"Sometimes you wait hours in line, sometimes days"

His life reads like a Graham Greene novel. As a young West German, Adrian Geiges, 62, went to the GDR for a year to study. Later he worked in China as a manager for Bertelsmann and produced television reports in New York. And that was by far not all stations. Here are some excerpts from his new book "Ofter times change the world".

I am volunteering for three weeks in the Brigada José Marti, named after the Cuban poet and national hero who fell against the Spanish in the War of Independence. He wrote verses of the song Guantanamera. "Brigada José Marti" is the somewhat pompous name of an international holiday camp in Cuba - with work assignments. We, a few hundred volunteers, live in a camp in the countryside 45 kilometers from the capital, Havana.

Guantanamera can often be heard from loudspeaker poles that stand on the site. Five people share a bedroom. The common language is English (I won't learn Spanish until later in Mexico). At 7 a.m., when we're on the bus that's supposed to take us to work, the same loudspeakers croak out the claim: "The buses are leaving right now." But they haven't left yet, so the announcement is repeated for half an hour. My first encounter with the relaxed Latin American mentality.

We harvest oranges and build a school, haul bricks and paper walls. We visit hospitals and learn that Cuba has the best healthcare system in Latin America, which is probably true, at least when the country was supported by the Soviet Union and was doing well economically. In schools the children applaud us, as in all socialist countries they wear red pioneer scarves, in Cuba the girls wear red skirts and the boys wear red shorts. The revolution started a literacy campaign, everyone can read and write, unlike anywhere else in Latin America - that's true too.

We experience the unlimited power of party and state on our bus trips across the country. Policemen on motorbikes push oncoming cars off the road and force them to stop, although we could make good time on the nearly empty streets without it. In Havana, we marvel at the iconic Che Guevara mural in Revolution Square, which spans ten floors of the Ministry of the Interior building. Beneath it is "Hasta la victoria siempre" - "until victory forever," a quote from Che Guevara's farewell letter to Fidel Castro, before Che went to Congo as a revolutionary and then to Bolivia, where he was assassinated.

While the West and I get excited about Mikhail Gorbachev, the people of the Soviet Union, including my colleagues at Progress, are reining in their enthusiasm. Gorbachev's glasnost, openness, brings germs of freedom of the press, one can write about Stalin's crimes or the mafia. Gorbachev released the GDR and the peoples of Eastern Europe into freedom.

But within the Soviet Union he hardly reformed the ailing socialist economic system, and a few half-hearted steps actually made life worse. Nothing works anymore. The Russians say: Perestroika, the transformation of society, is like gradually introducing left-hand traffic on the roads - let's start with trucks. People react cynically to Gorbachev's pathos that perestroika will bring bolsche sozialisma, more socialism. Everyone moans, "What? Even more?"

The grocery stores all belong to the state. They look as if they were set up or just not set up for some anti-communist satire. The huge, unadorned halls stand empty. Some days there are two or three items scattered on one of the shelves, a few cans of fish or a box of oatmeal. Only rarely does something eatable come in, a kind of brown bread, smetana, sour cream or pelmeni, dumplings stuffed with meat. Then queues form, sometimes more than a hundred meters long, squeezing their way through the store in spirals. Sometimes you wait hours in line, sometimes days!

The scarce goods disappear through the chyornyi chod, the “black entrance”, po blatu, via relationships. Everyone grabs what they can get and exchanges it with friends for other goods. As in the war, the government rationed basic foodstuffs. In Russia, of course, this includes vodka. I, too, as a Soviet worker, get talony, coupons on paper so flimsy that I feel I must use them before they vanish into thin air.

I'm entitled to one bottle of vodka a month. But now the vodka rations that I'm forced to drink as a guest of Russian friends and colleagues are enough for me. I'd rather have a bottle of wine again, but you can't buy it in the shops. With a work colleague I solve the problem in the Soviet way. He gets white wine from Georgia through an acquaintance who works for the railroad. But he prefers to drink vodka. My colleague and I decide to swap.

That's easier said than done. After waiting two hours in the vodka queue and showing my coupon, the saleswoman tells me that I also have to hand in an empty bottle of vodka as a deposit. Since I don't have one yet, I buy an empty bottle on the black market - at a price higher than the full one at the state store. With that, I'm back in line.

If you need to get somewhere in a hurry, you sometimes take a taxi in New York. The rides are cheap compared to Germany and you can hail the yellow cabs anywhere on the road. Like me, most drivers come from abroad and try their luck in New York. Once I have to go from West 23rd Street and 8th Avenue to East 55th Street and 1st Avenue – the intersection of street and avenue in Manhattan indicates where you want to go. The Indian driver says this is his first day at work, if I can show him where to go.

No problem, but it still amazes me. Here the streets run east to west and the avenues north to south, most of them have numbers instead of names, so you just need to know how to count to find your way around. I ask him how long he's lived in New York. He replies: "I just said that: Today is my first day in New York." And on the road as a taxi driver! He came to the US from India a month ago, but has been working in the kitchen at his uncle's Indian restaurant in neighboring New Jersey all the time, so he hasn't seen anything.

The construction boom in Shanghai led to a large number of vacant apartments, especially in the higher price range, which corresponded to normal prices in Germany at the time. Brokers scramble for customers and pick them up with the chauffeur. The landlord pays the commission. Most of the apartments are already furnished.

This also applies to the ones we choose: on the 15th floor of the Shanghai City Apartments, four rooms with parquet floors over 160 square meters, rent 2300 US dollars, of which the company pays half. That's one of the peculiarities of managerial life that I get to know: those who already earn a lot don't even have to pay for some everyday expenses themselves.

In Shanghai's commercial service apartments, there are some additional privileges included in the rent: former elite fighters of the People's Liberation Army guard the building; A cleaning crew of five vacuums and waxes the apartment three times a week; we run for free in the fitness center and crawl past plastic palm trees in the in-house pool; a quick-reaction team of craftsmen repairs everything at any time; all you have to do is call the models in burgundy uniforms standing behind the marble reception desk in the entrance hall.

The favela dwellers are the true Swabians. "Schaffe, create, build a house" doesn't apply here in a figurative sense, but literally: people build their own houses. Those who don't have the skills to do so can get cement and other building materials and hire relatives or neighbors to do the work have done something before. However, the idea of ​​planning is significantly different than in Germany, for example.

I look out the window at the narrow alley in front of my front door. Not bad either, because there is always something going on. But I dream of the view of the Sugar Loaf and the sea. When my friend Adriano, one of the motorcycle taxi drivers, tells me over a beer about his plan to build a house with this view in our favela, I immediately express my desire to rent a place there.

Months later, I haven't heard from him since then: again casually over a beer, Adriano tells me that I can move into the new apartment next week.

"Next week? That's a bit short term. I can't move that quickly."

"But you have to, otherwise I'll give the apartment to someone else. I have many interested parties.”

"But I haven't even seen the apartment yet!"

We'll go there immediately. In fact, the house offers the gigantic view of Guanabara Bay and the Sugar Loaf, as I dreamed. The bright white of the freshly painted walls looks much nicer and more modern than the crumbling plaster of my previous dwelling. But in the apartment there is still no floor, no kitchen and no bathroom. "We'll manage the few little things by next week," promises Adriano.

A week later, it's a Sunday, the apartment is actually ready, albeit not until around 10 p.m. My new landlord says I should move in now.

"But I'm a journalist, I need the internet, otherwise I can't work."

"No problem," replies Adriano. Together we go to Leandro, who is responsible for the internet in the favela. There are no bells here, we stand under his window and shout: “Leandro! Leandro!” He's already asleep, but comes downstairs after a few minutes anyway, in an undershirt and Bermuda shorts. He carries a ladder in one hand and a coil of cable in the other. Together we go to the new house. Like James Bond, Adriano and Leandro climb over the roofs - the houses are built so close together that you can get from one to the other.

You connect the cable to a pole and run the other end through the window into my new apartment. Half an hour later I have internet. Because everyone here does it that way, there is a tangle of electricity, telephone and internet cables running through the favelas that would certainly not find TÜV approval. But it works - as long as there is no storm. As soon as a storm is imminent, I quickly send out the most urgent e-mails because I know that the internet or the electricity will soon be out, usually both. When the storm is over, Leandro will come and fix it.

Adrian Geiges: "Ofter times change the world" was published by Piper-Verlag. 240 pages, 18 euros