This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 38, October 30-November 5,, 2005
Impressions of Cuba Walking into Havana's Jose
Marti Airport, we immediately sensed that this was not like other places: there
was no raft of billboards urging us to drink Coke, smoke Luckies, charge with
our MasterCard, or rent a Hertz. Indeed, there are virtually no commercial
advertisements in Cuba. (Nor, by the way, is there a personality cult
surrounding Fidel Castro: we saw far, far fewer images of Castro than we would,
say, of President Daniel Moi in Kenya. The omnipresent image in Cuba is national
hero Jose Marti, the poet and writer who helped lead the Cuban revolution of the
1890s.) We saw a country with major
accomplishments in health care, education, day care, and other services. Cuba'a
infant-mortality and life-expectancy rates are comparable to those of the United
States and other rich countries, and the country's main health problems are now
those of rich countries. "We die as wealthy people, even though we live as poor
people," one hospital director told us. Cuba has invested in and
maintains a sophisticated hospital system, with hospitals spread throughout the
country, not just concentrated in Havana. Even more important is the national
emphasis on preventive health measures and primary and community care. Every
person has access to a community doctor and nurse, who serve several hundred
neighborhood families and know the health profile of all their patients. The
women's association and other mass organizations, which are organized down to
the block level, also help ensure care is delivered – for example, making sure
every pregnant woman receives prenatal care. Cuba has also invested heavily in
biomedical research, giving it one of the only genuine biomedical R&D capacities
in the developing world. We were also taken with the
economic egalitarianism of the society. Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, Cuba lost more than a third of its national income in a single year. If
the United States were to suffer anything remotely similar, there is little
doubt that the heaviest burdens would be thrust on working people and the poor.
In Cuba, the pain has been spread equally: people have maintained their right to
health care and education and housing, and they were allotted food rations that
gave them a minimum level of sustenance. Even in times of genuine food
shortages, no one, so far as we know, starved. The country's former
economic dependence on the Soviet Union was, as it it should now be obvious even
to those who might once have argued otherwise, one of the great mistakes of the
revolution. Of course, this was a dependence foisted on Cuba in no small part by
the United States through its embargo and continuous military threat. Relatedly, Cuba erred in
relying on agricultural exports (sugar above all) produced on vast state-owned
plantations, instead of cultivating food for domestic consumption on smaller,
farmer-owned cooperatives. Over the last decade, the country has made
considerable strides in remedying this mistake, with more autonomy granted to
farmers and a new emphasis on organic agriculture (Cuba is now a world leader in
the field). Food, however, still seems in short supply. One of the biggest threats
to Cuba's accomplishments on the horizon is posed by the tourism industry and
the dollar economy. Cuba's greatest potential foreign-exchange earner, by far,
is tourism. Tourism is certain to grow rapidly, spectacularly so if the U.S.
embargo is ever lifted. Salaries in the peso
economy are on the order of $20 to $30 a month. With subsidized or free housing,
utilities, food, health care, and education, this is enough, or at least close
to enough, to get by. Workers in the tourism sector are tipped in dollars. A
maid or waiter will easily make far more than $30 a month in tips. And so the
incentive is for doctors, nurses, teachers, and others to leave their jobs and
go work in the tourist sector. The result is both a misallocation of
professional and skilled labor and the beginning of social stratification. There
is no obvious solution to this problem that maintains the fundamental
achievements of the revolution. The problem is exacerbated
by remittances from Cuban-Americans living in Miami and the gifts of toys,
designer clothing, and other items that they provide to family in Cuba. Walking
by the hip clubs in Havana's Vedado neighborhood, one can feel the magnetic pull
of the corporate culture on kids who have little way of understanding the very
dramatic sacrifices their society would have to make were Versace and Nike goods
to become freely available. Posted by Bulatlat Russell Mokhiber is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor.
They are coauthors of
Corporate Predators: The Hunt for
MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Common Courage Press,
1999). Focus on the Corporation appears Tuesdays. © 2005 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
Health care is a model, but tourist economy brings changes.
By
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Our first, short visit to Cuba has left us impressed with the accomplishments of
the island-nation that for more than 40 years has stood up to global capitalism.
We also returned home aware of the many limits of the revolution – some brought
on or exacerbated by U.S. economic and military pressure – and uneasy about the
difficulties Cuba faces in the coming years.