What Cuba was really like under Fidel Castro

Havana 27 February 1993

`Que undo est el, how beautiful he is,’ sighed a stately woman beside me in the crowd, showing a remarkable lack of teeth and a prodigious amount of bosom. I thought about the portly figure in the green uniform who had just driven off in his unmarked Mercedes. A living monument, certainly; charismatic, no doubt; romantic, if you like that kind of thing; a survivor, unquestionably. But beautiful? Perhaps I was not a proper judge of that. Yet even as she put her hand on the impressive bosom and looked in the direction he had gone, I felt instinctively that all those gleeful articles in the American press I had been reading about the imminent downfall of Fidel Castro must be wrong. In the weeks before the revolutions in central and eastern Europe, working-class women did not sigh about the beauty of Honecker or Ceausescu.

Havana simply does not feel like a society which is about to rise up and overthrow its government, no matter how disappointing that may be to the Cuban exiles in Miami.