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Title: Cuba Author: Peter Werbe Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: Cuba, travel, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #396 Source: Retrieved from Fifth Estate, Vol. 51, No. 1, #396 Summer 2016
On March 15, our last day in Cuba, my wife and I boarded the Hershey
Electric Railway in Casablanca, across the harbor from Old Havana, for a
57-mile trip to the town of Matanzas. We were flying back to Toronto
from the airport near that city the next morning after eight days on the
island.
The line was built a century ago by the U.S. candy manufacturer to bring
sugar from the fields to Havana harbor, and is the only remaining train
of what was once the most developed rail system in Latin America.
The train is shown in guide books painted a sparkling green and white.
Though clean and on time, it turned out to be a slow-rolling, rusting
rattletrap that bounced and shook, jolted and clanked through a four
hour trip, longer than it took on our flight home.
Once outside the country’s capital, it was like being transported back
to the 19th century. Men on horseback, oxen plowing fields, and
campesinos getting on and off the train with sacks of produce, many of
who seemed to know one another—and, no cars to be seen.
All of this was far from the tsunami of tourism and foreign investment
now hitting the island, finishing what wall certainly be Cuba’s complete
re-integration into the international economy. And, try as the island’s
central planners might to control the process, it will be on the world
market’s terms, not theirs.
We left Havana just days before U.S. President Obama arrived with his
mealy mouthed platitudes about democracy and promises of “normalization”
of diplomatic relations. And, before the Rolling Stones played for an
outdoor audience of 1.2 million people on the city’s famed Malec6n
coastal roadway. That’s ten percent of Cuba’s population!
We were in Cuba with a tour group that had flown from Toronto to the
resort city of Varadero, 50 miles from Havana. We boarded a bus for the
capital with a Cuban guide aboard who quickly announced with great pride
that the verdant space adjacent to the beach resorts would soon have “a
world class golf course." This presaged what we were soon to realize,
that many parts of the island were being quickly redesigned for tourism.
IN A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR, the island has gone from pariah status (in
the American view), to a bucket list vacation destination with potential
toursts all wanting to visit “before they put in the MacDonald’s.”
Construction of Golden Arches throughout the island are surely high in
that company’s planning, and a thousand other companies see massive
economic potential in a population thirsting for the stuff of the modern
world they’ve been missing.
Most people considering a Cuba trip now are drawn by the romantic notion
of a nation stuck in the past with its 1950s cars, crumbling Spanish
colonial architecture, rum drinks, salsa music, and jazz. That’s all
there, but the infrastructure of Havana is being overwhelmed by the
influx of tourists.
There aren’t enough hotel rooms, prices are rising, and what is
described in a recent Wall Street Journal headline as “The American
Invasion" means that Cuban eyes are increasingly aimed at income from
tourists just as in all other vacation islands, and as it was before the
1959 Revolution.
Everything on the island is ramping up to accommodate the influx of
tourists. American companies will manage hotels, new ones are being
built, Havana has become a restaurant destination city, and undoubtedly
staffs are being lectured on how to give a crisp, “Sí senor” in the
manner Americans expected before the Revolution.
Havana harbor has been designated as “port secure” by the U.S.
government, meaning that Carnival Cruise Line ships will soon be
disgorging 5,000 passengers into the narrow streets of Old Havana for
their two-hour “I visited Cuba* jaunt. There are reports of five-hour
waits for luggage at the city’s Jose Marti airport and three hours to
get through Cuban customs.
The improbable victory of Castro’s guerrillas is still the lens through
which everything is viewed by the Cuban ruling circles and most
certainly by leftist visitors who are desperate to hold onto the island
as being the last vestige of the idea that their socialism has a real
world existence.
However, the country is being roiled by immense social and economic
changes so that the concepts they employ of ‘The Revolution" (which has
receded into an historic event rather than something ongoing), and
phrases such as “The Cuban People," or calls to support the Revolution
or Cuba are hopelessly dated, and obscure more than they reveal.
The accomplishments of the Revolution, which overthrew a corrupt,
U.S.-backed torture state, are well known. Cuba's universal health
system, high literacy rate, organic agriculture, and other innovative
social programs are extolled endlessly by visiting leftist tourists
almost as a liturgy to assure themselves that it is here that socialism
works. What almost none of them address, however, is that the country is
bureaucratically managed by a single-party state which ruthlessly
suppresses opposition of any type.
I gave a suggestion to one enthusiast who was writing about his recent
trip to Cuba that he simply define the country as a police state with
good social services. It wasn't well received.
In fairness, all nations are police states with varying degrees of
harshness. The irony of Obama lecturing the Cuban government about
democracy is lost on most myopic Americans. If there is a comparison
made between the two countries since 1959 of internal repression, police
attacks on demonstrators, assassination of dissidents, framed-up
political prisoners, murders of unarmed citizens, a racist justice
system, capital punishment, a huge inmate population, draconian
sentences, horrid prisons; really, which country comes out looking most
like a police state?
The starkest comparison of the U.S. violation of human rights can be
seen on the island itself in the form of the U.S. Guantanamo prison
complex.
However, both Cuba and the U.S. need to be judged by the standards they
set for themselves. The bedrock principle of socialism is workers
democracy, of which there is none in Cuba.
Las Damas en Blanca, the Women in White, and other democracy reformers
demand parliamentary elections in a multi-party system. The Cuban
leadership probably correctly realizes this would mean the end of their
rule and the dismantling of the tatters of their Revolution if elections
were held.
But the installation of authentic workers democracy would also spell the
bureaucracy’s demise, and without the return to private forms of
capitalism. This subject is taboo in Cuba and among its foreign
apologists as well, some of the latter who defend the dictatorship, but
mostly pretend in their writing that it doesn’t exist.
Like the other so-called socialist states, Cuba’s economy was always
state capitalist, but now with the government’s encouragement of massive
foreign investment, some leftist writers argue that more capitalism
will, in reality, bring about more socialism!
Marxists invented the term state socialism to disguise the capitalist
forms of state ownership, wage labor, and commodity consumption that
have been present in all communist countries. As we have seen in Eastern
Europe and Asia, state socialism quickly and easily morphs into its
private form.
A representative from the Cuban Ministry of Economy and Planning told
our tour group that Cuba is allowing foreign investment in order to
raise its standard of living and deal with a deteriorating
infrastructure. She said there was great pressure from below to make
typical Western commodities available, but insisted that capital
penetration will be controlled and the social services Cubans receive
will not be eroded.
In 2014, the Cuban National Assembly unanimously passed a law
encouraging foreign investment offering steep tax cuts and promising a
climate of investment security. The latter assurance is key.
It means protecting, for instance, a returning AT&T which saw its
property confiscated by the Revolution. The Cuban government now sternly
promises there will be no repetition of this. In other words, the state
guarantees there will be no threat of workers democracy. Isn’t this the
task of all capitalist governments?
AT&T will return, secure from the anarcho-syndicalist unions that Castro
eliminated, a feat neither the Spanish colonial regime nor Cuban
dictators could accomplish.
No doubt, Cuba faces great problems. There is very little national
wealth accumulation and many people are not working, surviving solely on
government subsidies. But Cubans, like everyone else in the world, want
what capitalism offers. Smartphones aren’t a luxury item, but are
considered a necessity for life in the modern world.
The Cuban Revolution’s goal of creating a post-capitalist, socialist
consciousness can be seen in many of its admirable projects despite
bureaucratic distortions, and is still espoused by many of its
stalwarts. But now that competes with a world of iPhones, Gucci
fashions, and Rolexes.
The U.S. embargo, the ongoing explanation for Cuba’s economic failures,
may have acted as an inoculation against the raging demand for stuff
that is currently sweeping the island. One suspects the population,
particularly the young, will abandon the Revolution first chance they
get if they are denied what they desire.
The accentuation of class and wealth disparities is already visible in
upscale restaurants, smartly dressed women, and Chinese luxury Geelys
roaring past 1951 Dodges. When asked about this, the representative of
the economics ministry said it didn’t matter since everyone would still
receive the exact same social services—a stunning avoidance of the
question.
The future of the island may soon be a combination of Jamaica and modern
Vietnam—an economy marked by tourism and foreign corporate looting, as
before the Revolution. And, like Vietnam, a state apparatus which
guarantees the security of capital. The Cuban’s only option was resist
the lure of modernity and very few want that.
Remember the train to Matanzas? The rattletrap? I suspect if I return in
a few years, the old model will be replaced by a shiny, new air
conditioned one. It will roll on tracks that allow a smooth ride of
under an hour.
The passengers will be the same, still poor farmers growing yucca and
raising hogs, but rather than conversing about crops and local news,
they’ll be looking down at their iPhones checking pork belly prices on
the Chicago Futures Exchange, and listening to the Rolling Stones.
This is called progress. What is gained and what is lost?
Peter Werbe, long-time Fifth Estate staff member, says writing this
gloomy report after his fourth trip to the island saddened him. While he
and his group were in Havana, they visited numerous art projects,
museums, heard speakers, walked the streets, danced on roof tops, ate
delicious food, and lots more, as tourists will