Life is hard in island nation
FLORENCE ECKSTEIN
Editor & Publisher
An array of bright orange, yellow and green fruits and vegetables, along with fresh fish, adorn a buffet table prepared for visitors to the Jewish community of Santa Clara, Cuba.
This "beautiful reality of community work" took some doing on the part of some 30 Cuban hosts, gathered from the neighboring communities of Santa Clara, Caivarien, Sancti Spiritus and Cienfuegos, explains Joint Distribution Committee representative Diego Mandelbaum. "Someone goes here to buy the carrots, another person goes there for the cucumbers. You can't find everything you want in one place."
For most Cubans, collecting the necessities for living means walking, riding a bicycle, taking a bus or hitchhiking. Few own cars or can afford the gas to keep them running.
"They do not have the things we take for granted 100 times a day," comments Eleanor Eisenberg, a Phoenix resident and executive director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union. Eisenberg traveled to Cuba in 1996, then returned last month on a private trip with a group of 14 Valley residents. By coincidence, this second visit occurred at the same time as a mission to Cuba sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix.
Eisenberg has spent several weeks meeting with mostly Jewish Cubans in Havana and in smaller cities and towns throughout the island nation. Between visits, she corresponds with friends she has made there.
It is immediately apparent to the observer that some 40 years after rebels led by Fidel Castro overturned the corrupt Batista government, promising Cubans a better life, daily existence remains hard for residents of the sunny Caribbean island 90 miles southwest of Key West, Fla.
Cuban communism has not delivered on its promise of a healthy economy. The Castro government's economic, political and military ties to the former Soviet Union, aggravated by its confiscation of American-owned private property in Cuba, motivated the United States to impose a strict embargo intended to drive Castro from power. Yet Castro remains in command, and after four decades is the only head of state most Cubans have known. The main impact of the U.S. embargo has been not to weaken Castro's grip, but instead to isolate Cubans from their relatives and former trading partners to the north.
The Cuban economy depended for 30 years on $5 billion to $6 billion in annual aid from the former Soviet Union, until it collapsed a decade ago. In the ensuing 10 years, Cuba has struggled.
Cubans generally are paid in pesos the equivalent of $10 to $25 a month, Mandelbaum says. In addition, they are given ration stamps for rice and beans, and occasional fruit, potatoes and fish. Housing, education and medical care are free, but inadequate supplies of medications and equipment limit available treatment.
Since the early 1990s, a small number of Cubans, using newly legalized dollars garnered from relatives, tourists' gratuities and wages from a growing number of foreign-owned businesses operating in Cuba, have been able to buy consumer goods, including appliances, in supermarkets.
Fledgling attempts at private enterprise, ranging from paladares - home restaurants seating up to 12 patrons - to handcrafts, are contributing to small but important improvements in the economic well-being of some Cubans.
The growth of the tourism-driven dollar economy means that life has improved slightly in the past three years, Mandelbaum says. Some 10 million tourists, mostly from Latin America, Europe and Canada, are expected to visit Cuba by 2004, he says.
(Due to the embargo, U.S. tourists are monitored closely by the American government, and limited largely to family and humanitarian visits, and cultural and people-to-people exchanges, according to a spokesman for the U.S. State Department.)
Thanks to tourist dollars, "friends in Havana now have money in their pockets to buy coffee," Eisenberg observes.
In some areas, Cuba is progressive. Thanks to an extensive public education system, some 96 percent of Cubans can read and write, the highest literacy rate in Latin America, according to a U.S. State Department report.
Cubans long have maintained the lowest rate of infant mortality in the region, which now stands at 13th lowest in the world, the same report reveals.
But housing, though free, is scarce and poorly maintained, and three generations typically live together in crowded conditions, notes a tour guide. Sadly, seemingly countless buildings in the capital city of Havana - once known as the Paris of the Caribbean - and throughout the island have deteriorated badly and are in desperate need of repair. A handful of structures in Havana are now being refurbished by the Cuban government, some thanks to Spanish and other foreign investors.
While the troubled economy has led to a scarce supply of consumer goods, the authoritarian Castro government has severely restricted access to information about the world. Most Cubans have no phone. The number of daily newspapers has plummeted from 58 in the late 1950s to just 17 today, all of which are controlled by the government, according to United Nations data.
Major hotels are wired for CNN, but Cuban citizens can view only two Cuban channels in their homes, one of which broadcasts mostly Castro monologues. Internet access is virtually non-existent.
The government scrutinizes individual behavior closely, Mandelbaum says, through a system that includes neighborhood monitors. "They know everything. Everybody knows about everybody," he says.
A risk of tourism, Mandelbaum says, is that it "brings dollars but also brings ideas."
Since Castro seized power in 1959, Cubans' hunger for ideas, family reunion or financial well-being have impelled thousands to leave their island. Many have fled to the United States.
An intergovernmental agreement allows some 20,000 refugees to leave Cuba annually for the United States, selected largely by lottery from a pool of 500,000 applicants. The process is managed by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a State Department facility that functions "in the same manner as an embassy," according to spokesman Larry Corwin.
"The Cuban government wants this migration as a safety valve," Corwin says. Israel welcomes Jewish Cuban immigrants under a program called Operation Cigar. Some 240 Cuban Jews are now in Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post, and another 200 are expected to make the journey by June 2000.
For those who remain behind, life likely will remain difficult. Asked what may come once Castro is gone, a Cuban tour guide pauses, and then shrugs. "No one knows what Castro has planned," he says.
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