“Life is change,” Ricardo Alarcon–president of the National Assembly and number-two guy in the line of succession behind Fidel Castro’s brother Raul–tells a visiting group of black American journalists with which I’m traveling.
He is trying to explain to us at length–with too much dogma and too few facts–why it is no big deal that in this post-Soviet age Cuba is flirting with free enterprise.
It always has, he tells us, recalling the land reforms that broke up the country-sized estates of American corporations into small family farms in the early days of the 43-year-old communist government.
But those token reforms don’t begin to compare to Cuba’s recent transformation into two separate worlds, jostling each other to occupy the same real estate–and state of mind.
More Top Picks Dewalt 20v Max Dcs570
The government, in the interest of order, tries to keep the two apart. The result is a weird form of tourist apartheid: Cubans are not allowed to stay in Cuba’s fanciest hotels or use many of its fanciest beaches, cafes or restaurants, unless they are guests of tourists.
Tourists, and any Cuban who can get his hands on U.S. currency, shop in “dollar stores,” which take only greenbacks, and ride new and spiffy new “dollar taxis.” The cutest of these conveyances is the bright yellow three-wheeled “coco taxi,” so nicknamed because of its roundshape. Like gadgets out of “The Jetsons,” the “cocos” whiz tourists on short hauls from one tourist stop to another.
Most Cubans must rely on the same old “peso taxis” they always have had, along with the “peso stores,” which sell what a family needs to get by and not much more.
Tourist dollars also bring out the black market, which is what communist countries call any kind of unauthorized entrepreneurship. Indeed, with dollars you can buy anything, including “jineteros” or “jineteras”–male or female hustlers–who offer tourists anything they may want, but only for dollars.
How do Cubans like the new apartheid? Many don’t. A few will let you know it. When I asked a journalist working for the government-owned media, he said, “The government does not like Cubans anymore.”
But most Cubans seem to go along and get along, the same way Cubans have endured other abuses over the years.
Besides, I am constantly reminded, there are many ways to get around “the system,” and Cubans in their famously innovative ways find many ways to make the system work for them.
“People think of Cuba’s system as inflexible,” a young government reporter told me. “Actually, we are very flexible.”
Sure. Castro has justified the new class divide as putting capitalism to work for socialism. Cubans were starving in the early 1990s, after the estimated $5 billion yearly Soviet subsidies evaporated. Desperate, Castro loosened the barriers against entrepreneurship, made deals with international hotel and hospitality corporations and legalized private ownership of dollars.
The dollar has turned Fidel’s fiefdom upside down. Overnight those who worked menial jobs for tips–and Cubans receiving money from their relatives abroad–are making more than the masses whose salaries are fixed in worthless pesos by the government. Suddenly doormen make more than doctors, who receive the equivalent of $30 a month from the government. A waitress working at a tourist hotel can make more than that nightly in tips.
The result has been a new optimism you can see on the faces and hear in the voices of Cubans. It cannot comfort the regime that this new optimism comes because Cubans are tasting the joys of a free market system atop the safety net provided by the government, which includes government-paid health care and education, including universities.
Cubans do not want to go back to the bad old days of the mafia-influenced dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Then, the poor starved and the island’s large black population was excluded from good jobs, schooling and even public beaches. But neither do they want to stay where they are today.
Cuban entrepreneurs await the lifting of the U.S. economic and trade embargo so they can be truly free. Many Cubans are positive President Bush is only maintaining it to help his brother Jeb’s chances to be re-elected governor of Florida with the help of anti-Castro exiles in Miami.
Similarly, the voices of Castro’s government officials tremble with uncertainty. They don’t say it, but they must be relieved to have the embargo in place. It gives Castro an excuse for his inefficient government’s failings and slows the pace of change that is rushing his country into a future in which Marxism doesn’t have a chance.
Or, to put it another way, Bush pretends to support the embargo, while Castro pretends that he doesn’t. Yes, life is change, all right. And strange.
———-
E-mail: [email protected]