When I visited I found his observations to be dead-on.
Havana is a wreck. A once beautiful city that is in such disrepair that buildings (that were once very impressive) are collapsing at the rate of about one a day. If a building isn’t used by the government or is generating dollars from tourists then it just deteriorates. You can’t believe until you see it how deteriorated Havana is.
There is no real social safety net. If a person is of no value to the government then the government would just as soon they die. Despite the talk about socialism and health care, if an AIDS patient shows up at the hospital the only real care they will get is from charitable volunteers.
You cannot survive unless you are in some way dealing on the black market. Necessary goods simply aren’t available.
Cuban citizens cannot go into tourist hotels and beaches even if they can afford it. Discrimination against it’s own citizens is sanctioned and enforced by the government.
Cuba is not a “communist” country, it is a dictatorship. Communism is a far second to keeping power in the hands of a few.
The is a lost generation in Cuba. Those that stayed have been oppressed and are miserable. Unfortunately, the ones that left influenced US foreign policy to the detriment of the Cubans in Cuba. When there is change, the Cubans they stayed will get screwed over once again. The Cuban leaders never suffered due to US foreign policy. The Cubans in Cuba bore the brunt of it.
Uh . . . what? What do white and non-white have to do with tourists? And the only reason that busses run on time during commuting hours is because that’s when white people ride?
Well, it’s less about race and more about money, but that’s my basic theory and I bet if you did a study on DC transit options you’d see something similar- this is a very divided city. The point is that it’s not unusual anywhere, but especially in poor countries, for public infrastructure to be geared towards those who make money for the local government.
China still has quite a few subtle but very real rules about the ways that tourists and locals mix. Some train stations, for example, have special tourist ticket windows. Chinese people are technically required to register with the police if a foreigner spends the night at their home. This stuff happens.
I do like the idea that Castro invented the sex trade, though. Heh. I guess in other Latin American countries you’d expect to find a lack of brothels then, huh?
The healthcare in Cuba is also horrible for locals. The “great” healthcare that Michael Moore and others talk about is available only for the medical tourist who pay CASH for it.
The local doctors are hard pressed to come up with antibiotics, which to be fair, the government of Cuba blames on the embargo by the USA.
Correct. The locals are hard pressed to come up with any pharmaceuticals.Walk into a drug store in Cuba and there is hardly anything on the shelves. (Same for the food stores that are suppose to honor the ration coupons.)
The doctors may be well trained but the availability of drugs and medical supplies are so limited that they can’t treat patients the way they know they should. Terminal patients rely on charity workers just to get aspirin or acetaminophen, not to mention pillows and blankets. (In Puerto Rico the family has to bring the pillows and blankets so it’s not just Cuba).
Yes, if it generates dollars, you can get good stuff. But, if you really tried to live withing the system you would starve to death. A doctor, which is the highest paid profession make about $30 US a month. A retired government worker will get less than $5/month in pension. Over 30% of the population is being subsidized by relatives outside the country. That’s why the black market is so huge.
If that’s an ideal system then try to go live in it.
Okay thanks for that point. He told me that “Castro allows anyone to leave if that’s what they want but they just don’t want to”. Obviously not true.
Well, apart from his political views we get along quite well
Not yet - I plan on giving him all this information the next time he starts praising Castro and Cuba.
Thank you guys for your replies, some interesting reading here. And damn, it really sounds a lot more awful than I thought. Sounds like hell over there.
I was on a religious mission to Cuba a few years ago, Treasury license and all. Most of the places we went had prices posted in pesos (CUP) and convertible pesos (CUC), such as “4 CUP, 5 CUC.”
Backplot: CUP is the currency for Cubans, CUC is the currency for foreigners. Dollars, Euros, Yen, you need to buy CUCs. Naturally the government takes a cut on top of the exchange rate.
So on the face of it, you the foreigner are paying slightly more than the locals, which is a normal “tourist tax,” yes?
NO. The internal exchange rate is something like 1 CUC = 20 CUP, and only through authorized money traders – Cubans can use only the CUP at the Cuban-only businesses. So you the foreigner are paying many times what the locals pay.
The mission I was on was well managed to keep us away from anything sensitive, such as real businesses for locals. So I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge to the lack of basic supplies. Given that, we brought as humanitarian supplies lots of toiletries. I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the student.
Get him to read The Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana by Isadora Tattlin, charting 4 years in Cuba during the nineties. She was living in a wealthy expatriate household, but was able vicariously to experience life as a Cuban through servants and friends. I don’t know if this woman has any axe to grind - I don’t think so - and the portrait she paints is pretty grim. It’s also absolutely fascinating, and very well written.
Tell your boyfriend to change his name to Elian, go to Miami, rent a boat and head due south. When he gets to Cuba, he can tell them he wants politcal asylum. They will welcome him with open arms.
Back in college my Spanish teacher was a Cuba escape. She painted a pretty grim picture. And this was way back when the Soviets were doing their best to prop up Cuba financially and industrially/socially and the Cuba infrastructure was still coasting on what had been built in better times.
If it was pretty grim 30 to 40 odd years ago, I can’t image 30 years of decay and no more Rubles flowing in has improved the situation any.
As far as I can tell, Cuba does only about one thing right. They make sure everybody gets a basic education. To extrapolate just that to “its a paradise” is just plain silly (I am being polite here).
sounds like an interesting thought experiment. Does Communist Cuba allow Americans who are not ethnically Cuban to immigrate, whether as political asylum or under any other name?
Could somebody pull a Jim Jones, leading his sect of followers to settle there and, inter alia, integrate into this whole “Communist economy based on American remittances” thingie? I mean, Cuba has got to be a nicer place to wait out imperialist oppression than the jungles of Guyana.
Most of South Florida’s Cuban population is 1967 exiles/refugees and their descendants, but there are also lots of post-'67 refugees.
It’s not quite true to say that the pre-'67 emigrants are the “losers” of the revolution, though. Lots of them are just people who were (or would have been) harrassed, arrested, or “disappeared” following the revolution: intellectuals, political leaders and so on.
IIRC, most of the Bautista government types fled to other Latin American states rather than the US.
I dunno about a Jim Jones situation, but I bet the Castro brothers would love it if some Americans tried to defect to Cuba and claim asylum. What a PR coup that would be!
Uh, people are generally hungry and have no freedom of expression. The internet is severely restricted, nobody can afford to live alone or with their families, nobody can afford computers or basic electronics.
Here’s the best example: every time a Cuban athletic team comes to the US, somebody defects. As in, runs away from their family and everything they know to live in the US. Do happy people run away from their loved ones and their home?
For full disclosure, my mom is a Cuban emigre. She left with the clothes on her back and was often hungry in her childhood. My grandfather was a hospital orderly who changed bedpans in the US; in Cuba he was a physician who had delivered over a 1000 babies. Eventually my grandparents retired well off and my mom and her siblings are well off today but they bear the scars of their childhood. You never really get over being hungry, ya know?
Their friends who didn’t flee in 1960 were murdered.
