Posted on 06/14/2008 10:58:24 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
From The Sunday Times
June 15, 2008
Cubans flee island over ‘sham’ reforms
Optimism within Raul Castro’s Cuba is fading as his new freedoms make little impact on the poor
Tony Allen-Mills
ON a routine patrol off the Caribbean resort of Cancun earlier this month, the crew of a Mexican naval vessel spotted unusual activity aboard an arriving yacht. When officers inspected the boat, they found 33 Cuban migrants on board.
The Cubans were heading for Miami by a roundabout route - instead of braving the short but heavily policed crossing from western Cuba to Florida, they were planning to be escorted by professional smugglers overland through Mexico to the US border.
Authorities in both Mexico and America have reported a recent jump in the number of Cubans attempting to flee their home-land, despite widely publicised economic and social reforms introduced by Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing brother, Fidel, as president last February.
The younger Castro has won international attention for a series of eye-catching reforms that seemingly marked the beginning of the end of the rigid communist orthodoxy bequeathed by his 81-year-old brother.
Yet the lifting of bans on mobile phones, improved access to computers and other consumer goods, and the removal of unpopular restrictions on wages and foreign currency have so far had a limited impact on a poor population reeling from the effects of rising fuel and food prices.
Cubans have been voting with their feet, and those who succeed in reaching Miami have raised serious doubts about Raul Castro’s intentions as he tries to defuse mounting public criticism.
“It’s just a big facade to impress the people,” claimed Yhosvany Carmona, a popular young Cuban television actor who fled Havana via the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and arrived in Miami last week. “Who are these people who can now afford to buy computers, cellphones and DVDs? They are the same people who could afford to buy them on the black market before.” In one sense, Castro, 77, has had little choice but to embark on a radical restructuring of a Caribbean economy that has been struggling to rebuild itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed it of its principal banker.
Forced to import at least half of its food and fuel requirements, Havana has begun to acknowledge that revolutionary fervour and ideological purity are no match for a global financial melt-down. The Cuban vice-president, Carlos Lage, complained earlier this month that “the blind laws of the market have converted the world economy into a casino”.
Lage revealed that Cuba’s food imports this year will cost £1.3 billion (€1.5 million), up from £750m last year. Its fuel costs have risen from £4.5m a day to £6m a day. Fearful of stoking revolt by passing these costs on to Cuban consumers, the government has been heavily subsidising prices, forcing it to cut back on other projects.
Cracks in communist ranks have already begun to appear, and Maria del Carmen Concep-cion, a senior member of the party secretariat, warned publicly last week that the Fidelista revolution might “self-destruct” if economic problems were not resolved.
The pressures appear to have persuaded Raul Castro that he cannot afford to wait for his brother’s death to begin dismantling his legacy. Many Cuba-watchers have been stunned by changes they believe that Fidel could never have countenanced, most notably the first stirring of critical debate in the govern-ment-controlled media. Some have concluded that the giant of the Cuban revolution must now be so ill that he does not know what is happening.
Yet other analysts have noted that the reforms announced so far have been more about style than substance. Cuban citizens are now allowed to stay at beach hotels that were previously reserved for foreign tourists, but there has scarcely been a flood of local pleasure-seeking. The average salary of Cuba’s 11.4m citizens is £8.70 a month, and hotel rooms cost up to £100 a night.
The government has also removed a ceiling on wages. Originally intended to prevent social inequalities from emerging, the low salaries paid to Cuban professionals have driven thousands of them from the island. While the Castros are proud of the reputation of Cuban doctors, who staff hospitals across South America, sources in Havana say many of the doctors are forced to work abroad because they can barely feed their families at home.
US analysts believe that Raul Castro has little choice but to woo foreign investment, encourage private initiative, and address popular discontent. “What people used to say in low voices in the corridors they are now saying out loud at public meetings,” said Carmona.
Younger Cubans have been taking risks that were unthinkable when Fidel was in his prime. At a meeting with students at Havana University in February, Ricardo Alarcon, the government’s third highest-ranking official, was stunned when several lined up at a microphone and challenged government policies.
One student, Eliecer Avila, wanted to know why workers were paid in a worthless local currency, while most consumer goods were priced in a convertible currency pegged to the dollar. He also wanted to know why Cubans couldn’t travel to Bolivia to see the site where Che Gue-vara died.
Alarcon’s response showed how desperately out of touch the Cuban leadership has become after decades of relying on failed Marxist slogans. In a barely coherent 30-minute response, he defended the ban on foreign travel: “If all the world, some six billion people, could travel whenever they wanted, the jam in the skies would be enormous.”
Avila was duly arrested for his cheek, and conspicuously absent from Raul Castro’s reforms has been any move to free political prisoners or to tolerate serious political dissent. The regime has turned a blind eye to a number of critical blogs that were surreptitiously started on the island, but when Yoani Sanchez, author of the popular Generacion Y blog, won a top Spanish award for her writing, she was denied a travel visa to collect her prize.
Some analysts believe that Raul may be attempting to engineer a transition to Vladimir Putin-like democracy, with a new class of Cuban oligarchs emerging from the ranks of the communist and military elite. Others are more optimistic that Raul can bury a bankrupt political system alongside the brother who built it.
The European Union will this week consider lifting its sanctions against Cuba in the hope of encouraging further political change. Barack Obama, the US presidential candidate, has said he is willing to meet Raul Castro, although he will not lift a US trade embargo immediately.
Yet before anyone got too carried away by Castro’s tentative reforms, the Communist party organ, Granma, warned in an editorial that the reforms were aimed at “strengthening socialism” and would not lead to the kind of change sought by “adversaries, fifth columnists and internal mercenaries”. The editorial was entitled: “There will not be room for subversion in Cuba”.
I suspect the worldwide recession would bring them down. A naturally imposed economic sanction.
How could they leave the “Best Health Care System in the World”?
Does this mean Michael Moore and Oliver Stone were wrong?? Oh, the horrors!
That explains Cuba's restrictions on travel, they are helping to prevent mid air collisions.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I suspect the worldwide recession would bring them down.
Considering the horrors of the famines that North Korea has suffered through, I don’t think a world wide recession would end Little Kim’s reign of terror.
Kim would see each and every North Korean dead before he would free them and I believe his army would follow him to the grave.
They get a lot of practice.
“The day the regimes in both N. Korea and Cuba fall will be a historical day.”
One which many of our comrades at DU will respond to with weeping and gnashing of teeth, I suspect.
Socialism doesn't work. It's just that simple. You have enough farmland on Cuba to feed virtually everyone, plus have extra for tourists, but instead of using a capitalistic system to encourage maximum yields per acre, it's a quasi share-cropping deal that encourages slightly better yields, but caps it, lest these ‘farmers’ actually have something to look forward to.
Yup; best health care anywhere, least where foreign cameras are allowed to look, mostly because they've starved to death a lot of the elderly population.
There’s some very interesting commentary on both Moore’s film and the true nature of Cuban healthcare at this link. Be forewarned, there are also some pretty graphic thumbnails that may be clicked on that reveal some pretty dire sanitary conditions:
http://www.therealcuba.com/Page10.htm
Cuban healthcare is only wonderful for the tourists. For your average Cuban, it’s a nightmare.
I was going to post that link! Here is one about UK NHS and the natural progression of socialized medicine.
And here is one about the escalating defections of Cuban medical professionals who can no longer bear to be there.
http://www.newsobserver.com/689/story/552040.html
........your huddled masses yearning to breathe free......
I would say it was just as much for all the freebies we stupidly give them if they make it to this country.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
When Cubas economic system totally collapses, maybe that will be noticed by Americans as further undeniable close by evidence that socialism destroys a people.
Is that like Shamwow?
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...”
“Second verse, same as the first”
Folks,
Cuba could be a reflective of the USA in about 50 years if we are not careful and we don’t stop the likes of Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi. If this does come to pass, just know that we will not have any place to “flee” to. The USA is the last bastion of freedom on the planet. Europe’s freedom is slowing dying under the heavy hand of the EU and Canada and the UK are dying from Cultural Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.
Patrick Henry said it best, “...but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Sincerely,
JoMa
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.