'Given how proud Cuba is of its

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advanced in the Third World, these measures are a striking sign of the SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1991 13 in tourism. Spanish and Canadian firms have taken part in the building of new hotels and employ and fire staff according to their requirements. But there has until now been no recourse to foreign capital in industry.

For the first time, the government has broken with a 30-year tradition and allowed a French consortium consisting of the Total Enterprise and the Compagnie Europeenne des Petroles (CEP) to undertake off-shore oil exploration on Cuba's north coast.

The six-year contract signed in Havana in December 1990 with Cuba's Union del Petroleo, on financial conditions that have not been revealed, implies according to a Cuban diplomat, that if commercially viable oil supplies are discovered "the income will be shared between the Compagnie and the Cubans."

Cuba is also considering permitting foreign buyers to have 49 percent participation in certain enterprises, the limit being fixed in the law on foreign investment in 1982.

According to the president of the Association of Cuban Economists, Luis Cardet Henando: "Foreign investment would permit the elimination of economic dependence on one market" from which Cuba suffers, which at the same time favored investment in the sugar industry, sugarcane products, biotechnology and word processors in the Comecon framework.

Furthermore, another significant event took place at the start of 1991: on Jan. 16, a five-year trade agreement was signed for the first time with China. Since the disappearance of the GDR [German Democratic Republic], China has become Cuba's primary trade partner.

The joint inter-governmental commission, which was set up in 1988, a year when trade increased by 50 percent, met for the third time in Beijing in January. In 1990 trade between the two countries reached $578 million.

A five-year agreement has been signed along with a trade protocol for 1991. The Cubans will deliver sugar, citrus fruits, nickel and, for the first time, Cuban biochemical products.

But, according to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma, the best hopes are in envisaged in the five-year agreement, which are not known. Traditionally, trade between the two countries has been conducted in dollars, but it can be supposed that the Chinese government has made concessions in this respect, given Cuba's lack of hard currency; since March 1990 China has granted preferential payment and credit facilities to Cuba. But, although trade with China is going to expand, this will far from compensate for the losses Cuba has suffered elsewhere.

Big expansion in tourism planned The third possible way to alleviate the economic tensions is tourism. More than 320,000 tourists visited the island in 1989 and there has been an average 10 percent growth over the past six years.

The government is looking to quadruple the number of hotels in 1992, which also means more mixed enterprises with Spanish, Italian, Austrian, French, and Finnish firms. Nonetheless, even if the number of tourists from Canada and Europe is already on the increase, owing to the cheap prices, a more thoroughgoing expansion requires visitors from the nearest neighbor, that is, American tourists.

However, American trips to Cuba are strictly regulated (apart from journalists, Cuban-American families and researchers), and the penalties can reach $250,000 or 12 years in prison. Even if these sanctions are largely theoretical, they are enough, in the framework of the embargo, to dissuade most potential visitors.

Finally, the resentment aroused in the Cuban population by what some have described as "touristic apartheid" should not be underestimated. The contrast between this privileged and protected sector and the difficulties of people's everyday life bears the seeds of conflict.

In theory, Cuba could take advantage of gravity of the situation.' transport costs, are refusing to make the slightest financial concession to Cuba at a time when they are involved in negotiations with the United States. The re-negotiation of the San Jose accord on oil deliveries in the region does not apply to Cuba, except to impose on the island conditions that Castro does not seem ready to accept.

Given the drastic international constraints and an unfavorable immediate political environment, economic policy is made up from day to day. The tendency seems to be towards decentralization, with the Cuban foreign trade firms enjoying greater autonomy from the ministries, while Cuba's Chamber of Commerce is to play a more important role in foreign trade. The Arbitration Tribunal for Foreign Trade is being re-organized to resolve the likely conflicts between Cuban and foreign firms doing everything they can to circumvent bureaucratic controls.

But the main problem is to know whether decentralization will also take place on the social and political levels, that is to say whether real powers of control and management are devolved both to the enterprises and localities at a time when bureaucratic chaos can only aggravate the poverty and infuriate the population.

The idea of the need to re-establish a free market in agriculture and stimulate the peasants to improve food supplies seems to be widely shared, at least in Havana.

The suppression of the free markets was justified by the inequalities they caused, but it is not clear that inequalities resulting from the black market are better. The aim was to prevent profiteering by the peasants and intermediaries but the development of an underground economy favors, according to an official report, "a process of capitalization" through "growcriminal law to "reduce social phenomena to individual deeds."

Barral estimates that three sectors of the population are involved in seeking illegal profits: "a marginal or anti-social group...which penal repression tends to strengthen; a layer of corrupt employees and functionaries, who are criminals by virtue of their office'; and a neo-bourgeois layer formed of intermediaries and illegal traders and what remains of the former petty bourgeoisie," their common characteristic being that they are not prepared to renounce their own interests.

"Insofar as these interests are contrary to those of the revolution, they constitute a social group with a very dangerous potential, and who in a favorable conjuncture could provoke a spontaneous political movement with considerable counter-revolutionary dynamism.

"In our opinion it is by no means excluded that the whole of the criminal classes all may adopt negative political attitudes that could lead to spontaneous counterrevolutionary movements, whose danger is all the greater at a moment when groups of intellectuals are helping them to become aware of themselves, of the identity of their interests, if the latters persuade them that the revolutionary institutions incarnate their enemy, if they succeed in giving them platforms and leaders."

This is the explosive context in which the fourth congress of the Cuban Communist Party will take place. This is supposed to be a "refoundation" congress according to some Cubans, but the date is yet to be fixed.

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On Gay Freedom Day: A salute for the Bills and Dorothys of this world I met Bill in New York City in the fifties. In the middle of the McCarthy witch-hunt. He would come to socialist forums and he helped me put out our socialist newspaper. He was a sweet, quiet man from a rural part of some Western state. He was tall, shy, and had a great sense of humor.

But Bill happened to be gay; so periodically we would get a call from a friend of his saying that he was in jail and could we pay his bail and get him out. Someone would always go and bring him back.

Bill would be arrested, really, for only one reason. He certainly never robbed, beat, or killed anyone. Nor did he so much as get drunk, fight, or be mean to anyone. He was arrested for being gay (he liked to wear make-up). That's it, that's all.

I'm sure that Bill never argued back. What was so amazing is that he must have felt too guilty to cuss out the cops even when alone. In those days the closet was deep, dark, and locked. When we were working together, I would call the cops every dirty name I could think of and demand that Bill not put up with their harassment.

How could he stand it, I would demand? He quietly just said that that's the way cops are and there was nothing you could do about it.

Dorothy, was beautiful, smart, a good artist, and a first-rate socialist. She would go on sales of our paper, provide help in the office, and compose leaflets for us that were short and made sense. (She did not try to get the first chapter of Karl Marx's "Capital" on the leaflet—plus she could spell.) Believe me, in a small socialist organization she had unusual gifts.

Dorothy ended her own life because she was a lesbian. Life in this capitalist society was cruel to her. The powers-that-be didn't know the wonderful contribution she made to humankind. Worst of all, if they knew, they would have harmed her more.

She just ended it one day because she couldn't take being a phony and trying to live up to the Barbie Doll image America tried to impose on its gifted women.

In those days, if you walked down New York's Christopher Street, it was usually quiet and clean-and the only time there were disturbances was when the cops came around. They would stride into a bar, line everyone up and just jab their billy clubs at this one and smack that one. No good reason, just hate. Then the police paddy-wagon would pull up, and out they would go, one by one, handcuffed and heads hung down.

But one day, the cops walked in just once too often at a neighborhood bar called Stonewall. All hell broke loose and the gays began to fight back. They gave the cops as good as they got. It was not an easy arrest. No one knows who the leaders were; perhaps there weren't any leaders.

The word got out that gays had put up a fight for justice; they had refused to accept the unjust attacks against them. They had the effrontery to believe that the Bill of Rights applied to everyone.

At first, hundreds and then thousands of gays came to Christopher Street to discuss and praise the fight-back. The story went from city to city. Many hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbian women stood a little taller and looked a whole lot prouder: "We are as good as anyone and we have our rights too."

You just can't keep this kind of feeling down. You can't keep the human race down for long and get away with it. You cannot keep masses in bondage and oppressed— and get away with it.

June 30, 1991, is Gay Freedom Day. Hundreds of thousands will march in several cities and say, "Here we are. We're gays and lesbians. We're fighting for our lives and our human rights—and we will not stop until we win."

I lost track of Bill when we moved from New York to California. But I know that he will be marching wherever he is. As for Dorothy, she lives in the spirit of every. fighter for justice and human rights. If she were alive today she would certainly be a part of Gay Freedom Day.

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