My friend just returned from Habana last night. She was last there three years ago & couldn't believe the changes. She said the island is thriving with tourism. People are happy. The Cubans who work in the tourism industry make more than in the US, comaparetively & have no stress. The the exile community in Miami is laughed at from those that live there, according to her. No homeless people there and less people in jail than in the US, too. (No campaign contributions either.) Yes, it's not democracy, and I am no fan of Castro, but Cuba has never really had democracy.
Right now, Cuba is probably the safest place to go for vacation. 11% of tourists are from the US. Mainly Italians, Canadians & Spaniards. The Cubans she spoke to love Cuba, love Castro & loathe Miami (except for the money they send). When Castro dies there will be no change-
She visited many neighborhoods. People there are buying luxury goods and wearing designer clothes. Cars are mostly 40 years old, though.
Her friend has business there (perfumes & fragrances)and is making big bucks. Most of his customers in 20 stores buying $50-$100 fragrances are Cubans. They are not starving like we are led to believe. Cuba is going to go on the Euro.
She showed me the pictures and I was amazed at all the new hotel construction.
Total different point of view from what I see here in Miami. The younger Cubans here are all for bringing down the embargo as the way to bring democracy there, but the old timers are against it.
Funny part of all this is that if not for Castro, most exiles in Miami (who are upper middle class) would never have come here & achieved their success.
Miami owes it's renaissance because of the hard working Cubans here.
Europe has been trading freely with the Cuban worker's paradise for forty (40) years, and things are getting worse every year...
His adventures at the Police station were a real laugher. The cops REFUSED TO WRITE THE INCIDENT UP AS A THEFT, saying "No hay crimen en Cuba". The bureaucratic ordeal he went through to get back out of Cuba and return to Chile was pure Kafka.
You paint a rosy picture of the typical Cuban's affluence. What else do they have besides the Giorgio Armani suits, Rolexes and $100 perfumes? Yachts? Annual per capita income in Cuba is ~$1700, in case you didn't know. And the internal exchange rate is 22 pesos to the US dollar. Even professionals, such as doctors and professors, are grossly underpaid and frequently moonlight as bartenders and waiters. The majority of Cubans eat a subsistence diet consisting of about half the calories they should be getting. They have many problems, but obesity is definitely not one of them.
Gordon DiRenzo, leftist professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, was recently permitted an extensive tour of Cuba. He observed and interviewed many people all over that island and concluded the following:
"...less people in jail than in the US..."
There is no way you or your "friend" could possibly how many people are imprisoned in Cuba. Castro has consistently refused to release prison population statistics to anybody, including the left-wing "human rights" groups who clamor for them endlessly. It is well-known that the island is peppered with many jails, prisons, detention centers and forced labor farms, and the prison population estimates I've seen vary wildly. But even if we accept the lowest of these estimates, Cuba would have one of the highest prisoner densities in the world. In any event, Cuba has less than 6% of our population, so why would it surprise anybody that they would have fewer people in prison than we do?
Your "friend's" claim of a rapidly expanding tourism industry is also contradicted by the facts. Cuban tourism is declining. Hundreds of hotel rooms have been shut down and so have some of the hotels themselves. Yes, there are still many tourists who go there, but recent years have seen a net loss in their numbers and also in the available accomodations.