>From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>The Salt Lake Tribune
>
>March 7, 2000
>
>DESPITE SANCTIONS, CUBA RECOVERING
>
>By Christopher Marquis
>
>HAVANA -- A decade after it lost its Soviet patron, the government of Cuban
>President Fidel Castro is emerging from economic collapse and is likely to
>survive indefinitely.
>
>To be sure, the reality of most Cubans continues to be a daily struggle to
>get to work, shore up decaying homes and make ends meet. But Cuba's success
>with limited capitalist reforms has disappointed those who predicted the
>changes would lead to Castro's downfall.
>
>By welcoming foreign investment, legalizing the U.S. dollar, expanding farm
>cooperatives and allowing small-scale self-employment, the government has
>charted modest economic growth without scrapping its socialist orientation.
>The signs that Castro will pull it off are evident across the island.
>
>In Havana, streets that were empty four years ago are clogged with cars --
>not just ancient Chevys and Fords but also new Japanese and Korean models.
>Along the oceanfront, long-idle bulldozers clear ground for
>European-financed resort hotels. Teens wear imported athletic shoes and
>spandex shorts. Tourism -- primarily from Canada and Western Europe -- has
>surpassed sugar exports as the government's top source of revenue, at more
>than $1.5 billion annually.
>
>Like China's Communist rulers, Castro has coupled modest economic reforms
>with strict social and political control, carefully regulating coveted jobs
>in tourism and other branches of the dollar economy and continuing to
>ostracize or imprison government critics. Like the Chinese, he appears to
>be betting that even modest economic progress will stifle demands for
>political change.
>
>Cuba's halting but unmistakable economic recovery is not what Washington
>expected, and it poses problems for U.S. policy. For four decades,
>Washington has clamped one of its strictest trade embargoes on Cuba -- and
>tightened it twice in the past eight years -- in the expectation that
>economic distress would oust Castro, or at least moderate his behavior.
>
>But now important U.S. constituencies -- including business leaders,
>religious groups and some politicians -- argue that the United States is
>senselessly depriving itself of a natural and growing market and squeezing
>a struggling population on its doorstep, fueling the prospects for social
>conflict or another mass exodus of refugees.
>
>Cuban officials, meanwhile, express a confidence bordering on cockiness
>that they have defied both Washington and the political winds that toppled
>communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. And they are as determined
>as ever to resist U.S. dictates for democratic reforms.
>
>"I know that some people in the U.S. would like to have a different Cuba,"
>said Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba's National Assembly and a
>Castro confidant. "I know many Cubans who would like to have a different
>United States."
>
>Asked whether Havana contemplated any moves to patch up four decades of
>non-relations with Washington, Alarcon replied: "Nothing, absolutely
>nothing should Cuba do in order to have normal relations with the United
>States."
>
>Cuba's confidence is based in part on improvements in key sectors,
>including transportation, energy, communications and tourism.
>
>Daily transportation is still a grind for many Cubans, but buses do run
>more regularly. Gas is expensive at nearly $4 a gallon, but Canadian and
>French investors are extracting more oil for local consumption from wells
>off Cuba's Matanzas coast. In addition, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez
>recently signed a deal for Cuba to refine and distribute Venezuelan oil.
>
>Rolling blackouts, which once left entire neighborhoods of the capital in
>darkness for as much as eight hours at a time, are now infrequent and
>brief. Food is more plentiful in the cities, thanks to Chinese-style
>markets where farmers are allowed to sell food they produce in excess of
>government quotas directly to consumers. Luxury goods such as TVs are
>available to those with access to U.S. dollars, who by American estimates
>are anywhere from one-third to half of Cubans.
>
>The U.S.-built telephone system, which became hopelessly unreliable under
>Castro, is working smoothly, thanks to an overhaul financed largely by an
>Italian telecommunications firm in a joint venture with Cuba. Construction
>of luxury condos and hotels is under way in desirable areas such as
>Havana's Miramar neighborhood and Varadero Beach on the island's northern
>coast.
>
>Cuban-Americans and exiles in other countries, willing or not, have
>bankrolled the recovery by sending relatives here as much as $900 million a
>year, aided by a U.S. easing of restrictions on remittances.
>
>The price for Castro's government is a daily struggle against its own
>contradictions. To save itself, the regime has ushered back many of the
>ills it once sought to erase. Its greatest claims of revolutionary success
>-- universal education and health care -- are undermined by Cubans' daily
>scramble for U.S. dollars, the currency of the enemy.
>
>Some snapshots from Castro's neo-Marxist economy: A cabdriver confides that
>he is really an engineer. A history professor on Cuba's southern coast quit
>her job to sell trinkets to tourists. Cubans with family abroad live on
>charity. A doctor in Nuevo Vedado sells honey to complement his
>dollar-a-day salary. Patients arrive for elective surgery in a Havana
>hospital equipped with their own sheets and soap.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
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