World | Other World Stories
The tropical patina of Cuba's revolution
Despite some changes that may be on the horizon, Havana remains a time warped place.
- By Arno Maierbrugger, Sub Editor
- Published: 00:05 May 3, 2008
- Image Credit: Arno Maierbrugger/Gulf News
- Cuban housewives sit and chat on a street in downtown Havana. The socialist system today faces the same contradictions that it initially had promised to abolish.
Havana: In Cuba's capital every week one balcony drops off a crumbling house front, say Havana's residents in their typical mixed mood of resignation and irony.
Measured against all the debris and garbage lying in certain quarters of the town like Habana Vieja, Centro and Vedado, this could certainly be true.
People are used to the dilapidation since decades.
But in between the squalid houses children are playing, women with curlers are chatting with neighbours in the parlours and old, wrinkled men are selling the leading party's newspaper Granma, - whose design has not changed since its first edition was printed in February 1966 - just like the revolution had happened yesterday and as if anybody would be interested in what the "Ministerio de Economia y de Planificacion" - the Cuban ministry of economy - has stipulated to be this year's production output from the country's languishing industry and farming.
Queuing up
On the narrow streets of downtown Havana housewives queue up in front of tienda (shops), staring at half-empty shelves, waiting patiently to exchange their libreta vouchers for bread, sugar, cooking oil, or rice.
If Cuba is really heading towards a new era, it does not become obvious while strolling through La Habana, as the capital is called in Spanish. Fidel's successor as president of Cuba, Raoul Castro, admittedly has announced some changes, for example to allow private possession of houses and to some extent private farming, but any major economic and even political reforms are highly unlikely for the time being.
Raoul's real future challenge will be to combat Cuba's rising social disparity, which is the result of the amazing growth of the parallel dollar economy during the last years, after Fidel had announced the so called "periodo especial" - the "special period" - following the collapse of his communist allies and after he was forced to abandon the US dollar ban in Cuba and to allow the currency to be used as legal tender besides the peso.
The step was inevitable, but it led to a far greater disparity as the leaders assumed. Today the Cuban society is simply split into two parts: Those who have access to the dollar (or euro, yen, or, if not available, even to the Mexican peso or, recently, the Chinese yuan) and those who don't.
The latter earn about 300 pesos nacionales in monthly average from their state jobs, an amount that may be worth about Dh85 if the Cuban peso could be converted into any hard currency, but it can't. Therefore the buying power of the peso nacional is negligible. If there were no additional libreta coupons, ordinary Cubans would have a hard time to acquire their basic needs.
Imbalance
"The government gives the people pesos, but it is urging for dollars," says Cuban exile writer Jesus Diaz about the imbalance of the economy in his home country. And those who own dollars, regardless from what source, are of course the luckier ones.
While the tiendas are empty, Western goods are piling up in certain shops that only accept the hard currency. Cuba's socialism has created the same contradictions in society that it initially had promised to abolish. And Cubans try to get dollars in every conceivable way, which leads many of them into the darker side of business.
"Cuba fell into a coma somewhere along the line," says a taxi driver cruising with tourists on the Malecon, the city's famous Corniche, in an old pre-revolutionary 1954 Buick Skylark convertible that certainly has seen better times.
"But I am not sure when that exactly was", the driver says.
Hopes that Raoul will wake the country up in the foreseeable future aren't too widespread, but somehow the Cubans have learnt to manage themselves.
And stay kind of proud of their country because it is very unique - that's a fact any way you look at it.
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