by Ricardo Chavira
After 50 years of revolutionary rule, Cubans are still waiting for the one thing that matters most: economic security. While they enjoy free health care and higher education, millions of Cubans endure the grim hardship imposed by salaries of less than 30 dollars a month.
Traditional analysts and exile activists will tell you that Cubans above all yearn for democracy and full respect for human rights, and that assessing Cuba in simple economic terms is wrongheaded.
Certainly political freedom does matter. However, it’s far less pressing for most Cubans than the day-to-day struggle to make ends meet. That has never been truer than today. It could well be the ultimate standard by which the revolution’s success or failure is eventually judged.
I reached this conclusion after 20 years of travel to Cuba and conversations with hundreds of its residents.During most of this time Cuba has endured an economic calamity. Its tenuous recovery is now seriously threatened by the global financial crisis.
Because the Cuba debate is so intensely politicized,I was surprised during my first trip in 1989 to find most Cubans preoccupied with their personal economic plight. The same day I attended an event at which Fidel Castro vowed to preserve socialism, a teacher quietly complained to me he did not earn enough to provide for his family. He brushed off questions about revolutionary politics, pressing on the possibilities of making a new life in Spain or the United States.
In August 1993 Cuba was fully in the depths of its euphemistically named “Special Period in Peacetime,” the near-collapse of the system after Soviet aid ended. The government offi cials I met were shaken.They expressed grave concern about their country’s future. Food and other basic necessities were in alarmingly short supply and blackouts lasted most of the day. A senior bureaucrat and her husband invited me over for dinner, a lone avocado adorned with lettuce.
Over the next several years I witnessed Cuba’s agonizing climb away from the precipice. But its people, not unlike millions of others throughout the Caribbean and Latin America,have never attained liberation from the torment of not having enough.
Cuba’s poverty is less dire, for example, than that which prevails in Haiti or Honduras. Its 11.4 million residents aren’t starving or homeless. They are generally grateful for universal medical attention and education. Still, those advances do nothing to alleviate the stress caused by a dire housing shortage and chronically existing on too little.
Government rationing and subsidies are supposed to make for a decent standard of living. The reality is considerably different. Pay, for reasons never clear to me,is simply too paltry to cover the cost of living. The price of cooking oil, meat, produce, clothes, shoes among others items is prohibitive.A pound of powdered milk,for example, can cost two dollars. Cars and vacations to nearby resorts are out of the question for most.
Those with relatives elsewhere have the relief of remittances. Even they and many more pilfer from where they work. Food, beverages, clothes and anything else that has a black market buyer fi nds its way from the workplace to the street.
Recently Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura acknowledged in understatement that Cuba was confronting “very diffi cult”economic times. That’s hardly news to Cubans I know. They are nurturing the hope that Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama will overcome half a century of hostility,meet and pave the way for a relationship that includes economic betterment for the island.
“We want political change that will bring with it improvement in the standard of living,” one Havana native tells me, speaking for multitude. “It’s not really possible for us to continue on as we have.” Hispanic Link.
(Ricardo Chavira, a former foreign correspondent who covered Cuba, last visited the island in 2008 and continues to have contact there. He teaches journalism and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and California State University,Fullerton. E-mail: ricardo.chavira50@yahoo.com)
©2009
