3/28/17

Cuba
Part I

Santeria

My husband and I were lucky enough to take a nine-day trip to Cuba this past week. Our tour included a number of lectures on architecture, religion, US and Cuban history, visits to dance companies and markets and museums, so we learned a lot, enough to know we don’t know much.  But what we did learn is that Cuba is complicated. For example, two religions, Catholicism and the Afro-Carribean Santeria, have overlapped almost completely, two currencies are in use everywhere (local pesos and CUCs, the Cuban convertible peso), and the omnipresent, highly authoritarian Communist government is opening up to a modest free market economy.

We had two guides, one a local Cuban and the other the child of a refugee from the 1959 revolution whose family had lost everything when Castro took over the government. The refugee's father was thrown in prison for a year, an aunt and uncle for seven years.  Obviously, these two guides had very different views of modern Cuba. For example, the local guide pointed out how few policemen there were on the streets.  The refugee child said that all one had to do was stand on a street corner saying something politically unpopular, and plainclothes police would appear out of everywhere. We were grateful that we had access to both viewpoints.

And that brings us to the Spanish (Cuban) American War of 1898.  Cuba and the U.S. had really different ideas about how that turned out.

Cuban Viewpoint

American Viewpoint

As you probably know, Cuba was under the influence of the United States after the end of the war. Government policies were generally to the benefit of the US and less to the Cubans. The nadir was reached under the administration of US backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. His Havana was rife with corruption, underage prostitution, and gambling sponsored by a close alliance with the Mafia. I can remember the distain my parents had for him. My mom said he wasn’t a nice man (her very worst opinion!), but my dad was more descriptive: he said Batista was a thug heading an evil government.  At least in my house, there was some cheering for the scruffy revolutionaries who overturned him in the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Until it turned out they were Communists.  Then no more cheering. And then the Bay of Pigs. And then the Cuban Missile Crisis.  But more on that later.

Some immediate effects of the revolution were land reform – no more big land owners.  Every farmer was given the land on which he lived. Rations were instituted for basic foodstuffs. Medical care was planned for every local community, free and universal.  We also heard that you need to bring a little gift to the doctor or the hospital. Medical supplies can be really hard to find, so it’s important to encourage enthusiasm on the part of the health care provider. Free education for all.  But with the Cuban Embargo in place, access to technology, even to things like tractors and fertilizers, is extremely limited.  Farmers could produce more food, but they're still using oxen and organic fertilizers to grow their crops.

At the same time, the infrastructure is crumbling. Literally. Buildings in Old Havana collapse regularly due to lack of maintenance. There's a ongoing restoration movement, but it's barely keeping up. Schools and hospitals everywhere are in disrepair. Medical supplies can be hard to find as well as parts to repair almost everything.  If your toilet handle breaks in the hotel, the repair man will pull a handle from a toilet somewhere else because there's no replacement part available.  If our guides agreed on anything, it was that now is the time to lift the Embargo.  The angry, far right refugees who fled Cuba in the early 1960s are growing fewer with age and political influence, Marco Rubio and Teddy Cruz nothwithstanding.  Time for a new approach.

Anyway, between the revolution and now, a lot has happened.  The economy tanked in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, who had been their chief economic mainstay.  People were very hungry for quite a while.  Eventually the economy began to recover.  Along with that came some interesting economic reforms, leading to a small but enthusiastic private market segment.

Here’s a government store, where everyone is allotted a certain ration of raw sugar, refined sugar, rice, eggs, milk for the kids, and so on, all for free.  You can also buy some other items at government controlled prices.

And here’s a free market setup.

The literacy rate is very high, the infant mortality rate is lower than ours, and government sponsored arts programs are thriving.  On the other hand, Cuba is still highly authoritarian.  Dissent is met with a swift response, and access to media and the Internet is controlled and limited. Like I said, complicated.

Still to come:

Their weird double currency system

Religion

The wonderful faces of the Cubans

The Embargo

The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis

The cars, the cars, the cars!