Even though Hugo Chavez, its creator, and the Castro brothers are beaming with pride about ALBA*, the free-trade agreement with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, the agreement has insignificant benefits for the people of Cuba.
The most notable benefit is that, thanks to the flow of oil that the folkloric President Chavez generously provides us with, in the last three years we have not had prolonged blackouts in Havana, which at their height would last up to 8 hours daily.
Five years after implementing the treaty with Caracas, the bright side is that we have some petroleum. Not too much, though, since in the second trimester of 2009, the Cuban government ordered a new notch on an already over-tightened belt, and asked for even more economy with the black gold.
The other advantages we would supposedly have do not exist. In 2004, the Sole Comandante, delirious as only he can get, squinted his eyes—it’s almost as if I could see him now—telling us how Cuban stores would be filled with lots of merchandise and all kinds of food. And children would have no reason to whine because their parents would be able to buy them bonbons and other goodies. In a definitive manner, ALBA would make us economically independent. Of course, the common man on the streets was not fooled. He knows by heart all the Maximum Leader’s ravings.
Many foreigners now laugh and think one exaggerates when we enumerate the long list of promises and the bright future Castro I has been promising for half a century.
Let us review the list. Tubers and vegetables would be abundant. Let’s not even talk about how much milk there would be. We would no longer have to go to the dairy for it. Upon waking up in the morning, one would find on the patio or balcony of the house an exquisite midget cow waiting for us to milk her. Everyone would have pure and fresh milk to drink to his heart’s content.
There would be bananas for exporting. Coffee would be available in industrial-size quantities. Pork would be practically free. Cuba would be the closest thing to paradise. In San Julian, a community in Pinar del Rio, one could experience what it was to live in a communist society. Not even Lenin attempted it.
All our dreams began to crumble, but not because the Comandante lacked good will. No. He had more than enough passion, but he lacked rationality. As always. No tubers, and no midget cows. Even that which we had produced for centuries, like sugar, we now have to import from the Dominican Republic.
The common Cubans on the street long ago stopped believing in the utopias and pleasant dreams of Fidel Castro. Now they are more cautious, if not skeptical. For now, no one in their right mind believes in the benefits of ALBA. It is understood that as a member of the trade agreement, one of the island’s contributions is providing health care.
Therefore, thousands of South Americans travel to Cuba for cataract surgery. Even the natives can now have their eye surgery in the morning and be home by the afternoon. Just like what happens in New York, Barcelona, or Zurich. Castro, of course, brags about this service. But these types of surgical procedures are not news anymore anywhere in the civilized world because for a long time they have been successfully available.
What Cubans want is to see food in their pantries. They want to be able to have cafe con leche and buttered bread for breakfast. And for their children to have clothing and shoes. But that, they observe, has not been made possible by the much-praised trade agreement. Less rhetoric then, and more reality.
At this point, after 50 years of nonsense and waste, chimerical undertakings, and absurd plans, simple people do not bring up in serious conversation the supposed goodness of an alliance that has yet to show palpable results.
No one believed the lovely story of the Comandante in Olive Green, when one night in 2004, in a state of euphoria, he glimpsed a plethoric future for his subjects. Not even the children, to whom it never even occurred to ask their parents for bonbons.
*Translator’s note
The title—Alba o oscuridad, in Spanish—is a play on words. “Alba” is the Spanish word for dawn. The organization ALBA is the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas.
Photo: Claudio Vaccaro, Flickr
