The Cuban press was having a lot of fun at capitalism's expense. The lead
story in the eight-page Granma - named after the yacht that brought the
young Fidel back to Cuba to begin his revolution in 1956 - usually concerns
the anniversary of an historic action on the part of the Castros, Che
Guevara or even more antique heroes. But the second story, on this occasion,
encompassed a piece of credit crunch schadenfreude: the number of suicides
in the US was growing, according to the Samaritans; in Italy there were 16
million people living in poverty; and so on.
The cartoons showed Uncle Sam, an overweight old man with an anxious, miser's
frown, suffering an indignity. In one, he was on a raft in the sea (an image
humiliatingly associated with Cubans fleeing to the US) asking for help from
a socialist Cuba, represented by a doctor on an island. In another,
President Bush was attempting to reinflate a patched-up balloon of an Uncle
Sam.
The message to the Cuban people could not have been clearer: capitalism is in
crisis, just like we always told you it would be, and if you think things
can be difficult here, you should look at what's coming over there.
The theme seemed particularly appropriate, because Havana is not an easy place
for people to live in. This is not just because of the constant hucksterism,
prostitution and begging that has gone on in Cuba since the time of the
buccaneers, and which is described in Graham Greene's pre-revolutionary Our
Man in Havana.
In central Havana, a physiotherapist I'll call Eduardo explained the problem:
“Everything is depressed. The people are down. There's not enough food since
Hurricane Gustav.” Already in short supply, fresh fruit and vegetables had
become very difficult to find. He felt he was working every hour he could,
using every resource he had, and getting nowhere.
Adding to his problems was the inevitable police crackdown on the rampant
black market. “You see them everywhere now,” Eduardo complained. “Many
police, always stopping you, always asking for your papers, asking what you
are doing.” He then invoked the ultimate in Cuban pessimism: “It's nearly as
low as during the Special Period.”
For 30 years the socialist Cuban economy was subsidised by the Soviet Union
and its allies in the Eastern bloc economic organisation, Comecon. Cuban
sugar was bought at high prices or exchanged for Eastern European plant and
transport. Then, abruptly, amid the collapse of communism, the subsidies
ended. Cuba could no longer afford to import food, people lost their jobs,
and the indices of wellbeing - from daily calorie consumption to infant
mortality - rapidly worsened.
Inevitably, crime and smuggling rose and the State cracked down on activities
condemned as profiteering or antisocial. A Cuban invokes the Special Period
in the same way that old people in the West used to speak about the
Depression.
This autumn the police presence in central Havana was almost overwhelming. On
a short walk along the Malecón - Havana's promenade - we saw several people,
including two schoolgirls, stopped by police and asked for their papers.
In Cuba they seem to have Castro cycles like the West has trade cycles. When
times are good there is minor liberalisation, maybe a reform or two, the
police presence is reduced, life seems tolerable. Then the country runs out
of money, there are shortages, the tolerance stops and the space for people
to exist seems to constrict.
Underlying these cycles is the central fact that Cuba runs an economic system
- almost total state ownership and central planning - that has been judged a
failure in just about every other country in which it has been tried, and
yet it persists.
At the street level, Cuba is famously quaint. It is full of old buildings,
often in an advanced state of dilapidation, its few cars are ancient and
picturesque, there is little neon, the schoolchildren are smart and neat in
their identical uniforms. For spoilt Westerners this decaying simplicity can
seem a relief from our consumerist cornucopia, with its attendant anxieties
and fantastic waste.
To peer through a factory window in a Cuban town is to experience a camera
obscura of the 1940s or 1950s. In the city of Santa Clara, not far from the
centre, is a famous cigar-making plant. Inside a large room, sitting in rows
behind wooden worktops, rolling cigars by hand - political posters on the
wall and Seventies pop music on the radio - sit nearly 150 people, mostly
women.
Away from the tourist areas the shops that Cubans can afford to use are a mix
of the primitive and the understocked. A real supermarket will boast an
eclectic mix of almost random products, with one brand of each: inner tubes,
buckets, crude ladles, the one type of crash helmet, a small range of poorly
made clothes. One large, modern food store in Santa Clara was full of
cooking oil, and just about nothing else. At any time of day people were
sitting around on the pavements or outside their houses.
On the autopista, the unlined, largely unused main highway, men cleared the
endless grass verges with sickles. These are the sure signs of that malaise
of the planned economy: chronic underemployment. Or, as the old Soviet joke
went: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” The average wage for
a Cuban is about 340 pesos a month, or £10, with pensions set at 205 pesos.
The purchasing power of this pitifully small amount is boosted by the
provision of free education and healthcare, subsidised electricity, and by
the supply of staple food rations at subsidised prices.
However, just how little Cubans can buy is brought home to them every day by
the operation of a dual monetary system. The Cuban convertible peso (or CUC,
pronounced “cook”), pegged to the dollar, is worth 24 times more than the
“national money”, and is the unit of exchange for tourists and Cubans
wishing to buy certain products. William, a middle-aged quality-control
manager in the local rum factory, was on a higher wage of 700 ordinary
pesos, but with three children in Cuba (another had gone to work in Spain),
he was continually calculating the mathematics of shortage. “A T-shirt, that
is 10 CUC, jeans 25 CUC, shoes...” he shook his head “...shoes 60 CUC. Half
my money for one month, gone! My children, they want to make something! They
can't make something here.”
Although there are restrictions on foreign travel, it is possible to leave
Cuba - every year thousands of citizens take that option, adding to the
numbers who have fled over the decades. More than a million Cubans now live
in the US and Europe, many of them sending remittances back to their
families at home.
Since there is a commitment to egalitarianism, wages for skilled occupations
are not that much greater than for unskilled ones. I met one agronomist who
had been bringing in 350 pesos a month. She told me how she had given up
work to grow her own vegetables and sell them from a street stall - in the
process nearly doubling her earnings. The Government recently admitted to a
shortage of 8,000 teachers, many of whom had simply changed occupations to
try to find something vaguely lucrative.
The main way, however, that Cubans manage to make life tolerable is on the
black market. Since the State runs and owns almost everything, the market
largely exists by stealing from a government enterprise and reselling. “We
make the mercado negro, or we don't have anything,” said one middle-class
Santa Clareno. “Mostly we steal from work. If it's a shoe factory, then we
take something to make shoes at home and sell them. If it's building, then
we steal cement. We carry what we can; the poor man on his back, the rich
man in his truck.”
He had been involved in renovating public buildings, only to discover that a
third of the materials he was supplied with were being pilfered from the
sites. In Havana I bought cigars on the street (near the Museum of the
Revolution, ironically) from a middle manager at a cigar factory who had
stolen them that morning from the store. And there's bribery. At the famous
Coppelia ice-cream parlour in the Vedado district of Havana, a policeman
hoicked us off the Cuban queue and walked us over to the tourist section,
where the ice-cream costs 20 times as much. There was a quick flash of
silver as the man behind the counter paid the policeman off.
Cuba was the legendary island of sugar. In the 1990s the lumbering industry
was replaced by tourism as the main earner of foreign exchange. Last year
tourism constituted a full 43 per cent of the island's GDP, with more than
two million visitors sampling Cuba's many beaches and resorts. Wages for
Cubans working in foreign-owned concerns are paid to the Government, and a
proportion is passed on to the workers. But, with the disparity between the
Cuban peso and the convertible peso, the possible earnings from a
holidaymaker's tips makes working in tourism a passage out of poverty. A 5
CUC tip to the chamber-maid is equivalent to a fortnight's earnings.
I met hotel workers who would hitchhike for several hours each day to their
jobs. Jorge, a receptionist in Pinar del Río, told me that a day earlier he
had finished his 24-hour shift and set out on his ten-mile journey home at
9am; he finally arrived at 1.15pm. “It's normal,” he shrugged.
To add to the difficulties of Cubans, the transport infrastructure is woeful.
The railways are unreliable and much of the stock is pensioned-off Eastern
European stuff, like the brown, rusty Romanian carriages that stood in the
dilapidated station at Santa Clara. In that city - the size of Sheffield -
the principal public transport is provided by small, horse-drawn carriages,
into which up to eight people will often squeeze. “We were promised buses in
March - but where are they?” grumbled one local man.
“We walk a knife edge”, answered Eduardo when I asked him to describe his
life. Then he pointed to my copy of Granma. “But you also have your
troubles,” he said.
CASTRO'S COUNTRY
1959 Fidel Castro overthrows the dictator Fulgencio Batista
1960 US businesses nationalised without compensation. US breaks off
diplomatic relations
1961 Cuban exiles backed by the CIA try unsuccessfully to invade at the
Bay of Pigs. Castro declares Cuba a communist state, allied to the Soviet
Union
1962 Cuban missile crisis sparked by the deployment of Soviet missiles
on the island
1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's biggest benefactor. Cuba
forced to open up to foreign tourists to keep economy afloat
2002 US military begins to use Guantánamo Bay for the interrogation of
al-Qaeda suspects
2006 Castro undergoes gastric surgery. Temporarily hands control of the
Government to his brother, Raúl
2008 Castro announces permanent retirement. Raúl Castro takes over as
President
