Socialism with a Pizza Face

When it comes to sardonic humour the Cubans lack for nothing; they even make a joke about lacking for everything else. “What are the three triumphs of the Revolution? the question goes, “Education, health care and sports.” So far, so Castro. But then comes the sting –“And what are the failures of the Revolution?” “Breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

‘Let them eat parades’, the nepotistic Castro dynasty might offer in spurious consolation. The Cubans were certainly doing that recently, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution’s greatest ‘triumph’, the victory over the CIA-sponsored landing at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961. But as man, even revolutionary man, shall not live by marches alone, the Communist Party met soon after, the first national congress in fourteen years, to review the country’s woes. There is really only one item on the agenda: the appalling state of the Cuban economy and the need for ‘reform.’

With Big Brother Fidel safely parked in death’s antechamber, Little Brother Raul has been introducing a kind of creeping capitalism. But as always in this socialist paradise in the sun it’s a case of one step forward, one step back. “The time we have left is short and the work we have is gigantic”, Raul announced recently.

Indeed, the work they have is gigantic. But the orthodoxy still holds fast that the state should, by the lights of Marxism, occupy the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy; that is to say, the state is running the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy into the ground. Economic liberalisation and free enterprises here advances by the slowest and most cautious steps. Raul laboured gigantically and brought forth…pizzas.

Yes, that’s it, capitalism in Cuba has a pizza face, something, I suppose, that might go part of the way towards addressing the three failures of the Revolution – let’s all have pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner, assuming, of course, that they are not too outrageously expense in a country where a doctor earns no more the equivalent of twenty US dollars a month. The problem is that the doctor might blow the lot in a single night in one of Havana’s privately owned restaurants, ordering, say, pizzas.

It’s the total lack of imagination that strikes one most about Cuba and its ruling gerontocracy. There is Raul with enough wit to understand that something is wrong and too little energy to do anything about it, other than to allow free enterprise on the margins, a nation to be buoyed up by pizza bakers and plumbers, too little energy to escape from the stupid lie of socialism.

It’s amazing to think that a country as fertile as Cuba now has to import some 80% of the food consumed, which presumably includes pizza-making ingredients. The place is not being kept alive by Raul’s laughable experiments in economic liberalisation but by subsidies in oil from Chavezland. The pizza illusion is likely to be preserved for a little longer as this Wonderland slips into the final stages of ideological Alzheimer’s.

Castro’s Crooners

I’ve got exciting news for you if you are Cuban and a fancy-dress dancer. Your government has decided that you can work for yourself. That’s right, yours is among the 178 occupations that the Castro regime, in its limitless wisdom, has decided can be privatised. There is only one tiny drawback – you have to perform in the same style of costume as that of Benny Moré, the 1940s crooner. No, it’s not a joke: humour was first serious shortage ever created by communism,

I sincerely hope there are a lot of Benny Moré look-a-likes out there because, as I’ve mentioned before, Raul Castro, in an attempt to revive the moribund economy of a moribund state of a moribund revolution, is laying off 500,000 public sector workers. The private sector, such as it is, and it isn’t much at all, is expected to take this superfluous value. But in the unimaginative and bizarre world of orthodox communism the state has only been able to come up a fairly limited range of options, Benny Moré among them.

If you don’t have the required costume you can always become a clown or a button sewer, both of which made it on to the list. If you don’t fancy that you can try your hand at furniture repairs, just as long as you don’t try to make the stuff, and thus risk “accumulating property”; run the risk –Fidel forbid – of becoming a capitalist.

All these ideological dinosaurs are doing is simply legalising, if legalising is the word, a pre-existing informal economy rather than creating fresh opportunities. The caution is laughable, this fear of throwing out the baby with the bathwater when there was never a baby in the first place. Besides, the bath has a hole, so there is no water either.

Never mind that. Let’s be positive. All the Benny Moré guys will now be able to hire staff (does Benny Moré need staff?) beyond the immediate family. They will be able to have ‘employees’, in other words, one of those pre-revolutionary expressions long incarcerated in a verbal gulag.

When it comes to the Castro comedy people are understandably sceptical. Too many remember the previous liberalisation of the 1990s, when businesses thrived, only to be suffocated by red tape and exorbitant taxes after cheap Venezuelan oil started to flow in. People are now so used to things the way they are, used to the one step forward and three steps back approach, that many believe that things will never change for as long as the Castro Nepotism remains in power.

But they are wrong; things do change – for the worse, always for the worse. If you’ve been to Cuba I feel sure you will have heard the stories, the hard luck stories of people on the hustle. One acquaintance told me he had no choice but to work in the black economy because, in his words, he was paid shit by the government. Yes, they are paid ‘shit’, under $30.00 a month at the unofficial exchange rate, but at least there was guaranteed employment (never use one person when fifty will do), subsidised housing (dreadful places) and a basic food ration (go and stay if you can live on black beans and rice). Now that, too, is going there will be more beggars and hustlers than ever on the streets of Havana. No too many Benny Morés, though.

Socialism is death

“We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”, words as I said in my blog on communist-era humour that should really serve as the epitaph for systems driven by the Marxist idea. I have direct experience of this in the visits I’ve made to Cuba, a system where everyone pretends to work. Not any longer: people are going to have to pretend elsewhere because the state is on the point of stopping even pretending to pay!

Last month Fidel was trundled out of his semi-twilight, announcing to the world that the Cuban model no longer works. Dear comrade, it never worked; it never could work, as you would have seen for yourself if you had left your delusional cocoon and wandered around the streets of Havana. But you knew the truth all along, didn’t you? Yes, you did; you just chose to deny it. I watched you in Comandante, the documentary in which you were interviewed by Oliver Stone, the American movie maker. I saw you wittering on about all the prostitutes to be found on the streets in the good old bad old Batista days. But when you were asked if there were any now your eyes dropped as you replied, “Very few.” I laughed, one or two others in the audience laughed at your obvious lie, a lie you knew was a lie. Your whole life has been a lie; your revolution was a lie.

Now is the time for some truth. Raul Castro, Little Brother, nominally in control since 2006, is acquiring more assurance by the day. Not so long after Big Brother blinked into the light the government announced that up to a million state employees are to be laid off, half of them by 1 April 2011. To take up the slack the economy is being liberalised, with self-employment being legalised in a whole number of areas that were previously state monopolies.

But will it work? The precedents are not good. People must remember previous episodes: the late 1960s, when small businesses were effectively stolen by the state and their workers press-ganged, and again when the free enterprise experiment of the 1990s was later hammered to death by punitive levels of taxation, as the economic dinosaur was floated anew on waves of Venezuelan oil.

Still Raul seems determined, announcing to the National Assembly that “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where it is not necessary to work.” I can see that there are pressing necessities here in a country that now imports as much as eighty per cent of its food, another great achievement of socialism that has all but killed the domestic farming industry.

The truth, as those who have been to Cuba will understand, is that people always worked, oh not for a government, by whom they were nominally employed, but for themselves on some hustle or other. I would not go so far as to say that without the black market there would be no market in Cuba but the reality comes close. This is a place where hard currency opens doors, a place where a threadbare ideal is draped over the maggots of corruption. Socialism or Death, the slogan goes. There is no contrast here: socialism is death

Our Girl in Havana II

I was asked on another blog site I belong to about my experiences of life in Cuba so I thought I would say a bit more about this, a supplement to Our Girl in Havana, a piece I posted here last year.

First I should say that Cuba, while a highly controlled society, is not North Korea; it is possible, in other words, for visitors to go there without being isolated from local people and moved around like a package. Of course some people like the package experience, but not I. I like to travel with friends independently, making our own accommodation arrangements. So off to Havana I went, determined to avoid tourist ghettos like Varadero, determined to meet as many local people as possible, something I simply love to do, no better, no more authentic way of discovering a place.

I did heaps of research before going, something I always do. One piece of advice I received was that I should avoid discussing politics with local people because it would only compromise them. After all, one never knows who is listening. But I found not long after arriving, once I had a feel for the place, that lots of people I met in bars and the like wanted to talk politics with me! Oh, and how they hate the Castro regime, the old one and the new one. It's easy to understand why. Everywhere one comes across what I can only describe as ruined opportunities and frustrated lives. People are kept alive by doles, yes, but there is so much wasted talent. One guy I talked to, a hotel porter, was a qualified economist. "What are you doing here?", I asked. "It’s the only way I can make a proper living", he replied. "I earn more in tourist tips in a day than I would in a month in the university."

People who defend the regime will say that at least it provides excellent social services and health care. A point was made to me in a discussion yesterday that the Cubans have the best health service in the world. That is complete rot! I've seen what they get, I've been able to compare the abysmal facilities, facilities we would not allow for an animal here, that's on offer to local people with the lush services on offer to cash-paying visitors. I have the impression that everywhere a communist social system is introduced a kind of apartheid inevitably arises, favouring those with money, and I mean hard cash not local currency, over those who have not.

Money is power in Cuba. If you have money you can get virtually anything from a flourishing black market. That's another thing about socialism in the sun: there is corruption everywhere. Havana itself is full of hustlers, locally known as Jinateros, the males, and Jinateras, the females. They all want to be friends, of course, all want to know where you are from, where you want to go and so on. Just watch yourself, that's all I can say! It's difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference between what is genuine and what is not.

I did make some friends, people with whom I'm still in contact via email, lovely people, both boys and girls. But they break my heart, truly they do, the way they live breaks my heart, the lies they are forced to live and their overwhelming urge for freedom, for change of any kind, anything that will end the stifling claustrophobia of their lives. Socialism or death, the slogan goes. One of my friends said to me that she would rather have death. The terrible thing is she is only twenty-two years old.

History has condemned you

If people hoped that things could only get better in Cuba after that communist dinosaur Fidel Castro give way to his brother Raul, a little further ahead in the scale of evolution, they must be disappointed by the results. The real question with these people, in this nepotistic dictatorship, is not when will things get better, no, it’s could they conceivably get any worse? The answer to that is simple, yes, they most certainly can.

Cuba was once an island with a thriving agricultural economy. Not any longer; now food shortages are a regular feature of daily live. This is not North Korea- yet-, there is still the endless monotony of beans and rice to keep people away from the frontier of starvation, but other basics like bread and milk are disappearing from supermarket shelves for weeks on end.

Again it’s the same old same old when the state tries to manage the economy. The worst part of state socialism was always the collectivisation of agriculture. Cuba is no different here from the old Soviet Union. Its state farms are massively inefficient, now producing no more than 20% of the country’s needs. Such private enterprise as the state allows is stymied by a system of central supply and transport totally inelastic in responding to market demands. Last year the whole of a bumper tomato crop rotted, as The Economist reports, because government trucks failed to collect it on time. This style of economic mismanagement means that Cuba has to buy a good part of its food from foreign suppliers, using up limited amounts of hard currency.

History will absolve me, Fidel once declared, appealing to exactly the same court that Adolf Hitler once did, using much the same hyperbolic language. But history is already passing its verdict on the failure of socialism in Cuba, the failure of the whole wasteful Castro experiment, one which effectively destroyed a rich and productive nation. After this remove of time even Batista, the former dictator, looks good. I know from my contacts in Havana that more and more people are looking for the kind of closure that only time, and mortality, can bring.

Buried in Lies

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was not the sort of person one normally associates with political dissidence. He wasn’t an intellectual or a writer; he was a plumber and a brick-layer, an ordinary man in an ordinary profession, a worker who happened to live in Cuba, a ‘worker’s state.’ Not any longer; for he starved himself to death in prison last month, protesting against insufferable and brutal conditions. He had, as his mother said afterwards, effectively been murdered by the state.

Tamayo first came to the attention of the authorities in 2002 as a member of groups calling for civil rights and political freedom. He was arrested in March 2003 after taking part in a hunger strike in protest at the incarceration of a number of his comrades. Initially sentenced to three years imprisonment, this was subsequently increased to twenty-five years for prison activism.

Beaten and abused repeatedly, he finally went on hunger strike, dying last month after eighty-five days, the first political prisoner to do so since the death of Pedro Luis Boitel, a poet and student leader, almost forty years ago.

The case is noteworthy in one other respect: his death seems to have caused the Cuban dictatorship some embarrassment. President Raul Castro went on television to express ‘regret’ over Tamayo’s death, though denying any blame for the tragedy. Meanwhile the news agencies churned out even more lies; that he had starved himself because the authorities would not put a TV and a phone in his cell. He was, for them, as are all political prisoners, mercenaries in the pay of the United States, a criminal falsely elevated to a martyr status.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was buried in lies when he was alive; he continues to be buried in lies now that he is dead.

A New Generation

I have never understood-I don’t want to understand-the passion shown among certain leftie circles for the beastly Castro regime in Cuba, as repressive and as loathsome as any other dictatorship of any other age, a regime that incarcerates, tortures and oppresses; a regime that sends people as diverse as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses to camps to be‘re-educated.’

Fidel, as much influenced by Adolf Hitler as by Karl Marx, possibly even more influenced in practical terms by the former, may no longer have his fingers directly on the wheels of power, but he’s still there in the background, haunting the meagre Cuban feast rather like the ghost of Banquo. He and his brother Raul, now the public face of the tyranny, look so old, so decrepit, rather like the system they nurtured. I have no doubt that they represent the wave of the past, soon to dash on the breakwater of history. And what is the wave of the future? I would like to think that was best pictured in the shape of the courageous and indomitable Yoani Sánchez, creator of Generación Y, a really super blog about the harsh realities of life in Cuba. http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy

I’ve mentioned Yoani before in a blog headed Generación Y -Exposing the Corruption of Castroism, where I mentioned that, unable to silence her, the authorities had her physically assaulted. Still she talks on under the most difficult of circumstances. The Generación Y blog was blocked in Cuba in March 2008 forcing her to ‘talk blind’. She now emails her contributions and pictures to friends abroad who then post them to the website, though she herself cannot see the results. Of this Yoani has said “There is no censorship that can stop people who are determined to access the internet.” This is the true wonder of the internet-it overcomes silence, it overcomes isolation, something that dictators have always relied upon in the past.

It is precisely because of the actions of the thuggish and frightened Cuban dictatorship that Generación Y, starting in the most unpromising circumstances, is now one of the most influential blogs in the world getting about a million hits a month. In 2008 Yoani was even named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, saying that “under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot; freedom of speech.” Recently Barak Obama himself responded in person to one of her posts.

One measure of her success is that her blog was attacked by Foul Fidel who ‘expressed his grave disappointment that there could be a young person in Cuba today who thinks as she does’. This came soon after she was awarded the 2008 Ortega y Gasset Prize. A response was published on Generación Y, a contribution from Reinaldo Escobar, Yoani’s husband:

The ex-president disapproves of the fact that Yoani accepted this year’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, arguing that the prize is something that imperialism favours to blow its own horn. I recognise the right of this gentleman to make this comment, but I allow myself to observe that the responsibility implied in receiving a prize is never comparable to that of bestowing one, and Yoani, at least, has never awarded a medal to a corrupt person, a traitor, a dictator or a murderer. I clarify this because I remember perfectly that the author of these reproaches was the one who placed (or commanded to be placed) the ‘Order of Jose Marti’ on the lapels of some of the most terrible and undeserving men possible: Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Nocolae Ceausescu, Todor Zhikov, Gustav Husak, Janos Kadar, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Robert Mugabe, Heng Samrin, Erich Honecker and others that I have forgotten.

Yes, by their friends shall ye know them.

I know what Cuba is like. I’ve been there and I’ve seen how people live. I’ve met economists and other specialists who prefer to work as hotel porters because the gratuities they receive are the only way they can make a living wage. I see these things because I like to travel independently, not being bussed around in tour groups, going to hotels and resorts from which ordinary Cubans are banned. I’ve seen the harassment the people of Havana receive at the hands of the grey-shirted police, who stand on literally every street corner. It’s comforting to know that Generación Y allows the rest of the world to see these things also, to understand that freedom, the freedom to speak one’s mind without fear or intimidation, is the greatest right of all.

Viva Batista!

For a long time Fulgencio Batista, the former ruler of Cuba, was covered in stereotypes: he was nothing more than a corrupt dictator, a friend of the mafia and an oppressor of the Cuban people, a monster justly cast out by Fidel Castro. A reassessment was long overdue, and I am happy to report that some progress has been made along this road by Frank Argote-Freyre in his two-volume biography, the concluding part of which was published at the beginning of this month.

Batista was a far more complex character than the traditional depictions have allowed. He himself came to power as part of a revolution, and made sincere attempts to improve the Cuban economy. The problem was that the price of sugar, the country's main product, had fallen sharply during the Great Depression, and was subject to periodic fluctuations thereafter. In response, Batista looked to tourism to fuel a recovery, drawing in the mafia, in the person of Meyer Lansky to help him sort out Cuba's notoriously corrupt casinos. It was so successful that when the American ambassador was asked why the Cubans tolerated the presence of so many gangsters, he replied "It's strange, but it seems to be the only way to get honest casinos."

By the 1950s, largely thanks to Batista's efforts, the Cuban economy was booming. The problem was there was still a considerable gap between the wealth being drawn in to places like Havana and the relative poverty of the countryside; and it was on rural discontent that Castro built his revolution.

History is not Blind

Do you think that Raúl Castro reads Orwell, specifically Nineteen Eighty-Four? It's just that in reporting the dire state of the Cuban economy earlier this year not all the woes were placed at the door of the dreaded Yankee Devil. No, he said that Cuban and Cubans were often to blame for their own shortcomings, for the fact that "often two plus two results in three." I personally think he is being over-generous. The operation of Communism in Cuba has meant that two plus two more often results in two, perhaps less.

For the Cuban people the truth is depressing. Raúl the Benevolent ordered a wage increase for over a half million employees in the education sector, which really meant they had more paper in their hands, for there is little or nothing to buy. And what pesos can buy is either sub-standard or outright rubbish. Even food is in short supply. Amazingly up to 80% of the food supply has to be imported because the inefficient state farms simply can't produce enough. Worse than that they control most of the best land but leave much of it idle. Raúl is now offering incentives to private farmers, but agricultural production continues to fall. I imagine people are all too aware what might happen from past experiences, when the tiny private sector was flourishing, flourishing just a little too much for Big Brother (and here I really am thinking of Raúl's Big Brother!). He promptly saddled it with prohibitive taxes, opening the goose to find the eggs.

Touching on Big Brother let me tell you a story about Fidel. Some of you may have been to Cuba, in which case you may have seen reprints of his History Will Absolve Me speech, the one he gave at his trail after the failure of the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, his own Latin version of Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

What; Hitler and Castro; Munich and Moncada; Fascism and Communism? Surely not! Oh, yes, one can make a direct comparison between the two events in terms of the political mythology they engendered, that of the heroic failure, one that subsequently became an integral, and celebrated, part of the propaganda of both German Fascism and Cuban Communism. I also suspect that Castro had more than a passing familiarity with the 1923 events in Munich; for in his subsequent trial he cast himself in more or less the same 'man of destiny' role that Hitler did in 1924, even drawing on the same tiresome hyperbolic style. Consider these;

For it is not you gentlemen, who pass judgement on us. That judgement is spoken by the eternal court of history...Pronounce us guilty a thousand times over: the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to pieces the State Prosecutor's submissions and the court's verdict: for she acquits us.

I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully... I know that the regime will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled - it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it... Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

The first passage is Hitler and the second is Castro. Both, it would seem, have lodged appeals in exactly the same court. I leave it to you to decide if this is coincidence or not! History is not blind; Clio never absolves deadbeats and tyrants! Granice a la victoria. :-))

Generación Y-Exposing the Corruption of Castroism

Despite the shift of power from Big Brother to Little Brother, the Cuban regime remains as oppressive as ever. Raúl Castro’s government is now making greater use of a provision in the criminal code that allows indefinite detention for what is called ‘dangerousness’, this being defined as conduct “in manifest contradiction to the norms of socialist morality.” In other words, it allows for the incarceration of anyone who dares offer a criticism of this paradise in the sun and the gangsters in charge.

So far some forty Cubans have been jailed under this invidious provision for such crimes against ‘socialist morality’ as organising peaceful marches or writing critical articles. At the beginning of November Yoani Sánchez, who runs a blog called Generación Y, dedicated to exposing the political and moral corruption of Castroism, was forced into an unmarked car, after which she was beaten and threatened before being dumped in the street.

We don’t know exactly how many political prisoners there are in Cuban jails. The Economist says that there are at least two hundred, probably many more. The exact figure cannot be determined because Cuba is one of only eight countries in the world that deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons.

What strikes me about this is the sheer hypocrisy of the Organisation of American States which suspended Honduras after the coup against Manuel Zelaya, while holding out an invitation to Cuba to rejoin. There is no evidence at all of human rights abuses in Honduras; there is plenty in Cuba. Oh, and incidentally, Raúl Castro was one of those who joined in the parrot-like call for an economic embargo against the Hondurans, seemingly unaware of the irony that this invoked.

Socialism is a filthy doctrine in whatever form it comes; oppressive, miserable, thuggish and essentially anti-human, anti anything that makes life worth living. In Cuba and North Korea the doctrine has achieved its ultimate expression, that of tyrannical and self-perpetuating nepotism.

Great Poster, Shame about the Man

Last year I saw Che, the two part biopic about aspects of the career of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the Argentinean revolutionary and poster. Before that I saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which takes a view of his early life, his journey with a close friend from his home in Argentina to Peru, where he worked in a leper colony as a volunteer doctor. The latter was mildly entertaining; the former excruciatingly dull.

But it’s not these movies I really want to talk about; no, not the myth, rather the man, the nearest thing we have to a modern and secular saint. Indeed, I think he has acquired a semi-divine status among the local people in that part of Bolivia where he was executed in 1967. I cannot deny that Guevara was a good-looking man, one who made a great poster, eyes gazing into a million student bed-sits across the world. But look at the reality behind the image. What does one find? Why, just another repellent little thug who sought to pave the path to paradise with human skulls. Make no mistake, despite the worship he has been accorded, Guevara was a half-baked fanatic, a Marxist monster, who offered the usual substitution of tiresome abstractions for real people and real life. He was also a killer.

Soon after the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959, Guevara organised the mass killings in Havana of former government supporters when he was commandant of La Cabaña fortress, with no attempt at any legal process. He wrote of this;

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. … These are the procedures of the bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the teaching of the Wall

He was also responsible for the establishment of the Cuban Labour Camp system, where children as young as fourteen were incarcerated and where thousands died. A special section of these camps was specifically dedicated to dealing with Cuba’s ‘gay problem.’ Under the guidance of Guevara, the regime imprisoned a higher proportion of the population than Stalin and killed more in its first three years than Hitler did in the six years before the outbreak of the Second World War. His contempt for human life was evidenced in a remark he made to a Cuban newspaper after the 1962 Missile Crisis that;

If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York.

This icon of western liberals and muddle-heads was also against freedom of religion, of the press, as well as the right to assemble or protest, or anything else that was not compatible with his corrupted view of a Stalinist utopia. He was also an utter incompetent. As Finance Minister and President of the National Bank, positions for which he had absolutely no qualifications beyond his mouth, he earned the singular honour of all but destroying the Cuban economy, with his emphasis on the ‘new man’, one who would accept ‘moral’ for material incentives. Like so much else in his mind the ‘new man’ was no more than a ghost.

So, failing as a minister he trotted off around the world on a series of mad revolutionary adventures, where he proved himself no more competent as a soldier, totally lacking in military capacity and political vision. Never mind; he still made a great poster. It’s just a pity that Pol Pot was not just a little more handsome.

No Free Lunch

Castro’s Utopia is dying. The Cuban state is almost bankrupt, so much so that free canteens, one of the ‘benefits’ of socialism, have closed down in several ministries. Instead workers are to be given a daily pay rise of 15 pesos-about $0.60-in compensation, which raises their meagre salaries by more than half.

The insufferably dull Granma, the national newspaper, has welcomed the move, saying more is being given than is being taken away. What it does not say is that it does not matter how many pesos a person has in their purses or pockets because there is nothing to buy, nothing that pesos can buy. The free lunch, though of poor quality, was at least a guaranteed staple. The remaining staples which enable ordinary Cubans to survive, the monthly dole in food and cooking oil, is said to last for half that period at most.

President Raúl Castro is clearly aware just how bad things are, making tentative moves towards economic reforms. But Big Brother, though retired for health reasons, remains a decisive influence; and if there is one thing he hates its markets. Not for him the kind of advances, the economic liberalisation that has carried China and Vietnam to greater levels of prosperity. He is now the only Communist leader in the world still committed to outworn and threadbare notions of social utopia and perfect egalitarianism, setting always to one side that megalomaniac Kim Jong-Il and his termite state. The only time that the Cuban economy showed any real life, the vitality that emerged in the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, it was immediately quashed when he cut back on the flourishing micro-businesses.

Ordinary Cubans, those who are not sustained by relatives abroad, or have no attachment to the lucrative tourist business, are in a kind of limbo, neither capitalist nor socialist. It is in this gap that the venality of the worst type has been allowed to flourish, with high levels of crime and prostitution, as far removed as possible from the ‘new man’ envisaged by the likes of Che Guevara. Those who want to see the wave of the past let them come to Havana.