Translating Cuba

This September 28 they celebrated the fifty-second anniversary of the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution(CDR). In contrast to years past I did not see reports on Cuban television of two or three previously planned nighttime parties,”which customarily are celebrated on the 27thin “anticipation of the big day.” Normally, the national media “casually” attends these festivities in order to have broadcast images of CDR enthusiasm for the event. Instead, there was only one news report and it dealt with a daytime event in which the president of one committee spoke. His audience was a small group of passive and silent participants. There was not the usual interview with an ordinary member, who was “emotional and aroused” by theanniversary.

With the passage of years and the “permanent special period,” to which we Cubans living in this archipelago have been subjected, the festivities that were sponsored by these organizations have been replaced in the city by “a people’s cookout” featuring on an open-air caldosa* on each cuadra – the lineal space between the two corners of a block – and cheap rum for those who like alcohol. On the street where I live,in a cauldron blackened by poverty and evocative of the countryside,there was a pig’s head and two or three kinds of vegetables covered by a lot of water, all placed in the planting area in front of the house of my neighborhood’s CDR president. This time no music was heard during the very few and boring activities that took place, and the mood seemed to be more one of mourning than celebration.

This farcical institution — managed and founded decades ago to send a message of “consensus,” of a revolutionary honeymoon and a happy marriage between the citizenry and the authorities — is out of date. Almost no one expects anything positive from this organization, which has only offered interference in personal lives, surveillance, betrayal, nighttime security patrols — we never found out if they were acting in the role of police or of decoys — a lot of meetings, voluntary work brigades, rallies, marches and permanent blackmail through the use of negative reports if you did not actively participate in the tasks assigned by the organization.

After returning from a fact-finding tour of my neighborhood, I could see from my balcony the depressing sight of the few people willing to be served the “substantial” brew. They carried jugs, metal pitchers and other containers, gathering around the cauldron and, on command from a group of political warlocks with no future, conspire to annually expose their misfortunes.

*Translator’s note:Caldosais traditionally a thick broth or stew.After the Cuban revolution cooking it became a communal event in which neighbors brought whatever ingredients they had at hand. Some say this came about because of food scarcity; others believe that the change had more to do with the collective emphasis of socialism. (Source: cubaentuscon.blogspot.com)

October 2 2012

The figures are disturbing. For over 30 years the Cuban women, on average, have less than one daughter by the end of their reproductive years.An aging population without any replacements.And it is only decreasing. BecauseCuba has begun to subtract inhabitants in absolute terms.

This conclusion came as a report from the National Bureau of Statistics in 2011. Add the ages of the three strongmen of the country, both Castros and Machado Ventura, and it totals 249 years. To add more drama to the aging population, annually more than 20,000 people aged between 10 and 45 years emigrate from Cuba.

One solution the Cuban government has come up with to fight the high ages and shrinking size of the population is to raise the retirement age for women and men to 60 and 65 years respectively.

A retired person earns a salary in Cuba, between 100 and 300 pesos (5 and 16 dollars) and that does not even cover 30% of their needs. For a citizen to have a breakfast and two meals a day requires no less than 2,500 pesos a month (113 dollars).

We also have the grave problem of the living quarters. Some 62% of the houses on the island are in either regular or bad state of repair. Three or four different generations have to live under the same roof.

When space is needed in the living quarters, the displaced are usually the elderly. The best option is for the grandparents to have to sleep with the grandchildren. The worst is that the family decides to put them in some run down State asylum.

There’s no worse lead up to death for an old person than to live in a State hospice. Badly treated, lack of hygiene and poor food. Already last year, more people died in Cuba than were born.

Obviously the haphazard and weak economy is not prepared to guarantee a decent life for the two million people over 60.

If currently the average age in Cuba is 38, in 2025 it will be 44. Almost 26% of the population will be over 60. By 2030, 3.3 million people will be over 60.

Today the group of Cubans older than 60 is 17.8%. It is more than the number of children ages 0 to 14 which is 17.3%. The ideal would be to promote policies to motivate women to have two or more children.

In Europe, the benefactor state usually pays a stipend to mothers with children. But the public coffers in Cuba are just about empty.

Since General Castro inherited power from his brother, the construction and social and leisure facilities for the population has dropped to almost zero. They only invest in projects that return hard currency, like tourism, or strategic projects such as petrochemicals or the transfer of water to the eastern region.

Therefore, one should not expect that at a meeting of the monotone National Parliament they will announce a cash incentive to encourage women to have more than one child. The accelerated aging in Cuba is a phenomenon that will have to be dealt with by a future government. By 2025 the Castro brothers will rest in a mausoleum or be two infirm elderly nearing the century mark.

The next president, in addition to aspiring to spectacular economic growth, will have to try to renegotiate the foreign debt and try to design a coherent society, inclusive and democratic.

All this work should be undertaken with an aging human capital. And the growing segment of women, professional or otherwise, who due to material scarcities put off forming a family.

To convince them that Cuba needs rejuvenation and more daughters would be a commendable task. We’ll see whether in ten years leaving for Florida continues to be the personal quest of many Cubans. Hopefully not.

Photo: Ivan Garcia

September 22 2012

A wave of recently implemented layoffs sent an undetermined number of workers into the streets. Official data on the initial number of people laid off referred to something around a half million; later there would be a second round that would lead to a total figure of about a million jobs lost, to be identified through rigorous State analysis.

If this process had been called by its name — by what the world would call these “readjustments” — it would have been a scandal; even more so when the one to blame for the current situation is the State itself. But as often happens in Cuba, after many long faces and some show of displeasure, people end up accepting the “package” and venting their outrage at home, consoling themselves with tears and stored up hatreds.

Among those affected by the mass layoffs have been experienced and competent professionals. For them, like the rest, the options provided by the State were farm work or “self-employment” in just the few dozen trades allowed. Most people “available” — they invent terms here to avoid universal standards and statistics — have no experience in making land produce, whether it is vacant or overrun by marabou weed and available for leasing in usufruct, so most of them opted for self-employment.

So it was that an army of entrepreneurs (?!) began to take out licenses to try their luck in the uncertain world of business. The most fortunate could count on family or friends abroad to provide resources to invest, or advice and information about the operations of their businesses.

What these excited people didn’t know was that there were already some macabre minds who had planned everything in reverse. The communist gurus in charge of the necessary accounts had designed a system of taxes and controls in which the conditions of the country resulted in armed robbery.

This was explained with absolute clarity on several Roundtable TV shows, but the hopeful and enthusiastic did pay attention. “This is designed in such a way as to avoid the accumulation of wealth on the part of individuals,” was what they said on these programs.

But if business owners don’t accumulate capital, how are they going to invest, acquire technology, widen their opportunities, improve quality and increase production, to be able to lower prices so that people benefit? If they can’t accumulate enough money, how are they going to develop their business and compete?

This means that no matter how much effort and investment they put in, no one is going to turn their business into a success nor prosper much beyond what is allowed by decree for any humble Cuban.

A devastated landscape

The current tax system alone is enough to make you throw in the towel and give up. But things don’t stop there. The brave aspirants find themselves in a country designed from beginning to end to have an anti-business approach. More than fifty years of building this absurd philosophy would not be erased by magic, not even when one of its main promoters said in a speech that a “change of mentality” was needed.

Among other things, the raw materials for food and supplies to provide basic services continued to come from “illegal” sources, and the supplies promised by the government in the vast majority of territories never arrived. Thus, within a few months, the avalanche of tiny businesses and kiosks that initially flourished began to disappear. (Some owners keep their licenses to pay their social contribution and so they won’t appear unemployed, thus dodging the surveillance of the Sector Chief and being able to dedicate themselves to other activities).

Another element that de facto destroys any initiative, especially in small towns and rural areas, is the total lack of economic capacity among potential consumers. Thousands of people who have the need and desire to acquire products are lacking resources. The population is economically dead, consisting mainly of the unemployed, poor farmworkers, wage laborers, etc…

On economic issues, first there must be money in the hands of those who would consume, so that investors are found to take the risks, borrow, look for alternatives: no one will risk anything to sell to skinny phantoms and neutral onlookers. At the same time, it’s curious that journalists in the official media who reflect endlessly on the increase in license applications and the proliferation of small businesses that are supposedly “going full steam ahead,” have not said a word about this.

And the result is always the same: after the failures, exhausted hopes, and with no sign of any more rabbits to be pulled out of the dark hat of the government, people look even more desperately than before for ways to leave the country. Especially the young. The lines at the embassies are ever longer.

It’s a shame that so many prefer to leave rather than to stay and fight to change things. Although in the end it’s understandable: who wouldn’t want to go from being someone who needs help to being someone able to help?

From Diario de Cuba

3 October 2012

What does the voice of Henrique Capriles sound like? A neighbor asked me a few days ago. I didn’t know whether to tell him it was high-pitched or deep, soft or forceful, because the Cuban media is careful not to air it. Instead, we only have the opportunity to hear the agitated shouts of Hugo Chavez, the verbal attacks he throws at his young opponent.

A few days before the Venezuelan elections, our official press has closed ranks around the current occupant of the Miraflores Palace in Caracas. The television commentators assure us that there will be a landslide victory for the Socialist Party and celebrate in advance. But that’s just in front of the cameras; behind the cameras is nervousness, not certainty.

Raul Castro’s government has too much invested in the Venezuelan elections on October 7. Much more than with the dismemberment of the USSR and the conversion of the Eastern European countries. On that occasion, the loss of the Soviet subsidies and the political allies of the socialist bloc submerged the country into a profound material and diplomatic crisis. But within the country the control exercised by Fidel Catro’s regime had the strength — and stubbornness — to withstand the blow.

Today, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, little remains of the fervor, the stubborn will, with which we faced what Fidel Castro called The Special Period, a crises presented to us as a necessary sacrifice, a test of ideological fortitude.

There are so many similarities and yet profound differences. The loss of the economic underpinnings from the Kremlin forced Fidel Castro to allow self-employment, the renting of houses, the development of farmers markets, foreign investment, and opening of the Island to international tourism and dollarization.

However, it was precisely the rise to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 that was the key element to the walking back of these reforms. With a powerful and nearby partner lavishly giving us oil, why continue to deepen the process of relaxations that resulted in a loss of power.

Raul Castro, years later, would retake the path of economic openings that his brother had retracted. This time he would be supported by the Venezuelan subsidy, which has enabled him to implement the few changes slowly in a lukewarm fashion. Perhaps there was a moment when he believed that offering farmers the ability to lease land in usufruct, or expanding licenses for self-employment, would allow Cuba to take its first steps towards economic independence.

Or maybe he always knew that this type of dependency, once established, ends up becoming a chronic situation. More than a circumstance, the need for external subsidy is the core of the Castro regime, the direct result of its inability to successfully manage the national economy.

If, on Sunday, Venezuelans reelect Hugo Chavez as president, Raul’s regime will get some breathing room. But the great polarization in Simon Bolivar’s fatherland will make it more difficult to publicly sustain the maintenance of Cuba. It will no longer be the same.

On top of that, the obvious physical collapse or the expected death of Fidel Castro is an open secret throughout the whole country. His last brief and delirious “Reflections” column was published in the newspaper on June 19. Some say they are only waiting for the end of the Venezuelan elections to put an announcement date on his obituary.

The government in Havana is approaching complicated months. Venezuela’s will be the first in a cycle of three elections that will influence, to a greater or lesser extent, our national life. The presidential election in the United States follows immediately in the list of electoral processes that lie ahead. Mitt Romney has promised a heavy hand with the Cuban authorities, but Barack Obama can also be very caustic to the Cuban system if he deepens his policy of family, academic and cultural approaches.

The first five-year term of Raul Castro will end in February 2013. Few are betting that he’s thinking of retiring to make way for a younger figure. These elections, the third that await us in the coming months, are also the last in importance and in generating expectations. The process of nominating People’s Power delegates and installing them in the National Assembly has already begun, and this body will approve the nominations to the Council of State.

If the Venezuelan results will decide whether we are granted billions in subsidies, and our relationship with our powerful neighbor to the north is in play in those elections, the Cuban elections smell strongly of a play whose script is already written. We don’t even need surveys or voter polls. There is no possibility of a surprise.

4 October 2012

As has been the trend in recent years, the once nurtured and animated Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) “fiestas” on September 27, have been added to the list of Revolutionary anniversaries on the way to extinction.

Just by chance, for personal reasons, I was crossing the city last Thursday and could observe how great apathy had taken over the blocks of the capital, substituting a scandalous silence for those old festivities where CDR neighbors shared a pot of stew in the street, made with officially allocated scraps (some pig’s head or other minor portion of the animal) and vegetables collected from among the neighbors, seasoned thanks to the enthusiasm of the neighborhood’s Revolutionaries, along with a sweet cake and the everlasting and fetid mass-produced rum.

There is nothing so eloquent as this capital now, dark and silent, on the eve of the most popular Revolutionary celebration, which until recently honored the founding of an organization conceived in power, so that Cubans could betray each other and consecrate the surveillance-based police state in service to a dictatorship which, like every autocracy, despises its followers.

Nobody dresses up the blocks with garlands and multi-colored paper flags, and just a few faithful persist in hanging a Cuban flag from their balconies, because for decades they were led to believe that being Cuban and being in the CDR were the same thing; only now are they beginning to learn that they signify the exact opposite.

The few isolated fires I saw were a pathetic specter of past revelry, simply a pretext for the neighborhood drunks, whom nobody wants, to be as wasted as they want in the streets and to mollify their empty stomachs with a little hot broth.

A brief look at the signs shows that all the mass demonstrations that gave a scenic valor to the Castros’ Revolution have disappeared: the marches of the “combatants,” voluntary labor, CDR guard duty, marathon blood donations, collections of raw materials, and more recently these parties.

The extended decline betrays that popular sympathy for the dictatorship is neither spontaneous nor free. I don’t know where Havana’s Revolutionaries were this September 27, but clearly they realize they no longer have much to celebrate.

2 October 2012

Camagüey is a Cuban province that rarely generates news much beyond low milk production and the slaughter of cattle. A vast plain that forms the widest part of this long and narrow island. A territory vegetating in the apathy of Cuba’s interior, and in the lack of opportunities, which has become chronic in the eastern part of the country.

But in the midst of this apparent calm, this week shock and rumors have taken over its main city, have obsessed the narrow streets of the village founded under the name “Puerto Principe.” The excitement centers around a young man of 24. Reiver Laborde Rico has returned to his family home, leaving behind an investigation in which he appears as a suspect in a murder in Italy.

From the tranquility of Lignano Sabbiadoro, a coastal village a stone’s throw from Venice, he has escaped to the shelter of his Camaguey region, but followed there by the gossip… and the press.

While his sister confessed to having participated in the murder of the elderly couple last August, Reiver insists on his innocence. So he told three Italian journalists who entered Cuba on tourist visas in search of testimony from the presumed fugitive. As he was being recorded, six police officers raided the house and confiscated the footage. The reporters were arrested and deported from the country.

TV and the official newspapers have been silent on the subject. They have not mentioned the scandal that the death of the the couple has unleashed in Italy, nor the alleged involvement of the two Cuban citizens. But notwithstanding this secrecy, the events are on everyone’s lips in Camagüey. Suddenly, the dead calm of the city is broken, as everyone talks about the drama happening thousands of miles away.

2 October 2012

As I was reading “an extensive special report” by a journalist for Juventude Rebelde,Nyliam Vázquez García–published on September 23 of this year and dedicated to Adriana, the wife of Gerardo, one of the Cuban spies sentenced to prison in the United States–I could not avoid thinking of those purple prose novellas that were often printed in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. They were melodramatic in the extreme and were intended to elicit easy tears from the eyes of their young readers.

It is well-known and has been proven that these “five heroes,” as they are referred to on my planet, entered United States territory with false identities and joined the “Wasp network,” which was carrying out espionage activities for the Cuban government.

If Adriana, the wife of Gerardo, is back here, it is because she was expelled from the United States after it was shown she was part of this network, something that would surely prevent her from going back there. This would be a reason that country would not grant her an entry visa, though she remains silent on this subject. And the journalist, who surely knows this, avoids asking questions about it.

Adriana complains about the lack of communication with her spouse, and immediately recounts how she and Gerardo have only 300 minutes of phone time per month, which they are required to parcel out in 10 minute increments each day.

It seems she is ignoring the majority of Cuban wives and mothers with sons imprisoned for political reasons who cannot speak with them by phone for even ten minutes per month. Nor do they have access to the computers or the internet to play chess with their children here as Gerardo and other members of his network have done on more than one occasion.

In regards to the distance separating them, I would remind this woman that Cuban mothers are also separated by great distances from their imprisoned children, even when they are in this same country. The majority of us have also seen ourselves separated from our children for decades for reasons that are well-known to everyone. And we do not have the pleasure of periodically speaking to them by phone due to the very high cost of such calls in our country.

I think it is great that the wife of this man has found ways, which she relates to this journalist, to keep “the call of love and hope” alive. She is always buying presents for Gerardo on her numerous trips overseas, including a shirt he expressly asked for, as well as those used by President Correa of Ecaudor. In all sincerity, however, I would advice her to carefully store them between layers of blue silk and moth balls so that they are in good condition when her nephews and grandsons inherit them.

October 1 2012

Now one of the photos I had put in my posts has been taken by State Security and put in a 17 minute documentary to try to accuse Señora Martha Beatriz Roque and twenty other Cubans of faking their hunger strike.

I wasn’t able to watch the documentary because my television broke some weeks ago. Following the appearance of the photo (where I appear in the company of women I greatly admire), I had won the opportunity to be heard by some people who didn’t know about the hunger strike.

In reality, this protest is also targeted to the arbitrariness of the system that doesn’t recognize our rights and tries to destroy us. So it was not covered by any Cuban news media but merited an entire production by the Revolutionary “artists,” who offered proof — once again! — of how over time they patrol, monitor, and keep our lives under surveillance.

So in the later edition and with the efficient work of a sound engineer, or maybe just a simple sound guy, part of the Cuban public has taken it as “proof” that the hunger strikers, and especially Martha Beatriz, were not in a state of complete starvation, having been given vegetables through the window on a date, according to what I was told, of September 18, which is when the strike ended after having received a response from Chaviano’s kidnappers.

I’ve worn myself out trying to explain to my neighbors that if someone wants to say it’s a hunger strike and later wants to eat their fill secretly, they can hide the food before beginning the process. I have noted the magic of editing and sound, with which you can do almost anything in audiovisual material, which is why it doesn’t prove anything.

Martha Beatriz did not move from her deathbed where I saw her, did not let anyone in, and always refused to receive medical care. One of the women companions of the strikers, who were there to help them, had to revive her on several occasions when she lost consciousness. There wasn’t any doctor from the clinic like they showed in the documentary.

Ultimately I decided to investigate, consulting several publication about when and how many times and based on what it was said, or F. Castro said from the podium, or from the position of an accusing witness (as in Huber Matos’s trial), that Cubans who opposed and do oppose the politics of the Castro regime that has become Cuban communism are not representing themselves. To put it another way: in my country, from the beginning of this great scam, they have accused the opposition of being mercenaries.

A mercenary is someone who is not involved in the cause for which he risks his life, and who receives payment from those who truly are interested. When my country received a huge amount of money and arms, including nuclear weapons as in the October Crisis, from the Soviet Empire with the condition that communism would be installed, who was the mercenary in that economic relationship?

But earlier, when the former Cuban president Prío Socarrás and the then president of Costa Rica in 1958 supported the armed insurrection of the rebels of the Sierra Maestra with money and arms, what did the opposition against Batista use this money for that was not taboo and in an case was it necessary and just to use it for something that was never the freedom of the Cuban people?

What happens in Cuba is that the State is the owner of all jobs, including the self-employed who take care not to annoy the State. And the State pays a salary of less than 20 CUC (< $20 US) to its employees. And if one of them behaves in a way that turns into a “deserter” from the hyper-controlled politics (which above all tries to keep Cubans with an idiotic beatific smile of socialism on their faces, waving flags and worshiping the government icons) it turns out that this uncomfortable atom in sick and dangerous society will be left, in the first place, without a job, if they decided ahead of time that they weren’t going to continue to receive — as a mercenary! — a salary from the abhorring State dictatorship.

Then, as the Cuban opposition is peaceful and doesn’t buy weapons, State Security and its campaign of manipulation whip up the people who receive half a pound of oil for the whole month against people who eventually could be consuming olive oil.

The political prisoner Martha Beatriz Roque, the only woman among the 75 arrested during the 2003 Black Spring, and Antunez, and the many people they slander on television are not compensated, let alone with $50 million dollars, because no one is asked if they are willing to suffer everything they narrate in their testimonies and in the end if they would be given this sum would choose such an ordeal for their life. A life so short, so fleeting, so exhausting, like that of the whole world. Their health, their youth, their life, their freedom, cannot be compensated with money. Our time is too short to sell it.

It takes courage and faith in God to believe that Cuba can still be free of the plague that darkens it.

October 2 2012

If we compare the style of governance of the Castros during their respective terms in office from a bird’s eye view, we would make a serious mistake in believing the two autocrats are much the same.

You don’t need a magnifying glass to see the differences. What are the similarities? Well, the duo have authoritarianism in their genes. And they see democracy as their major enemy.

While Fidel Castro acted like a true visionary, father of the country and shopkeeper of the neighborhood, his brother prefers to exercise power from behind the scenes. Castro I was an impetuous hurricane. He never kept still. On any given morning he was capable of mobilizing all the means of production in the country for a banana harvest.

Overriding the national budget, he ordered the construction of a biotechnology center. Believing himself to be a world-class statesman, he devised a plan to abolish Latin America’s external debt.

His vocation was that of a warrior. He handled the various conflicts in Africa as though he were the supreme commander. He personally directed the military campaign in Angola from a mansion in Havana’sNuevo Vedado district.

He controlled everything down to the last detail. He knew the amount of asphalt needed to build an airport runway and the exact number of chocolates and sardines his troops consumed.

In domestic affairs he governed with the mentality of a shopkeeper. He ran some numbers on his calculator and decided to purchase refrigerators that he thought would be most effective in launching the energy revolution.

He could recite from memory the exact number of energy-saving lightbulbs the country had to import. And the benefits of Cerelac. And the amount of concrete required to build one-hundred daycare facilities.

Fidel Castro was an autocrat. A narcissist his entire life. Even in retirement he cannot be constrained. Now at times he predicts atomic disasters and swears he has discovered a formula—the moringa plant—that will satisfy all of humanity’s food needs.

His supporters consider him to be the most important statesman of the twentieth century; his detractors think he is certifiably insane. His 47 years governing Cuba were marked by predictions of war against “Yankee imperialism” and mass demonstrations condemning those who chose to leave the country.

When the mood struck him, he would storm TV studios and give long lectures on a variety of topics. But the figures do not lie; Fidel Castro was a bad administrator of the nation.

By the time he was forced to give up power due to illness, Cuba’s economic statistics had contracted in the extreme. Sugar production, the mainstay of the economy for centuries, was at the level it was in 1910. Cities were run-down and needed painting. Streets were filled with potholes. Drug dispensaries were empty. Free health care and education remained in place, but they were of poor quality and headed downhill.

The transfer of power to General Raúl Castro on July 31, 2006 occurred without popular consent. He was hand-picked by his brother.

Since the end of the 1990s many sectors of the economy have been run byRaúl Castro’s men, the military’s businessmen. It is a closed circuit of olivegreen-khaki-clad executives who have devised methods for entrepreneurial advancement, which they apply to their industries and businesses.

Raúl Castro has quietly buried the notion of volunteerism and the anarchy of his brother under thirty feet of earth. He has also shut down ludicrous government agencies like the Ministry for the Battle of Ideas—a monument to ineffectiveness—and restructured the administrative apparatus.

He has cleaned house as much as possible. Fidel Castro’s trusted men were either retired or went down in disgrace. Schools in the countryside—cradles of unwanted pregnancies and a burden on the national budget—were shut down.

The general has not taken these measures as a prelude to serious and profound reform. No. They are simply temporary cures intended to stimulate the functioning of a moribund economy.

The expansion of self-employment and the sale of houses and old Russian cars are not starting points for the implementation of liberal methodologies. The objective is to throw out ridiculous laws. Castro II is focused on the maintaining the continuity of the system.

To achieve this, he needs two things: dollars and the removal of the heavy weight of excessive state control. In the pursuit of efficiency and a rise in productivity he has come up with a plan in which a million and a half workers will lose their jobs.

If Fidel Castro seemed like an idealist, his brother has his feet planted firmly on the ground. The future, as foreseen by Castro II, is a capitalism practiced among friends which would allow them to control the country’s main economic levers.

Raúl is not betting on anachronistic Marxist treatises. He prefers Putin’s Russia. And he admires the economic growth achieved through capitalist means of the Chinese giant.

The general knows that, to perpetuate the work of Fidel, it is essential that there be an efficient economy which can satisfy the aspirations of the average Cuban, who wants to live in a decent house and have enough to eat.

To achieve this without losing power while keeping the opposition at bay is the goal. The differences betweenRaúl and Fidel are procedural. Castro I was more about revolution, the third world, mass rallies, applause and anti-Yankee rhetoric. Castro II is about doing things out of sight, without too much noise.

The general hopes that the work started by his brother and continued by him might last a hundred years. Or a little longer.

Photo from a blog by Tania Quintero.

September 30 2012