Cuba Revisitied

As I had previously reported we went to Cuba earlier this year to visit the last functioning communist/socialist state. I had come away with a relatively positive view of the state. Recently however, there has been somewhat of a media campaign highlighting the troubles confronting Cuba.

First there was a program on German television discussing the beauty of the land, the music the people, and the fact that the state is rapidly running out of money. This was followed by an article in Die Zeit and this morning on BBC News was an extended report on Cuba.

Last November Raul Castro, Fidel's younger brother at a sprightly 80 years old changed the laws to allow Cubans to hire Cubans removing the state monopoly on employment with the exception of being able to hire family members.

The real driver behind this change was that the state was planning to cut 500,000 jobs which in a population of 11 million is quite an austerity measure. And that is the problem. Despite all the positive aspects of Cuba which attracted me to the country, Cuba is in deep trouble.

Its external debt is around US$40 billion and it is really not capable of servicing it. Granted that about 50% of the debt was to the Soviet Union and now Russia, but still it has not been a self-sustaining economy.

Cuba imports around 80% of its foodstuff requirements-the majority of which comes from the USA. The average monthly wage of a Cuban is $20. Surviving on this subsistence salary has only been possible due to food rationing and the heavy subsidies on housing, health and education.

But here is the problem. These handouts have bred a culture of dependency, with no incentives to work. Cuba's struggling inefficient economy can no longer afford to be so generous. This year's agricultural yield was the worst for 20 years and it looks to be one of the worst sugar crops specifically for even longer than that.

At yesterday's 50th anniversary of the defeat of the American-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs Raul Castro announced amongst the sweeping changes of transforming Cuba into a social market economy that term limits of 10 years would apply to political leaders, including himself.

Lest the "free" world stand up and proclaim the fall of yet another "communist dictatorship" one should reflect a moment on the achievements of the revolution.

Life expectancy in Cuba is to 80-even longer than in the US. The child mortality rate is lower than that of the US. Almost all children are in school until they are 16 with a 90% literacy rate. And, from a social point of view perhaps most amazingly, Cuba has the lowest rate of crime including murder and violent crimes in all of Latin America.

I can only hope that this political/economic evolution that Raul is instigating will be able to steer a course that provides a more efficient socio-economic basis without losing the outstanding achievements of ridding the state from the clutches of organized crime and the murder, violence, drugs and general exploitation that accompanied it before Castro's victory in 1959.