English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
This photo is for all of you, my readers. It is a shot of Mitsukuso, my cat, finally accepting to pose for a card. Believe me, it was not easy to convince him. I guess he is very similar to me.
My sincerest wishes of happiness and prosperity for all of you.
Translated by Raul G.
December 23, 2010
Just a few hours ago a shocking even took place in my semi-wintry Bayamo: at approximately seven at night this Wednesday, December 22, a young man of 34, Alexander Otero Rodriguez, appeared at a central corner of the city, accompanied by his wife, Aliuska Noguer Tornés, 18, along with their baby, born 48 days ago.
Accompanying them, a relative and a friend.
In a few minutes they built a fiber-cement hut from fragile boards, in a vacant lot once occupied by a grocery store. They spread out on the floor — surrounded by weeds — the rickety mattress they brought on their backs, and got ready for the storm.
Alexander Otero just took the riskiest step of his life, the most desperate: publicly claiming the right to adequate housing for him and his humble family.
It took no time at all for the public officials, the police, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) to come and question that blackish den where suddenly two people with a newborn baby had installed themselves. The answers from both young people were the same: “We’re not moving from here until someone puts an end to the way we are living. We have spent months wandering from place to place, we don’t have a home, and now that our son is born we are sleeping in the streets.”
Not late in coming, either, were the curious, the supportive neighbors, who were suddenly left speechless by what these people were doing; nor was the informant late in coming, a member of the intelligence services who, unhappily, tried to avoid my filming the event and taking photos of him.
I repeat: unhappy man, who never imagined — as I could never imagine — that a crowd of dozens of Bayamese would turn against him, almost expelling him, and showing an enormous contempt for his sudden “coming out of the closet” as a citizen repressor.
According to the words of Otero Rodriguez, this action was the culmination of an inhuman waiting that started 11 years ago, when he first asked for a small space to build himself a home. Since then, the Housing Department continues to ask him to wait while, he said, they allocate huge amounts of land for houses for government and military officials in the area.
“For months Aliuska and I have lived as nomads, renting at night in a small room or sleeping in the Bus Terminal. When our son was born, we asked the authorities to pay attention to our situation (homeless and with a baby), and they only thing they did was to sell us these fiber-cement boards and seven bags of cement, without giving us authorization to build a house.
After leaving the Maternity Hospital, the three had continued to sleep in the open.
“In parks, in terminals, in doorways. We have knocked on the doors of the Housing Authority, we have been to the Party headquarters, and all, absolutely all, have shown no interest in our case. They tell us their help — selling us the boards and the cement — ended there. So here we are unable to move on with our life.”
At nine at night, with a considerable crowd in strong support, both parents challenged the bureaucrats of the Housing Authority and the President of the Municipal Assembly of Peoples Power, and the handful of officials who dared to pass through the circle of neighbors.
Otero Alexander’s words were always the same, “As long as I don’t have in hand some land where I can build a house for my family, they won’t take me from here alive, and I charge them with the life of my child if they try to take me by force and pull down this roof.”
I want to make clear the most exciting part of this, which at four in the morning got me typing like one possessed, and I am still excited by what I witnessed: the unyielding support of thirty, fifty people surrounding that place, who not only give them blankets, food and drink, but in an act of public spiritedness — never seen by me in my environment — they do not hesitate to denounce the corrupt officials, they don’t hesitate to back up with their own fists the decision of this young man, and they didn’t even feel gagged when a crouching repressor tried to block my camera.
I believe it’s time for me to reconsider what I published just two days ago in this same blog, about the ancestral fear of Cubans.
“Enough of lies, of thieving leaders. Enough of the only escape route in this country being emigration. I am Cuban and I do not want to leave my country,” were other words of Otero Rodriguez. “It is not I who should leave this country; those who should go are those who cause things like this, injustices like this.”
One of the options the young parents had rejected was an ambulance, sent by the authorities, to take the mother and baby to the hospital.
“My son is not sick. The illness my son has is to not have a home. The one most ill is me, I have a huge stomach ulcer, and I will not move from here.”
Arturo Pérez Sánchez, President of the Municipal Assembly of Peoples Power, also went to the site in person, stating that “acts like this are very damaging, they bring down the Revolution,” and then asking the people to retire so he could speak to Alexander Otero alone, a request that the masses disapproved and denied — and so he tried to evaluate the case in the early hours of the morning.
“Anyway,” repeated Otero, “without a signed document I’m not leaving here. We know too well about false promises. The second I leave they will knock me down, and I’ll be sleeping in the street again.”
From this morning of Thursday, December 24, I am sure that the life of this father, strangled by inefficiency, laziness, and the misery to which he’s been condemned, will change drastically, in one sense or another: he will, perhaps, receive a poor site where he can “legally” erect this same shack; or he will be expelled in some way from his scrap of ground and be punished for his act of rebellion.
I intend to follow this event, in the future, as the best way in which I can squeeze the hand of this brave Bayaman, along with so many supportive neighbors, and tell him he is not alone. From now on, he is not alone.
December 23, 2010
December 14, 2010
To go to work on December 25, to have school on New Year’s Eve or to be called to “voluntary labor” as the year drew to a close. All this was possible in an ideologically fervent Cuba, with its false atheism and disdain for festivities, that left us with grey Christmases, celebrated in whispers. The last weeks of 1980, 1983, 1987, so identically boring, lacking in color, run together in my mind. I spent many of those days sitting at a desk, while in other parts of the world people shared them with their families, opened gifts, celebrated in the intimacy of their homes.
It seemed that the Christmas vacations were never honored in Cuban schools, the students only had breaks for patriotic or ideological celebrations. But, little by little, unannounced, and never approved by our peculiar parliament, students themselves began to reclaim these holidays. In the beginning, each classroom would be missing about a third of its students, but slowly the absence virus began to infect everyone. Until finally the number of students missing in the last two weeks of the year left the Ministry of Education no choice but to declare a two-week break in classes. It is these small citizens’ victories, reported by no newspaper, that we all understand as terrain wrested from the false sobriety they try to impose on us from the podium.
Today, my son Teo got up late and he won’t return to school until next year. His classmates haven’t been to high school since Wednesday. Watching him sleep until ten, make plans for the coming days off, helps to make up for my boring childhood Christmases. I can forget all those Christmas Eves I spent without even realizing there was a reason to celebrate.
In Havana you will not see men dressed as Santa Claus, dressed in red, fat and friendly, handing out sweets to children at the entrance of shopping malls. In the rest of the island, you will not find a special Christmas atmosphere either.
The tourist hotels and the foreign exchange shops and cafes do displays trees with ornaments and wreaths. Not so in the national currency establishments, which prefer to dismiss all this paraphernalia. In these service centers, gloomy and in need of paint, portraits of Fidel Castro usually hang, along with slogans of the Revolution.
If it is a neighborhood store, you might see a handwritten list, sometimes with spelling errors, reminding people who have not paid for the appliances, four years after the State distributed them, to replace the American refrigerators from the 50’s and the black and white televisions manufactured in the Soviet Union.
Although the city does not have a Christmas atmosphere, ordinary citizens prepare to celebrate Christmas Eve at home on December 24. Those who have family abroad or profitable black market businesses can afford to buy a pig and roast it in the backyard, sipping beer or some good aged rum.
For those for whom things were not so bad in 2010, at 12 pm on December 31, they can eat candies, apples and grapes, and make a toast with cider. But most people wear out their shoes visiting the farmers’ markets in search of pork, black beans, yucca, tomatoes, lettuce …They will listen to salsa or reggaeton music at the highest volume, while drinking unbottled beer and lesser quality rum.
Those who live near a church usually attend a midnight Mass. In their way, Cubans celebrate Christmas. It was not always so. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, he slowly and intentionally threw aside one of the most deeply rooted traditions of Cuban families.
The final blow was given in 1970, when during the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest, with the pretext that the festivities interrupted the work in the cane fields, he removed December 25th from the holiday calendar. Those days off disappeared from the island by decree.
Because the triumph of the revolution coincided with January 1st, the first and second of January were declared to be days off. Thank goodness. If the bearded ones had taken power in March or August, for sure, we would not celebrate the arrival of the new year.
The absence of Christmas from the Revolutionary calendar lasted 27 years. In 1997, in honor of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba, Castro re-introduced December 25 as a national holiday. It is an official holiday, but the authorities do not feel motivated to create a Christmas atmosphere for the population. Although it is celebrated in private.
As a child, I went with my grandmother and my sister to the house of Blas Roca, an old communist now deceased and a relative on my mother’s side. At that time, Roca was one of the heavyweights in the political hierarchy. I remember how my eyes opened, when I saw a whole pig roasting and a significant amount of other delicacies.
It was a time when people wore work shirts and plastic shoes. Beef was distributed according to the ration book. And very few dared to celebrate Christmas Eve, as forbidden as jazz and the Beatles.
Decades later, something has changed. True, Castro remains in power. The economy is adrift. Certain freedoms are denied. But today there is no fear that someone will make a report to “the appropriate authorities” for celebrating Christmas.
Obviously, one wants more. And while celebrating with his family, hopes that in the coming year, good things will happen. Cubans still have not lost their optimism. Fortunately.
Translated by Rick Schwag
December 23, 2010
In my house in Mantilla, Christmas Eve was always a feast of family and friends. It was the most anticipated date and for days ahead of time we started the preparations, buying nougat, marzipan, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, wine, cider and cheese. We looked for black beans and soft yucca, and well-threshed rice. The pig was sacrificed the day before and marinated and then taken to the oven at the bakery in the early hours. The same day we bought lettuce, radishes and tomatoes for the salad, to ensure they were fresh. The whole day was given over to preparing for the big dinner at night.
In the cement patio at the back of the house, we set up a big table made of boards on saw-horses. All around were benches, also wood. The table was covered with huge white tablecloths. My uncles made sure there was a barrel of beer, soft drinks, apples, pears and grapes, and an occasional bottle of wine. The dessert pancakes and coconut and guayaba candies were made by Joaquina, our neighbor, a black cook who was part of the family.
The children spent the day playing and helping out with whatever they told us to do. We also visited the homes of friends who were preparing their dinners. My neighborhood was modest, but the majority of the houses celebrated Christmas Eve with more or less comfort. The joy was contagious and all the shops were decorated, and in the houses were lit trees and manger scenes. It was a day of happiness. And music accompanied us the whole day.
At nine at night the dinner started. The whole family participated, along with friends we invited and those who dropped in to surprise us. We made enough food and always had room and a plate for whoever came. Rice with black beans, yucca with a mojo sauce of oil and garlic, pork roast and salad were universal. There was wine and beer for the grown-ups and soft drinks for the kids. By dessert we were drinking cider. The dinner lasted until eleven, when we went to the Rooster’s Mass* at the church facing Route 4. When we got home we continued the party into the wee hours of the morning.
Despite everything that has happened in these years, and even though we lack almost everything, we always try to celebrate Christmas Eve. Our family is dispersed through mass exodus, and the practice is officially frowned upon, but we gather those who are left, along with our friends, and around the lit tree and the creche we share this unique dinner on the best of all nights. We can not let something as important as our national identity be taken from us.
*Translator’s note: In Latin American countries the midnight mass on Christmas Eve is called the Rooster’s Mass because the belief that the only time the rooster crowed at midnight was the night Jesus was born.
Spanish post
December 19 2010
This is the Hotel International they are planning to demolish in Varadero, the photos are from July 2010.
The Sun Cabañas, designed by the architect Nicolas Quintana and annexed to the Hotel, will suffer the same fate.
Photos courtesy of Martha Aquino
December 23, 2010
Albert Einstein used the say that God doesn’t play dice, but the Cuban government plays at being God and sets up the table of intolerance in any corner against those who don’t understand that the initiatives come out of the Palace and not the citizens, considered by the Owner-State like minors, incapable of enjoying Human Rights, more appropriate for Europe and North America than for an island in the Caribbean.
Friday, December 10, the game board was located around Villalon Park in Vedado, where Dr. Darsi Ferrer called for a silent march with banners, to evoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1948.
This document is barely known on our island, and was ignored by Batista, from 1952 to 1958, and from 1959 by the Command of the Castros, still today clinging to military orders that contradict the articles of the Declaration, with which peaceful opponents to the regime identify, organized in turn around small political parties that promote democratic changes.
The struggle between democrats and the military is a common fact, but at times it touches on the absurd and reveals the unusual. Friday we watched the game of hundreds of cats against dozens of mice. The main command was located in the mansion occupied by the digital portal La Jiribilla, alongside the former mansion of Generalísimo Máximo Gómez, perhaps to frighten the ghost of the independent warrior and, incidentally, the officials of the UNESCO Regional Office, the musicians of the Amadeo Roldan Theater and the pedestrians of the area, where the arrests were a la carte.
There were guards in uniform and political police on adjacent corners, from Linea all the way to the Malecon and between A Street and the Park at Calzada and K, where those who are getting the immigration paperwork from the United States Interest Section in Havana wait, besieged by soldiers every day of the year.
Although most of the walkers don’t know the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many are aware of the arrogance and audacity of the young agents, who pretend to listen to music with their right hand on their pistol, while watching possible suspects and following orders they receive.
Last Friday morning I witnessed the military deployment to block potential attendees of the celebration at Villalon Park. The scheduled time was 11 a.m but at 7 the SS boys were already at their posts. I went down first to the Malecon and D as far as Calzada, with a friend who was taking his children to the school located in front of the Superior Institute of MINREX. We returned at ten to avoid the hunters and their patrols.
They completed the harassment and arrests of Friday with early morning warnings, it’s common for them to knock on the doors of the opponents while the family is sleeping. They hide in the shadows of the night and in the anonymity of the agents, one of the tactics of the troop of Warlocks who throw the dice of intransigence and disregard the freedoms and rights of citizens.
December 16 2010
The discourse is once again repeated. The criticisms start to dissolve, without any first names or last names, but implying all of us, or all of us except a certain few. In sum, the same situation as always.
Hearing all the latest calls for austerity, the reading of the Guidelines, the imminent unemployment rate, etc., reminded me of something Cicero, the grand philosopher, once said:
“The budget should balance itself. Treasure should be re-stocked. Public debt should be reduced. Arrogance among those who take on important public roles should be moderated and controlled. And foreign aid to other countries should be eliminated in order to save Rome from bankruptcy. The people must once again learn how to work, as opposed to living at the expense of the State.”
Year 55 B.C.
I ask myself, now who are we going to blame?
Translated by Raul G.
December 21, 2010
The hospitable accommodations were built on land where pre-fabricated parts were once assembled to create a city for the New Man. As this chimeric individual never emerged, nor were there resources to build new housing, the site remained vacant for decades. When the so-called Battle of Ideas unfolded, they began to lay the foundations here for a hotel with more than a hundred rooms. The cranes and trucks arrived at an astonishing speed for construction in Cuba, and in barely two years they had raised the walls, installed the aluminum windows, and opened the place up. With the resources stolen from that project, many area families painted their facades, installed air conditioning in bedrooms, and remodeled bathrooms.
Known as the Little Tulip Hotel, it was intended as a shelter for Latin American patients who came to our Island for a cure. During the heights of the so-called “Operation Miracle,” its wide entrance was packed with buses discharging dozens of patients every week. Later, when the number who came for health reasons was shrinking, other groups came to receive political-ideological preparation to implement the “Socialism of the 21st Century” in their respective countries. The neighbors — from beyond the wall — were curious about the transformations taking place in those accommodations and ventured various hypotheses about what its final use would be. Some even placed bets on whether it would be given to the military, or if victims of the last hurricane would be brought to live in it.
However, a few days ago, a poster appeared with an offer of a “Christmas dinner” in the formerly exclusive dining room of the small hotel. A few weeks earlier, neighborhood youth had been invited to watch the match between Barcelona and Real Madrid from the plush lobby seating, for a two convertible peso entry fee. Now, the employees in reception say that anyone can rent a room and it’s no longer necessary to be a foreigner to enter the beautiful central courtyard. Undoubtedly, a clear sign that the Battle of Ideas has been laid to rest once and for all and that the real “miracle” proposed by the government, now, is to raise some foreign currency to earn enough profits to cover the costs. To see if the country does not sink into the abyss, as Raul Castro feared in his last speech.
An anecdote not often shared relates that, at the end of a meeting between Fidel Castro and Cuban artists in 1969, where he pronounced his polysemic “Words to the Intellectuals,” a discordant — and unexpected — voice spoke up.
It was Virgilio Piñera, perhaps the most immortal and lacerated playwright our Island has given birth to. A frail man who, facing the Commander in olive-green with his six feet and more and his gun in his belt, must have seemed like an insignificant blade of grass.
They say that, once in front of the microphone, pale due to his natural color and because of his nerves, the interjection of the effeminate Virgilio took less than ten seconds.
“The only thing I can say is that I feel very frightened,” he said. “Only that. I don’t know why, but I am afraid…”
His tortured life didn’t allow him to know that he wasn’t wrong that time, that fear would be his destiny.
I think of Virgilio when I hear from the mouth of another intellectual, and friend, very similar words. The only difference is that this teacher, this young writer knows perfectly well why he is afraid.
His name is Francis Sánchez and, like me, he lives in a little provincial city, Ciego de Ávila, where exercising individuality implies more risk than in the cosmopolitan capital. For a long time his name has been known among professionals of letters for his literary laurels, and his publications in the country’s diverse magazines.
Anyone who sees him, with his nicely fleshed-out body and his well-trimmed mustache, would think he was the most complacent and docile of citizens. A perfect pater familias who, like any ordinary Cuban, deals with the shortages and dissatisfaction. And shuts up.
But Francis Sánchez bears a cross of ashes on his forehead: he has never consigned himself to renouncing his condition as a free man, his condition as a non-conformist Cuban who doesn’t know how to close his eyes against the reality he doesn’t like, that doesn’t suit him.
Like a good man of letters, knowing the absolute impossibility of publishing his questioning articles in any institutional media, the personal chronicles about the country that he longs to have and doesn’t, he decided, like many of us, to open his personal blog. If I remember rightly, he just opened it with the excellent name: Man in the Clouds.
But Francis Sánchez is afraid, and doesn’t hide it. He tells me:
“You are a single boy, Ernesto. We are four. It’s not the same.”
And suddenly I feel very small, devoid of reasons before a circumstance like this: an honest Cuban has decided, knowing the risk, to endanger the stability of three people other than himself: his wife and their two children. And he has decided not how we choose one option ahead of another, or how we shuffle the possibilities on the negotiating table. No. Rather, he is someone who cannot contradict his abiding spirit, and who knows that it may cost him very dearly, and be very hard, but still he crosses the thin line.
One of his phrases has left me trembling like a leaf. He told me, with subtle indignation:
“I feel very afraid, not for myself, but about what could happen in the future to my family. And this fear only irritates me more. Because the fear is the most incontrovertible evidence that I must confront the country in which I live: I don’t want to feel afraid! I shouldn’t be afraid if the only thing I am trying to do is to express what I think!”
His rationale is scathing. Absolutely no one should fear for his integrity, social stability, if what he wants to do is done everywhere in the world of free people: raise his voice against the imperfect, the deformed, what he considers unacceptable. We should fear terrorists, pedophiles, those who corrupt. But men with their own voice, never.
But, that is the daily life of Cubans.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, from the mouth of one person or another, “I would love to do what you are doing, but I can’t.” And then, a long or short list of reasons that sweeten a painful reality: fear is stronger than the need for expression.
And so the mask never fails to hide the unpleasant features of our personality, and to camouflage the fear that takes hold in the most varied pretexts.
What are the most frequent arguments I hear in this regard? In the first place, the impossibility of survival without the employment offered by the State. Some say, “If, like you, I had at least one family member outside this country who could help me economically, I’m sure that I would have founded a Party, I would no longer go to the polls, I would say what I think in the assemblies at work, I would have opened a blog.”
Others say, “If I didn’t have a family to support, I would have exploded long ago and would have screamed at the officials everything I think of them.”
There is something undeniable, beyond ethical and moral judgment, that these words prove: There has never been a better partner for totalitarianism than naked fear. If this century’s technology has been the worst enemy of those who would like to control the minds of men, since ancient time it has been fear that has provided the fuel to sustain the machinery of the dictatorships.
What do people really fear in my socialist Cuba? It’s worth asking. It’s not the fear of death or disappearance, as used by tropical dictators like Trujillo or Somoza. The Cuban people’s fear is more ethereal: the fear of disintegration as a social being.
Losing a job without any possibility of finding another livelihood; the constant defamation surrounding a person; the exclusion from spaces and organizations that you used to frequent, and as may be the case, being refused admittance even to public cultural institutions. Add to that suffering constant harassment not only against yourself, but worse still, against your loved ones and your friends. And, depending on the strength of your positions and your consequent activism, physical repression and prison.
So the more I think about cases like that of Francis Sánchez, and so many others who once broke their chains and decided to play according to their own rules, I remember the vibrant words I heard from the mouth of Father José Conrado: “We are all afraid. The essence of the totalitarian system is precisely to provoke a response of paralyzing terror. The problem is when one has to conquer it in the name of a great responsibility.” And there are many more examples, dignified, beautiful, which make me believe more and more that to rely on presumed accommodating arguments is an irresponsibility that is even more costly, in terms of the eternal weight on one’s conscience.
After listening to Pedro Luis Ferrer quote his favorite phrase — “Nobody knows the past that awaits him” — I discovered what is in truth the greatest of my fears, the supreme terror I could not face: the fear of facing, in the future, my children and my grandchildren, and having to explain to them where I was and what I was doing when my country was suffering so much fear.
Now that President Raul Castro has said, with regards to the 6th Communist Party Congress, that from this point forward the only necessity is that each Cuban speaks the truth, whatever that might be, and that everyone must do so without fear (his exact words, confirming an open secret: Cubans have a sense of raging panic around expressing their truest opinions), I think it is the perfect time for all of us to dedicate five minutes to self-examination, and of taking the President-General at his word, lest we soon repent our failure to do so.
December 21, 2010
The eminent Cuban essayist and educator Enrique José Varona, Secretary of Public Education during the U.S. occupation government (1899-1902), said: “The job of the teacher is to teach people how to work with their hands, with their eyes, with their ears, and then, with their thoughts”
The aphorism remains relevant after half a century of gambling on creating a ‘New Man’, out of which emerges the opposite: apathy, lack of values, extreme hedonism, and other childish growths that certify the dissonance between words and deeds.
In these December days, the island press releases a flood of slogans about education, since the 22nd is the Day of the Teacher. are Lowered from their bronze pedestal are worthies like Jose Marti and E.J Varona, whose phrases come in handy for teachers and professors, who bear the guilt of our disastrous educational system, although nobody consulted them to formulate educational policy, still based on utopias that try to annul individual initiative by means of state indoctrination, militant asceticism, promoting accessories, and the habit of obeying without question.
A government that had the luxury of closing the Teachers Normal School, and sending prospective teachers to study under palm leaves in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, does not end by finding a path of balance in such an important area. The syndrome of the emergency and the barbed wire of censorship of school textbooks, marches forward along with the poison of ideological propaganda, the lack of school materials and the devastating outlook of the country, where it encourages servile complicity and a denunciation of diversity of thinking.
Teaching is one of the pillars of the Castro regime, which uses indoctrination with media propaganda, adorned in turn by the precepts of cultural institutions, in tune with the monotonous discourse of power, able to punish political difference, insult those who express themselves without masks, and makes up for the lack of arguments with outdated slogans and dogmas.
An education system that instills loyalty to the leader, forces children to take an absurd oath and excludes from universities those who do not support their revolutionary pedigree, is like a barricade against intelligence, creativity and individual development.
Like on every Dec. 22, teachers wait for their presents and the authorities ring the bells about the wonders of the educational system in Cuba. They forget, however, the phrase of Varona about teaching how to work with thoughts, and the maxim of Marti about the respect for freedom and the thinking of others
Translated by Rick Schwag
December 22, 2010
People on the street in Cuba look sideways at the recent reforms designed for the impoverished national economy. Few are counting on these changes put forward by president Raúl Castro. They don’t believe they will make the country function more efficiently.
They know what a group of Cubans think. In a survey of 48 persons of both sexes, with an average educational level of 12th grade, between 18 and 71 years of age, white and black, there was more pessimism than optimism. Many don’t trust the system. So expectations are low.
There were four questions:
1) Do you believe that real reforms will bring satisfactory, short-term changes that will improve your standard of living? 2) What do you think is missing in the government’s new economic proposals? 3) Do you believe that Raúl Castro’s administration can give a boost to our economy? and 4) Do you think the Cuban social system can generate wealth and motivate independent business people so that they will benefit from the government plan?
Thirty-nine (39) of those polled think that the much-vaunted reforms are more of the same. “It’s not the first time that the country has brought up a supposed change to put socialism back on track and make it more efficient. As I remember, it was tried in the ’70s, the middle of the ’80s, and now again. Nothing makes me think that the third time will be the charm,” said a cab driver.
The answers of the other 38 are similar in tone to that of the cab driver. They feel pessimistic about the government’s economic suggestions. They laugh ironically at the thought that changing only the polish would change their lives for the better. They doubt that General Raúl Castro can make the weak local economy function.
Even fewer believe that the present model of a collective society will generate creative and dynamic people who will produce wealth. “That’s the principle of these systems that combine Marxist ideology with authoritarian forms of government: to control man. They come with a dislike of people who make money. They don’t want there to be a class of rich people. It’s a kind of society that’s allergic to capability and individual liberty for its citizens. They are seen as enemies. They are a contradiction,” says one university student.
The 39 people polled do not expect great things from the regime’s economic update. They believe there are interesting matters that are not considered in the plan, which these days is being discussed at work places and CDR meetings in the neighborhoods.
“No one is saying that Cuban Americans can invest in the country. Also, they ought to abolish all the immigration regulations for those born in Cuba, introduce a realistic investment law that will give incentive to foreign businessmen to invest in the island. Eliminate entrance and exit permits. Abolish the high taxes for people who work for themselves. Drop once and for all the role of the State as a prison warden that must control its citizens,” adds an intellectual.
Nine (9) of those polled gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They are not fully optimistic, but they think that the changes will bring, in the long term, a haphazard version of capitalism to the country.
“No one wants this. Socialism is a system that is purely superior in theory. If it has not shown results it’s because the human factor has failed in the practice. The Cuban revolution has been more political than economic. In order to involve a large section of the population in the changes, we should abolish absurd laws and not look at those who make money as an enemy. The reforms may fail. But there is still the question, asked by an engineer, “What if they work?”
The economic reforms launched by the government have not created a state of favorable opinion in the majority of the population. They think they are subsistence measures. That they can bring a new plate to the table. And perhaps a glass of milk.
But basically the government can’t commit to a profound turnaround, which is necessary for the economy to be efficient, robust and long-lasting. The dream of millions of Cubans. Whoever accomplishes it will be a giant.
Translated by Regina Anavy
