I think they’re right to worry. I know there are many call centers in the DR and I can imagine that the same call centers can be moved to Cuba where the salaries are sure to be lower, at least for some time. Cuba is still way behind in infrastructure to support that kind of economy, but in the meantime if relations with the US opened up it would probably pull american tourists away from there.
How is Ernest Hemmingway viewed there?
This explains why the U.S. farm lobbies (Texas Farm Bureau for one) are so interested in getting the embargo relaxed. I’ve wondered why.
By the way, thank you for this thread.
I knew Hemingway as a writer, and I knew that he had lived in Cuba, but his books are almost impossible to get. I do know that the government has recently started renovating Hemingway’s old house, since it has become a tourist attraction.
Cuba imports over 80 percent of its food, and most of it already comes from the US, I only learned that after I left Cuba by the way. The lifting of the embargo would allow US farmers to extend credit to Cuba, which they can not do today, all transactions must be in cash. Personally I think selling on credit to Cuba is a very bad idea, the Cuban government has a history of defaulting on its payments, but my guess is that they expect the loans to be backed up by the US government just in case.
What’s your take on the independent Cuban libraries, and their suppression? When you were there, did you know of any, and did you use them?
I did not know of any independent libraries when I was in Cuba, and my guess is that if I had known about them I would not have used them. They are without a doubt being watched and those who can not leave Cuba can not take the risk of being seen doing those things.
On another level I think the people running the libraries have huge balls, I assure you they are being harassed day and night by the government and thugs. That they still set up the libraries and run them under those conditions is amazing.
Do you attend Mass or otherwise practice more mainstream Catholic rituals ?
No. That’s probably too short for an answer, but when I was little going to church was not an option for my family, it would have been political suicide. And since age 12 I lived away from home in Lenin school, and there was no church there obviously. Once I got to university the same thing applied, I lived in a government complex and church was not an option. I do my thing with the saints because I do believe there is a higher power and Chango is not a saint to be messed with, but I would probably call myself an almost-atheist.
Wonderful and excellent thread, lalenin! I’ve often wondered what life is like in Cuba.
I live in Toronto; every winter we see ads for travel to ‘warm, sunny Cuba’, with pictures of happy couples disporting themselves on some brilliant tropical beach while turquiose waves roll in. It’s known as a relatively-inexpensive place to go for a week in the sun, the kind of holiday where you shut yourself away from the world on the hotel property and forget about the world. I believe there are tours of Old Havana, etc, but I get the impression that tourists mixing with Cubans is not particularly encouraged.
I presume these ads are placed on behalf of the official Cuban government tourism agency?
I’ve often wanted to go, but I’ve also been hesitant: uncertain about how to behave when one of my extremely-average paycheques might be able to support the average Cuban family for a year. Are we expected to tip the staff at the hotels? If we talk to them, are they in danger of being ‘ideologically contaminated’, so to speak, and becoming less loyal to the regime? Would I endanger them this way?
One of my friends went to Cuba a few years ago for the 5th (I think) All-American Congress of Esperanto (next year it’s in Montreal). I should ask him about this. Is Esperanto known at all in Cuba, or would this simply have been another foreign convention pumping money into the government’s pockets?
:: pause ::
I just came back from lunch and was chatting with a co-worker. Turns out the reason I hadn’t seen her last week was that she spent a week in Cuba! 
She’d been to the all-inclusive resort at Varadero Beach, but she’s also spent a couple of days in Havana.
She said that tourists could leave the resort and travel around, but that facilites and shops for them were mostly segregated from those for Cubans, with the tourists paying much more. She said that this was so that tourists, with their greater money, didn’t displace Cubans from buses, shops, etc. She gave the example of a tourist bus from the resort to Havana, a distance of about 140 km, costing about $15 Canadian per person, but a similar bus for Cubans costing about $1.
My main question: for the past year or so, I’ve seen the Special Period in Cuba being held up as an example of a society’s successful (or at least, “not completely catastrophic”) adaptation to loss of energy supplies, when Soviet supplies of oil ceased after the Soviet Union fell apart, and the US embargo was still in effect.
Without fertilizer and pesticide inpuuts, local agriculture went organic, and people gardened in the cities. Private transport declined, public transport was rearranged. People got thinner, but society stayed together.
I’ll see whether I can find a link to the article describing this; it was in Permaculture Activist magazine a few months ago.
Some people point to impending shortages of oil and especially natural gas in North America, and say that we may need to take some lessons from the Cuban experience.
What was your experience, if any, of the Special Period? The changes to agriculture? Was there starvation? Was there unrest, or did people pull together like the British did in World war 2?
How typical of the Cuban population are you ?
I was married for 23 years to a Cuban girl who got out in 1961 and who’s family got out later.
The difference between her and her family and the ones that got out in the mid 80 was mind bowing.
With this thread, I now have a much stronger hope for Cuba and the Cuban people.
Thank you for sharing.
Stick around, I really appreciate what you have to say.
edit for spelling
Lots of questions. Let me try to answer them. Your friends experience of tourism apartheid is correct, but the explanation of it being done to “not displace the Cubans” is major BS. The shops the tourists go to do not take anything but hard currency (pesos convertibles), which are out of reach for almost every Cuba. But even those Cubans with access to hard currency are not allowed in the resorts and hotels.
If you do go to Cuba and are looking for a cultural experience do not stay in an all inclusive, the only Cubans you’ll see are those working there. But if you do stay there please tip, the workers there are paid $15-20 a month in cuban currency, that’s all.
Esperanto? I’m sure it is taught at university, but I was never exposed to it.
Now to your main question, the special period. There was just no food, no power, no gasoline, no water, nothing. People starved, and people died, mostly from nutritional deficiencies. At one point so many people were ending up in hospitals for malnutrition that the government was forced to distribute doses of vitamins to bring the situation under controls.
It was during the special period that a huge protest broke out in Havana, the only one ever against the government as far as I know, in 1994 I think, it was called the Maleconazo because it took place in front of the Malecon. Fidel showed up for a couple of minutes to try to personally calm the situation and had to be rushed away when the crowd went after him. After that trucks carrying thugs with sticks were brought over and the protestors were beaten or arrested. I was in Havana at the time but was not allowed to leave work so I did not see this.
The very next day power was restored in Havana, and food started appearing in stores again. It has not been that bad since that time, but that was bad, bad, bad.
If the US or Canada start taking lessons from Cuba prepare yourself for food shortages. That is a terrible idea.
I could talk about the special period for days, it was the darkest time I have ever lived through.
When I was in Cuba I would say that I was pretty typical. I had no connections to help me, no friends or family in the government. I was born in a small town but ended up in Havana. I also had no family abroad so I had no access to hard currency, which might be less than typical. I really don’t know if I can answer that objectively though.
Thank you GusNSpot. I know what you mean about the differences between the generations of exiles. When I came to Miami I always knew who were the historical exiles and who were newer arrivals. The historicals always ask you where you’re from, where your family is from, and surreptitiously try to find out if you were connected with the government. The newer arrivals want to know where you went to school, were you worked, and if you have any family still in the island. It’s just a different mindset, the historicals left thinking they would return but only after Fidel fell, the newer arrivals have only known the current system so we take it for granted that things are as they are and won’t really change.
I suspected as much.
What else is there? Are there regular hotels on the street in Havana? B&Bs?
Thanks, lalenin.
Here’s the article: The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil. I do think there are lessons to be learned about redesigning our society to not be as dependednt on foreign energy, but my SDMB-trained BS-detector also tells me that there are stories they aren’t telling.
Knowing what went wrong and how that happened is even more important than knowing what went right. And the lessons of the open-source sommunity and the history of science seem to indicate that open systems are more robust than systems where information is partitioned and hidden.
(If you get the idea that I do not trust that the supply of foreign oil to North America (especially the USA) is guaranteed in the long run, you would be correct.)
If, during a period of scarcity, vitamin-type nutritional deficiencies were more quickly harmful than the bulk shortage of food, so to speak, and we were expecting shortages, then we could stockpile nutritional supplements beforehand.
But I suspect that, during the Maleconazo, resources were always more available than the regime let on, at least in the short term.
lalenin, I’m surprised that you say that Catholicism is relatively uncommon in Cuba, though I can understand why. (It reminds me of what I read about China.)
Is there a large pent-up ‘demand’ for Catholicism, and if restrictions were relaxed, would the Cuban people go back to it, like Russians did to Orthodox Christianity in Russia? Or woud they remain largely non-religious as in China?
(I see Chinese people from the PRC describing themselves as non-religious on dating sites far more than I do people from anywhere else.)
I think most Cubans would describe themselves as I did as Catholic to a degree. That means they might have been baptized, and might have attended church at some point, but it is more likely that they think of themselves as Catholics in the sense that they pray to a specific Catholic saint, and its Santeria counterpart. Church attendance is not very high, and it is openly discouraged.
As an example, I used to visit a friend in Matazas who lived in the same block as a Catholic church. Every Sunday morning the local government would set up a stage on the same corner as the church and from about 10-4 there would be music and dancing there. Pretty good crowds of young people would gather there, this is one of the reasons I would visit my friend. But as a result it was very difficult for anyone to go into the church, and I’m pretty sure the music made it into the church so I’m guessing mass was disrupted.
So, lalanein, you must be a socialist now, right? 
Seriously, on what do you blame most of Cuba’s problems? Socialism? Castro? Castro-style socialism? Salsa? Other?
Have you read the Cuba chapter in P.J. O’Rourke’s book, Eat The Rich? If so, does it fairly describe the situation? (If not, I recommend reading it. Then come back, and if you have been around SDMB long enough, you know what to bring along with your review.)
I have not read the book, I’ll look for it though.
It’s hard to put the blame for Cuba’s problem anywhere other than Fidel. Everything he has done has been with one goal, to stay in power. He ruled without even a constitution or any other legal framework until the mid 1970’s when the soviets forced him to establish a constitution, and that constitution was written pretty much saying that Fidel could override anything in it anytime he wants to.
He has taken the Cuban economy and used it to test his experiments, he decided that Cuba was going to produce more coffee than any other country, so we planted coffee everywhere. Of course coffee doesn’t grow everywhere so that failed. Then Cuba was going to produce more milk than any other country, so they spent years developing some hybrid cow that never went anywhere. Now it’s the same thing with biomedical products, vaccines that don’t work, and cures that don’t do anything. I don’t know if Cuba can support the free market capitalism of the US or Canada, but some form of mix of capitalism and socialism, without central planning has to be better than what’s there now.