Ordinarily, photographing the Cuban military is prohibited, and just might land you and/or your camera in a Cuban military hoosegow.  But Primero de Mayo (May 1) is Cuba’s version of Labor Day, and there’s a huge parade/march through Revolution Square in Havana with lots of military groups.  Apparently, all bets were off on that no-photography rule during the parade. 

Last week, I made my second trip to Cuba.  A happy coincidence of timing put me right in the middle – literally — of the May Day parade.  The whole thing is fully orchestrated, with (according to press reports) about 400 thousand marchers and with Castro’s government handing out the various flags and banners each group of workers will carry.   It is a spectacle.  The crowd paraded right through Revolution Square, past El Presidente Raul Castro, who succeeded his brother Fidel as leader of Cuba in 2008.

We arrived at dawn – jumping out of our cabs near the back of the parade staging area.  I wandered right into the middle of the crowd of flag-bearing young people, then headed off to see if I could photograph the uniformed military personnel.  Soon the throng started to move while I was in the middle taking some pictures, so  I moved with it.  I wasn’t completely sure if it was still “staging” or if the march had officially begun, because there were almost no spectators.  Then I saw we were approaching Revolution Square, the site of the big Jose Marti Monument (Cuba’s ugly, creepy version of the Washington Monument).  At that point it was clear that I was “in” the parade.  Physically within, at least.  I was in the fat middle of the military marchers as they chanted their way past the Monument, with President Castro looking on from the viewing stand.

Thousands of Cuban soldiers participated.  Cuba has a mandatory military service requirement, so there are lots of 19ish-year-olds (male and female) in some form of “military” service.  You do not get the feeling they are fierce warriors (though surely Cuba has some somewhere).  I got no sense that they were unhappy about being “forced” to be there; nor did I get any sense of deep fervor or passionate ideological support of the regime.  You just got the feeling they were a bunch of strangely-dressed teenagers looking to hook up on a Spring Break in Havana, chanting prescribed political slogans with about the level of intensity and sincerity a casual fan might show for his local college football team.

At one point I was walking backward, taking pictures of a group of 100 or so young soldiers walking along behind me.  They got so preoccupied with following and “posing” for me (lots of flag-waving and thumbs-upping), they failed to hear (or to comply with) their commander’s instruction ordering them to stop.  Happily, he was a good sport — especially when I rushed over to take several shots of him, to make sure he was in on the fun.

Cuba’s economy is very dependent on Venezuela, with whom Cuba has a doctors-for-oil exchange program that supplies Venezuela with semi-indentured Cuban healthcare workers, and supplies Cuba with at least a faint economic heartbeat.  Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez died recently and Cubans seem worried that their support from Venezuela may be in jeopardy.  Thus a major theme of the parade was solidarity with Venezuela.  Signs, large and small, pictured Chavez and labeled him “Our Best Friend” (that’s Communist for “BFF”), which seemed a little odd since he’s dead and all.

Last year when I went to Revolution Square, the military guards barely let me walk around and take pictures at all, so being “allowed” in the middle of the parade as it went past Castro was unexpected to say the least.  I carried two very professional-looking cameras, so they all seemed to assume I was a press photographer (which is ironic, because I spoke to an actual press photographer, and he did not have the same degree of freedom to move through the parade).  At one point, I was asked (in very good English) what newspaper I was with.  I blurted out (truthfully but nonsensically), “Soy de Houston!  Tejas!” — as if I could fluently speak neither English nor Spanish.  I gave a goofy thumbs-up and headed off to get lost in the crowd again.

I’m one of the last people on earth you’d ever expect to find at – much less “in” — a Communist-organized march extolling the virtues of socialist labor.   But put a camera in my hand and a documentary mission in my head, and I’ll go almost anywhere.  This was one of the craziest experiences of my life – and that’s saying something.

Posts from my spring 2012 trip to Cuba started here and ended here.

No. 7 in a series that started here. 

Basic education in Cuba is pretty good (at least by developing-world standards).  The school buildings aren’t great, but since labor is cheap and other opportunities are limited, there are plenty of teachers.

In some senses, education – specifically medical education – is now one of Cuba’s biggest exports.  A deal with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has sent about 30,000 Cuban doctors and healthcare workers to oil-rich Venezuela; in exchange, Cuba gets $3-4 billion worth of oil every year.  Cuba pays those doctors around $300 per year and Venezuela pays Cuba $100,000 or more each for their services.  It’s a big part of what’s keeping the Cuban government and economy afloat.  Unfortunately, Cubans can make more money peddling cokes or souvenirs to tourists in the streets than they can by becoming doctors, so it’s hard to imagine how this setup will survive.

I got lots of pictures of school kids.  The big green doors are a Havana school.  The two boys sitting in a schoolhouse doorway are in Trinidad (notice the all-too-typical gaping hole in the building right at the entrance).  That little girl with no uniform is a preschooler, standing in front of a two-room rural schoolhouse (you can see the edge of it on the right side of the frame).  The close-up shots with pale blue backgrounds are on the porch of that school.

The uniforms are in fact “uniform” across the entire country.  Those “neckerchiefs” seemed to be a nice touch, but my inquiries about the significance of the different colors revealed that the scarves signified the kids’ enrollment and participation in the “Pioneers” group.  Their slogan (which the school kids have to chant as their “pledge of allegiance”) begins:  “Pioneers for Communism.”  Suddenly the neckerchiefs weren’t nearly as endearing.

Actually, the long form of that slogan is “Pioneers for Communism; we will be like Che.”  “Che” is Che Guevara, who was a key leader in the 1950s revolution that put the Castros and Communists in power.   Lots of propaganda and patriotic discourse in Cuba focus on “La Revolucion,”  which seems to frame Cubans’ political thinking as “Are you better off now than you were fifty-four years ago?”  Contrasting the Castro regime to the 1950s Cuba with an even-worse previous leader/dictator (Batista) yields far more favorable comparison than comparing the current regime against all the progress and possibilities of 21^st-century capitalism and democracy.  That focus is reinforced with the ever-present iconic image of  Che Guevara.  That picture is everywhere.  Everywhere.

Other government slogans and billboards (often painted on the sides of buildings — even residential buildings) refer to “Defendiendo Socialismo” (defending socialism), or to the evils of capitalism.  The Castros apparently don’t see the irony in the fact that those signs mostly stand amid dilapidation and squalor brought about by 50 years in a system that saps all signs of initiative, effort, ambition or personal responsibility.

There are also a lot of signs about the neighborhood “CDRs” – Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which serve the happy purpose of monitoring every person on every block to ferret out any potential “counter-revolutionary” activity.

Another pervasive “patriotic” theme is the slogan:  “Patria o Muerte.”  See, for example, the billboard in the picture below.  “O Muerte” means “or death.”  Literally, “Patria” means “homeland” or “motherland,” but the term seems synonymous with patriotic loyalty.  Someone remarked that the phrase arguably paralleled American slogans like “Live free or die,” or “Give me liberty or give me death.”  But the Cuban version says nothing about freedom or liberty, and when the phrase is paired with images of a military-clad leader who ruled the country under a one-party Communist regime for 50 years, the message seems completely the opposite.

(Yes, that’s me in front of the Patria o Muerte billboard, so No, I didn’t take that picture.   That last image — with Che Guevara’s face on the side of the building — is at Revolution Square, which is the area that’s the center of the federal government.  You’re not supposed to take pictures of government buildings, but this one is an exception.  In the process of trying to get some basic, touristy pictures of the big monument in the Square and of the big Che and Fidel portraits, though, I had three different police officers blow their whistles at me.  Apparently the rule (that day) was that I had to be standing across a street from whatever I was taking a picture of.  I wound up with only crappy pictures, but at least I’m not sleeping in a Cuban hoosegow.)