In a conversation this week with Atlantic correspondent Jeffery Goldman, Fidel Castro admitted that the Cuban socialist economic system was failing. As Washington considers loosening the trade embargo, the World Policy Journal reflects on Silvana Paternostro's spring 1996 article on the economic difficulties faced by the common Cuban.
By Silvana Paternostro
For 37 years, the United States and the Cuban-American community have scrutinized Fidel Castro's steps – worrying, plotting, planning, projecting what life will be like in Cuba without him. Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, predictions of his demise have intensified. The United States has tightened its 33-year-old embargo on trade with the island, and Castro has railed even more furiously about imperialist plots to destroy the triumphs of his revolution.
The average Cuban citizen, however, has had little time to spare to think about the trade embargo or about politics. As Castro squares off for a final, twilight struggle against foreign adversaries (evidence of which may be seen in the recent downing of two U.S. civilian aircraft by the Cuban air force), ordinary Cubans are faced with a daily battle for simple survival.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro's government lost its economic guardian, which alone accounted for 85 percent of Cuban exports and imports. There were no more preferential trade agreements and no more swapping of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. In just three years, from 1989 to 1992, Cuba's exports fell from $8 billion to $2.2 billion, and overall, Cuban economic production shrank by 40 percent. Overnight, Castro's socialist state found itself unable to continue supporting its population, and Cu-bans have been left, like orphans, to fend for themselves.
The average Cuban citizen has had little time to spare to think about the trade embargo.
On the streets of Havana, even the simplest tasks have become a struggle, and the search for basic goods has become so urgent that everyday Spanish has given way to a vocabulary of crisis. The verbs for "to find," "to get," and even "to have" have merged together into one: resolver, "to resolve" or, better yet, "to solve."
When I visited the island last fall, a young father, who had plenty to eat in the Soviet era, proudly declared to a friend: "Today, mi hermano, I resolved a pound of cheese for my kids' lunch." But his upstairs neighbors, a theater director and his wife, "re-solved" their midday meal by boiling some herbs and drinking the infusion to quell their hunger. A 22-year-old student sporting new running shoes told me that a tourist had "resolved" them for him. And when I asked a teenager wearing a black Metallica T-shirt if he liked heavy-metal music, he said no: "It was the only T-shirt I could resolve."
Before they can worry about Fidel's future, Cubans must "resolve" their rice and their beans, their rum and their cigarettes, the milk for their babies and the bus ride to work each day. With few spare parts, little modern technology, and no money, their resourcefulness shows in their inventions. I saw a 1957 automatic Chevrolet that ran with the stick-shift transmission of a Soviet Lada and mopeds that had been made from bicycles and the motors of lawnmowers. A young rock musician made an amplifier out of a Russian turntable and a couple of television cables. Another musician used telephone wire to make guitar strings.
Pedro Luis Ferrer, a popular and outspoken singer and songwriter who used to get wonderful French guitar strings from the government-run music institute for free, recognizes how nice that was. He grew up supporting the Revolution and fearing a U.S. invasion; now he questions socialism: "Let me ask you, does it make any sense that the state should provide me with my guitar strings? We got used to living in a basic economy that gave us everything. Now that the state can't continue supporting us, we need to take care of ourselves."
But taking care of one's self in Cuba is not that simple. "We need to invent ways to resolve things, we need to invent ways to find money," says Ferrer, as he shows me his house, which he inherited from his aunts – a privilege in Cuba, since property cannot be bought or sold. Very few Cubans own their homes. He has refurbished one of the front rooms as a recording studio and hopes to get permission from the government to open a bar with live music.
Taking Care of Themselves
Like Ferrer, most Cubans I met are eager to start taking care of themselves. But because the government is trying to open the economy while keeping control of it – it says that it does not want to allow market forces to destroy the triumphs of socialism, as is happening in the former Soviet Union – economic policy is constantly changing. The government says it is supportive oiiniciativa propia, private initiative, and that Cubans can participate in this new economic experiment through trabajos por cuenta propia, self-employment. It has issued a list of about 1,700 different types of permissible business activities. These range from starting bicycle repair shops, to operating stands that offer such services as sharpening knives or refilling cheap cigarette lighters, to running stalls selling fruit juices, used books, or flowers for santeria rituals.
Artisans display their work in demarcated areas, and farmers sell their produce in open-air markets. Musicians peddle their homemade recordings of traditional music to tourists. Families are converting their din-ing rooms into restaurants, and elderly couples walk up and down the Malecon, the famous seawall in Havana, selling sandwiches, chocolates, peanuts, and pizzas.
An estimated 200,000 Cubans are currently self-employed. But Cubans are never sure of what it is they are allowed to do, or not do, to take care of themselves now that the salaries and perks from the paternalistic state are not sufficient to meet their needs. Professionals -lawyers, doctors- are not al-lowed to start independent practices. Ferrer has been waiting for months to get a license for his bar. And while I was there, I heard that selling homemade pizza had become illegal, the government having decided that "the people's" flour could not be used for profit.
"People are hiding in order to do work, to do things for which there is no need to hide," says Ferrer. But he, like many Cu-bans, has no desire to live anywhere else. One of Cuba's favorite trovadores, he would like to be able to support himself as the professional musician he is, without help from his brother in Miami. Imagine Bob Dylan not being able to afford new guitar strings. Even when they are available, a set costs $11, which is roughly equal to a musician's monthly state salary.
"Socialism or Death"
Without Soviet aid and with the added strains of a tighter U.S. trade embargo, the Revolution's pride and joy – its health care system, free and technically advanced- has declined. Since 1994, for example, there have been no new heart pacemakers on the island. The two companies, one Australian and the other Swedish, that had supplied Cuba with them for years stopped selling to Castro after the U.S. Congress passed the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992, which made it illegal for foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with the island. The Australian manufacturer announced in 1993 that it could not continue its commerce with Cuba be-cause its product contained U.S.-made parts. Soon after, the Swedish supplier was bought by a company based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as the subsidiary of an American enterprise, it also had to stop selling to Cuba.
This may be seen as a victory back in Washington, Miami, and Union City, New Jersey – homes to the supporters of the senseless Cuba Democracy Act – since both the U.S. government and el exilio cubano continue to think that if the sanctions are tighter, Castro will fall sooner. But while the bill might have deprived Cubans of the pacemakers to keep their hearts pumping regularly, four years later, Fidel Castro is still in power.
The international community has condemned the embargo – in the U.N. General Assembly this year, 117 nations voted against it. The United States, Israel, and Uzbekistan cast the only three votes in favor. Meanwhile, Castro is receiving support from most Latin American governments. Last year, he was invited to all regional summit meetings except the Summit of the Americas, which took place in Miami. Spain, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Mexico are investing in this tropical island, whose leader's motto is still "Socialism or Death."
These days, the government likes to gloat about having weathered the storm by quoting recent economic indicators. Last year, the economy grew by 2.5 percent, registering the first substantial upswing since the loss of Soviet largesse. This does not mean that Castro is home free, however. The economy still depends primarily on sugar, and this year's harvest- not foreign investment – will decide Cuba's economic future. By keeping the embargo in place, the United States gives Castro the opportunity to absolve himself of guilt for what is wrong, missing, or impossible "to resolve" in Cuba.
As he has done for the last 35 years, Castro continues to point his finger at the United States and to blame the trade embargo for all of Cuba s hardships. At the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations last year, he referred to the embargo as "ruthless" and said it causes "the death of men, women, and children, youths and elders, like noiseless atom bombs."
While the bill might have deprived Cubans of the pacemakers to keep their hearts pumping regularly, four years later, Fidel Castro is still in power.
Cuba's hardships have forced Castro to open up the island's coasts to capitalism, however, and this – not the tightening – has rocked the Revolution. He had little choice: for the first time since it came to power in 1959, his government had to fend for itself. Free training for doctors, engineers, film directors, painters, and ballet dancers in Russia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania had ended. There were no more Soviet automobiles, radios, or television sets to allocate to good revolutionaries and laborers. Gasoline was, suddenly, simply not available, so Castro started distributing Chinese bicycles. Basics such as pencils, aspirin, toilet paper, and electricity became scarce. Cubans began to live in the Special Period, Castro's name for the era of post- Soviet reality.
The legalization of the dollar, the opening of farmers' and artisans' markets, the arrival of tourists – 800,000 of whom visited the island last year to windsurf, drink, and cavort with cubanas -are bringing a new way (or the old way) of life to Cuba, one that clashes with the concept of the egalitarian society that the government has preached for 37 years. Economic liberalization and contact with foreigners are giving Cubans a peek into the culture of consumer-ism. As with Ferrer, making money – which means making dollars – has become the main priority for most Cubans. A younger generation is catching on. "I want to be paid what my music is worth," says Athanai, a 23-year-old up-and-coming rock star. The dollar, however, is creating class distinctions in this Caribbean classless Utopia.
Making It
In Cuba today, there are the haves and the have-nots. Those who have, have dollars, usually because they work in the tourist industry or work illegally. The privileged Cu-bans- apart from the nomenklatura- are the waiters, the cab drivers, the prostitutes, even the smugglers of antiques and cigars. The have-nots, the dollarless, are the doctors, the engineers, the teachers, those who still serve the ideals of the Revolution.
Doctora Maria Eugenia is the perfect ex-ample of Cuba's economic distortions. When Castro came to power, her parents were poor, but the Revolution gave her an education. As a top medical student, she was sent to finish her studies in Moscow. When she came back to Havana in the late 1970s as a kidney surgeon, the government gave her a two-bedroom house with a mango tree in the backyard. A few years later, it commended her good work by giving her a four-door Lada.
Today, the car sits idle, and the walls of her house are peeling. A prominent surgeon with an international reputation, she makes roughly 200 Cuban pesos, about $15, a month. She cannot afford to paint her house or to buy new tires for her car. She has not driven to work in more than six months. In-stead, she bikes to the hospital, about 45 minutes away, in Havana's tropical heat. When she gets there, she worries about finding the gauze she needs for her surgeries.
"I am exhausted," says Maria Eugenia, a strongly built woman in her mid-forties, as she introduces me to her 80-year-old mother, who lives with her. "And I need to worry about her." Now she has found a solution.
Last November, she was offered a three-year post at a hospital in Yemen and she took it. Desperate for cash, the Cuban government leases trained doctors to other countries. Yemen will pay Cuba $1,200 a month for Doctora Maria Eugenia. She will get $400 a month. She is not happy about leaving Cuba or her elderly mother, but she understands that she can best take care of her mother from Yemen. She will send her $100 every month. "With that, she will live well here, almost like a queen," she says, smiling at her mother, as if to compensate her for her upcoming absence.
Another surgeon decided to supplement his meager salary by moving into his garage. He rents his home – an apartment in one of the divided-up mansions of Miramar, the beachfront neighborhood where Havana's elite lived in the days before Castro- to dollar-paying foreigners.
Professionals and laborers are not reporting to work. They are moonlighting for dollars or simply staying at home. I talked to twins who are trained nurses but who were auditioning for a cabaret show that would take them on tour to Latin America and for which they would be paid in dollars. Plus, a trip abroad is highly coveted by Cubans. A composer and a violinist supplement their $15 monthly income from the orchestra of the national opera by playing for tips – about $15 a night – in the bar of a three-star hotel three nights a week. Many of the doctors, engineers, and professors who received Soviet cars from the Revolution are using them to drive foreigners or dollar-toting Cubans around. If caught, they risk their jobs and a huge fine.
A 60-year-old woman who had cleaned government offices for as long as Castro has been in power stopped working last year. She decided that rising at dawn, taking a crowded bus to work, and mopping floors eight hours a day was worthless. "What for?" she asks, wiping her hands on the green-striped housedress she made from the set of bed sheets her son, who left last year on a rubber raft, sent her from Louisiana. "So that when I get paid, all I can buy is five pounds of rice?" She and her husband, who sits beside her nodding his head and who drove a city bus until his retirement last year, live off his pension of $2 a month. "They like to tell us that everything, the rum, the tobacco, the beer, that it all be-longs to el pueblo now," he says softly. "But that's not true. We have no access to it."
Juan Carlos, at 33, does. He buys the best rum, the kind that is sold for dollars in hotel shops. He is one of Cuba's new haves – a bisnero, a distorted Cuban term borrowed from "businessman" that describes the new class of entrepreneurs who work illegally for dollars. An anti-Castro engineer who lost his job when he was caught trying to escape on a small fishing boat during the exodus of August 1994, Juan Carlos has become rich by Cuban standards.
When he was brought back from the open sea by Cuban police, he was humiliated in front of his coworkers, fired from his job, and branded as a traitor to his country. Today, he makes in one day what he used to make in a year as a state-employed engineer. He buys and sell antiques – family heir-looms, old gold watches, porcelain, works of art – to foreign dealers, collectors, and tourists. If he is caught, he will go to jail. Meanwhile, his pockets are full of $20 bills. He is one of the few Cubans who can afford to take a date to the trendy convenience store next to the Melia Cohiba Hotel, the latest of the luxury hotels being built with Spanish capital, and pay $6 – a fortune for most Cubans – for hot dogs and soft ice cream. To eat, they cross the street and sit on the Malecon, where, on a Saturday night, they join many young couples like themselves.
Ever since the Cohiba opened, the area of the seawall facing the hotel has become the favorite hangout for hundreds of Cubans, especially on the weekends. First, the location is popular because of the hotel's modern architecture- the amount of neon, glass, and marble in the building has not been seen in Cuba since before the Revolution. It is the tallest building in Havana and by far the most glistening.
Second, it is the hub for business transactions. This is where the dollar-toting foreigners stay – so it is the waiting area for the gypsy-cab drivers and the men selling black-market cigars, old pesos signed by Che Guevara when he served as president of the national bank, or P.P.G, an expensive medicine for lowering cholesterol manufactured in Cuba and coveted by tourists for its alleged aphrodisiacal powers.
The Cohiba also houses Achi, Havana's hottest discotheque. Every night, dozens of heavily made-up Cuban women sit outside, on the ledge and on the steps, and ask the foreign tourists and businessmen to invite them in. Juan Carlos would like to take his date dancing there, but the $15 per-person cover charge and the $5 dollars per drink is too much, even for him. Ache is affordable only for foreigners – the only Cubans who get to dance inside are the women who proposition them.
Selling Cuba
Businessmen are flocking to the island be-cause Cuba is for sale. Newsstands at the air-port and in the hotels display glossy magazines that explain the Law of Foreign Investment and announce new business opportunities in five different languages. Spanish and German hotel chains are building and man-aging resort hotels along Cuba's coasts. An Italian company has expressed interest in re-building its telecommunications system, and Canadians are mining its nickel. De-spite the trade embargo, 500 American businessmen visited the island last year, and 100 of them signed letters of intent to do business with government-owned enterprises as soon as the embargo allows them to do so.
Lifting the embargo could hasten the end of Castro's regime. Cubans are anxious – desperate – to try something new.
Castro, however, continues to be wary of anything American and to carry on about U.S. conspiracies. In a radio address late last year, Castro declared, "All sorts of people, adventurers, have come here wanting to make deals. They had ordinary, absurd, clumsy, and unacceptable ideas…. Every time I see them, I say, 'This can come from the CIA.' Even the CIA has been making offers to invest in hotels to make us waste one, two, or three years holding discussions."
Ironically, the government is pitching business opportunities to Cubans living abroad, to those whom for years Castro referred to as gusanos, worms. Today, they are known as mariposas, butterflies. Last November, during a conference meant to increaser elations with la migration cubana, more than 350 of these Cubans arrived in Havana, where they were well received by the government's top officials. Roberto Robaina, the minister of foreign relations, addressed them in his welcoming speech as "cubanosto dos" -Cubans all. At a panel discussion on Cuba's economic activities organized by the vice minister of foreign investment, they were told all about the attractive investment possibilities available to them. "One of the great results from the meeting in Havana," a young Cuban diplomat told me, "is precisely the possibility that the Cu-ban who is living abroad can participate in the opening process to foreign capital."
This seems unfair to those Cubans who have lived and worked for the Revolution, those who have needed "to resolve" during the Special Period, I tell him.
He opens up his arms, shrugs his shoulders, and in the tone of a business-school graduate, answers: "Well, we are very aware that in economic matters, countries need capital, technology, and markets. Do you know any Cuban who lives in Cuba who owns any technology? No. How about a Cuban with access to markets? No. Any with capital?"
Cuban officials like this young diplomat talk about the need to restructure the economy through the development of markets, Cuba's competitive advantages for foreign investment, and the strength of the Revolution all in one breath. He was born after the Bay of Pigs, but, as a well-trained Castro official, he blames the trade embargo for Cuba's difficulties and argues that the United States wants to see Castro fall so that it can reign supreme in the hemisphere. Still, he would like to see an end to the U.S. embargo. Castro's regime could be saved, he claims, if Cuba could buy spare parts in Texas rather than in Asia.
This might well be true, although the economic benefits that an end to the embargo could bring would not be felt in the short term by the 1 1 million people who are physically and mentally drained by their daily struggles. Lifting the embargo, however, could hasten the end of Castro's regime. Cubans are anxious- desperate- to try something new. As I was told by the theater director, who had fought in the Sierra Maestra and today drinks herbal tea for lunch, "Not even Che Guevara himself would be capable of lifting the faith of our people today."
Silvana Paternostro is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.
Photo: Screen shot of Cuban daily life courtesy of Sam Miron's short film, "Por la Manana."