Housing may have been nationalized. Pay lowered, so as to have full employment and to eliminate the upper class--but there are still stark contrasts in the very richest and the very poorest Cuban housing. The housing pictured here is from just outside Havana, and we saw quite a bit of this sort of abodes. Corrugated metal roof and walls, not much in the way of protection from the elements, dirt floors--a house that would offer none of the coolness that the adobe and cement homes offer in terms of storing some of the night's coolness for the heat of the day. But even worse, this is hurricane country. With gale force winds and blinding rain, these houses are inadequate to protect even livestock from the elements.
I took this photo at Hotel Nacional de Cuba--a magnificent hotel in downtown Havana. We had lunch in this overblown dining room, with two waiters at our beck and call and were occasionally serenaded at the grand piano by one of our table mates. How very gentile. But the contrast is aggravating. I could see that if I was struggling to feed my family, not able to do so despite my best efforts, and I saw how other people in my very own province were living, it could make me a revolutionary. The tinder box was lit, and now everyone has almost the same amount of things--almost nothing. All is owned by the state--the land, the animals, the fruits, the vegetables--and while some are luckier and some are not, some engage in the underground economy to a greater extent and some to a lesser extent (if seems almost impossible to avoid some activity if you want to survive. Even the rice and beans are not quite enough), no Cuban dines in the Hotel Nacional on a daily basis any more.
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