I spent the weekend reading Martin Cruz Smith's novel from 1999, Havana Bay. This was another in his Arkady Renko series, a character who was introduced in the early 1980s. At the time, it was a novelty to imagine a crime story being narrated with a Russian police detective as the protagonist. The Soviet Union was seen as a closed society, and we were used to viewing it in terms of diammetrical opposites. We couldn't imagine Russians as human beings, for they were our supposed mythical enemies, inhabitants of the "Evil Empire" as it was called by Ronald Reagan.
I don't have many memories of that first book, Gorky Park, but I do remember finding it fascinating in the way it offered a glimpse into that other society. Almost as fascinating as Hedrick Smith's book The Russians, which was not a work of fiction but which undertook to give a general introduction to that society on the part of a journalist who had spent years in that country.
Now, things have changed dramatically. Who could have foreseen the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s and its devolution into a mafia society? At the times I was a lowly engineer working for a noted defence corporation and I remember viewing the sudden changes with the same astonishment as the rest of the world, even though I knew that it portended a reevaluation of my own prospects in this line of industry. During the past few decades the perception of this entity known as the "Soviet Union" had been modified from one of an existential threat to that of a lowly (although still dangerous) country in decline. The Russian economy, and with it the geopolitical threat, crumpled like a paper tiger, to be replaced by the perception of new threats, embodied as they were in other, more dangerous ideologies as well as by the ascenscion of China.
This particular novel was published over ten years ago, and it places the detective in Cuba in the midst of that period of travail known as the "Special Period". Soviet subsidies have ended, there are no more oil imports nor industrial subsidies and, as a consequence, the Cuban economy is in a period of profound stagnation. To be fair, the stagnation had been ongoing, but it was accentuated dramatically by the Russian implosion, and now the only currency seems to be one that trades in exoticism and revolutionary nostalgia.
Under the official promulgation of a socialist ideology (one of the last countries of the world to assert this) there are profound inequalities at work. First and foremost, in the priorities and authoritarian nature of the political system, in which one man holds power and sway over an entire society, exercising an almost hypnotic hold on the population. And yet there is also abundant evidence of corruption and the decay of a revolutionary ideal that is manifested in slogans and committees of watchmen who take note of the comings and goings of people, and the lines at the food distribution centers where people wait for hours to obtain some meager supply of rationed goods. There is a parallel system in which Cuba is being opened up to foreign tourists in an effort to earn desperately-needed hard currency. These tourists arrive like parasites, willing to throw around their cash in an effort to have the opportunity to wallow in the decadence of Cuba, rendered all the more exotic by the aura of revolutionary chic. While giant paintings of an energetic Fidel striding forward line the sides of building, Cuban women in stretchpants and halter tops stride along the malecon, the sea wall of Havana, looking for male tourists to seduce and disencumber. They are the jineteras, the female jockeys, who "ride" their tourist friends in a desperate race for social mobility and survival. Their revolutionary idealism has given way to pragmaticism.
Arkady comes to investigate the death of his friend, another Russian colleague by the name of Pribluda. This friend was retrieved from the ocean, and all signs seem to point to his having been the unfortunate victim of a fishing accident. What makes this circumstance all the more revealing (and depressing) is what it reveals about this society. Apparently, it is very common for Cuban men to go out fishing in small inflatable tubes that are termed neumaticos (tires), and they launch themselves with regularity into the sea, hoping to catch fish. This despite the risk of being swept out by a current, of being capsized by a swell or of being attacked by sharks. Apparently, all these risks are minimized in the face of a need to supplement their food allotment, although one suspects as well that this custom is also in part attributable to a male addiction to risk. In light of what we know about the continual stream of boat people from Cuba who undertake desperate journeys to Florida in the flimsiest of crafts, this custom can't help but highlight a political undertone as well.
A deeply suspicious nature leads Arkady to investigate further, and this leads to a series of complications in which he becomes slowly more entangled with the locals. In particular, he begins to collaborate with Ofelia, a police officer who, like himself, is somewhat of a defensive outsider. Arkady begins to unearth clues and as he does so he suffers various attemps on his life, attempts that only serve to confirm that he is unearthing details about more than a simple accidental death.
For all the dreary aspects of life in an economy that is collapsing as dramatically as in Cuba, there is still much vigor. Yes, this is a society that is under the spell of revolutionary nostalgia, and yes, the figures of Fidel and Che still loom large. It is hard, however, to overlook the cultural renaissance, in which the blend of African and Spanish cultural outlooks takes center stage, a fusion that proves as much exotic as enticing and fraught with paradoxes. (A medical forensic expert, Dr. Blas, scorns any evidence of Afro-Cuban religious ceremony.) The drumbeat alludes not only to resistance and conflict but also to a form of entrancement, in which people (and we readers as well) can be possessed by the evocation of a group of musicians performing.
In the end, yet another plot to assassinate Fidel is revealed, and a group of devious collaborators and amoral characters is revealed. The tension leads to a culminating scene in which discoveries are made and in which Arkady narrowly misses meeting the same fate as his dead Russian friend. Corruption is everywhere, but so is the spell of human entanglement and desire.
As a special note, I particularly enjoyed the final paragraph. It is set in Moscow, upon Arkady's return, in which he unexpectedly encounters a former friend, Erasmo, one who had been instrumental in foiling the plot on the "Jefe's" life. It is a somewhat cold and bittersweet meeting punctuated by recriminations as well as the suggestion that Ofelia, his Cuban collaborator and, briefly, his lover, had moved on. There was no sense of permanance in that relationship which was all too brief although it was satisfying in its own way. The memory of this sun-filled interlude in the Caribbean receeds in the mind of an eternally morose and melancholic imagination. The sun and the light and the vibrant colors that are associated with passion and idealism, even when challenged by an economic collapse, are somehow obliterated by a fading memory and the weight of time as another elemental force that, like the ocean and the falling snow, overwhelms even the sun.
"It was the sort of evening, Arkady thought, when each individual apartment window looked like a craft tossing in a dangerous sea. The Kremlin was out of sight but not its bonfire glow. Snow outlined lampposts, gutters, sills; packed against truck tarps and wing mirrors and on the collars people clutched up to their eyes; melted at the wrist and neck, trickled down the arm and chest; flew down one flagstone wall of the river and up the other like sparks from a chute; turned the trees of the park into whitecaps; made each step a visible memory and then covered it over."
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