Communists, Coffee, and Call Girls: Travels in China, Vietnam, and Cuba

When I first visited the People’s Republic of China in the late 1980s, most of the hotels and restaurants were owned by the government, service was universally bad, and if you wanted a waiter or waitress, you called out “Comrade!”   Three people were delegated to carry out a task that only one person could handle.  On buses, one person took your money and another gave you a receipt.  All paperwork had to be reviewed by the police or the foreign service office and was unofficial until it bore the ever-present stamp of the red communist star.  Forms had to be filled out for everything but going to the toilet. 

Early in my first visit to China, I made the mistake of relying on local or “chicken” buses for transportation.   The buses were cheap, but exceedingly slow.   I remember a bus once taking eight hours to go 150 kilometers.  Many cities and counties in China were then closed to foreigners.  Before venturing out of the major cities, one had to consult with police or a recent guidebook to determine which areas were open for foreign travel.  Police permits had to be obtained to travel to closed areas.  At the bus station, they would sell you a ticket, but not tell you that the area to which you were traveling was closed.

Twice I was temporarily detained and deported from localities for entering “closed” areas.  In both cases, the local communist officials were very polite.  They simply informed me that I had broken the law and must pay a fine and leave the next morning.  The fine was usually less than an American dollar; leaving the next morning was the only inconvenience.   The first time I was detained I was placed under house arrest until the next morning when I had to take the first bus out of town.   The second time, I had my own mountain bike, which I had bought for about eighty U. S. dollars.   I was, therefore, able to ride away into the sunrise own my on early the next morning.

In China, the locals have great respect for cyclists—that is still the predominant mode of transportation in the country.   The bicycle helps one blend in with the scenery and not be the typical western tourist.   And you can get to some of those out-of-way places, like local monasteries, small towns, and forested natural areas (few are left in China), all of which are usually off the beaten path.

On my first trip to China, I had learned that because Chinese authorities think all foreigners are evil, the “outsider” (“foreigner” literally in Chinese) had to do something really bad to get arrested.  My roommate in Kunming (in the south of China in Yunnan Province) was Japanese, in China to collect swallowtail butterflies.  Upon returning from dinner, I found him and another Japanese gentleman in my room smoking a brass hashish waterpipe.  Alarmed, I firmly pointed out that I would rather they not do that, as I did not want to spend 30 years in prison for their deeds.  I was informed by them not to worry; if a foreigner were caught with drugs, he was simply deported.  On the other hand, native Chinese were often executed.  The next day I was off to climb mountains, and my Japanese friends were illegally collecting Chinese butterflies and smoking Chinese hash.

Foreigners then even used a different form of currency than the native Chinese.  This money was called FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificate) and could be bought only with foreign monies.  The foreign traveler was to use only FEC while in China.  One could trade FEC back to the Bank of China upon leaving the country.   This meant that the FEC was actually worth something in foreign trade, while Chinese money, the reminbi (RMB), was not.  There was, therefore, a large demand for FEC on the street.  One of the first things I learned in China was how to exchange FEC for Chinese money on the black market.  On the street, you could get about two RMB for every FEC; this meant you could double your money if you were traveling in rural or small-town China.

                

Foreigners were looked upon with extreme suspicion, as they always have been in China (elder Chinese still call Westerners “foreign devils” or “foreign ghosts”—remember the English introduced opium to China).  Entrance fees at museums, park, and major events were higher for foreigners.  As a large, non-Asian male, I dramatically stood out from the local population.  In the small towns and countryside of China, people would often come up to me and marvel at my size, beard, or the thick hair on my arms.  When I traveled by mountain bike China, and again in northern Vietnam in the mid-1990s, I would be surrounded by people upon entering a small town or settlement.  People in Vietnam are equally curious of Westerners but much less suspicious than the Chinese; I was often invited into private homes for meals in Vietnam.

An interesting fact about the structure of Communist societies that makes tourism easier is the crime rate.  China was virtually crime-free in the late 1980s, as was Vietnam in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as is Cuba even today.   A foreigner can walk down a dimly lit street in old Havana on any Saturday night and have little or no fear of being assaulted.  Don’t try that in Memphis, Guatemala City, or your nearest American city.  According to a Cuban friend of mine, it’s because the prisons are so bad.  “No one,” he said, “wants to be put in a Cuban prison.”  One may also note that in Cuba the police are paid more than doctors.

In a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the intelligentsia must be subdued.  In the 1960s in China, this was done by re-education.  (In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge simply killed all the intellectuals—one million of the seven million people in Cambodia.)   I met a Chinese anthropologist with a Ph. D. from Xinhua (the “Harvard” of China) who had spent the 20 years of his life as a shepherd in Mongolia.  This was his re-education.  With an inexplicably large gap in his resume, he had been allowed, in the late 1980s, to go back to the research that he had begun in the 1960s.    Another intellectual I met in China worked on a pig farm for three years because he had made an off-hand insulting comment about a party official.   Many intellectuals who came of age in the ‘60s have stories like those of these two gentlemen or, often, much worse.  Of course, many intellectuals from Vietnam and Cuba, and a few from China, now live in the United States.

So if you cannot talk politics, that most dismal of sciences, you can always talk food.  Street food in China and Vietnam is wonderful (one rarely gets ill from Asian street food because most dishes are cooked at high temperatures).  You can eat steamed buns, pot stickers, and noodles—all among the world’s best fast food—or sip jasmine tea in bamboo chairs in the old teahouses.  In the old French section of Hanoi, the street vendors sell fried dumplings (they look like apple turnovers) stuffed with bean thread (glass noodles), wild mushrooms, pork, and shrimp.  You sit on small stools and dip these heavenly morsels into fermented fish sauce.  At the end of a long biking trip, I once ate four of these in a row.   And the prices are unbelievable cheap on the street or the roadside.  I once stop at a roadside restaurant in China near the Laotian border.   I ordered tea and rice (I was cycling and did not want to eat any greasy meat).   When I got up to leave, I flashed some Chinese money, preparing to pay.   The proprietor said, “No charge; tea and rice are always free in China.”   I paid anyway.

And there’s the matter of coffee—real coffee. The kind of expresso and café au lait you can get in Florence or Paris.  Some of the best coffee I have ever had in my life was in communist countries.  While cycling the Chinese island of Hainan Dao in the early 1990s, I stopped at a small restaurant for breakfast.  People were drinking tall glasses of a milky mix of sugar and swirling coffee grounds.  It looked horrible.  I ordered a glass, added sugar, and drank it up.  It was among the best café au lait I had ever tasted.   A few miles down the road, I began to understand why—there were coffee plantations on both sides of the road.  In Hanoi, you can get café au lait and baguettes that rival anything you have had outside of Paris.  And in Cuba, the “cubana” is everywhere.  This is the pure “short” expresso, called the “cortado” in Spain, served in a diminutive cup.  Although exceedingly strong, it is a delightful cup of coffee.  (Not being an expresso purist, in Cuba I often ordered a glass of milk and mixed the two to make an excellent café au lait.)   [You can also get a good cubana in Miami or New York City; I once spent the night at the Miami airport, where no one speaks English, and had a cubana in Styrofoam (polystyrene)—how demeaning—for breakfast.]

In China in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and in Cuba today), shopping in large government department stores was miserable—nothing but ugly plastic ware and cheap appliances.  Shopping the backstreets, however, was wonderful.  One little street I know in Chengdu (in Sichuan Province, locally called “the Paris of China”) had antiques, bonsaied plants, birds, bird food, bird cages, goldfish of every color imaginable, and fresh flowers.  In Cuba, many western books are banned, but on a Sunday morning, the Plaza de Armas (which was laid out in 1498) in old Havana is surrounded by bookstalls of old Spanish books.  Because my idea of total bliss on a Sunday morning is a good coffee and a book or newspaper at a sidewalk café, the most relaxing places I have ever been, at least in the Third World, are the Plaza de Armas in Havana and Hoan Kiem Lake in old Hanoi (fortunately, none of our American bombs ever hit there).

In the late 1980s in China, any woman in a bar who smoked was a prostitute; Chinese women simply did not smoke then.  Times have changed.  Now girls on the street give foreigners cards that explain that they will be your tour guide while you are in China.  Interestingly, the girls pictured have little or nothing on and are always large-breasted and extremely sexy.  In the 1990s in Vietnam, especially Saigon, prostitutes and call girls were always aggressive.   A girl in a black dhao cai (the traditional Vietnamese skirt/pants) drove up to me on a black moped once, asked me to get on and she would take me to a hotel for “fun.”  South of Hanoi, I was hounded by a motorcyclist who wanted to get me a good Vietnamese girl.  The price started at $25 and quickly dropped to $5.  When I refused $5, the man seemed incredulous.  He must have assumed that I did not like Vietnamese girls, because the next morning he met me and said that he had found a nice English girl for me.

Many European men fly to Havana just for the girls.  Graham Greene called Havana “a factory producing beautiful women.”  On the streets of Havana, call girls are about as common as noodle shops are in China.   The going rate in Havana is from $45-100, according to the neighborhood and hotel in which you find yourself.  I was propositioned for $100, $75, and $45 by different girls in different areas of Havana.   The Havana girl says she just wants to have some fun, go dancing, and then…whatever.   Most of these girls do not appear to have pimps and seem to be own their own.   An endocrinologist I met in the west of Cuba told me she made US $12 per month and professional baseball players earn about $25 a month; a prostitute in Havana is, therefore, making several months salary in an hour.  A medical team from my home state in the U. S. went to Cuba a few years ago.  One of the orthopedic surgeons on the team was with a Cuban woman he had paid to come up to his room when she said (in English), “What do you in the United States?”  He said, “I’m an orthopedic surgeon.”  She replied, to his surprise, “that’s interesting, I am studying to be an orthopedic surgeon in Cuba.”

When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital—that biting critique of capitalism, written and researched at the British Museum, across London town from Highgate Cemetery where his remains now lie, he probably never thought that he was outlining basic principles that nations would later attempt to follow.   Communism looks good on paper, but in practice becomes a nightmarish mixture of totalitarianism and bureaucracy.  The experiment has been poorly carried out in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and a few other countries.  As I have reminisced above, however, all is not bad in these realms.  In the next few decades, we will probably see the last of communism as a form of government.  China now has become more capitalistic than America, letting people who have no money die in the waiting rooms of hospitals.  Vietnam is a rural communist country surrounding two large capitalist cities—Saigon and Hanoi.  And with the passing of the two Castros, Cuba will undoubtedly become more capitalistic, ending an era. 

On my last night of a recent trip to Havana, I had a cold beer at four, a glass of wine with supper, and two mojitos afterward.  Walking unsteadily, I was heading for my hotel near Central Park to get to bed early and catch a morning flight.  As I turned a corner, one of the most beautiful Cuban women I had ever seen in my life hooked my arm and said, “Let’s have some fun tonight…only $45.”  “Why didn’t I meet you on my first night in Havana,” I thought, and then said, “No thanks, but you are beautiful.”   A policeman approached, as we parted ways in the darkness.