Observations on Cuba

A college-student acquaintance is spending a semester in Cuba as part of his film program.  He writes this:

You may have heard that it is a socialist country – this is true. What that means, however, is very complicated. I was coming home at two AM one night from filming a show in the city and I stopped to get some chicken at a small stand. The man working there was very friendly and explained to me what Socialism meant for him. “You want to know what socialism is? I have a degree in engineering and I’m selling fried chicken at two AM, that’s what socialism is.”

I’ve heard similarly frustrated sentiments from many different Cubans who complain that even if you can make money there is not very much you can do with it because its very difficult to get permission to use it for anything as expensive as a car or a house.

The way to make money, it seems, is to work for and around tourists, because the dual economy gives all the power to the CUC dollar which is what tourists can most easily buy and spend, and is worth 24 times that of the Cuban dollar. To put it in perspective a cab ride in a fancy tourist taxi will cost about 5 CUC, and the Cuban average income is about 10 to 20 CUC a month. If you can get a job related to tourism you basically have it made. More on this later.

There is virtually no violence here; Havana is the safest city I’ve ever visited or heard of. This means that there are police around almost every block, but Cubans have a much different relationship with the police than we do. They’re not thrilled about their presence, but many of the police officers and security guards were assigned their jobs as part of the year of military service required of all men. Everyone has an uncle or brother who is or was a police officer so people don’t think of cops as any different than firemen or teachers or any of the other jobs that are government assigned and regulated.

There are also virtually no homeless, a very low illiteracy rate, and a tolerance towards homosexuality and womens rights that parallels the US’s.  (Which is totally absurd when compared similar countries in Latin America and the rest of the world.)

But at the end of the day you do here a lot of complaining along the lines of – why should I work when I have no motivation to do better? Why can’t I control my own business? etc. Not to mention this country is plagued by somewhat absurdly over the top propaganda, cameras and censorship that makes the island feel like a chapter out of 1984.

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