Johann Hari

In the middle of a stormy Caribbean summer, a few tears in the intestine of an old man have made two twinned cities – Havana and Miami – awkwardly, anxiously combust. The physical decline of Fidel Castro has been dreaded or dreamed of for nearly fifty years, and now it is here and Fidel is failing and faltering, it has a strange air of unreality.

The kinetic energy that crackles between these opposing poles of the Cuban imagination – the two-thirds of the population imprisoned on the island, and the exiled lump ninety miles away in Miami dreaming lunatic dreams of Batista and of vengeance – is now more intense than ever. They are gazing at each other across a thin strip of water asking: what Cuba comes next?

Power appears to have been ceded to Fidel’s brother Raul, in an ironic moment of communist monarchy. But the new King has only offered a single robotic statement to state television. Fidel has been pictured BlackBerrying on his hospital bed and bragging he will live as long as Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea. And offshore, Condoleeza Rice has this week renewed an offer to lift the suffocating American embargo in exchange for open elections.

Since Fidel was hospitalised, most comment has focused on these top-level state shenanigans. But buried beneath this, there is the ordinary voice of the Cuban people, ignored, as ever. To the outside world, Cuba has always been as much a symbol as a country – either a plucky icon of resistance to the American Empire or the last frozen gulag of Communism left behind by the Cold War, depending on your political perspective.

One side sees the terrific schools and hospitals, the long life expectancy that is far better than in comparable countries with US-backed governments, and the cruel American embargo blocking all trade with the island. The other side sees the political prisoners, the ban on the internet, the firing squads, the driving-out of millions of innocent people. Pick a vision and project whatever you like onto the Cuban people. It’s not like they can speak for themselves without facing jail.

But now – as Castroism sags into incontinence – it is time to move beyond these sterile polarisations and hear the multiple voices of Cubans, both at home and in Florida. If you listen carefully, there are whispers of a future Cuba, beyond the rotting carcass of Castroite communism and the right-wing mania of the Bush-backed exiles. The fascinating new documentary ‘East of Havana’ offers us an insight into this world through the most unexpected of mediums – rap.

In the cracked, fading barrios that circle the Cuban capital, the children of the Special Period have been shrugging off state censorship and expressing their frustration through rap, secretly recorded and sold in bootleg. They have lived their entire adult life in this, the period that began with the fall of the Soviet Union, when the static communist-Cuban economy stopped being lubricated with money stolen from the Russian people. They have never known anything but rolling black-outs and families flinging themselves into the sea on rafts to flee.

While they fear the designs of the Bush administration, they also rap to Fidel, “For you to live is to die as a historical figure/ To drag an entire country to the grave with you.” They are the Buena Vista Social Club in a seething slum, and these eloquent, dignified young Cubans refuse to shut up. They echo the words of Raúl Rivero Castañeda, the Cuban democrat who says, “No one, no law will make me believe that I have become a gangster or a delinquent just because I report the arrest of a dissident, or list the prices of staple foods in Cuba, or write that I find it appalling that more than 20,000 Cubans every year go into exile in the United States and hundreds of others try to go anywhere they can.” For uttering these criminal words, he is serving twenty years in prison.

Rap groups like ‘El Cartel’ have become to Castroism what the Plastic People of the Universe were to Czech communism – a musical outlet for political rage. They long for something like European social democracy or the democratic Chavista revolution in Venezuela.

Intriguingly, there is a parallel movement of liberal Cuban exiles who say that “both sides of the Florida Straits are fighting against our own dogmas.” ‘East of Havana’ was made by the team of siblings called Juan Carlos Saizarbitoria, Jauretsi Saizabitoria and Emilia Menocal, and I met up with them last week. They are thirtysomething Cuban-Americans, and their life-story is a parable about the mirror-image intolerance of many of the Cuban exiles seething in Miami. The first generation of Cuban exiles fled in 1959 when the Cuban revolution toppled the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had all the thuggishness and none of the decent social programmes of the Castro regime. The hardcore of Batista-followers dreamed of a restoration, and they comprise the Loony Tunes hardcore of the exile movement today. But Juan, Jauretsi and Menocal’s grandparents made up a very different wave of exiles that followed in the 1960s.

Their grandfather owned a newspaper and a famous restaurant that supported the revolution and lauded Castro, believing his promises – from his guerrilla hideout in the Sierra Maestra – that he would hold democratic elections. But once the dictatorship began, the newspaper was swiftly shut down by Castro’s goons, and the family was forced to flee. They opened an exact copy of their Sentro Vasco restaurant in Miami and tried to keep alive the dream of a liberal democratic Cuba.

But they found fanatical opposition from some of the exile community because they tried to maintain a dialogue with Cuba. In 1996, they even booked one of the few native Cuban performers allowed to travel, Rosita Fornes, to perform in a cabaret. This was a massive taboo, seen as funnelling money into a tyranny. The restaurant was firebombed by enraged exiles. “We had our restaurant taken from us twice,” explains Juan. “Once by Castro and the hard left, and then by the exiles and the hard right.”

Menocal says softly, “Our generation of exiles needs to start a new conversation with native Cubans of our own age.” In their travels through Cuba to make the film, they found a surprising shared vision of a democratic Cuba beyond the poisoned poles of Castro or Bush – but how can it be realised? In their travels through Cuba to make the film, they found a surprising shared vision of a democratic Cuba beyond the poisoned poles of Castro or Bush. But this tentative connection needs to be handled gently. The hardcore exiles have visions of seizing the island when Fidel dies. “That would be a really bad idea,” Menocal says. “The exiles will arrive saying, ‘I’ve been fighting for your liberation for fifty years’, and the people of Cuba are going to say – who the hell are you? We’ve been hungry and you’ve been fighting for our liberation from an air-conditioned room in Florida.”

The route to a genuinely democratic Cuba is not through Condy’s current offer of trading elections for the end of the embargo either, a bid the White House makes in the certain knowledge it will not be taken up.

No: it is to lift the embargo without conditions today, and make the real Fidel and Raul stand up. “The embargo has given Fidel a cloak he can wrap around himself. He can blame every abuse and every problem on it,” Menocal says. Once it is gone, the hideous problems caused by suppressing all economic activity and all democratic sentiments will be exposed without excuses.

Shorn of the embargo-excuse, Raul would have to either open up a democratic space, fall back on the “cannons” he threatened to use against pro-democracy protestors in 1994, or fall altogether. It’s unlikely the regime will pass peacefully into the night: Raul was the most enthusiastic chief of the Cuban firing squads in the early years of the revolution – he and Che “competed in killings and viciousness”, according to one left-wing guerrilla comrade – and the most vehement Stalinist in the years of Soviet slush-funds.

Raul will probably try to pursue the Chinese route of loosening control of the economy while keeping fierce control of politics. But as the rap groups and liberal exiles show, Cubans are hungry to return to the democratic values articulated on the Sierra Maestra all those years ago, before Fidel became intoxicated by communism and raw power. They will not settle for becoming a sixth-rate Shanghai.

But for now, it seems that even as Fidel fades, the American embargo and Cuban communism are determined to continue marching hand-in-hand into history, as slouching, sinister Siamese twins.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send personal comments on this article to johann (at) johannhari.com or, if you would like them to be considered for publication in the Independent, write to letters@independent.co.uk

L'OPINION DU JOUR -

"Cette semaine, des politiciens se sont réunis dans une ville au cœur du monde développé et ont pris des décisions qui auront pour conséquences des destructions massives de vies humaines." Pour Johann Hari, chroniqueur de The Independent, la ville fatale n'est ni Tel-Aviv, qui ordonne le bombardement du Liban, ni Khartoum, mis en cause dans le drame du Darfour, mais bien Genève, où les négociations au sein de l'Organisation mondiale du commerce (OMC) ont échoué. Ce qui devrait entraîner la mort de millions de gens à travers le monde, pour cause de famine et de pauvreté.

Pour le chroniqueur, les pays riches ont trahi leur promesse, faite il y a cinq ans, de consacrer le cycle actuel d'échanges commerciaux au développement et à la lutte contre la pauvreté. "Pour chaque euro d'aide accordée par les pays riches, il y a 7 euros de dommages liés aux règles commerciales inéquitables." En cause, "les grasses subventions agricoles" et "les barrières douanières imposantes" des pays riches.

Reste que, pour l'auteur, il est toujours temps de changer cet état de choses, d'autant plus que ces subventions agricoles sont peu défendues dans les opinions publiques. Ainsi, "le mouvement Make Poverty History s'est développé dans le monde riche pour forcer nos classes politiques à agir", rappelle Johann Hari. Malheureusement, le cycle de négociations commerciales dit "de Doha" a tellement évolué qu'il n'a au final plus rien à voir avec son engagement initial.

Selon Johann Hari, il y a trois manières d'organiser le commerce mondial : le libre-échange, le commerce équitable et celui qui prévaut largement aujourd'hui, le protectionnisme des pays riches. Or "l'OMC a été conçu pour accroître le libre-échange à travers le monde, et à ses yeux l'aide aux paysans pauvres dans le cadre du commerce équitable et le protectionnisme des pays riches sont des maux équivalents".

I love film festivals because, in a world of watered-down weak movies made by corporate Hollywood committee, they serve up full-strength celluloid caffeine. They jolt your brain awake from its Twentieth-Century-Fox-induced REM sleep by parading before you all the original, brave movies you will never see at the multiplex. You finally see the movies made by film-makers who have not yet been absorbed by the slithering amorphous blob of the Hollywood studio system, and the Edinburgh Film Festival – now skipping and dancing into its sixtieth anniversary – is one of the best.

The freakish, fantastic mockumentary ‘Brothers of the Head’ is a perfect example of the film festival movie. Its plot is simple. A pair of conjoined twins, Tom and Barry, are effectively sold by their father to a record company that turns them into a cult punk band in 1970s Britain. It sounds like the premise for a bad taste slice of American Pie, but in fact it is a pitch-black, pitch-perfect character study told with a straight face and a broken heart. Tom and Barry are hosed down and beaten up by their new bosses, and fed on by a parasitical entourage who are being interviewed decades later about the dead pair, who have long since joined what Kurt Cobain’s mother called “that stupid club” of martyred rock stars.

The hideous intimacy between the brothers – their twin really is “your own flesh and blood” – is teased out in raw, bitter performances by Harry and Luke Treadaway. They descend into furious rages where they attack each other with knives, but they cannot bear the thought of separation. By taking a hellish gothic story and embedding it in the total naturalism of documentary, the directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton have produced something genuinely intense – and intensely horrific.

Of course, the price of experimentation is that sometimes you see movies that belly-flop into the cinema and leave only some splashed water and an embarrassed silence. I saw two disappointments in Edinburgh this year. ‘Neo Ned’ has a fantastic concept: a neo-Nazi imprisoned for “stomping a nigger to death” falls in love with a black woman who believes she is Adolf Hitler. For the first half-hour, the writer Tim Bough runs with it. “Maybe we can keep in contact after the revolution,” the Nazi tells his new love after making her a slew of swastikas in art class, only for her to say, “Let me get this clear. You want to have a war to divide white from blacks, and then sneak across the barbed wire fence for coffee?”

But it’s as if Bough is frightened of the brilliance of his own concept and runs away from it. He quickly establishes that the Nazi isn’t really a Nazi at all, and didn’t really stomp a black guy to death. He’s just a nice regular romantic lead. The woman doesn’t really believe she’s Hitler either; it was all a ploy. They go from being mental patients to being sunny Middle Americans in two easy steps, and the film degenerates into a flabby romcom-by-numbers. All the staples of 1990s American indie cinema are rolled out to keep the film lubricated – a soft rock soundtrack, flashbacks to suburban anomie, long road journeys across America, check, check, check. If the film-makers had been prepared to be as stark and bleak as the team behind ‘Brothers of the Head’, they could have done something great with this premise and this cast. Instead, watching their film is like biting down on a cyanide capsule and finding it is made of marshmallow.

‘Colour Me Kubrik’ is another terrific idea that haemorrhages away into mediocrity. In the 1990s, an alcoholic confidence trickster called Alan Conway fell upon the idea of passing himself off as the famously reclusive film director Stanley Kubrik. He wandered across Europe hoovering up the money and hospitality of the gullible, even attending film festivals in Kubrik’s name. The ambiguities of this story should spill from the screen. Did Conway coat himself in the protective padding of lies to protect himself from his own self-hate? Did his victims suspect, but dismiss their suspicions because they desperately wanted to believe the great Kubrik was interested in them?

But all this is dismissed in favour of a Carry On Kubrik comedy of almost unimaginable crudeness, reduced to making its characters fart and wearing pink shell-suits to get a laugh. It’s the cinematic equivalent of gurning. The film treats Conway’s victims with the same casual contempt as Conway himself, presenting them as imbeciles (“Who would have though Stanley Kubrik was into heavy metal?”). The movie consists of a jumble of caricatures and cardboard cut-outs who inflict cardboard pain on each other to the apathy of the audience. John Malkovitch playing Conway tries to invest this role with occasional moments of poignancy, but the script constantly undercuts him by putting Frankie Howard jokes in his mouth (“I want to make sure nobody handles you but me, Rupert”). There is a sadder, truer film to be made about Conway one day.

But after these disappointments there were two bomb-blast documentaries from a burning Middle East. Israeli director Yoav Shamir’s film ‘Five Days’ follows a pack of fanatical Israeli settlers living on stolen Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli soldiers sent to remove them last summer with the support of a majority of the country’s citizens. At a time when the Israeli right is claiming disengagement was a disaster and the Israeli left is claiming that true disengagement hasn’t really happened because Gaza is subject to intensified collective punishment, the film is a raw reminder of the wrench that occurred a year ago.

“All the weirdoes of Israel have gathered here,” one soldier notes as he stares out over the flocks of hard-right settlers who claim a Biblical right to the land that trumps the democratic will of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. As they scream and wail about being forced from their homes, dubbing the soldiers “Nazis” and telling them to “go back to Germany”, a black irony hangs over the movie. The settlers are decrying being driven from their “homeland” – precisely the fate they inflict upon the Palestinians without the tiniest fleck of empathy. Even when the comparison is most blatant, the thought does not seem to even cross their minds; theocratic thinking provides a total inoculation against self-awareness.

But there is another, yet uglier irony about this film. Shamir is known in Israel as a left-wing film-maker and a passionate defender of Palestinian rights. It’s hard to watch this film without being revolted by the settlers, or without seeing the repugnant difference between the kid-gloves used by the Israeli army to handle fellow Jews and the casual violence used against the Palestinians. When the Palestinians make a brief cameo by throwing some rocks, the soldiers immediately ask whether they should fire in the air or “at their legs” – an option not even considered in response to settler violence.

Yet supposedly left-wing campaigners from the Stop the War Coalition campaigned to prevent this film from being screened in Britain at all. Some of its members even threatened to vandalise the film festival’s website if they insisted on screening a (boo! hiss!) Israeli film. It doesn’t matter how left-wing and pro-Palestinian an Israeli is, it seems; to them, they are all to be shunned. If they had prevailed, we would have missed a sober, superb insight into the battles within Israeli society.

But the documentary of the festival – and probably the year – is ‘My Country, My Country.’ Last year, the American film-maker Laura Poitras did something very brave, and very foolish. Without a bullet-proof vest, without a security team, without even a translator, she wandered the streets of Baghdad – far beyond the Emerald City of the Green Zone – looking for the real human stories beneath the bombs. Iraq is now a subject so burned up in polemic that it is like cool, clear water to actually step inside Iraqi homes and hear ordinary Iraqis talking about their post traumatic stress society in their own words.

The Kurds talk with bashful gratitude about “removing a threat to the whole world,” yet fear Saddam remade Iraq in his own image: “He taught them to cut out tongues. Such a mentality is something you can’t get rid of.” But the horrors of the Anglo-American occupation are burned onto almost every frame too. In Abu Graib Prison, Poitras met Dr Ahmed, a dignified Sunni determined to stand for election to the Governing Council. Poitras follows him as he tries to coax his fellow Sunnis into the democratic process, only for him to be labelled ‘dangerous’ by the occupying forces for criticising the massive violence (including chemical weapons) used by the Americans against the Sunni civilian-packed city of Fallujah.

Dr Ahmed’s liberal optimism about Iraq is slowly burned away, until finally he declares “we are a suicidal people, it is our destiny,” and begins to talk about the End of Days. But the most fascinating figures in the film are not Dr Ahmed but his wife Samera and his daughters. They are bolshy, smart and ignored, snapping at the men who pompously lecture them about the importance of religion and defending secularism in private arguments. Yet at the end of the film they still vote for the Sunni theocratic political parties; tribe trumps values. I watched the film wistfully wondering about the kind of Iraq the country’s women would build, if only they could raise their voices over the gun-men and Islamists and occupiers.

As she watches the people who wander in and out of the Ahmed family home, Poitras captures some startling images of everyday life in Iraq. A friend enters in a sweaty panic because his son has been taken for a $15,000 ransom. The kidnappers call; he arranges a pick-up but then tells the Ahmeds that he has informed the American soldiers and they are being very helpful in getting him back. Then – a stopped heart – he realises he did not hang up his phone. He holds it to his ear, and the kidnappers are still on the line. “My son is dead,” he says. “I am going to be killed.”

After years of being desensitised by the dead hand of ‘Superman Returns’ and its thousand-fold clones, these are films to remind you that movies are an art-form that can smack you around – and leave bruises.

A strange shift has happened in my gut over the past three years. (No, it’s not another dodgy kebab churning its way through my poor, abused digestive system). In my brief career as a hack, I have been sent to some sweatily dangerous places – Iraq, Palestine, Congo, the most fetid slums of Latin America. And as a result, my sense of risk has dissolved. You know that low anxiety you feel when something irritates you on the tube – a man going through every ring-tone on his mobile in a crowded carriage to see which one he likes most, say – and you nervously wonder whether you should challenge it? I don’t have that feeling any more. I left it in the sands of Mesopotamia.

And it is the most amazing liberation. Now, whenever I see someone behaving in an antisocial way on the tube, I don’t make silent eye contact with the other people on the carriage, offer a tiny shake of the head, and then look down and pray I won’t be stabbed. No. I pick an argument. When I saw a man swearing at a woman who was begging with a baby, telling her to “piss off back to gypsy-land”, I told him I would rather keep her in my country than a bigot like him – and she was so pleased she cried. When I saw a man doling out ring-tone torture to an entire carriage, I asked him what the hell he was doing. After a few teeth-sucking murmurs of defiance, he slunked off to the next carriage where, I noted with glee, he kept his mobile silent. The people in my carriage beamed at me like I had just saved them from death.

I have dozens of these stories, a whole battery of silent triumphs over the casual rudeness that corrodes life in this glorious hunk of concrete. People are almost pathetically grateful that somebody has said something. But it has also made me aware of the strange dilemmas of tube etiquette. I don’t mean the stupid, sterile etiquette of Debretts’, a snobbish social code designed to distinguish the PLU (People Like Us) from the smelly masses. I mean the basic contours of niceness, those silent codes that make London life bearable and are only broken by a few enraging people.

When I asked you to e-mail me with the borderline cases – either the tiny rudenesses or the is-this-really-rude dilemmas that you are never quite sure about – I was hit with an electronic tsunami of irritation. The most enraging tiny tic of tube life for you guys is, it seems, something we might dub Swollen Testicle Syndrome. This is when you are next to a guy who insists on sitting with his legs splayed apart so they intrude into your space, squishing your legs into a feeble inward arc. These days I retaliate by opening my legs back in a silent get-out-of-my-space signal; usually they retreat. But unless challenged in this way, the advice for male tube passengers should be like that doled out to Victorian virgins: keep your legs together at all times.

But there are softer dilemmas it’s harder to find a solution to. How long can you stare at a fit person on the tube without it becoming stalkerish? (Until they make eye contact with you, in which case you must look away and pretend it was an accident). Is there any way to initiate conversation with a fellow tube passenger without looking mentally ill? (No. Not unless you happen to be reading the same book as them – this is how two friends of mine who now have a child met – or the tube has simply stopped in the tunnel for more than five minutes, in which case you can engage in a low grumble together.) How old or pregnant-looking should somebody be before you offer them your seat on the tube? (Tricky. If you are over-generous, you can end up offending people in late middle-age or fat women who are not pregnant).

And there are a handful of acts that have been stigmatised as rude but aren’t at all. The Underground authorities have been trying to stigmatise people who leave newspapers on the tube as guilty of littering. Hello? Leaving reading material is a public service that saves thousands of people from tube-boredom; to compare them to people who leave the carcass of their KFC chicken is crazy.

But my new rule is: if something annoys you, argue about it. Don’t be afraid to confront. The odds of being punched or stabbed are negligibly tiny, but the chance of feeling smugly satisfied – and basking in the instant love of your fellow passengers – is almost guaranteed.

At last I have seen Al Gore’s startling new film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which opens in London next month. It is a cool, clear outline of the dilemma the world is faced with – and particularly those of us in this city. The amount of carbon dioxide suddenly released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has sent the planet’s climate into chaos. Of the 21 hottest years ever recorded, 20 have just happened. (Remember the summer we just had?). Mount Kilimanjaro is nearly bare of snow for the first time in ten millennia. The Arctic is melting like ice-cubes in warm water.

Here in London, we are in terrible danger from global warming – a risk that makes the 7/7 psycopathy look like a chipped nail. In the entire 1980s, the Thames Barrier had to be raised seven times. So far this year, it has been raised more than 30 times. Rising sea levels are not some future threat for your grandkids to fret about. They are here, now. Global warming is making extreme weather events much more likely: Katrina-style hurricanes have doubled in intensity since the mid-1970s. It is only a matter of warmed-time until one of them heads our way, and four million people live on London’s flood-plains. Go see Al Gore’s film – and join the fight against climate chaos. It is a fight to save London.

My name is Johann Hari and I am an addict. Reader, I have the shocking of confessions to make. Scattered across the East End, there is a rash of fried chicken outlets that are – if you can imagine such a thing – a few notches below the culinary standards of KFC. I’m sure you glance at their names before retching back: Tennessee Fried Chicken. Chicken Cottage. Cut-Price Chicken. They are often illustrated with a graphic of a beaming chicken chewing on a chicken leg. When your corporate logo is a cheerful cannibal, you know something has gone wrong. But I love them. Any scrap of breadcrumb-coated lardy chicken for only 99p and I’m there. These ‘restaurants’ have a strange grubby beauty, with London’s poorest and most lost citizens filtering through, consuming some rank poison, and disappearing back into the night. Try it – you might like it before you begin to puke.