There is a buzz in the air in Havana. Since the new year dawned, economic reforms have been happening almost daily as Cuban President Raul Castro steps up his attempt to drag his becalmed nation toward modernity and prosperity.
In streets and squares across the battered and crumbling Cuban capital, evidence of the reforms is everywhere.
New things are springing up everywhere. Under the forceful direction of Eusebio Leal, Havana’s official historian, the hauntingly beautiful city, a UNESCO world heritage site, is being smartened up with a will.
The biggest structure on the skyline, the dome of the Capitolio, erstwhile seat of the Cuban Congress, is being repaired under scaffolding.
New, privately-owned eating places, the paladares, or privately run restaurants such as the Cuba-Italia in Calle Cuba, are appearing like magic.
Ancient churches like St Francis of Assisi in Old Havana have been repaired and restored by the state.
The new fine arts museum, with its grand collection of English and Scottish paintings, has been remodeled. It also runs the Bar Baco, the best refreshment place in the city, a quiet, sunny spot with views over a shady square.
A kilometer down the Malecon, the promenade alongside the ocean, Yaigel Roque and Reinier Mendez, two young entrepreneurs, got a license for a games business. Today they are running paintball on an old tennis court in the once smart Vedado District. For a few pesos, a group of friends can don protective clothing, take air rifles and from behind padded walls pop away at each other with white paint.
Children can go pony riding in the broad acres and arboretums of Parque Lenin. Accommodation in private houses, once tightly controlled, is cheap, plentiful and bears a government sign.
It used to be a headache, but now it is easy to change money in the scores of official exchange kiosks. Innovations in recent weeks include the rapid spread of automatic cash machines and the advance of the credit card.
You can start as an independent trader in 200 occupations from hairdressing to teaching taekwondo.
Some Cubans are making a lot of money and banks are open to small loans. Consequently, recently authorized car showrooms have no worries in offering a tiny number of small European saloons at the equivalent of more than US$213,000.
It is not at all like the dark days of 1991 when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact disappeared in a puff of smoke and former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev ended Russia’s enormous subsidy to the island overnight, leaving the beleaguered economy gasping for survival. Then, people did really have to look after their pets lest they were popped into a neighbor’s saucepan.
Factories closed, and petrol was unobtainable for all but a tiny group of civilians. A newly miniaturized army — perhaps no more than a fifth of what it had been — was left to face the might of the US, which was drawn up just over Cuba’s northern horizon.
Since Washington’s ban on trade with former Cuban president Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, the USSR had been buying almost all Cuba’s exports of sugar, nickel and citrus and selling the island two-thirds of its food and 98 percent of its fuel. People with long memories there still shudder at the thought of what Fidel Castro, in the euphemism to beat all euphemisms, called the “special period.”
Then hunger did stalk the land until former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez sold Cuba oil at cut prices. Hal Klepak of the Royal Military College of Canada estimates that the Cuban economy shrank by perhaps 50 percent in the five years to 1993.
Yet today, memories of hunger are fading and the survivors of the guerrilla campaigns of the Sierra Maestra, who fought the failed US invasion at the Bay of Pigs secretly planned by former US president Dwight Eisenhower and executed cackhandedly in 1961 by former US president John F. Kennedy, are dying off. In a state that was for long the exemplar of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism, the day of the individual entrepreneur is returning, albeit bound around with serious restrictions.
The present optimism, fostered by a tourism boom, is more sober and measured than anything I had experienced in half a century of visiting Cuba since the end of the 1962 missile crisis, but no less strong.
Cubans are facing the end of the rule of two octogenarians — Fidel Castro, 87, who came to power in 1959 after leading his guerrillas to victory, and his younger brother Raul, 82, his successor as president, who has announced he will leave office in 2018 at the end of his present term.
The number of registered businesspeople has gone up from 157,000 in October 2011 to more than 442,000 today. The future is much more open, and Raul Castro is keen to leave his island in the best circumstances to face an unpredictable outlook.
Formally, Cuba is no longer a Marxist-Leninist construction. German Marx and Russian Lenin were dethroned after the extinction of the USSR. The principal guide to strategy is now officially the nationalist example of Jose Marti. Born in Havana in 1853, he became a hero as a teenager. Arrested at 16 by the Spaniards, whose colony the island then was, for his support of Cuban independence, he was sent to Spain in chains. He eventually died in battle in Cuba in 1895, fighting on a white horse against Queen Maria Cristina’s forces. The Spaniards were expelled in 1898, though for decades Cubans’ freedom was closely circumscribed by the US.
The change in emphasis from Marxism-Leninism toward Cuba’s particular goals is clearer by the day. Cuban politics are not built on an electoral system. They are authoritarian, grounded on the Cuban Communist party.
Yet both Castros have produced over the decades a system of consultation through seemingly interminable discussions at the local, provincial and national levels. They were aimed at keeping up with the task, vital for the brothers’ political survival, of charting the national mood, among women, for instance, or in the armed forces and other parts of society.
No Cuban leader can ignore that, while fewer of the population have any direct experience of Fidel Castro’s revolution, Cuban society has become increasingly porous to foreign ideas — despite gigantic efforts to keep the media strictly to the official line. Few will criticize Cuba’s output of marvelous pop music and most support the excellent and entirely free secondary education, whose standards, according to the UN, are very high.
The health service is free for citizens and visitors alike. The recent funeral of former South African president Nelson Mandela, attended by Raul Castro, reminded Cubans of the key role 200,000 of their own troops played in defeating apartheid in South Africa at the cost of 2,000 dead, while the western powers, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger sat on their hands. Mandela had already voyaged to Havana to give Fidel Castro South Africa’s thanks.
At the same time, few government supporters can with a straight face defend the daily offerings of the party’s newspaper Granma or the somniferous output of Cuban radio and television.
On Wednesday last week, for instance, Granma carried a story about an attack by criminals on two members of the national boxing team in the town of Camaguey under the heading “A news note from the Ministry of the Interior,” another announced that the president of Venezuela wanted everyone to work for greater prosperity, a pleasant item, but not gripping. Sadly, the media message is shouted at you from ubiquitous advertising hoardings in towns and along the sparsely used motorways — “Socialism is People,” “The changes will strengthen Socialism.”
Everyone in Cuba, officials, ordinary citizens and visitors alike, knows how longingly the inhabitants want a higher standard of living, better food, an end to widespread slum housing, an improvement in the infinitely small official wages and salaries, with professionals often earning no more than US$16 a month, the chance of access to foreign currency for travel and so on.
Changes are on their way, but not at the pace that many want.
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