Cuba fights the tide

Scan page 21

"In contrast to numerous other Latin We are publishing below an abridged version of an article contained in a personal newsletter circulated by Garrett Brown.

Brown spent two weeks in Cuba, Feb. 12-22, 1992, and here gives a brief report on the situation there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article is reprinted with the permission of the author.

While in Cuba I had the opportunity to get around quite a bit. But the fact of the matter is that this was a very brief visit to a very complex reality.

All I can offer is the impressions and conclusions of an honest witness to the slice of Cuban reality I was able to capture in 10 days and analyze based on my own life experience. With that disclaimer in mind, this is what I saw:

Cuba today is facing the most severe crisis of its 33-year-old revolutionary process, a crisis that is primarily economic in origin but has clear political aspects as well.

At this moment Cubans are talking not about the next step forward in development, but rather how how to save the revolution itself. I left the island cautiously hopeful that they will succeed, but there are no guarantees in this life, and a lot of what will happen in the next several years depends on us and on the United States.

Basis of Cuba's crisis Before describing the current crisis, it is essential to put Cuba into its proper context. Cuba is a small, underdeveloped island of 10.5 million people in Latin America. Cuba should be compared to other underdeveloped countries in the Americas, and not to some idealized version of the United States, a country 25 times larger and immensely richer.

Moreover, Cuba's crisis is part of the world economic crisis and a regional crisis as well. There is no Latin American country whose economy is not in crisis today.

On top of all that, Cuba is still subject to the relentless, 32-year war waged by the U.S. government that has included military assaults, economic embargo and sabotage, all types of covert operations, and a massive disinformation campaign.

What existed until two years ago was a socialist, planned economy based on mutually beneficial trade with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The economy had numerous inefficiencies, and was notoriously short on material consumer goods, but still stood head and shoulders above other underdeveloped countries and had, in fact, achieved "advanced country" status in several areas such as healthcare, education, and nutrition.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies has meant a complete rupture of trade relations (85 percent of which were with the Soviet Union) and a massive dislocation of the Cuban economy as a whole.

The key element has been the disruption of oil deliveries (which have declined 60 percent in the last year), requiring major cutbacks in industrial production, urban transportation, use of agricultural equipment, and the necessity of using hard currency reserves for energy purchases.

The trade rupture has also meant drastically fewer industrial raw materials, equipment and spare parts, the disappearance of many consumer items, and large cuts in imported foodstuffs.

Cuba has had to engage in with foreign capital, especially pean; and tourism.

The leadership sees growth of the tourist industry as essential to the survival of the Cuban Revolution, but this strategy is clearly the most controversial and potentially the most dangerous.

In 1991, some 350,000 tourists visited Cuba, mostly Canadian and European, and the goal is one million tourists by the year 2000. Tourism has the capacity to immediately generate large amounts of hard currency, without which the island would be simply unable to purchase energy, raw materials, medicines, etc.

However, as one Cuban Communist Party leader told our tour, tourism is like chemotherapy for cancer: it has very powerful side effects, and it can kill you as well as cure you. And once one starts the treatment, the side effects are inevitable.

The side effects are already clearly visible in Cuba. There are basically two separate economies operating side by side: a U.S. dollar economy for the tourists and a Cuban peso economy for the Cubans.

As it is illegal for Cubans to have dollars and prohibited for tourists to use pesos, these economies do not legally overlap. In order to be able to compete in the world tourist market, Cuba has had to reserve its best hotels, restaurants, stores, night clubs, and beaches (and all the food, drink, clothes, etc., that go with these) for tourists with dollars, while the average Cuban has limited or no access to these facilities.

Political Cubans view this disparity and lack of access as a necessary evil; other Cubans see this as simply evil and unfair; and almost all Cubans, I think, feel a certain resentment or uneasiness.

As is always the case when tourism brings together people with advanced country" resources and people with "Third World" needs, tourism has generated certain levels of prostitution, black marketing, hustling, and other socially corrosive behavior.

To control this, for both economic and political reasons, the Cuban government has created a large, very visible "Tourist (continued on page 19)