Cuba’s Concern
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By Kenneth Bagnell
When it comes to liking Cuba, no country is remotely close to Canada. About this time of year Cuba has begun drawing close to a million Canadians for a 2013 vacation according to official estimates. (Next in line is Britain, but far back, with about 175,000 yearly visits.) While many of us feel goodwill to Cuba’s people if not its politics, I can’t help thinking the actual draw is more touristic: sun, sand and surf. That conclusion isn’t based on scholarly research but casual observations over my own six or seven visits. I find it a bit sad that the history of Cuba and the hardship of its people don’t provoke the interest they should from many Canadians.
Here’s but one example: a few years ago, while on a writing trip and staying in Varadero, a comfortable two hour drive from Havana, I decided to return to the old capital for an afternoon walk. So I boarded a van with about a dozen tourists, all Canadian, plus a guide, as usual well informed. (Many, as you know, are university graduates in various disciplines –accounting, law, etc.– but since the income is so poor they make more on tips from guiding.) Once the guide gave his overview of Havana’s history he invited questions. None. I decided to break the embarrassing silence by asking one hoping that would provoke others to speak up. He seemed to delight in answering, but there wasn’t a single additional question. I expect most of the passengers were on a shopping trip.
Now, given some recent good news, it may get better. For Cubans seem to have fresh optimism, brought on by the decision of its oppressive government, to permit people to open their own businesses, by permitting market entrepreneurship to offset the dead hand of the economic system of Fidel Castro. A few years ago, Castro, whose revolution did rid Cuba of a corrupt regime, was asked by a journalist of the Atlantic Monthly if he felt Cuba’s political model was worth “exporting.” He replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” History has shown that it never has anywhere, including the China of yesterday. Keep in mind Cuba’s socialism was never democratic socialism as in Norway, Sweden, Finland and its neighbors. Under Castro, who took power in January, 1959, Cuba endured a dictatorship for just over a half century. (It was stern, some journalists insisting that until the late 1990s, there was an implicit outlawing of contact between Cubans and tourists.)
The recent change calls to mind – and here I go by memory — an interview given a couple of decades ago, by Zbigniew Bzezinski, (then US President Jimmy Carter’s Security Advisor), on what led to the fall of Soviet Communism. As I remember, Bzezinski listed four reasons for its internal decay, but the one that interests me most was his fourth: that communism has an inherent spiritual flaw which suffocates the human creative and spiritual yearning, aspiration and ambition. Castro’s Cuba revealed that: every store, every café, even every barbershop belonged to the state. Those who challenged this practice were often jailed by the hundreds, so that the illusion of public acceptance was protected from thinking people. What did that do for a person with vision to create her own real estate firm or his own bakery?
Almost in a reflection of Bzezinski’s keen insight, about a half million Cubans have already decided to open restaurants, sell cars, renovate houses and repair everything from radios to roofs. Almost 400,000 are now self-employed. Then just a couple of weeks ago, Cuba lifted the cumbersome regulation that made it extremely difficult for Cubans to travel abroad, thereby encouraging other opportunities. (The only real opposition to the soft introduction of the market has come, predictably, from some bureaucrats fretting about their loss of cozy influence.) All in all, as a recent British television documentary made evident, it’s given a real lift to the spirit of thousands of Cubans who want to follow their ambitious fellow citizens. Along with that, roughly 20,000 people from aboard, now go to Cuba for medical services, including top quality neurosurgery and numerous other specialized treatments, which now generate about $40 million yearly.
The regime that led to the Castro era, (from the late 1930s to the late 1950s,) was overseen by a man named Fulgencio Battista. To put it mildly it was totally unacceptable. It was, in truth, a horror. During the Battista years misery was widespread, though with pockets of vast wealth here and there. (Given its proximity to the US, American organized crime thrived in Havana.) When student protest and social unrest broke out in the middle 1950s, Battista began ordering executions so often they became virtually routine. (They were usually carried out in public and some estimates, not always reliable, put them at 20,000.) Then, in 1959, Castro’s guerrilla uprising replaced Battista and life became better. But one example: medical education was to be available to all who qualified, including almost every specialty. (And, of course, medicare for the people.) Alas, given its compulsory socialist economy, the enterprise that would have rewarded initiative and created opportunity, wasn’t there.
Now that economic encouragement is in place, what’s ahead? I’d say promising possibilities but with a qualification: that the rumors aren’t true that Cuba’s government will impose a tax regime that, in these circumstances, is ridiculously high, as some reports predict 70 percent or even more. If it does it will take the wind out of the sails of Cuban hope. And it will validate something said years ago by one of the great men of history, Winston Churchill: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
January 1, 2013.
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