A Date With Svetlana Alexievich In Berlin Or, Smuggling Bugs Into Soviet Moscow

A Cuban writer, having lived in Soviet-era Moscow and East Berlin in the 1980s, reflects on real-life bugs and make-believe characters.

- Jorge Ferrer

I hadn’t been back to Berlin since the mid-1980s, but I used to go there quite often as a teenager. In fact, Berlin was the first city I set foot in outside of Cuba. We stopped there on the way to Moscow for what back then was called “habilitation,” meaning the purchase of clothes at the state’s expense so that impoverished Cubans would not look so impoverished when they were seen in foreign lands. There were a couple of stores on Calle Galiano in Havana where travelers were sent as well. In fact, the visit to Galiano was the first leg of the trip. Buying shirts and underpants, ties and moccasins, was a trip unto itself!

The most senior of functionaries like my father—who back then held a position in a bank that was responsible for counting the money that Eastern Bloc countries owed one another—traveled to Berlin to “habilitate” themselves. If you were going to work in the East, you traveled first to Berlin, to East Berlin; if you were going to work in the West, you’d go instead to Paris or Madrid for such purchases. Thanks to that, I was able to see the Wall when it was still standing. I saw it from the front and from the side. And I saw it from above, from the window of an apartment where we stayed on one of the “habilitation” trips, and from where you could also see the West. Later we’ll return to that window, not to look outside, but rather to observe what’s going on inside.