Back from Cuba --and after some days of readjustment to my home surroundings in the Belly of the Beast with its ugly, rampant commercialism and its frightful disparities of wealth and power -- I'm ready to answer some of the curiosity and questions that have come my way. I'll even take a crack at commenting on the New York Times article about Cuba's "dual economy". First, I should emphasize that I'm a little more than the proverbial "instant expert". This was my first ever visit to Cuba so I don't have a personal baseline of other experiences for what Cuban daily life was like earlier in the "Special Period" (Cubans' term for the years of hardship and desperate economic innovations following the demise of the Soviet Union) or before that. I'm also handicapped when trying to talk to people by my meager one-year of high school Spanish.

On the other hand, I've been in off-and-on contact since the early 1990's with a number of left-liberal North Americans from around this area in Vermont who 2have traveled to Cuba. Some of them have worked on the island and maintain close friends there.

Our own little tour group included fluent Spanish speakers, and many of the Cubans we met were also quite adept in speaking English -- learning English, followed by French, is a major push right now for young people in the Cuban school system -- and many Cuban were also quite willing to speak rather candidly with us about current difficulties while being overwhelmingly supportive of the tremendous gains of the Revolution in education, health care, etc. from 1959 up to now.

So, with those caveats in mind . . .

First, my impression is that things on the whole are getting somewhat better economically in Cuba, albeit more slowly than people there would like. On the macro level, according to official Cuban government statistics, the Cuban economic indices grew at least a small amount last year -- making it one of the few, if not the only, Third World countries to do so in the current recessional context.

Sugar remains a big problem, with very depressed world market prices. However, nickel prices are not too bad and Cuba is one of the big producers. Oil deposits have also been found on the north coast and have been going into production -- although not enough deposits to export, or even to cover fully Cuba's domestic consumption. However, this discovery should certainly help the economic situation since Cuba formerly got its oil from the ex-Soviet Union in exchange for sugar. Cuba has oil refineries of its own. But, in the early 1990s, the oil refinery in Santiago de Cuba, where I was for most of the visit, was forced to close down and lay-off workers for lack of the oil to run it.

(One silver lining, perhaps, of the oil-shortage cloud is Cubans adopting the bicycle on a massive scale which in the short-run is helping the air pollution problem from getting any worse [Cuba's mainly older fleet of internal combustion vehicles use leaded gas] as well as helping with overall physical fitness. Furthermore, it's egalitarian. You see everybody going to work on bikes, including security men and military officers. There's also been more use of animal power again in the countryside -- mules do not compact the earth as badly as heavy tractors ... plus they produce manure.)

The main present emphasis of the economic planners in Cuba is, for better or worse--or more correctly, for better and worse--on tourism. During the late 1960's, the main emphasis was (as everyone knows) on sugar production and the 10 million ton harvest (never quite achieved) for the sake of the primitive accumulation that would make other forms of development possible.

Today, the big national goal is pushing up the numbers of tourists. Next year's goal -- I saw a poster promoting it using a picture of Cuba's world record high-jumper -- is to break the 2,000,000 visitor mark ... which seems quite do-able. The numbers were already up around a million and a half for this year.

Cuba has a lot to offer tourists: an abundance of interesting cultural and historical sites, the warm winter weather; its uncrowded beaches, rain forests, mountains, and reefs; hot trova, son and salsa music; excellent beer and rum; friendly and well-educated people, etc., etc. Plus, Cuba is actively underselling most other popular winter destinations in the Caribbean such as Cancun or Puerto Rico. My two-week package cost only $1250 Canadian (c. $900 US), including round-trip air fare from Montreal, lodging in a well-located 3-star hotel with pool, MAP (breakfast and dinner), music and floorshows nightly, guides and bus transfers.

Currently, the greatest number of visitors come from Canada -- a mere 3 or 3 1/2 hour flight from major cities Toronto or Montreal. But I also encountered lots of tourists from England, France, Germany, Holland and elsewhere in Western Europe. The U.S.-imposed embargo on travel and business contacts is already being outflanked in a major kind of way, as a number of the more farseeing (and greedy) U.S. capitalists themselves are beginning to see. This brings us to the New York Times article. What does this current heavy emphasis on developing the tourism industry mean for the values and social fabric of Cuba?

On the whole, the NYT article is yet another scurrilous attack on a courageous people who are pursuing their own independent path in the world. The author has sought out some of the worse things he could find about Cuba to sensationalize and exult about -- things that most resemble conditions in parts of the U.S (and for which the U.S. with its embargo is in many ways responsible). As in so many of these kinds of articles for the purposes of manufacturing consent, the lesson here seems to be: "Capitalism may not be perfect. But there's no alternative. Human beings wherever they are are really just possessive individualists. They're just like us. Make the best of it." Nevertheless, the article does contain a grain of truth. One member of our tour asked some of our Cuban friends, after seeing some old mansions that once belonged to the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie, if there were any classes today in Cuba. The answer was a firm "no", that there were no classes in Cuba today -- which I took to mean that there was no private ownership of the means of production or any exploitation of labor power.

But there are certainly real disparities between those with access to dollars and those with not. The tourist economy uses dollars -- all foreign visitors are required to bring and pay for their purchases in U.S. dollars, regardless of their country of origin. The objective here is for the state to then use the dollars it earns -- fingering the nose at the U.S. embargo -- to pay for t2he imports it requires for spare parts and Cuban development ... and at the sa2me time to subsidize the larger part of the economy which continues to run on pesos and where essential items such as milk (and not-so-essential but value-of-life goods like ice cream which Castro apparently promised to provide for the people in the early days of the Revolution) are rationed (one liter of milk per day per child) or kept artificially cheap.

In the peso economy, as McDonald Stainsby has already noted, at a state-run cafeteria one can buy a strong cup of Cuban coffee for 30 or 40 centavos (2 cents) or an ice cream cone for a peso (5 cents). I saw lots and lots of people on the streets of Santiago eating ice cream, and on one occasion a man in line at the stand ahead of us simply bought and gave us two ice cream cones when we appeared mystified by how to pay for it in pesos. Beer is also quite cheap, and there is no shortage. Ham sandwiches and other food stuffs that Cuba produces were reasonably priced and widely available on the city streets and at stands in the countryside. Of course, these low prices by U.S. standards must be balanced off against the wages of Cubans, which average around 200 pesos a month. [these wages have recently been raised some 25% to help correct inequality - ed.]

All this may make a lot of sense for Cuba on a macro-level in its current circumstances, trying to preserve the principal gains of the Revolution, now basically going-it-alone in a capitalist global context. However at the micro- level, where the people carry out their lives, the dual economy is the cause of no little distress. The Cubans we were with were highly-educated professional people. It seemed wrong and unfair to them that they were having to get by on their 200 pesos a month with little or no access to dollars (and the things that only dollars can buy such as imported shoes and clothing) whi2le bellhops and taxicab drivers were making lots of dollars in tourist tips.

Other workers too got by, we were told, in the black-market economy. Cigar workers might appropriate a few of the cigars, which would then be resold to e2ither tourists or Cubans. Those who worked at gasoline stations would appropriate a little gas for resale. And so on. The government seems to turn a blind eye to this kind of activity, as long as it is not being conducted on a large scale as by one individual to acquire wealth. But these teachers complained that they had nothing of this sort to appropriate.

They also told us quite frankly about young and well-educated girls they knew who had been drawn into selling their bodies because they could make in dollars in a single night spent with a tourist what they, or their parents, would otherwise make in the good part of a month. It was emphasized ,however, that these on the whole were not professional prostitutes -- but the fact that it was happening was still distressing to our friends.

Our friends were also distressed by the appearance of petty theft and even some murders and rapes in Cuba, although by U.S. standards these crimes --especially violent ones--are not very common; Cuba is still an extremely safe place -- which they attributed to the corrosive effects on peoples' values of the economy's dollar sector. Another area of concern had to do with many hotels and other such facilities being now more-or-less off limits to Cubans because they were reserved for tourists. [To restrain prostitution, Cubans are not allowed up into hotel guests' rooms, though they can socialize in hotel lobbies or bars. To prevent guests from being hassled, Cubans--especially those of certain profiles--may be stopped at hotel entrances to determine the legitimacy of their business in the establishments. - ed.]

While we were in Cuba, Fidel gave a major speech to a gathering of the police, broadcast as usual nationwide, in which he called for a crackdown on prostitution and crime (things also of course highly counterproductive to the "family tourism" market Cuba says it wants to specialize in). Reform school for prostitutes; longer prison sentences for criminals. This was welcomed greatly by our friends.

However, these same issues will no doubt continue to surface so long as Cuba is forced by external circumstances to rely so much on tourism. It is no different anywhere this route is being tried. I can speak from my own experiences living and working here in Vermont to the contradictions that can arise between those people involved in a declining, low-wage agricultural economy and outsiders who come as tourists ("flatlanders") along with those local people involved in a more prosperous economy servicing their needs. Resentments can build up, although here without the benefit of any political leaders to put it all in a context of political economy and to point at the real source of the problem, capitalism.

Plus, these kinds of economies remain highly--maybe even more highly--vulnerable to the vagaries of the world economy. What happens when the global economic crisis hits the North hard--as it surely will--and the streams of tourists, no longer able to afford the luxury of a foreign trip, begin to dry up?

Fidel talked at some length in his 40th anniversary speech in Santiago on January 1st (which I had the enormous pleasure of attending) about the spread of the economic crisis to all parts of the world. Cuban planners must be giving some thoughts to this likelihood and its implications for Cuba's future, but I don't know anything about them.

The U.S. continues to keep up the pressure on Cuba and to try to exploit any possible contradictions. In fact, cynically enlarging contradictions within Cuba between those at least partly making-do in the dollar economy and those in the peso economy seems to be one of the agendas behind Clinton's recent "easing" of the sanctions against Cuba.

This is all explained quite openly in a recent Associated Press article. One change is that any U.S. citizen, not just a relative, will be able to send up to $1200 to a Cuban individual or non-governmental organization. (They may also be trying to create racial antagonisms -- Cuba is the most non-racist place I've ever been and I would like to write more about that another time -- since 98% of the Cuban exiles in the U.S. are white and they would presumably be sending their dollars to their white relatives. But that is my own conjecture.)

The Cuban government has rightly denounced these imperialist machinations and has called again for a simple unconditional lifting of the embargo. Along with the lifting of the sanctions against Iraq, this needs to be high on the agenda of all of us in the progressive or working-class community, particularly in the U.S. We have to do whatever we can to help this amazing society survive and prosper and continue to be a source of alternative inspiration to the rest of us, as I think it will.

I was never before so interested in Cuba as I am now. Its importance to all of us has indeed grown.

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