Buffalo
– Havana
A Tale of Two Cities
By Michael I. Niman, Blue Dog Press,
May 17th, 2001
Buffalo
– Havana
By Michael I. Niman, Blue Dog Press,
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It was during my first visit to Cuba in the 1980s that I took note of the
TVs. They were these big awkward
Russian monsters with bulbous tubes. When you turned them on they would start to
whistle. The whistle would get
louder and louder. Finally there
would be an audible pop; then a fuzzy black and white image would usually
appear. Often times, however, they
would implode.
On the tube were endless cartoons of khaki garbed men with beards, rifles
in hand, fighting off los imperialistas.
More recently I returned to my Cuban hotel room one night, exhausted from
12 odd hours of urban hiking. I
glanced over to the TV, a Korean Sankyo. Things
have changed in Cuba.
I turned it on hoping to catch Fidel in one of his trademark marathon
speeches. No Cuba trip would be
complete without a glimpse of the Island’s master orator.
The little TV popped on, full color, tuned to one of Cuba’s national TV
networks – not the drone of CNN coming from the other hotel rooms.
The announcer explained that we were about to see “a very important
ethnographic film about life in the United States.”
I waited with anticipation as he went on to explain that it was “an
important film about the typical life in an America City.”
I wanted Fidel, but I got Vincent Gallo. The film was Buffalo 66 – in
English with Spanish subtitles. Damn!
I turned the TV off and went for a walk in the warm tropical air.
In a nearby bar a small crowd was drinking and staring off at the TV as
Gallo attempted to urinate on a downtown Buffalo parking lot.
It was then that it hit me, that with Buffalo 66 repeating over and over
as the week’s feature on Cuban TV, it would reach a larger audience in Cuba
than it did in it’s limited theatrical run in the US.
Weird.
But the Cubans related to it. When
I told people I was from Buffalo they’d all nod in recognition and mumble
about the Bills. Gallo’s dreary
gray imagery of Buffalo struck a cord in Havana.
Torontonians can see it as well. Often
when they visit Havana “on holiday” they say it reminds them of Buffalo.
Toronto Singer Songwriter Ron Hawkins, in an interview with The
Buffalo News, explained: “There’s a bit of a sad, romantic element about
Buffalo. In a way Buffalo is
something like Havana. It’s
beautiful, tawdry and decaying, but there’s a sense of elegance about it.”
As I wandered the streets of Havana on my most recent trip I kept
thinking back to Buffalo. Hot
tropical sun bleached Latino communist Cuba is culturally about as far from
wintry Buffalo as a three and a half hour flight can take you.
These cities might as well be on different worlds.
Buffalo dates to the early 1800s. Havana
dates to the early 1500s. We’re
the “Queen city of the lakes.” Havana
was the principal city for the new world. We’ve
got Frank Lloyd Wright and E.B. Green. They’ve
got the most eclectic collection of architecture in the hemisphere, if not the
world. We’ve got the Basilica in
Lackawanna. The Pope visited
Havana. They’re also ground zero - Zion - for the world’s practitioners of
Santeria. We’ve got the
Philharmonic. They’ve got a
signature Afro-Cuban sound known the world over.
Critics call us a shrinking backwater hamlet looking to Cleveland for
inspiration. They’re a
world-class travel destination undergoing a hotel building boom.
Businesses are fleeing Buffalo. Multinationals
are flocking to Havana. The list
goes on. These are different
worlds.
But still there is an unmistakable kinship here.
Anyone who has visited both places can feel it.
We’re survivors. We’ll take any curve thrown our way. We’ll endure bad governments and bad press.
People will flee both cities for supposed greener pastures.
But they’ll always miss us.
What follows is an exploration of our similarities.
Both cities have Diasporas. There
are Buffalo theme bars throughout the Sunbelt catering to this city’s
expatriates from Charlotte to Houston. They’ve
left, but their hearts are till here. They’re
nostalgic. They eat wings and watch
Bills games. Havana too has a
Diaspora. Cuban ex-pats are
scattered throughout the U.S. and Spain. They
eat at Cuban restaurants, practice Santeria and listen to Cuban music.
Like those who left Buffalo, some are economic refugees looking for
condos, credit cards and SUVs. Others
are political refugees from across the Cuban political landscape.
Many of the displaced Cubans and Buffalonians hope to one day return
home.
Both cities suffered great capitol flight. Cuba’s
wealth took off to Miami shortly after the 1959 revolution, helping to establish
that city as the business capitol of Latin America.
At the same time Buffalo’s wealth started drifting north and south, to
‘burbs like Amherst and Orchard Park where building booms have sucked the
city’s tax base dry. The success
of both Miami and Amherst is directly tied to the poverty in Havana and Buffalo.
Havana is only now recovering with an influx of European Union
investment. Buffalo’s day is yet
to come, with the city still having to use corporate welfare as bait to bribe
businesses to stay.
There are no Fortune 500 companies headquartered in either city.
That’s part of our charm.
Both cities remember, for better or for worse, a grander past. For us it will always be 1901 – the undisputed heyday of
Buffalo – the Pan American Exposition. For
Havana it was the boom days of the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s and
finally the Mafia hey days of the 1950s when decedent American tourists flocked
to Havana casinos and whorehouses.
Our glory days began to slip away with the assassination of President McKinley and the riots at the end of the Pan Am Expo. The final deathblow was the closing of Bethlehem Steel’s main furnaces in the early 1980s. For Havana, everything changed on New Year’s Day in 1959 when the new revolutionary government sent the Mafia, foreign monopolies, and their riches, packing.
Both cities spent much of the period from the 1960s through the 1980s
watching as their communities hemorrhaged people amid declining economic bases.
Most of Havana went for over 30 years without paint.
Buffalo lost more than half of its population and thousands of buildings. To this day both cities are saddled with buildings that
are literally collapsing under their own weight from neglect and the elements.
For both cities, decaying run-down housing stock poses one of the biggest
challenges they face. And both cities are plagued with aging infrastructure,
with water mains long overdue for repair and replacement.
The positive side of this
economic morass is that Buffalo and Havana escaped the building boom of the
1960s, 70s and 80s and the hideous architectural scar it left on most major
American cities. No building boom
meant no mass urban renewal and no mass demolitions of historic districts.
Buffalo lost myriad treasures back in the 1950s when the economy was
still healthy and expressway projects ripped our neighborhoods apart.
But the economic collapse of the late 1960s and 70s spared us from more
such pain. Today, historic
Victorian buildings, like water, are among Buffalo’s main selling points,
especially when competing with newer sun-belt cities and their overpriced
cookie-cutter housing stock.
The same goes for Havana.
In the 1950s, hotel developers such as Meyer Lansky and the Hilton chain
gouged holes in the historic Vedado district to erect high rises.
That all stopped in 1959. Though
a host of abysmal Soviet Style buildings, mostly housing projects and hotels,
were built during the 1960s and 70s, Havana’s central planners avoided costly
demolitions, thus sparing its historic architectural heritage.
Today preservation and restoration are the mantras for Havana’s
redevelopment. The United Nations
has recognized the city as a World Heritage Zone.
Culturally, the people of both Havana and Buffalo have adapted to
adversity. We pitch in to help our
neighbors no matter the problem. In
Buffalo we dig each other out and provide shelter and food during snowstorms. We pull together in block clubs and fight slumlords and drug
dealers. In Havana life is all
about pulling together. People pull
together on a daily basis as crowds of up to 300 people pack into giant
“camel” tractor trailer buses. They
pull together and share food, clothing and tools in time of need. Millions pulled together to demand the return of Elian
Gonzalas.
Both cities are big sports towns. Habaneros
love baseball and pack their stadium to watch games that occur on an almost
daily basis. Buffalonians love
football – sometimes practicing fandomonium to absurd extremes.
Both cities are centers for health care.
Buffalo’s Roswell Park is nationally renowned.
Havana provides medical services to people from throughout Latin America
who travel there for elective surgery. Both
cities have medical schools and centers for medical research. The Cuban
government is providing scholarships for minority students from the U.S. to
study medicine at the University of Havana.
Other students come under similar arrangements from throughout the third
world.
The medical systems in both cities, however, are in decline. Buffalonians are suffering abuses at the hands of HMOs and
are seeing a decline in the quality of care as hospitals cull their nursing
staffs, merge and close. Habaneros,
while enjoying free medical care and the highest per capita population of
doctors in the world, are suffering from an acute shortage of medicine due to
the U.S. embargo against Cuba and a shortage of hard currency.
Both cities have educated workforces suffering from severe chronic
underemployment. In Havana
biologists and engineers clamor for jobs as taxi drivers and bellhops –
currently among the highest paid professions in the country with workers earning
tips in U.S. dollars, Cuba’s preferred currency. Doctors, by comparison, earn
the equivalent of $20 per month in Cuban Pesos, a currency not accepted in most
stores.
Both are one newspaper towns – though in Buffalo we have a weekly, a
bi-weekly and a monthly alternative. The
press is censored in both places as well, though to differing degrees.
In Cuba, censorship is absolute and by government decree.
In Buffalo it’s the result of pandering to the interests of advertisers
and upscale demographic groups.
Both cities are one party towns. In
Cuba, this is mandated by law. In
Buffalo it’s mandated by our own apathy and our robotic behavior on Election
Day. In any event, the
results are the same. Everyone
complains about the government but it never really changes.
Communists run Havana. Democrats
run Buffalo. Get used to it.
Both cities have a history of caulderos, or strongmen, in
government. Again, people complain,
but decades go by without political change.
Fidel, who actually seems pretty popular these days despite Cuba’s
economic malaise, has been running the show in all of Cuba for 42 years. In Buffalo, we put up with [former Mayor] Jimmy Griffin for
16 years, and it looks like, barring an unlikely Green Party victory this
November, we’ll be calling [current Mayor] Tony Masiello mayor for at least 12
years. Politically both cities are frozen in time.
Time isn’t standing still, however, when it comes to crumbling
infrastructure and declining services. In
the early 20th century Buffalonians could ride commuter trains to
Ellicottville and trolleys to the beaches of Angola.
A comprehensive light rail transit system served the entire city, with
spurs going far off into the countryside. Havana,
as recently as the late 1980s, had a comprehensive systems of buses that, for a
fare of less than a penny, would whisk commuters off in comfort to the far
reaches of the metropolitan area.
Good mass transit is now history for both cities.
Prodded by the oil, tire and bus industries, Buffalo tore up and
abandoned it’s trolley system after World War II. Today buses run infrequently and often drop passengers off on
snow-clogged streets where they have to brave auto traffic on foot.
Riders needing a transfer often wait for a half hour in the snow and
rain.
In Havana, the shortages of fuel and spare parts that occurred after the
collapse of Cuba’s biggest trading partner, the Soviet Union, crippled their
transit system. The US embargo made
things worse. In the early 1990s,
getting around Havana became as difficult as getting around Managua, Nicaragua a
decade earlier after the US backed Contra mercenaries blew up many of the
city’s busses. In both cases
there were far more riders than buses.
Cuba responded first by passing a
law making it mandatory for automobile drivers to pick up hitchhikers.
They hired transit officials to stand at popular hitchhiking spots and
pull cars over and load them up with passengers.
They then set out to build a fleet of “Camels,” which are giant
bus-like devices made from welding three disabled Eastern European buses
together into large trailers, and then pulling them behind Ford truck tractors.
Today Camels are the mainstay of mass transit, usually operating with
200-300 passengers. Like
Buffalo’s bus system, it works. But
it sucks.
Buffalo and Havana have something else in common – and it’s big. Both cities can, arguably, trace their current woes to U.S.
Government policies. The federally
funded St. Lawrence Seaway geographically pulled Buffalo out of the loop,
allowing Midwestern grains to be shipped directly to foreign markets.
Previously grain ships discharged their cargoes in Buffalo, to be milled,
then shipped first by canal, then later by rail, to east coast ports.
The federally funded interstate
highway system further eroded Buffalo’s position as a rail center, as the
railroad industry lost ground to the trucking industry.
Federal funding for local highway projects translated into a government
subsidy for suburbanization with new highways allowing residents to move further
and further from Buffalo’s urban core. Federally
funded roads such as I-190 now occupy miles of Buffalo’s prime waterfront
land, cutting the city off from it’s most important resource and denying it
billions of dollars in potential property tax revenues.
Buffalo has also been devastated
by U.S. trade policies such as NAFTA that have allowed corporations to lay off
local workers, replace them with low-wage foreign workers, and still have full
access to sell their goods in the U.S. market.
The failure to establish a federal policy protecting labor rights has
also caused many local companies to relocate to low wage southern states where
local “right to work” laws thwart union organizing. The proposed FTAA agreement will hasten the race to the
bottom, with the few remaining local manufacturers competing against foreign
sweatshops that pay their workers pennies an hour.
The end result of all of these policies is a local economy that has been
hemorrhaging both jobs and population for over 20 years.
Cuba also traces most of its problems to the U.S. government. Many of us are familiar with the Bay of Pigs invasion (and the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis) and the trade embargo, which has been in effect for 40 years. Few Americans, however, are aware of the more bizarre covert actions taken over the years against Cuba, such as allegedly airdropping dead diseased pigs on the Cuban countryside in the 1980s in a biological attack against the Cuban pork industry. The U.S. has also provided a base of operations for various anti-Cuban terrorist groups such as Omega 7, which have been accused of hotel bombings in Havana in the 1990s, the 1973 bombing of an Air Cubana flight, and the release of agricultural viruses in the Cuban countryside. CIA funded and trained Cuban exile groups have allegedly been responsible for a host of violent actions directed against Cuban targets. Recently declassified information about the CIA’s “Operation Mongoose,” shows the agency targeted Cuban civilian infrastructure such as power plants and factories in an effort to destabilize Cuba in the 1960s.
Cuba has, for the last 30 years,
made allegations and provided evidence of a host of “biological warfare” attacks, mostly against their
agricultural sector, ostensibly orchestrated by the U.S. government.
These attacks supposedly include a 1971 swine fever epidemic, a 1981
mosquito borne bleeding dengue fever outbreak, and a 1996 infestation of potato
devastating thrips palmi insects. The
U.N. is currently investigating Cuba’s charges that the U.S. has violated the
convention on the use of biological weapons.
The U.S. government denies the allegations.
Still, the most devastating effects of U.S. federal policies in Cuba, as in Buffalo, have been economic. In 1959 the U.S. was Cuba’s largest trading partner. The ensuing embargo, and U.S. imposed sanctions against third country businesses that trade with Cuba, has cut the island off from the largest natural market for its exports – the U.S.
The U.S. and Cuba do not maintain
formal diplomatic ties with each other, and treasury department regulations
forbid Americans to casually travel to Cuba.
Americans are also not allowed to import Cuban products such as musical
CDs or cigars, not even from Canada. The
U.S. and Cuba countries often accuse each other of human rights violations and
other crimes. Despite these
barriers, however, Buffalo and Havana have been growing closer.
State department travel restrictions force many Americans traveling to
Cuba to transit through third countries such as Canada, creating a geo-political
quirk making the Buffalo/Toronto region a gateway for Americans heading to
Havana.
This relative closeness to Cuba
has also opened the door for numerous cultural and educational exchanges between
Buffalo area organizations and their Cuban counterparts.
The University at Buffalo, for example, has brought hundreds of students
to Cuba over the last 15 years as well as sponsoring lectures and performances
by Cuban scholars and musicians in the Buffalo area.
In 1998 U.B. created the first mutual cooperation agreement in 40 years
with the University of Havana. Starting
this fall the two institutions will be offering a joint Masters degree.
Other Buffalonians have joined the tens of thousands of Torontonians who annually venture to Cuba “on holiday” each year. Lured by Canadian advertising and a host of inexpensive regularly scheduled direct flights and vacation packages, many of them are technically in violation of what they see as an antiquated U.S. State Department ban on travel to Cuba. Others have found legal ways to essentially make the same trip. In either event, Havana is getting closer by the day as more and more Buffalonians taste the forbidden Cuban fruit.
Copyright 2001 Michael I. Niman
