south to north through the city until it ends up by the new treatment plant at a depth of 25 meters. Now completed in its core phases, it is one of the largest sewer projects in the world.

But the city is still struggling to connect everyone to it. Millions of the city’s residents live in illegally built concrete and brick apartments that scatter out across the desert in endless waves. One analyst estimated that 25 percent of the households in Cairo lack water and sewer connections.

As this mega-city struggles with sewers and subways, it’s also fighting to direct overall growth patterns. To keep sprawl from gobbling up agricultural land up and down the Nile, the government is redirecting growth to the east and west, into the desert. This has meant the establishment of several “new cities.” One of them, New Cairo, has a growth area of 43,000 acres – the equivalent of nine Manhattans in land area – and 2 to 3 million people are expected to live there.

It’s difficult to love this new “city” blooming in the desert. One section of “New Cairo” looked like a Middle-eastern version of outer Houston, with mega-supermarkets, concrete apartment buildings and even a golf course blooming from the desert.

Still, directing growth there seemed better than by the Nile, and plans are to eventually have transit.

The city is also building parks. The biggest is the new 87-acre Al-Azhar park, planned as Cairo’s “Central Park,” built just outside the Medieval city walls on a 1000-year-old garbage dump. (City inhabitants essentially pitched their garbage over a wall, and the pile eventually grew higher than the city itself.) Now under construction, this park will include promenades, restaurants, orchards and ponds. Buried underneath this calm environment are more serious functions – three enormous water tanks, each 80 meters in diameter, the size of small stadiums.

“We have 16 million people and we have almost no open space – nothing,” said Dr. Maher Stino, one of the park designers, as he led a visitor around the park site. Nearby, workers chiseled away at slabs of limestone for a park restaurant.

“We want to help the public understand what a park is and how to appreciate plants and nature.

We also want something unique to Cairo. We don’t want a copy of Regent Park [in London].” As the New York region struggles with its own challenges, it can perhaps gain a bit of perspective in seeing a similar sized region struggle with far greater ones.

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First Published Feb. 20, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, the newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.

In Cairo, An Old University Moves Out To The Suburbs

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Egyptian Sprawl

By Alex Marshall

With its move to a new city in the desert, is the American University in Cairo buying sanctuary or isolation?

“I started wearing it six months ago; I just felt like I wanted to,” Nancy El-Orindy says about the traditional Hijab scarf that she, like many women in Cairo, wears over her hair. “We are supposed to be covered so we don’t attract too much attention from guys.” The 19-year-old student slouches in a wicker chair in the central courtyard of American University in Cairo, an unlikely school in the heart of the capital city of Egypt. Around her, classmates sit at café-style tables and chairs, and young men play basketball on a shortened, urban-sized basketball court behind a wire fence. As the students lounge, a half dozen or so cats, ubiquitous in Cairo, slink about the walkways, stairs, and tables.
Orindy’s story illustrates the Waring-blender whirl of money, culture, religion, and history in the region. On the one hand, she wears the Hijab as an example of her new commitment to her Islamic and Egyptian roots. On the other hand, she plays college soccer–a passion she probably picked up in her native Canada, where she was born to Egyptian parents. She speaks English better than Arabic. And the professional goal of this Hijab-wearing, Canadian-born soccer player? “I want to go to fashion school, to be a dress designer,” she says with an embarrassed smile. “I like Gucci and Prada.” She can’t wear the clothes of the designers she admires, she says, but she can still design similar items for other women.

Orindy is one of 5,000 students at American University in Cairo (AUC), a school that is confronting and capitalizing on similar cross-cultural forces. Founded by Presbyterian missionaries from Minnesota in 1919, it is presently “an Egyptian University with an international student body teaching an American-style liberal arts education,” says its immediate past president, John D. Gerhart. Many of Egypt’s most prominent officials send their children to AUC. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s current strong-man president, is a graduate of the school, as are the couple’s two sons. But despite its largely Middle Eastern student body, the board of the school is still mostly American, and some of its funding comes through a stream of income set up by the United States government. It is routinely called “the best university in Cairo,” and many Arabs see it as part of a way their region might modernize: by copying the best of American-style liberalism in the classic tradition, through openness, education, and scientific thought.

Now the institution is embarking on an equally cross-cultural expansion program. The school is moving its entire campus from the heart of downtown Cairo to a spot 30 kilometers or so outside the city, on the edge of the desert, where it will occupy 260 acres in the middle of a planned new city called New Cairo. AUC has hired some of the world’s top architects to design the grounds, buildings, and interiors. Currently under construction, the $300 million project is intended to help the school become, if it isn’t already, the premiere research and teaching university in the Middle East.

But the university is expanding at a time when the American presence in the Middle East is expanding in ways that are highly inflammatory, at least within the middle east. This past spring American jets were bombing Iraqi cities just across the Nile and Red Sea. As American troops neared Baghdad, 50,000 Egyptians protested the American war and battled police at Tahrit Square outside AUC’s front gates. In fact, several AUC students were injured fighting police. In moving outside the city itself, the school is escaping some of these turbulent forces. But is it buying sanctuary or isolation? In moving to a closed, gated campus in the suburbs, AUC is gaining space but may be losing its soul.
The map of New Cairo outlines 46,000 acres, or 72 square miles–the equivalent of almost three Manhattan islands. It is the latest in a line of a half dozen “new cities” Egypt has built over the last half century in attempts to channel its swelling population. Presently, New Cairo looks like the outer growth edge of Houston or Dallas, with the replacement of blocky Cairo apartment buildings for Texas-styles subdivisions. These apartment complexes are springing up on cul-de-sacs placed off wide, empty highways. Closer to the center city a typical pattern of amenities is going up, including two water-hungry golf courses and a huge Carrefour supermarket. If all goes as planned (a big if), state planners project that 2.5 million people, a population the size of Chicago’s, will live here. Near the site of the AUC campus two broad boulevards are planned; on a map at least, they are supposed to fan out in Beaux-arts style, with homes and other buildings between them.

In its location, shape, size, and relationship to the highway, the new campus essentially resembles a regional shopping mall. The new school will have two million square feet of floor space set on amoeba-shaped 270 acres. As with a mall, parking lots will ring the new complex, with shrubbery and other landscaping to soften their impact. Students, who in Egypt are accustomed to living at home, will drive or be driven on the city’s beltway highway to the school. Many students live in wealthy suburbs outside the city, so they will actually be closer to the new campus than the old one.

The buildings and spaces–designed by an international team of seven firms–are imaginative and subtle, drawing on the approach of Islamic architecture if not its well-recognized symbols. The campus has few horseshoe-shaped arches or minarets, but it does have a lot of courtyards, wooden screens, and pathways that blend inside and outside space–all common in Islamic architecture. At a time when upper-class Egyptians, like Texans, are proud of their ability to air condition spaces, the university will rely on substantially natural cooling devises like courtyards, “wind catchers”–open vents on upper stories that funnel cooler air into a building–and groves of lemon, palm, and olive trees. The primary architect is a joint venture of Sasaki Associates of Massachusetts, and Community Design Collaborative of Cairo, led by Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim. On a site plan by Carol R. Johnson Associates and SITES International, Cairo, there’s also a library by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; student housing, a main auditorium, and a campus center by Legoretta + Legoretta of Mexico City; and athletic facilities by Ellerbe Becket.

The school’s present campus occupies a relatively tiny 7.3 acres in the heart of an older “New Cairo,” the nineteenth-century city laid out by Khedive Ismail after a visit to Paris during its renovation under Baron Haussmann in the 1860s. The school sits at a central square as broad, Parisian-style avenues merge around it. In fleeing all this the university is gaining space and flexibility but losing a richer cultural context. Already privileged, its student body will have even less contact with ordinary Egyptians. Right now, the university has its own stop on the city’s new subway system, and it’s just a block away from the enormous Egyptian Museum, designed by the British under colonial rule. The medieval city is a short drive or walk away.

“They did not try hard enough to get it together downtown,” says one local architect. “There are plenty of good examples of urban universities, like the Sorbonne or Leiden. The students could even walk a half mile to a building. They will be away from everyone and everything on the new campus. I’ll be damned if I’ll go schlepping out there.”

Another potential pitfall for the school is whether suburban New Cairo will ever come together in a style that resembles what is on the planning documents. At a luncheon in February, after the official groundbreaking, at the Katameya Golf and Tennis Resort in New Cairo, school officials and city planners began arguing over the area’s future and who would pay for what. “We try to get natural gas, and [city officials] say, ‘Sure, for twenty million dollars,'” complains Hussein M. El-Sharwaky, vice president of new campus development at AUC. “We want a metro line, they say, ‘Okay. One-hundred and twenty million dollars.'”

One Egyptian planner urged the school to open the campus to the public. “Don’t put up a fence,” says Raouf M.K. Helmi, who has a son and daughter studying at AUC. “Open your playground, your library. Open your beautiful facilities to the people.” In fact, the new campus of AUC, like the old one, will be mostly closed. The public can enter the exterior courtyard, an arts center, and the school bookstore, but the bulk of the campus will only be admissible with a pass.
Sometime in 2007, the new campus is set to open. Although the school appears set to gain a bright new campus with all the amenities, it is hard not to conclude it will lose much of its connectivity with other citizens and sectors of society. In moving to the fringes of the city, an elite, isolated school will become more so.

Abdelhalim, the bearded wise man of Cairo architecture who came back to his native city after 11 years in Berkeley, says the new campus will be a center for the commingling of cultures and ideas, regardless of its location. Just as the school blends Islamic architecture within an American-style campus, he hopes it will fertilize the Islamic world with Western-style education, to produce a new Islamic version of it. The essential question, he says is “What does a liberal arts education mean in Egypt, within an Islamic community?”

–Published in Metropolis Magazine, September 2003

A Glimpse of Cuba in 1988

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It was lunch hour inside the Ministry of Commerce in old Havana. In a small cafeteria, in a building that dated back to the 1800s, workers ate baked fish, rice and beans, soup, salad and cake, off white dishes on tin trays. They washed down the food and cut the sweltering heat with cold water from sweating metal pitchers placed on each of the 20 tables. Like many of the basics in contemporary Cuba, the meal was subsidized and cost each employee only a few cents.

A clerk there, a 58-year-old man with crooked teeth and thinning hair, spoke about why life was better, now that a Communist government ruled his country.

“Before the triumph of the revolution,” he said in a gravelly voice, “it was a dictatorship here. Only a small group of people”–and he held up one hand with the fingers bunched together–“had money, jobs, power and opportunity in life.”

“Now there’s liberty,” he said, and he grinned. “People have jobs and money. Hospitals are free. I have two sons–one is studying economics at the University and the other electronics at technical school.” He patted his pants pocket. “I didn’t have to pay a cent for their education,”
“I come from a poor family of farmers. We had no chance before. Things are much better now.”

This is one of the faces of Cuba.

A mile or so away from the Ministry of Commerce, a middle-aged woman sat on her bed in a small room with soaring, 20-foot ceilings where she lived with her two small children.

In the fading light of the afternoon, she spoke of feeling oppressed in a country where people were jailed for saying the wrong things, where neighbors watched each other for “counter-revolutionary” activity and sentiments, where private enterprise was forbidden and foreign travel restricted.

She spoke of tiring of the interminable meetings of the Committee in Defense of the Revolution–one of the thousands of local block committees which monitored the actions and the ideology of their members.

She spoke of Cuba’s president, the former “guerrillero” who almost 30 years ago, gained international fame by ousting a dictator and successfully standing up to the United States–then the strongest nation on earth.

“Fidel Castro is a great leader,” she said softly. “But he is only a leader.

Lowering her head, she said,

“I feel like a pigeon in a cage here.”

This is another face of Cuba.

Through Castro’s leadership and Soviet subsidies, Cuba now has universal education and literacy; it has a widespread system of modern hospitals and rural clinics staffed by Cuban doctors using Cuban manufactured medicine; it has full employment; it has eliminated hunger and malnutrition. Anyone who has travelled through other Latin American capitals and seen the filth, the beggars that gather like flies, and the miles of cardboard shacks on the outskirts of town, knows this is a remarkable achievement of which other Third-World nations can only dream.

A price has been paid for this transformation, although Cuba is still a Caribbean-Latin nation of surpising charm and sensuality. Its denizens still dance the Rumba, the Conga and the Cha-Cha-Cha. They spend a surprising percentage of their income in restaurants and state-owned cabarets, where high-kicking dancers in sequined bikinis and two-foot high feather headdresses grind alongside throaty-voiced singers.
Havana, despite the halt of roulette wheels and the extinguishing of the neon trim that once laced its skyline, remains an intensely beautiful city. One of terraces flung out over streets filled with aging American automobiles of the 1940s and 1950s, of columns with vines slithering up over wrought-iron railings. A city of fading pastel colors, of chipped mustard-yellow plaster around salmon-pink doors with eggshell-blue trim.

The real loss has been the elimination of what Marxists contemptuously label “Bourgeois freedoms.” It is a country where word, deed and even thought are controlled to an astonishing degree. Cuba is not an El Salvador or a Chile, where citizens are tortured, shot and “disappeared.” But Cuba is one gigantic company town. To get along, one goes along.

In the past few years, the tight rein held on dissent has slackened a bit. Several hundred long-time political prisoners have been released and this August, a delegation from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights will visit Cuban jails to check conditions.

As for the press, Castro has urged journalists to be more critical and “less boring.”

Still, there is nothing approaching the glasnost of the Soviet Union. And instead of perestroika, Castro has begun a campaign of “rectification,” in which capitalist tendencies that have sprouted up–such as the private farmer’s market in Havana which was shut down in 1986–are weeded out. Castro, contrary to most other socialist-bloc countries, has chosen to continue along the path to “pure” communism. Castro can take such a route because most Cubans support him and his decisions.

The stoutest “Fidelistas” are the formerly poor and disenfranchised of the rural countryside. Prior to “the triumph of the revolution,”–the phrase heard over and over here–Cuba was a country of some wealth compared to the rest of Latin America, but with vast inequities in its distribution. Much of the rural population lived in huts of palm and wood, worked three months out of the year during cane-cutting season and seldom saw a school or a doctor.

Today, the closest thing Havana has to a slum is a “barrio” of wooden shacks on dirt streets by the Almendares River on the edge of Havana. Cubans call the neighborhood, “El Fangito,”–the muddy place–because the river periodically rises and floods the homes. From a distance, these plywood shacks look distressingly poor. Up close, one discovers electricity, running water, televisions and refrigerators. Still, some vestiges remain. Outside one house, an old woman washed clothes in an iron cauldron over a wood fire.
Most residents say they will soon move to new apartments they are building themselves as part of “Microbrigades.” In this program begun a year ago, workers leave their regular jobs in order to build housing, daycare centers and clinics. In return, they receive salaries but also the right to an apartment when finished.

The level of “Fidelismo” among the youth is a topic of concern to party elders. They fear youngsters who have no memory of the fall of Batista in 1959, or the victory over the United States at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, may lack fervor. The youth are, perhaps, beguiled by the Madonna songs played even on government radio stations, the Hollywood movies, such as Rocky, shown at government movie houses, and the fashionable clothes seen on the many tourists who come to Cuba.

Much of the youth remains committed to communism and the ideal of a new society. At Che Guevara high school, for example, the young women were as giddy in their adoration of Fidel and Che as American teenagers are of rock stars Sting and Bono.

But other young people are quite apolitically tired of the ever-present lines where one waits to purchace anything from a new bathing suit from a meagerly stocked store, to a shot of the thick, sweet black coffee drunk here. They would willingly trade their egalitarian society for a pair of Nike sneakers and Levi blue jeans.

On one of the beaches outside Havana, two young men, ages 18 and 20, approached me and asked if I would buy them several coveted Aditas T-shirts from the nearby tourist shop. At such shops, only foreigners are permitted entry and all prices are in U.S. dollars. It is the government’s way of gaining hard currency. What the young men were doing was quite common and quite illegal.

The 20-year-old had scraggly blond hair and scruffy stubble on a sun-tanned face. He was quite cynical.

“I’ll tell you what’s good about my country,” he said. “The sun”–aiming a finger at the burning sky–“the sea”–pointing toward the aqua-green water before him–“the girls”–motioning at the supine, bikini-clad bodies around him, and “the tobacco”–holding up his stubby unfiltered cigarette which he was smoking.

“That’s it,” he said.

I asked him what would happen if he talked like that to a neighbor.

“If they’re finks,” he said, “then”–and one hand quickly clasped the wrist of the other hand in the familiar gesture meaning police arrest and imprisonment.

Fidel’s position on dissent and expression are defined in a famous speech, later named the “Word to Intellectuals,” which he gave in June, 1961 before a group of writers, scholars and artists at the National Library. In one much quoted sentence, Castro declared that “within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.”

Twenty-seven years later, it is still the guiding principle on civil liberties. Protection of the revolution is foremost. Interviews with top government leaders reveal a different conception of what human rights are.
“I believe that our people are freer than the poor people in your country,” said Jorge Enrique Mendoza, a close adviser to Castro who fought with him in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958. For 20 years, he was editor-in-chief of Granma, the nation’s top daily newspaper, which is published by the communist party.

“I don’t believe that an unemployed person can be free,” he said, “or a sick person, or someone who cannot go to school.

“I am not going to debate with you about party (communist) control of the press. It is certain. But we believe we represent the interests of the people. One can criticize specifics, but to make propaganda about capitalist ownership is not permitted. I would like to see a capitalist newspaper that attacked the basis of the capitalist system.”

In the area of religious freedom, a slightly wider circle is being drawn around what is “within the revolution.” The publication in 1987 of “Fidel and Religion,” has radically altered the status of religious faith here. In the 300-page book, which is a transcription of conversations between Fidel and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, Fidel talked favorably of his Jesuit upbringing and says, “I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian.”
“The fact that this book exists,” said Monsignor Manuel deCespedes, the archbishop of Havana. “is a very positive fact. Before the book was published, it was taboo to talk about religion.”

Wearing a black gown, and with a bald head and a quiet manner, deCespedes was the very image of a fatherly priest at an interview in his office in old Havana. He has established a close working relationship with Castro in recent years and deCespedes handles the complexities of being a Christian in a Marxist state with finesse. One the one hand, he says, “I am not a communist,” but on the other, he says, “a good Christian is not anti-anything.” This diplomacy has meshed with the government’s increasingly tolerant attitude.

deCespedes ticked off the figures that show how church participation has grown in the last few years. Church attendance up. Baptisms in Havana have tripled, from 7,000 in 1979 to 21,000 in 1987. Whereas formerly only the elderly attended Mass, now 10 to 20 young people are seen at each service. Last year, the church was permitted to import 30,000 copies of the bible for the first time.

On a recent Sunday in a beautiful old cathedral in Havana, a priest gave mass to about 75 people of all ages. Before the service, a group of teenage boys said “repression” against religious practice did not exist, but a certain amount of discrimination did.

“We don’t tell our friends at school about our faith,” said one 17 year old, “because they would stay apart from us if they knew.” He noted that because of his religious faith, he could not be a member of the Union of Young Communists.

Despite their loss of status, they supported their government and country. “Some people think Catholics are counter-revolutionaries,” said an 18 year old. “But that’s not true. We will pick up a rifle and defend our country when necessary.

“We are with the revolution.”

Until recently, Castro has never allowed an organized opposition group to exist. The exception, since spring of 1987, is the Cuban Human Rights Committee. The group is officially illegal, but operates in a limited fashion. It is allowed to contact groups such as Amnesty International and America’s Watch and to speak with foreign journalists.

“This small handful of people have had a tremendous impact,” said one high-placed western diplomat. “For the first time, Cubans have a source outside the government to publicize abuses by security forces and police.”

It’s leader is one Ricardo Bofill, 45 years old, who has spent 13 of the last 20 years in jail for such crimes as “enemy propoganda.”

Thanks to a massive campaign against him in the Cuban media, including a three-hour television documentary and full-page spreads in Granma, most Cubans are familiar with Bofill’s beady black eyes and scrub-brush mustache–and with some of his accusations.

The article in Granma on Bofill was a good example of current Cuban journalism, managing to pack every paragraph with a few pejoratives, lest the reader hesitate in forming an opinion. “Faker,” “swindler,” “liar,” “crook” and “bastard,” were some of the most oft repeated.

Bofill insists such tactics have helped his cause by giving it publicity. He operates from a small apartment in Guanabacoa, a ragged suburb of Havana of light-industry and plain, one-story housing, and has few recourses. He cannot leave his home, he says, because he is attacked by stone-throwing government police dressed as civilians when he tries to walk to the bus-stop.
Significantly, Bofill, once a professor of Marxism, looks towards the Soviet Union under Gorbachev as the best example of change for Cuba.

“These are the materials one has to read,” Bofill said, holding up copies of Moscow News and New Times, both Russian magazines translated into Spanish, “to find a path for Cuba to follow.”

Bofill does not deny the social advances made in his country. But, he said “you can’t separate public health and public liberty.”

“To judge the achievements of this country,” Bofill said, “you have to measure them in an integral form. For example, in South Korea and Taiwan, tremendous advances were made economically.

“But they were still dictatorships.”

So in Cuba, the debate between the right to eat, and the right to speak and think as one pleases, continues.

That Bofill is not in jail proves the government’s tight grip on dissent has opened slightly. But the sledgehammer attacks against him in the official press prove the parameters set on dissent are still in place: Direct criticism of government policies is not permitted.

In a recent article in The Nation, Professor Rene David of San Carlos Seminary in Havana was quoted as saying that Cuba has not “achieved the difficult balance between equality and liberty necessary for a more authentic fraternity.”

Fidel, because of his overthrow of Batista, the following social advances and his personal charisma, has built up an enormous reservoir of goodwill that has yet to be exhausted. For the time being, most citizens will continue to follow where he leads them.
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Versions of this article were published in The Virginian-Pilot and The San Francisco Chronicle.

by Alex Marshall