Leonardo Padura

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Jan 21 2015 (IPS)

All Cubans, on either side of the Florida Straits, but in places like Spain, France or Greenland – where there must be a couple of Cubans – as well felt it was a historic moment that included each and every one of us, when U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Dec. 17 the normalisation of relations after half a century of hostility.

Those of us who are in Cuba felt that way precisely because we live here; and those who live abroad felt it because of the various motives that prompted them, at different times and for a range of reasons, to move away and rewrite their lives.

The great majority met the news with joy and hope; a smaller percentage felt a sensation of defeat and even betrayal; and another small group perhaps felt little about what the decision might mean for their futures.

But what is indisputable is that each one of us was shocked by the announcement, which some media outlets even dubbed “the news of the year” – extraordinary, really (even if you consider it an exaggeration), given that we’re just talking about the normalisation of ties between the United States and a small Caribbean island nation that is not even decisive in the economy of the region and supposedly does not influence the world’s big political developments.

But for years Cuba’s small size, in terms of both its geography and economy, has been far out of proportion to its international stature and influence, and the “news of the year” really was (or may have been) such due to several reasons, besides the emotional ones that affected us Cubans.We Cubans who live on the island have already felt a noticeable initial benefit from the announced accords: we have felt how a political tension that we have lived in for too many years has begun to ease, and we can already feel it is possible to rebuild our relationship with a neighbour that is too powerful and too close, and relate to each other if not in a friendly way, then at least in a cordial, civilised manner.

This was because of its symbolic nature as a major step towards détente and as a final stop to the long-drawn-out epilogue to the Cold War, as acknowledgement of a political error sustained by the United States for far too long, because of its weight in inter-American relations, and because of its humanistic character thanks to the fact that the first concrete measure was a prisoners swap, which is always a moving, humanitarian move.

And it also was so because in a world where bad news abounds, the fact that two countries that were at a political standoff for over half a century decided to overcome their differences and opt for dialogue is somewhat comforting.

Three weeks later, the machinery that will put that new relationship in motion has begun to move. On the eve of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson’s visit to Havana to start high-level “face-to-face” talks with the Cuban government, President Obama announced the introduction of his government’s first measures towards change.

The policies will make it easier for people from the U.S. to travel to Cuba, expand the remittances people can send to Cuba, open up banking relations, increase bilateral trade in different areas, and help strengthen civil society by different means, including improved information and communications and economic support for entrepreneurs.

Cuba, meanwhile, released prisoners with regard to whom Washington had expressed concern.

The measures recently implemented by Obama could be extremely significant for Cuba. Above all because they have punched holes in the straitjacket of the half-century embargo and have practically made its removal a question of time, and since they eliminate many of the fears that investors from other countries had with regard to possibly investing here.

Cuba, in the meantime, is waiting to be removed from the U.S. government’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, which it has been on for years.

And on both sides of the Straits, Cubans have an understandable sense of uncertainty about the future of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guaranteed U.S. residency to any Cuban who set foot on U.S. soil – an issue that will surely be discussed during Jacobson’s visit.

But while the political agreements are moving along at a surprising pace, we Cubans insist on asking ourselves how this new situation created since Dec. 17 will play out on the island.

Because while Obama’s intention is to bring about a change in policy that will lead to a transformation of the system in Cuba, at the same time there are decisions that the Cuban government will be adopting internally to take advantage of the useful aspects of the new relationship and eliminate potential dangers.

The possible massive arrival of U.S. citizens to Cuba could be the first visible effect.

Today the island receives three million visitors a year. That number could double with the new regulations announced by Obama. Everyone is asking themselves whether the country is prepared for this – and the answers are not overly encouraging in general.

After a lengthy crisis triggered by the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its generous subsidies, and the stiffening of the U.S. embargo with the Torricelli Act [of 1992] and the Helms-Burton Act [of 1996, which included extra-territorial effects], Cuba today is a country with serious problems of infrastructure in communications, roads, transportation, buildings and other areas.

The lack of resources to make the necessary investments also affects the purchase of products that the presumed visitors would demand and will create difficulties for domestic consumption, where there are already problems of high prices and occasional shortages.

Perhaps the first to benefit from the massive arrival of U.S. citizens to Cuban shores will be the small businesses that offer accommodation (and the thousands of other people connected to them).

Currently in a city like Havana there aren’t enough rooms in the hotels (which belong to the state or are joint ventures with foreign companies), let alone quality service in the state-owned restaurants that would make them competitive.

That means a significant part of the money that will circulate will pass through the hands of those involved in private enterprise (the so-called “cuentapropistas” or self-employed) – a sector that even though they must pay high taxes to the state and extremely high prices for inputs purchased in the retail market (because the wholesale market that they are demanding does not yet exist), will make major profits in the scenario that will take shape in the near future.

And this phenomenon will contribute to further stretching the less and less homogeneous social fabric of this Caribbean island nation.

Another of the major expectations in Cuba is for the chance to travel to the United States because, even though this has become much more of a possibility in recent years, obtaining a visa is still a major hurdle.

And there are new questions among those who hoped to settle down in the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act, and who now have the added possibility of not losing their citizenship rights on the island under the protection of the migration laws approved two years ago by the government of Raúl Castro, which eliminated the rule that if a Cuban stayed overseas for a certain amount of time, their departure was automatically seen as permanent, and they lost their rights and assets on the island.

And then there is the less tangible but no less real aspect of discourse and rhetoric. Half a century of hostility on many planes, including verbal, should begin to wane in the light of the new circumstances.

The “imperialist enemy” and “communist menace” are sitting down at the same table to seek negotiated solutions, and the language will have to adapt to that new reality to achieve the necessary comprehension and the hoped-for political accords.

In the meantime, we Cubans who live on the island have already felt a noticeable initial benefit from the announced accords: we have felt how a political tension that we have lived in for too many years has begun to ease, and we can already feel it is possible to rebuild our relationship with a neighbour that is too powerful and too close, and relate to each other if not in a friendly way, then at least in a cordial, civilised manner.

For that reason many of us – I include myself – have felt since Dec. 17 something similar to waking up from a nightmare from which almost none of us believed we could escape. And with our eyes wide open, we can catch a glimpse of the future, trying to see shapes more clearly through the haze.

Edited and translated by Stephanie Wildes

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Dec 11 2013 (Columnist Service)

After three decades of supposedly planned socialism (1960-1990), when government plans were often only halfway fulfilled, lost in oblivion due to lack of oversight or of realism, or in the best of cases carried out any which way just to live up to the goals, Cubans got used to waiting (with or without hope) for the political leadership, financed with heavy Soviet subsidies, to come up with the next “plan”.

This reorganisation or new project came into our lives like a whirlwind, although it could later disappear with the speed and consistency of smoke.

The idealistic planning had, however, one result: people got used to receiving orders and orientations in which their individual decisions had little to no weight. If you had a telephone it was because the state let you have one; if you travelled, it was because the state allowed you to….ad nauseum.

The toughest years of the crisis and scarcities that followed the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its subsidies showed how unprepared the country was to make it on its own, because all that socialist planning had barely managed to provide the national economy with a structure capable of sustaining itself without foreign support.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

In the last six or seven years, the state-government-single party, led by General Raúl Castro after Fidel Castro withdrew from power, has tried to introduce order into the economic and social structure with more realistic planning, and endorsed it with the drafting of economic and social policy guidelines, approved as a pragmatic instrument at the 2011 Communist Party Congress.

Under cover of these guidelines, the leaders have introduced numerous and important changes in the economic and social life of the nation. But between the programme and the real, day-to-day individual lives of the people of this Caribbean island nation, there is a stressful distance caused by the uncertainty about how, when and in what order the planned “updates” will occur…

I will explain myself briefly: Cubans continue to see it as impossible, despite the planning, to create their own life projects because each time they must modify them, reformulate them, or forget about them depending on what comes down to them from the heights of political decision-making, and on the form and intensity with which the planners of the updates decide, with their lofty macroeconomic or macrosocial scrutiny, on these plans or variations that often arrive without Cubans having the chance to make their own updates and new plans.

Right now Cubans who one way or another have managed to save up some capital have very little certainty about the monetary future of the country, because the dual currencies will be unified, but there is no clear idea of how or when this will take place, how much the money will be worth, etc.

Those even more fortunate who, for example, hoped to buy a new or used car sold by the state now don’t know if they will ever see that dream come true, or how it might happen.

For some reasons that have been kept quiet, car sales are still controlled, restricted or denied by the state, even though the sale of a car in Cuba is one of the most lucrative business opportunities that any salesperson in the universe could dream of (new cars are, or were, taxed at a 100 percent rate – in other words, they cost double their market price).

But these lucky few are, as it is easy to deduct in an impoverished country, a tiny portion of the population.

Most Cubans live hand to mouth by juggling subsistence household economies that are constantly altered by inflation that has grown since the 1990s to the point that the wages earned by public employees, who account for around 80 percent of those working in Cuba, fall far short.

The cost of basic articles (food, hygiene products) and of electricity, transport and other services rises steadily, according to central planning, and ruins the plans with which hundreds of thousands of families, millions of people, barely managed to get by.

As another year is coming to a close, most Cubans know that not even the cryptic and poetic predictions that the Ifá priests (of santería, a popular religion of African roots) make every January will truly shed light on their immediate future, which each person has to plan in order to live their personal life – the only one that biology (or perhaps some god) has given them.

What will the next year be like for Cuba’s 11 million people? I don’t think even the oracle of Ifá knows for sure.
(END/COPYRIGHT/IPS)

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Nov 6 2013 (Columnist Service)

For the Cuban economy, the year 2014 is set to start with the opening of the first installations in the Special Economic Development Zone in the upgraded Mariel port, 70 km west of Havana.

The new trade and industrial hub will include a container port, enormous warehouses, a free trade zone, industrial endeavours with foreign capital, and modern infrastructure. It will be the country’s leading industrial centre, and is already considered Cuba’s main window to the world of imports and exports.

As soon as the Mariel container terminal begins to operate, Havana’s ageing port will start to be overhauled and renovated, to turn it into a marina for yachts and cruise ships, especially once the half-century U.S. embargo is lifted to allow tourists to come and boats from the United States to dock on Cuban shores.

The upgrade of the Mariel port installations has been mainly financed – 640 million of the 900 million dollars invested – by a loan obtained through an intergovernmental agreement signed by Brazil and Cuba.

Leonardo Padura

The involvement of Brazil and its companies in the construction and investment gives some indication of that country’s interest in gaining a commercial and productive foothold in this privileged geographic location in the Caribbean, at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico and across from the U.S. coast, just before the expansion of the nearby Panama Canal, which will be able to serve bigger ships as of 2015.

The big question with respect to the future of Mariel is who will invest, and under what conditions, in the development zone, which will have not only port installations and warehouses but also industries.

There has been a great deal of talk about the need for the Cuban government to finally declare whether it will modify its legal relations with foreign capital.

Back in July 2012, an official announcement was made that a new investment law was to go into effect by the end of that year, to replace Law 77 passed in 1995.

But there has not yet been a clear response to the expectations created. Meanwhile, what has actually happened is that 190 joint enterprises between the Cuban government and private foreign capital were operating in mid-2013 – only half the number in operation in 2000.

According to a recently read report, from which I took the previous figures, a Cuban deputy minister of foreign trade stated that “a general and sectoral policy to accompany the fomenting of foreign investment is currently being evaluated, and although a modification of the law is not being considered, certain regulations could be updated.”

In other words, no new law can be expected for the time being, and the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone will move towards its future under regulations that in the last few years have scared off more investors than they have attracted, according to the most simple of mathematical operations.

However, due to its special characteristics, Mariel could be governed by different legal mechanisms, which will perhaps be among the regulations to be updated.

The economic transformations undertaken by the government of Raúl Castro, outlined in the economic and social policy guidelines approved at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2011, have gradually modified certain structures and fundamentals of the Cuban economy.

Self-employment has been revitalised, numerous agricultural and services cooperatives have been created and small private businesses have been opened, which has improved services, gastronomy, passenger transport, and food production to a certain extent….

But because of their reduced level of influence on macroeconomics, the changes have failed, and will fail, to become a motor to accelerate development in a country in urgent need of efficiency, productivity, modernisation of all infrastructure, liquidity and access to finance – that is, the elements capable of generating palpable wealth, and with that, an improvement in the living standards of a populace that for nearly a quarter of a century have been getting by on depressed wages that make it impossible to satisfy all of their basic needs, including food.

On several occasions, high-level government officials have said that the most significant economic modifications are yet to come. But the content of what has been promised is unknown and the timeframe for implementation uncertain.

If the announced new law on foreign investment is not approved in the end in a form that manages to draw foreign capital, it is hard to imagine who will be interested in investing in Cuba, even in the Mariel development zone.

Besides Brazilian, Chinese and Russian companies that are predictably close to that investment, the geographic factor and hopes for future changes alone no longer seem sufficient attractions for businesspersons who, upon arriving in Cuba, would even have a problem buying a vehicle for driving around executives and employees.

And a pending question would be where Cubans – that is, Cubans living in Cuba – fit in these new structures, because according to what I read, the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone could be a source of employment for them…but not investment.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Aug 5 2013 (IPS)

For Cubans, baseball is not a sport, much less a game: it is almost a religion, and taken very seriously.

Baseball was brought to Cuba around the mid-19th century by young men whose families had sent them to study in cities in the United States.

Leonardo Padura

Back then, “el juego de pelota”, as it was called in Cuba, had crucial importance in different areas of the national spirituality: as a non-conformist social activity that indicated a desire for progress (United States’ modernity in contrast with the backwardness of Spain – the former colonial power); as a manifestation of national unity, because very soon it was played all over the island; and as a means of bringing together social classes and ethnic groups (because Afro-Cubans and peasants soon became devotees of the game).

It was also a performance in which sport and culture came together, thanks to the entertainment provided by “orquestas de danzones” (bands playing the Cuban national dance), the design of baseball teams’ uniforms, modernist pennants and graphics, and the artistic and journalistic literature devoted to commentating on and promoting the sport.

For Cubans, baseball has been the most played and most beloved of sports, the one that has given rise to the most legends and has carried the greatest social weight. In recent years it has also been (as it could not avoid being) a battleground for some of the most critical political, social and economic conflicts taking place in Cuban society.

Several dozen Cuban players have taken the risk of being branded “deserters” or “traitors” by official rhetoric, deciding to depart the island to try their fortunes in other leagues (especially in U.S. Major League Baseball). This has caused a commotion in Cuban society and sport, which cling to the models and politics of amateur sports followed in the socialist countries.

The departure of these players from the country has had three basic consequences.

One, for sport: a drain on regional and national teams, since a “deserter” is banned from returning to represent his or her club or country at any official event.

Another, economic: while athletes on the island earn the salaries of “amateurs”, those doing well abroad can sign contracts worth (many) millions of dollars, and even those whose performance is less outstanding can earn at least several hundred thousand dollars a year.

And thirdly, political: the Cuban government, without essentially modifying its sports policy, has begun to allow baseball players to be contracted for professional tournaments abroad (although not for the Major Leagues).

The perpetual tension of baseball politics allows this sport to express, in a quantitative way, the distance between Cubans living on the island and those who have left it in search of new horizons.

Its overwhelming influence in Cuban society and spirituality transform it, together with its cultural expressions, into one of the facets of Cuban life where any moves toward reconciliation and communication have special connotations, capable of influencing every order of life, including politics.

Recently a Cuban businessman living in Miami had the bold idea of holding two or three baseball games in the southern U.S. state of Florida among retired players of Cuba’s most emblematic club of the last 50 years, the Havana Industriales.

The novelty was that they would play on the other side of the Florida Strait and the intended participants would be former players living both within Cuba and outside the country – that is, the so-called “deserters.”

The first step would be obtaining permission from the Cuban authorities for the players to meet and play against their former teammates. Without official confirmation, it was understood that permission had been granted, but silently, as if nothing were going on.

The second step was up to the other side of the Strait: would Cuban exiles accept the presence of Cubans living in Cuba at a public event?

From the outset, former players living outside of the country were favourably disposed to the idea, to the satisfaction of most of the Cuban exiles, who looked forward to seeing their old idols again. However, a small but powerful minority of the exiles were against the proposal.

That is when the event promoters’ tortuous ordeal began, as in addition to receiving threats of all kinds, they have had to wander the city of Miami looking for a baseball field to hold the matches in. But the promoters vow that the event will be held, “even if it is in a canefield.”

To lack the capacity to see the momentous social and political significance for Cuba and its future of having émigré players and those who have remained in the country fraternise on a baseball field is an attitude of political blindness. But I believe, above all, it is an expression of a fracture of the Cuban national soul that is so deep, so charged with resentment, that not even something as sacred as baseball can easily mend it.

Too many years of deadlock, hatred, desire for revenge, and exchanges of insults and abuse (those who left the country are “gusanos” or worms, turncoats, traitors; those who stayed behind are communists, oppressors, Castro accomplices, etc.) have accumulated and still muddy the present and future of the different fragments of the broken heart of this Caribbean island nation.
(END/COPYIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

The reform process launched in Cuba by the government of President Raúl Castro has made several changes to the country’s rigid social and economic structure, with the ultimate aim of bringing this island nation out of its economic lethargy and making production, which is sinking under the weight of restrictions, controls and contradictions, more efficient.

After the announcement of the government’s intention to introduce “structural and conceptual changes” to “update” the model, the 2011 Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba – the sole legal party, which governs the country – approved the Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy which set forth the transformations to be carried out.

The programme laid out in the document, which is precise on some issues but vaguer on others, sets out guidelines and commitments for the proposed changes, small and large.

In response to demands or criticism that the pace of change is too slow for a country plagued with social and economic problems that range from the highest structural and macroeconomic level to the complicated daily life of the average citizen, Raúl Castro has stated on several occasions that the transformations will keep pace with well-thought out plans, in order to avoid new errors. He calls this tempo “slow but sure.”

Recently the vice president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers, Miguel Díaz-Canel, confirmed to the press announcements already made by the president.

While economic and social changes have so far brought about slight (or not so slight) shifts in the relations of production, property and citizen rights, such as the revitalisation of private enterprise, creation of agricultural and worker cooperatives, distribution of land for farming, or the important migration reform that allows a majority of the population to travel, changes in the years to come will have a more radical effect on the basic structures of the system.

As Díaz-Canel said: “We have made progress on what was easiest, in the solutions that required less depth of decision and less work to implement, and now we are left with the more important aspects, which will be more decisive in the future development of the country, as well as more complex.”

What is intriguing is that neither leader has specified what the changes will consist of, or what their sphere or scope will be. They merely respond that everything is laid out in the Guidelines.

But an event of international importance has made a big difference to the balance of decision-making in Cuba.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Cuba’s main political supporter and trading partner through bilateral and regional agreements, such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), is definitely a factor that Havana cannot take lightly.

If, as analysts expect, Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s political heir, wins the presidency in the upcoming elections in Venezuela, Cuba will be able to breathe more easily, given Maduro’s promises with respect to the island and the loyalty he has pledged to Chávez’s thought and commitments.

But what no one doubts is that, with the passing of Chávez, the internal situation in Venezuela could become complicated in many ways, and its close relations with this Caribbean island nation, at least in economic terms, could change because of those unpredictable complications in Venezuela’s domestic reality.

This new turn of events will doubtless have been studied by the Cuban government, independently of political declarations or even silence. And the development will probably have an effect on the pace of internal change.

The fragile state of this country’s economy calls for efficiency, investment (including, of course, foreign capital), the redefinition of production relations, and the updating of state and private sector use of new technologies.

Meanwhile, the complex social fabric, that is so different today than in the early 1990s (when a severe crisis was triggered by the break-up of Cuba’s main political and trading partner, the Soviet Union) requires more realism and dynamism in the process of change, given that a large percentage of the Cuban population is made up of young people with different ideas and points of view, and also that many people have spent more than 20 years struggling to survive on low wages and facing concrete problems of all kinds.

Has the time come to cut short the pauses and accelerate the pace? And is it time for citizens to begin to learn what future is in store for them with those deeper and more complex transformations, that could define the destiny of the country and, certainly, of their own lives? In all likelihood, yes.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

The Cuban National Assembly, the parliament, has just passed a historic milestone: the visible turning point when one momentous and complex phase in the life of the country begins to come to a close, and a door opens on a future that, however hard to predict, will in many ways be different.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

General Raúl Castro, re-elected on Sunday Feb. 24 by the Assembly as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers for the legislative period 2013-2018, publicly reaffirmed that, independently of constitutional changes to limit terms for high positions, this will be the 82-year-old’s last mandate as head of state.

While Raúl made this declaration, former president Fidel Castro, in his 87th year — who held the reins of power in this nation for over 46 years — witnessed from his first-row seat in the parliament the statement that marked the beginning of the end of a historical period stamped by his personality and his style of government.

As it enters this period of potentially transcendent closures and openings, the country is already different to that governed by Fidel in 2006, when he became seriously ill and had to step down from power, first provisionally, then, in 2008, definitively.

Although the essential system has not changed, and there is still a one-party structure, the same electoral system and a socialist economy, it cannot be denied that the reforms introduced by Raúl as part of the “process of updating the Cuban economic model”, and transformed into a political programme as the “Lineamientos de la política económica y social” (Economic and social policy guidelines) approved in 2011 by the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, have gradually changed the reality of the country.

A series of economic and social measures, of greater or lesser scope, but in many cases convulsing the centralised, state-run political model, are beginning to change the face of the social and economic framework of this Caribbean island.

Among these changes is the elimination of prohibitions that limited the capability of self-realisation (access to mobile phones, the possibility of buying and selling houses and cars, etcetera), the various modifications that have been introduced (expansion and facilitation of self-employment, turning over unused state land to private farmers, creation of cooperatives, greater opportunities for marketing agricultural produce, availability of bank credits, a new tax law, among others), and even as transcendent a decision as approving a migration reform that, for the first time in half a century, allows free movement for the vast majority of Cuban citizens.

In parallel, the government of Raúl Castro has launched other campaigns, to strengthen the institutional environment of the country, to combat corruption at different levels of the economic apparatus, to change officials in charge of ministries and decision-making posts, and even an ostensible change in the style of government, moving away from grandstands, speeches and the constant and costly convening of mass mobilisations as part of the “battle of ideas”, to meetings behind closed doors where concrete goals are set, which to a greater or lesser extent have been making their influence felt in national life.

President Castro’s express purpose, ratified at his re-inauguration on Sunday, is to preserve the socialist system installed on the island in 1961. And for this he has tried to shore up the inefficient economy of the country and to find leaders among the upcoming generation who will be capable of sustaining it in the short to medium term, when Raúl and the other members of his generation can no longer fulfill their responsibilities, due to their age, and it seems, due to a forthcoming constitutional law.

However, in his latest public appearances the re-elected president has said that the most important “updating” motions are yet to come. Little is known about the nature of these changes, although there is much speculation.

Without doubt, the major challenges of any government in Cuba will be economic: the inevitable elimination of the dual currency that distorts the macro-economy, the micro-economy and family economy; the urgent need for wage increases to bring them in line with a living wage for the population; encouraging foreign investment capable of renewing the ageing infrastructure of the country; the controversial yet indispensable provision of access to the internet, without which it is impossible to think about individual, social and economic development in the digital age; and so on.

What kind of country will Raúl Castro hand over to his successors in five years’ time? Cuba continues to be the island with the finest tobacco in the world, and the most fiercely contested questions.

(END)

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Feb 13 2013 (IPS)

Early this month, Cubans went to the polls to elect delegates nominated by municipal and provincial assemblies to the island’s parliament, the highest government body where citizens’ votes carry decisive weight. The turnout, as usual, was over 90 percent, and all the municipal candidates, as usual, were voted in.

The people of Cuba voted as they have always done, as a matter of routine, says Padura. Credit: Leonardo Padura

The people of the island voted as they have always done, as a matter of routine, perhaps not realising the momentous changes these elections are ushering in.

On Feb. 24, at the first session of the new legislature, the 612 elected members of the National Assembly will elect from among their number the leaders who will constitutionally direct the country’s affairs for the next five years.

The most prominent news about the new legislature is the official confirmation that Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada will cease to serve as head of the National Assembly, a post he has held for the last 20 years.

According to public statements, Alarcón explained his departure from the position with the affirmation that 20 years is “too long”, and “there must be change, there must be change”.

But the prospect that is hardly talked about, yet which has implications of immense potential political and historical importance for Cuba, is that after the National Assembly has elected Raúl Castro as president of the Council of State (an outcome no one doubts), the countdown will begin: after 1,823 days, his term of office will end, as will the terms of at least five of the six current vice presidents, all of whom took office in February 2008 when it became evident that Fidel Castro would not be able to resume power and his brother was elected president of the Council of State.

It was Raúl Castro himself, during sessions of the Congress of the ruling Cuban Communist Party in 2011, who proposed that no political office should be exercised for more than two five-year terms – including his own, as president.

The proposal was approved by the party Congress, although it has not yet been incorporated into the constitution, which must also include reforms forged in the country’s new economic model that has been inspired, advocated and promoted by Raúl Castro.

This new situation — unprecedented in a country like Cuba, where political, state and government posts were exercised without limits for five decades – opens a scenario of expectations when it comes to the changes that will happen in the next five years, and what the future will look like in February 2018.

For over five years — first at a slow pace, with changes of vocabulary, and then with concrete economic and social measures for the short, medium and long term (like the migration reform that allows most Cubans to travel freely from January this year, after nearly 50 years of being unable to do so) — army general Raúl Castro has set in motion the machinery of Cuban socialist structures in search of what the country most needs: an institutional environment, financial control, higher productivity, economic efficiency, self-sufficiency in production of certain items, changes in employment policy and changes in property law, among others.

But these urgent matters lead irrevocably to other transformations that have been announced by President Castro himself, in a process that must develop to its fullest during the five-year term beginning Feb. 24 and, indeed, be reflected in the constitution, as it will be reflected in society and its actors.

What changes will take place within the Cuban model? Will there be deeper modifications to the economic structure of the country, which so far has only seen changes that, while significant, are not macroeconomically decisive, and have not been able to guarantee certain goals, such as food production?

What opportunities will there be for foreign investment, in a country that needs capital to renew its ageing infrastructure?

What other freedoms will be approved for citizens in coming years, after the key move of lifting travel restrictions? What kind of Cuba will the so-called “historic generation”, now in their 80s, after half a century at the helm of the island’s government, leave to future leaders who will be groomed and prepared in these decisive years? What economic, and even social, role may old and new emigrés have in the country?

Cuba is entering a phase of transformation, and the critical period for the resulting changes is the next five years: a long time in the life of a human being, but only a heartbeat in the timeline of history.

(END)

Excerpt:

A few days ago a small boat docked at the port of Havana. Flying the Bolivian flag, the “Ana Cecilia” had come from Miami and was loaded with electrical appliances, packages of food and medicine, clothing, and household items most of which were sent by Cuban exiles to their relatives on the island. It was the first of the numerous bimonthly deliveries that are expected.

Underreported by the official Cuban media, the shipment could be a sign that some of the restrictions that are part of the blockade/embargo of Cuba, maintained by the United States since the Kennedy administration, will be modified.

What is curious to say the least is that these shipments, which considerably lowered the cost of the packages sent via charter flights between Cuba and various U.S. cities, began to arrive right as the General Customs Office of the Republic of Cuba announced a law affecting individual imports and shipping. Among other things, the new legislation would impose a fee equal to 100-200 percent of the sale price of imported goods worth more than 50 dollars. The new law drastically increases the final cost of any object received or brought into Cuba by citizens whether or not they are residents.

The central purpose of the changes has to do with the flood of “mules” from Ecuador, Panama, and the U.S. who import large quantities of goods (clothes, jewellery, and food) to supply the small private businesses that are springing up again throughout Cuba.

The side effect of the new law is that the people in the most dire economic condition who receive packages from relatives off the island will now have to ask for money to cover the import fees, which effectively double the real cost of anything sent and will inevitably reduce the amount of goods shipped to the island, including the next boatload from the Ana Cecilia.

Given the introduction of these new fees, sending cash seems like the least painful option, though it involves two disadvantages: first, the punitive official exchange rate, and second, the fact that recipients of the funds will have to spend them in the shops on the island, where prices are much higher, there are fewer choices, and the quality is generally lower.

The economic reason for these new regulations is obvious: in Cuba today, the economy and the currency combined with efforts to raise the efficiency of production are at the centre of the new government’s plan of changes intended to “update the economic model”.

The recently concluded session of the National Assembly of Popular Power, the Cuban parliament, was a reliable reflection of the centrality of economic matters to the government’s concerns and actions.

There are three clear signs of current efforts to jumpstart this country hamstrung by years of economic inefficiency, a lack of financial discipline, and excessive numbers of relatively inefficient state workers: the approval of a recent tax bill that would require all Cuban citizens to pay taxes (until now only independent workers were required to); the announcement of an impending (and experimental) opening of production and services cooperatives whose only ties to the state would be fiscal and legal oversight; and the effort to clean up the national financial system. All moves were debated and approved by the deputies.

It is revealing that at the conclusion of the session, president Raul Castro dedicated a significant part of his speech to discussing the evolution of an economic policy that in his words “has entered a phase that is qualitatively superior in terms of updating the economic model”.

He went on to refer to the advance of the economy, the growth of exports in comparison to imports, the new tax law, the reestablishment of financial discipline, the creation of non-agricultural experimental cooperatives, the creation of incentives for food production and measures that make it easier to sell those items. “It is time to stop thinking only about just getting by and to start working out the general outlines of a plan for sustainable economic development and the infrastructure that it needs,” the president said.

Meanwhile, the effects of the above changes on Cuban society are growing clearer and clearer. Today in Cuba there are almost 400,000 self-employed workers in the private sector and the number is expected to jump significantly once the new cooperatives take shape and the permitted scope of private enterprise is further broadened.

The effect of this evolving reality on day-to-day life in Cuba is complex: while a state cleaning worker earns about 200 pesos per month, a private house cleaner (often without paying for a license) earns the same amount in three days of work. In a country where state employees will remain the country’s primary force of production, it is difficult to see how these two wheels can be made to carry the same cart. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramon Mercader, as central characters.

While Europe reels from a crisis that is annihilating small businesses, shaking up large ones, and catapulting huge numbers of people into poverty, Cuba, which for the last twenty years has made a specialty out of living in crisis, seems to be on the verge of putting itself back together and even reclaiming part of the faded glamour that was once its hallmark.

This is not to say that things on this island have improved greatly in recent years with respect to the reality of half a century of socialism. Neither the efforts to “update” ­the term the government uses­ its economic model, nor the changes in thinking announced by President Raul Castro have been substantial or profound enough to generate any real discussion of a truly different economic or political reality.

On the political front, the lack of any real evolution can be seen in many contexts, from public statements that the political establishment in Cuba will never change to the persistence of the habitual state secrecy regarding information, which has been criticised by the current president.

For example, in Cuba today little is said (or written) about the recent outbreak of cholera in the east of the country. For those of us that remember, it is clear that Cubans were far better informed about the cholera epidemic in Haiti after the 2009 earthquake than about what is happening here.

Even less is heard from the authorities about the promised reform of the migration laws that would ease the absurd system now in place of severe prohibitions and onerous requirements for permission to leave or enter Cuba, which are binding on Cubans both on and off the island.

However, it is clear that on the economic front at the most elemental level there have been contractions and changes that are visible even in daily life.

One revealing case is the existence of a much remarked upon list of the top thirteen restaurants in Havana, compiled, it would seem, by a British food critic connected to GuidePal.

These private restaurants, some of which opened in the 1990s, others in response to the recent relaxation of restrictions on private enterprise, are said to offer a wide range of high-quality international cuisines (curry and sushi included) in settings that range from exotic to modernist to home-style to traditional Cuban, all at prices that are more than reasonable for Americans, British, and even crisis-stricken continental Europeans.

With entrees costing around 10 dollars, a diner can enjoy a captivating Havana evening with wine or beer and a meal prepared by the finest chefs of the city and served by a young staff, all for a total of about 25 dollars ­or the average monthly salary of a Cuban.

But to show that things have not changed that much, very close by these refined and successful private restaurants you can still find a state-run operation where, to be competitive, prices are far more reasonable – let’s say 3.50 dollars (a seventh of the monthly salary) for a plate of run-of-the-mill Chinese food. Here, in good socialist style, there is no desert and not even coffee, because “the machine is out of order”.

The disparity between the fancy private restaurants listed by the British journalist and those still run by the state, with its traditional hobbling inefficiency, is the distance between the two realities that intersect at the street level of the Cuban economy.

The disparity between either of the restaurant options ­private or public­ and the official salaries of Cubans is dizzying and gives an all-too-clear idea of the economic possibilities and exigencies of the majority of the country’s people, who can barely make ends meet, as the government itself has recognised.

And thus while there may be a return of the old glamour in certain parts of Havana ­where, despite the crisis, a small, lucky, and enterprising sliver of the population is prospering and awaiting changes in the law to rush to Cancun on vacation­ on another corner of the island a pensionless octogenarian farmer has to work all day just to survive, carrying water to a town without it.

This man must sleep alongside the horse that helps him with his labours because if it were stolen, he would lose his only mode of survival. For this farmer, interviewed for a documentary by Cuban television, having a meal at one of the hot spots on the food critic’s list is about as likely as having a picnic on the moon ­once travel restrictions are lifted, of course. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Leonardo Padura is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramon Mercader, as central characters.

What will the Pope’s visit bring Cuba? This is the question that tenaciously preceded Benedict XVI on his way to this perennially polemical critical island, which remained apparently intact by the time he ended his intense three-day visit on March 28.

Cuban cardinal Jaime Ortega asked himself – and all others – this question before the homily of the pontiff at the mass celebrated in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolucion, but he left it unanswered, like a great mystery (a word, moreover, very dear to the Catholic religion).

Before the Pope’s trip to Cuba, it was pretty clear that three sectors of the Cuban social and political arena hoped to obtain from the presence of the Pope and his symbolic mission on the island something more or less concrete.

On the one hand, the local Catholic Church seeks to strengthen its social and pastoral presence, though it was granted greater latitude over the last two decades and especially the past few years. Again and again it has called for reconciliation and pardon among those born on the island, as was clear at both masses celebrated by the Pope. Without a doubt the wave stirred up by the Pope’s visit will bring sand to these shores.

Although in the homilies the Pope did not refer explicitly to subjects that would have greatly pleased Cuban authorities – the U.S. embargo and relations with other countries, for example – he did, in his farewell words, call for conciliation. But the mere fact of his visit to Cuba and declaring to be satisfied with his stay is a political triumph for the government of Raul Castro, who attended both masses celebrated by the Pope.

The various domestic opposition groups were also very interested in the Pope’s visit and managed to sow tensions on the island with various concrete actions, like occupying in various churches – one for 48 hours – against the wishes of the Cuban clergy, or presenting petitions to win the attention of the Pope. And while the government did ramp up the presence of the police, visibly (and doubtless invisibly), the real payoff for this sector was increased visibility, especially abroad, which was generated by the papal spotlight.

For the people of Cuba, and especially Cuba’s faithful, the presence of the Pope in Santiago de Cuba, in the village of El Cobre (home of the parish that holds the original image of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint) and in Havana, can also yield benefits. For Cuban Catholics, including the large numbers who travelled to the island to witness the historic event, satisfaction might (or may already have) come in a less material and immediate and far more spiritual manner.

If fourteen years ago Pope John Paul II, true to style, touched on current events in a society that was deeply affected by the fall of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, his successor, true to his style, kept to the theological and transcendent (while still talking continuously about concrete charity) rather than current conditions, at a time when the reality of certain economic and social changes are being felt in Cuba.

In the homily given in Havana, the Pope dedicated the core of his remarks to the twin themes of truth and freedom as understood both in Christian theology and in a way that affects all social conduct through their ethical expressions. Without condemning or exalting, focusing on his apostolic message with a tone of conciliation, the Pope insisted that the search for truth was an exercise of authentic freedom, a spiritual challenge that affects not only Catholics but all citizens – and not only Cubans, of course.

If Benedict XVI’s visit will have any benefit for the majority of the island’s population, I think it will be found in his ethical message, which can be applied by all regardless of whether or not they are religious.

Cuban society is suffering from a persistent problem that is growing increasingly alarming: a moral deterioration that has been generated by all of the material and spiritual crises that the people have suffered in recent years. With the palpable erosion of traditional and universal values, the loss of a sense of courtesy and respect, and the spiritual atrophy of Cuban society these days, the people should look at themselves in the mirror the Pope is holding up before them with his invocation of truth, regardless of whether one believes in gods or their representatives on earth, setting aside grudges or alliances, including those of a political nature, which are so present in Cuban life.

If this was the only gift left by the Pope for the Cuban people, it was well worth suffering through the tensions that seized much of the island for the days of the papal visit. In this context, there were no losers; rather there were many winners, which is precisely what this nation needs most to overcome the hatred, the loss of values, and the aggressiveness that affect it and may continue to do so in the future.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Festooned with lights and brightly painted, the sweet shop “La Caridad” just opened on the outskirts of Havana. One of the new breed of private businesses, the store is in the back of a modest home. A single glance at its appearance and offerings is enough to show that it has lofty aspirations.

A few blocks away in the same neighbourhood, far from the centre, is the deluxe Cuban-Italian restaurant, “Il Divino”, set out on the terrace of a huge colonial country house. Among its attractions is the fact that it houses the Sommeliers Club of Cuba and its cellar boasts thousands of wines from Italy, Spain, France, Chile, and Australia with impressive vintages and staggering prices.

Elsewhere in this same part of Havana you will find dozens of carts selling vegetables, costume jewellery, industrial objects, and light meals.

Businesses like these ­ and others legalised by the recent Cuban legislation intended to broaden and support the so-called “self-employed” and even spur them to hire workers ­ are springing up on the most unexpected corners and, apparently, even in remote areas of the country like an explosion. They are built over decades of suppression by the centralised model of socialist economics, which had always banned and fought these enterprises like an enemy (at least in terms of class).

In one of these burgeoning businesses a customer waiting for a server asked his companion something that, in that atmosphere of efficiency and the desire for prosperity, may well reflect the way of thinking now found on this island in the Caribbean: “So is the Pope finally coming to Cuba?” The other answered: “So it seems.”

The two ran up a bill of 150 pesos, about a third of the monthly salary of an average public employee.

Fourteen years ago, when the visit to Cuba of Pope John Paul II was approaching, it is possible that very few Cubans would have asked the above question. The entire world knew that the Pope was coming and how long he was staying and what his presence on the island might provoke. But between that visit and the exchange noted above, occurring not long before Benedict XVI is due on the island (from March 23-29), the minds of Cubans must be spinning faster than they can count.

A few weeks ago, when the image of Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, completed her tour of the island, the people displayed a religious fervour, or at least a sense of curiosity, that would seem improper in a country where scientific atheism is state policy. In the streets, tiny chapels, known churches, people came together to be near the Virgin and hear the messages of the Catholic priests. Her pilgrimage ended with the gathering of a multitude in an avenue of Havana near the cathedral.

Religious feeling, even preserved in secret for many years, is an undeniable reality. But what about the visit of the Pope?

Cubans still have in many cases the same problems as they did in 1997 and 1998 leading up to and during the visit of John Paul II – and even new problems. What is different is that back then the elimination of political and social discrimination against religious beliefs was new.

Today, weighed down with mundane concerns, people seem to expect less (except perhaps a heavenly blessing) from the visit of the Pope and far more from their own ability and initiative. It is as if many have decided to take seriously the old Jewish maxim: when misfortune strikes, you must pray as if help can only come from heaven while also taking action as if that were the only solution.

The slightest easing of the socialist state’s strict limits on private initiative and the consequent possibility of finding independent ways to improve living conditions has generated far more energy and interest than the lofty questions of politics and even faith. Large numbers of Cubans seem quite uninterested in whether or not the Pope is coming or when.

These are some of the same people who, months earlier, while rushing to see the image of the Cuban virgin, were hoping to hear from Cuban authorities whether they might finally have Internet access (thanks to a fibre optic cable that seemed to have been lost at sea) or be allowed to travel freely abroad as a result of the not-yet-completed reform of certain emigration laws – among other postponed or vanished dreams.

People seem to think that the material problems of those who earn little and live badly will be hard to alleviate in the here and now with the visit of Benedict XVI. Those who earn more and want to prosper must think that supplies, taxes, and competition are their most pressing problems. Thus it is not strange that they are not boiling with expectations of the symbolic power of the pope’s visit.

Their needs are terribly mundane, for now.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramon Mercader, as central characters.

By Leonardo Padura
Oct 5 2011 (IPS)

HAVANA, Oct (IPS) Under the pounding Cuban August sun, three young graffiti artists are working on a wall along one of the central avenues. Passersby look over with curiosity and bewilderment, some perhaps bothered by what seems like a meaningless slathering of paint. A few people ask the meaning of these strange letters and the nonsensical word they spell. It happens to be the name of the founder of the movement of independent graffiti artists that these boys belong to, but written backwards.

What is significant here is that the manager of the auto repair shop that the wall belongs to gave the boys permission to do their work there because he didn’t have enough money to paint it. Most curious is the fact that in the six hours it took the painters to complete their “opus”, numerous police officers passed on foot or in their patrol cars but not one even asked what they were doing or what their painting said.

While these boys are carrying out an activity that in the rest of the world is conducted furtively and at night, in a protestant church in Havana about sixty followers of an ex-pastor who was expelled from his religious denomination have locked themselves inside to wait for the end of the world, which their leader said is imminent. This is the story told in the street.

The police were called to check out the situation but they surround the building with the intention only of preventing incidents outside. What happens inside the church is up to the pastor and his flock. Although Cubans are followers by nature, it does not seem likely that this gathering will end up in a collective immolation. And if it does, it is a sign that things are changing too much.

At the same time a question is making the rounds of the Cuban capital: what happened with the fibre optic cable from Venezuela? The only answer comes in the form of rumours. The cable was supposed to be in operation by this summer (now past, though the sun and heat are still strong, as the graffiti artists can testify) and provide Cuba with data and images. The explanation off the record and in the streets is that the cable project was never completed because of corruption among the Cubans charged with carrying it out. There has been no mention of this whatsoever in any of the state media, digital or otherwise. And where there is silence, rumour is sovereign.

What was discussed, and copiously, on the most official Cuban web sites were the statements made in Miami by Cuban musician Pablo Milanes, who declared among other things that he has ended his loyalty to Fidel and even entered into discussions with a prominent opponent of the Cuban system. Although there was no coverage of this in Cuban newspapers and television, or of the concerts held in the United States by this outstanding musician, the official digital world blasted him for what was considered his infidelity (and never was the term better used), including even the charge that he had betrayed the principles of the revolution. However, as far as can be ascertained from non-Cuban press and media, Pablo Milanes returned to Cuba and is now in his home in Havana, hopefully at peace.

It has been noted with pride than already more than 300,000 Cubans have sought licenses for free-lance work and started small businesses throughout the island. These “independientes” seem to have all reached the same conclusion: though you have to pay taxes and work harder, it is more profitable to work for yourself than for the state.

Other important news: Caravaggio’s Narcissus and perhaps two other works of the great Italian master, as well as additional pieces by his followers, are on display in Havana for two months. This is apparently the first time that a Caravaggio has been to Latin America and provides a unique occasion for Cubans to witness, like Narcissus himself, one of the most breathtaking creations of human genius.

Like graffiti, some things reach Cuba late. Others simply never arrive or have a difficult time making it there. Some of these are mentioned by the government, while others drop to the bottom of the well of secrecy, which is in many ways sustained by these things that never arrive, like public access to the Internet, which might have guaranteed the completion of the controversial fibre optic cable. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Aug 10 2011 (IPS)

Five years have passed since the announcement by Fidel Castro that because of health problems he was “provisionally” delegating his responsibilities in the Cuban government to a group of five officials headed by his brother Raul until he was well enough to return to office. It would soon become evident that this return was not imminent, and before long Castro announced his withdrawal from active political life, though not from politics.

The absence of the leader of the 1959 revolution and the figure who for decades held the top positions in the country planted a question in the minds of the people: would Cuba be the same without Fidel? Today it may be possible to venture an answer, albeit one with certain Socratic overtones: Cuba today is both the same as it was under Fidel yet at the same time quite different.

While the essence of the Cuban socialist system and its political manifestation have not changed substantially, social structures and social thinking have undergone a violent transformation which is very visible in certain crucial areas: the government’s complete economic team (and not just economic) was replaced; there was an expansion and revival of freelance work; the potential of owning private property was introduced; a war on high-level corruption was initiated; and the state’s usual triumphalist rhetoric gave way to a more realistic tone. These were just some of the changes.

In these last five years the greatest transformation may have been the change from a political view of the economy to an economic view of politics. Revelations about the intense degree of the country’s chronic inefficiency created pressure for reform of its financial, productive, and commercial systems which was considered necessary for the survival of the political model.

There then followed the repeal of purely political measures that kept the government from collecting revenue (the ban on mobile phones and the sale of appliances and computers, the opening of tourist sites to Cuban citizens, etc) and other more profound steps, like a redistribution of unproductive state land to private producers and the opening of individual or family microbusinesses as a way of creating goods and resources, boosting state tax revenue, and generating jobs -just as the government was “discovering” that Cuba’s “full employment” hid the existence of more than a million workers who were paid without having real assignments.

To those of us who have lived in Cuba for all these years it is almost unbelievable that what was obvious has finally become public policy, with the elimination of deeply-rooted methods of social mobilisation: volunteer work, now recognised as unproductive and unprofitable; the student brigades that had to sacrifice part of their vacations doing work that they were not qualified to do and that generated more waste than benefits; and the middle schools located far from cities and designed to combine studying with physical labour, though ultimately the students learned neither academics, nor work skills, nor any kind of ethical or civil lesson.

In the area of pure politics, the most significant development of this last period was the liberation of more than fifty prisoners, most of whom had been arrested in spring 2003 and given long sentences. Thanks to the efforts of the Catholic church and with the mediation of Spain, about 90 percent of these ex-prisoners are now outside Cuba. The release provided Raul Castro’s government with a resolution of the political crisis caused by the death of Orlando Zapata on a hunger strike. It had threatened to grow more serious with the possible death of dissident Guillermo Farinas.

While this lowered the pressure on the political class, the crackdown on corrupt public officials intensified, and in 2011 alone 36 bureaucrats, including an ex-minister and ex-vice minister have been tried and found guilty.

But it was in April of this year during the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party that Raul Castro made the announcement that was to definitively characterise his way of doing politics: together with the order calling for a radical change in the thinking needed to govern, and live in, a country in the process of changing, he also announced the decision to limit the service of upper level government officials to two five-year terms. This change in both style and action, unprecedented in a single-party socialist state and more profound in its effect than anything that has happened thus far, seems to spell the end of one model of government and mode of public administration and a transition to another that could take any number of forms but is already different from that generated by Fidel Castro in his 46-plus years leading the country. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

Cuba may be the only country in the world whose citizens have, for half a century now, not been allowed to freely acquire a car or a home. Indeed the very words have a very different connotation on the island.

As a part of the egalitarian policies of the state, which has exerted total control over most of the property in the country, the socialist government, during its fifty years in power, has emitted a series of laws and regulations which, originally intended to limit the amount of property a person could accumulate and to reform the way real estate can be held (so-called “urban reform”), allowed people to keep some of these properties -one home and one car- though in reality the latter was not entirely theirs because only cars manufactured before 1959 could be freely and legally sold to other Cubans.

For a Cuban to be able to “own” a home or a new car the government created complex mechanisms that are still in operation. In moments of economic good times it was possible for certain enterprising people to build on top of their existing home or on land they held what were known as “home-made” homes. However, the most frequent way to come by a house was to receive a “grant”, whether on the basis of merit or exceptional need, of a property on the condition that it be used only by the beneficiary (in many cases is could be passed on to one’s heirs) but never sold to anyone unless the “grant” explicitly transferred the title to the property via a bill of sale, though for a price that was actually payable for the majority of these fortunate few.

In the last fifteen years, in the full economic crisis left by the 1990s, it became possible to buy a new or used but recently manufactured car for people who somehow managed to save enough money and who obtained from either a president of certain institutions, a minister or even the vice president of the Council of State or the Council of Ministers the famous “letter” authorising the holder to buy a car from a government agency -a car which was taxed at an extortionate rate and which could subsequently be sold only back to the government and then at a rock-bottom price typical in monopolies. The rules that apply to real estate remain more or less the same, given that the prohibition on sales and limits on housing swaps (known as “permutas”) were intended to prevent the parties involved from making any profit from buying or selling their home.

To control the limited range of transactions that might involve these properties (which as should be clear could never fully own) the General Housing Law was passed to regulate virtually every change of residence, legal or not. Over the years numerous increasingly paralysing executive orders(5), decrees(2), and 180 other similar regulations, orders, and guidelines were introduced by the National Housing Institute, the Justice Ministry, and other organisations to regulate this sector.

As for cars, there were “40 bans or limits … on the transfer of property”.

What is significant is that despite this complex system of regulation and oversight, especially regarding real estate, there emerged a black market which a Cuban could navigate only by breaking any number of laws whether out of desperation or sheer recklessness.

Moreover, none of this led to any relief in the extremely tight housing situation, where shortage was perennial and the condition of properties is rapid and unarrested decline.

Now in the process of “updating its economic model” initiated by president Raul Castro, the Cuban government has decided to relax the controls on buying and selling cars and homes. The announcement of this change still did not include any mention of a sale of new homes or cars (which would be a great deal for a state monopoly) but only the sale of existing ones, subject to various rules and heavy taxes imposed on selling, inheriting, and owning. Five decades later, what is essentially a universal practice is returning to Cuba.

Just as in the above quotations, all taken from material published in Granma, the official newspaper of the ruling Cuban Communist Party (the July 1 breakdown of a meeting of the Council of Ministers) I will now use quotation marks again because the paper affirms -and this is important- that the new policy will also seek to eliminate “bureaucratic regulations that lead to the manifestation of malfeasance or corruption”…

It is nonetheless curious that this mass of laws, decrees, resolutions, and prohibitions have in the end engendered a proliferation of violations, corruption, illegality, and obstructions that benefit the most crooked and rash individuals and a vast legion of bureaucrats corrupted by the proliferation of laws and decrees that they supposedly should observe and apply for the good of all. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Apr 21 2011 (IPS)

The plans and agreements approved at the recently-concluded Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party has left people with a wide range of reactions, from hope, to scepticism, to fear, to satisfaction, to the sense that old ideological principles have been renounced or that such certainties are no more than window dressing. But the Congress left no one with a feeling of indifference. Cuba’s magnetism -sometimes morbid, sometimes admiring- prevents that from happening.

Although the news was not surprising, there was much discussion about the resignation from Cuban Communist Party leadership of Fidel Castro, the historic figure who for more than 45 years shaped the destiny of Cuba and has now decided to be a simple activist of the party -though we all know that he will be anything but ‘simple”.

More surprising and moving (politically and even humanly speaking) was the proposal of the President and now new First Secretary of the Republic, Raul Castro, to reduce to two five-year terms the period that the future premier can stay in office, something unheard of in the ruling apparatus of a socialist country, where those in the upper reaches of power often serve until they die. How these changes will be implemented remains to be seen.

In contrast, everyone expected the proposal of a broad overhaul of the obviously exhausted Cuban economic model. The new plan will try a range of alternatives, such as foreign investment, work, taxation, private production, the decentralisation of the government, the elimination of bureaucratic red tape, and cuts in government subsidies. All of these measures will introduce the element of market competition desperately needed in a country weakened by an interminable economic crisis, rock bottom production, and a society deformed by the way goods and services are provided.

The word “market”, demonised for decades in official Cuban circles (even for the sale of books) has reappeared, but there was another word that was reintroduced and mentioned more times: “change”. How radical and profound will the changes be? Will they affect the economic and social essence of the system, including aspects that are political? This too remains to be seen, but there can be no doubt that change has arrived and more is coming -not always desired (by certain elements of the government leadership) but always inevitable, given much has already occurred in our society and more is being imposed by time itself and the reality of Cuba and the planet.

However, there has been too little, if any, talk of other profound transformations that will or should accompany the economic, social, and even political plans that have been proposed or approved so far. I am referring to changes that are subtle but indispensable, including change in the top-down, fundamentalist exclusionist orthodoxy, which, fuelled for years, managed to convert into a suspect, if not an enemy, anyone who dissented from official positions and tried to think with his own head as opposed to a logic based on “the moment”, “the situation of the country”,of “top-down orientation”.

If five or seven years ago, someone in Cuba had proposed measures like those adopted this week by the party congress, he would without a doubt have been branded as revisionist, even counterrevolutionary, and been stigmatised by some benighted sector of the ruling bureaucracy.

Without profound changes in this attitude towards controlling thought, and without allowing freedom of expression, it will be difficult to put in place a real culture that supports the need to “change everything that must be changed”, because the party agreements and decisions just made will not uproot from one day to the next the tendency to accuse (among those from higher up) and the habit of fear (in those below). Over many years, too much fear and too many accusations have built up in the lives and consciences of Cubans for this change to take place overnight, even though it is clear that in Cuba today the level of permissiveness and heterodoxy is light years ahead of that thirty or forty years ago, when any divergent opinion was condemned as “an ideological problem” or seen as “strengthening the enemy” -even when it was a clear and obvious statement of the truth.

Too many years of political verticality, of an excessively powerful bureaucracy, of considering as an enemy anyone who doesn’t think the same way -these are burdens that the newly-approved plan for the future must eliminate if Cuban society is to regenerate itself and become more vital and audacious. The same is true of the tendency to stigmatise nonconformists, an all-too-frequent practice of the backwards and reactionary bureaucracy, which was responsible not only for innumerable economic disasters (for which no one paid the price, or if there was any accountability, some involved may have lost certain privileges). But the worst part of this practice was the removal from society of a culture of dialogue and the expression of nonconformist ideas, which are natural elements of social diversity.

Today the need to allow in the new and different and heterodox is recognised today even by government and party leadership: Raul Castro himself sees that “the first thing to change in the Communist Party is the mentality, which is what we will pay the highest cost for because it has been tied for years to obsolete criteria.”

Only in this way can there be real change in Cuba, not only by decree but also by consensus, not only imposed from the top but percolating up from every corner of the country. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Mar 22 2011 (IPS)

Havana is being reborn. I can’t be sure whether this is taking the best form possible. The first elements of the “updating of the Cuban economic model” have been made official. At the meeting of the Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in mid- April, this model will be given a definitive form and plans. The effects of the new policy have begun to be felt in an accelerated fashion on the face of a city that for the last fifty years seems to have been stuck in time (and even slid backwards with intensifying deterioration).

Thus far the most striking and visible opening in the country is the revival of self-employment, with a broadening of the allowed categories and activities (nothing spectacular- it has been concentrated in lower-level jobs and small businesses rather than professions). To spur the expansion in this direction, a significant number of new licences have been issued, although at the same time the government has imposed heavy taxes on these forms of work, which raises doubts about whether many people will be able comply.

This newly-approved form of self-employment, long prohibited and even stigmatised, fulfils various purposes, from absorbing a part of those government employees who will be newly “available”, to use the Cuban euphemism for laid off. It is calculated that more than a million people will fall into this category by the time the process is completed, though it seems to have slowed already as it has become evident that the Cuban economy and society simply cannot generate enough jobs for the number of people who need them.

At the same time, the self-employment initiative is part of an effort to give a gentle but necessary push from below towards the decentralisation of the economic structures of a model in which, until today, the presence of the state was essentially divine: it was felt everywhere, though not always in a visible or tangible manner. In the labour market, of course, the government’s presence was absolute and hegemonic, though since the crisis of the 1990s it suffered substantial desertions as state salaries were too low to cover the basic expenses of the average employee and many people of working age simply preferred to turn to what Cubans call “invention”, meaning anything you can do to get by.

Among the forms of “new business” that Cubans have resorted to after the recent changes in the law, two stand out: food services and the sale throughout the city of farm products. The avalanche of new cafes, small restaurants, and street vendors (which require little or no up-front investment) has introduced an environment of creativity and movement that is giving the city the feel of a country fair in which people are selling anything they can however they can. The hundreds of cafes cropping up on corners, in doorways, or out in the country (which may make you wonder whether there are enough possible clients to keep them afloat in a country where most people barely make enough money to survive) have little or no sophistication and in most of them you eat or drink standing on the sidewalk, which conveys a sense of poverty and transience.

Meanwhile, those selling farm products have set up shop in places that are even more shoddy and badly put together. Some simply sell their wares in the wooden crates they were shipped in. Without a hint of sophistication, convinced that demand will far exceed supply, and with no effort at attracting customers with quality, presentation, or good prices, these little operations are reviving in Havana less a look of poverty or improvisation than a backwards rural feeling that the city left behind decades ago.

Another form of employment that has sprung up with official approval is selling music CDs and television and film DVDs pirated in the most imaginative ways. This business, though it springs from an illegal activity, has flourished in Havana since the state endorsed it and now taxes the proceeds. Thus on rough boards set up in alleys and doorways you can buy the latest releases of American movies and recordings of mega stars at prices that draw foreign tourists as well.

The search for individual solutions in these small businesses and the absence of regulation of their look or location has given Havana the feel of a bustling country fair, uncontrolled and unlimited, of a city where the urban and the rural mix with improvisation and novelty, and where ugliness and the feeling of poverty have come to define it. In the end, Havana is changing because it has to change, and one of the costs of this is yet a further loss of its already diminished beauty. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Dec 23 2010 (IPS)

From the time I was capable of reason I remember hearing this old refrain, full of optimism, commonly remarked in Cuba around Christmas: “A new year, a new life.” The expression is charged with unfulfilled desires, postponed goals, and possible hopes for the life that will begin with the new year -as if thinking about mere possibility was a way of getting closer to this “new life”, better and different.

For about twenty years, when the collapse of European socialism and the implosion of the USSR consigned Cuba to economic and political isolation, Cubans went through one of the most trying periods in their nation’s history. And although today we do not speak of a new “special period in times of peace” (as this brutal phase was officially baptised), daily life remains a constant challenge for almost the entire population of 11 million Cubans.

While it is certain that remittances sent by exiled relatives or jobs close to sources of hard currency (like tourism or positions in medicine, sports, etc., abroad) can alleviate economic tensions for a part of the population, it is also true that a majority of Cubans must resort to financial balancing acts to live with any comfort.

The crisis of the Cuban economic model, the inefficiency of production, the solution of (or intent to solve) problems with political formulas don’t come close to addressing the situation in which the country and its citizens now find themselves and the state of moral and physical deterioration in which an entire generation of Cubans was born and lived.

The year 2010 ends in the middle of a debate on the new way of life that will be implemented in 2011, when the proposals and discussions of today become the state policy, endorsed by the Congress of the Communist Party, which is scheduled for this April. Themes like the laying off of between 500,000 and 1.3 million state workers, the opening of new though heavily-taxed avenues of self-employment, decentralisation of the state, the elimination of large amounts of the government bureaucracy, or timid land reform indicate a major shake-up of the system implemented in Cuba to address the crisis of the 1990s.

And so are we approaching a new country? All indications, at least economic, indicate yes, and even when, as if often the case, things are not called by their real names (private property, for example), or when the implementation of new modes of investment or job creation are rather nebulous, or when many people begin to feel new and more intense labour, economic, and food pressures (if this is possible) than in previous years.

What many Cubans would like to know is whether in the new year, and the new life, things will be better for them. Because while a “perfecting of the Cuban economic model” is proposed, which might increase opportunities for social and financial advancement in one sector of the population, the majority of Cubans will be hard hit by the reduction of subsidies, the lack of jobs, the high cost of living, and the housing shortage with which they have lived and may continue to live in the new country set for delivery in the new year. And although the new is usually better than no change, or what has been proven to be inefficient, the good is not necessarily a direct consequence of this novelty.

At the moment, Cubans are living quite far away from the so-called “Christmas spirit”, waiting in long lines to buy a few extra pounds of rice and asking their neighbours if they know where to get some black beans to serve at a modest New Years dinner where they will dream of a new life. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Nov 30 2010 (IPS)

After a long wait and numerous postponements, the Cuban Communist Party has decided to hold its sixth congress in April 2011. The last was held in 1997, more than 13 years ago, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs.

In this analysis, Padura writes that at the same time as the announcement of the meeting, the release of a 32-page pamphlet entitled “A Plan for Social and Economic Policy”, was made public. The document contains 291 proposals and attempts the definition of a new model for the country’s economic, productive, commercial, and social policy which, it is hoped, will help Cuba weather the current crisis.

The “structural and conceptual” changes in the Cuban model announced three years ago by Raul Castro are starting to take shape and make their presence felt. Now we will see how they effect the lives of millions of Cubans, doomed to live in a country in which economic competition and work must now take the place of state paternalism, and where efficiency will now try to displace subsidies, and where economic and social inequality is certain to rise after decades in which equality was officially created and promoted.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM// (END) (END)

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Nov 16 2010 (IPS)

After a long wait and numerous postponements, the Cuban Communist Party, which oversees and directs the politics of the island, has decided to hold its sixth congress, in April 2011. The last was held in 1997, more than 13 years ago.

At the same time as the announcement of the meeting, which was made by the second secretary of the organisation and president of the republic, General Raul Castro, the release of a 32-page pamphlet entitled “A Plan for Social and Economic Policy”, was made public. The document contains 291 proposals and attempts the definition of a new model for the country’s economic, productive, commercial, and social policy which, it is hoped, will help Cuba weather the current crisis.

The release of the Plan is in keeping with the principle that “the socialist planning system will remain the cornerstone of the management of the national economy” and with intent to move the island towards greater efficiency in production. It seeks the elimination of a wide range of paternalistic practices of the Cuban state and will establish its credibility with new and old foreign investors.

The goal of the massive distribution of the Plan is to make the text into an object of debate among both party organs and citizens in order to see where there is agreements and disagreement and to devise changes to its concrete, tactical, and strategic elements. However, the categorical formulation of many of its points, the specialisation (economic, financial, and commercial) necessary to understand many of its sections, make it clear that its general application is a work in progress carried as part of the so-called “perfecting of the Cuban economic model” promoted by a government struggling with the difficulties, incongruencies, and incapacities of the system in place up until now, which was in many ways a response to the profound crisis the country experienced in the 1990s and which resulted in the existence of a double currency scheme, among other ills.

While many aspects of the document stand out, the most notable include the decentralisation of the economy by granting autonomy to entrepreneurs and the introduction of economic and financial instruments in a process that is usually dominated by political and administrative decisions, often anti-economic, as the reality of the country demonstrates.

Thus in very precise language, the Plan warns that in the period to come the survival of almost all businesses will depend on their ability to generate earnings, and if they don’t they will face “liquidation”. Meanwhile entities that receive state money will be reduced to a bare minimum. The Plan also states that the solidarity projects with other countries (an essential part of Cuban foreign policy) will be subjected to economic evaluation, never previously the case.

The plan also contains numerous calls for ending subsidies (including the ration booklet, which provides a modicum of food staples at low cost that are indispensable to a large percentage of Cuban families), the elimination of jobs in state companies (a process that is already underway and involves layoffs of half a million employees in six months), and the promotion of forms of non-state production, services, and land use, with a projected increase in the work force in cooperatives and free lance operations.

These developments will be accompanied by the rollout of a new fiscal policy that includes imposition of a high tax rate for the highest earnings.

The economic shakeup that has begun in Cuba is in every way radical and profound, though there is no parallel wave of major changes to the single-party political system and government structures. Nonetheless, the social impacts of the changes that have already occurred and those to come will constitute a serious challenge to the Cuban political system.

For the people, the most controversial changes involve the new labour policy and the elimination of subsidies, which extends even to education and health care. The possibility that a part of those laid off in coming months will move into freelance work just as many who are already freelancers will have their status finally legalised makes this one of the more complicated solutions, given the country’s critical economic situation.

It is clear that the “structural and conceptual” changes in the Cuban model announced three years ago by then interim president Raul Castro are starting to take shape and make their presence felt in Cuban social and economic life. Now we will see how they effect the lives of millions of Cubans, doomed to live in a country in which economic competition and work must now take the place of state paternalism, and where efficiency will now try to displace subsidies, and where economic and social inequality is certain to rise after decades in which equality was officially created and promoted. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Oct 26 2010 (IPS)

Six years ago, when I leapt definitively down the rabbit hole of writing a book about the exile and assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the bizarre and spurious selection, training, and fate of the man who would ultimately be his assassin (the Catalan Ramon Mercader), I frequently asked myself the same question that journalists and readers have asked me since the publication of the novel in Spain in September 2009, and recently published in Italy in the first of a number of translations underway: what can you tell us that is new about the history of the assassination of the ousted communist leader exactly 70 years ago, with WWII raging and in a remote world in which, at the end of that conflict political systems would divide into two camps, the communist and the capitalist. A distant time in which a large part of humanity still believed (despite Stalin) in the possibility of a proletarian socialist utopia founded by the October Revolution, the better world always dreamt of by man.

It’s been twenty years already since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the collapse of the USSR. Yet in that time there has been no slowing of the flow of documents and testimony about the reality of real socialism: and though we believe that we already know everything, the elucidation of episodes like the Katyn massacre in which Soviet soldiers killed thousands of Polish officers, and the distribution of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Life and Destiny, in which Russian Vassili Grossman lays out the essence of totalitarian systems, or the simple (not so) understanding of the daily run-ins with terror that filled and perverted the lives of millions of human beings, are stories that still affect, because economic, political, and even religious totalitarianism, the desire for control, and the fight for power are still not things of the past. And nor is or will ever be the right to dream of a world where we are all really “more equal” as George Orwell would say.

Now if much has already been written about all of this, what can a Cuban writer contribute who has lived and continues to live the Cuban experience in the streets of his city, trying to capture it in his novels?

The practice of literature in Cuba, still today, fortunately, involves the old responsibility of commitment: because it would be neither dignified nor ethical or even artistic to write literature in Cuba for aesthetic reasons alone. Although maybe it could be, in the name of this supreme liberty that Trotsky himself believed should be extended to art.

However Cuba is not only a complex and highly politicised reality but also unique and, despite this, is often seen in simplistic modes, both adulatory and condemnatory, without grasping the elements that give it its extraordinary density, which no one understands better than Cubans themselves.

One of the possible and valid reasons to have written such a novel in Cuba and from Cuba would be to consider it as a response to the idea that art should have a “cognitive function”.

The near total lack of knowledge of the trials that led to the political fall and assassination of Trotsky, that ink-black cloud in which we Cubans have lived for decades, was one of the elements that generated the impulse to write this novel and that then sustained it. Because without a doubt, from my point of a view as a novelist, more than a historical fact the brutal assassination of Trotsky is a powerfully charged symbol: it was, as we say in Spanish, the cherry that the pie needed.

Because this killing, ordered against a supposed “fascist enemy”,, was carried out a year after Stalin signed the Non-aggression Pact with Hitler’s Germany and invaded Poland with the remnants of the Red Army that, in collusion with these same Germans, the red tsar had purged in 1937. The death of the “traitor” Trotsky also came a year after the painful defeat of the Spanish Republic, where Stalin’s advisors enthusiastically carried out the same sickening fundamentalist terror campaign that had been inflicted on the USSR. The condemnation of Trotsky, moreover, had been carried out in certain Muscovite trials that between 1936-38 eliminated the last elements of the old guard Bolsheviks who, with Lenin and Trotsky himself, had made the 1917 revolution and launched his ideas into the world.

The murder was carried out with an ice axe placed in the hands of a communist believer (Ramon Mercader) after millions of Soviets and thousands of European communists had been sent off to Siberian work camps or died (by the millions) in the land and property “collectivisation” process that impoverished Russia and condemned the inefficient communist state economy.

Off the island the knowledge of these phenomena was more widespread, discussed, and even refuted, but with the passage of a few years, forgetfulness set in and today, just two or three generations later, it is as if it never happened.

I am and will always be convinced that it is useful, indeed urgent, to know and relive in the 21st century the political as well as social and human reasons for the perversion of the marvellous idea that man can live in a society with equality and not only with free health care and education but also the maximum freedom and the maximum of democracy, to make human existence truly more full and whole.

The urgency and relevance of this understanding derives from the reality of our world today, battered by economic, ecological, migratory, and religious crises. It is a world that extols its democracy but in which millions of humans suffer from chronic hunger and misery, which makes us consider the necessity of refounding a utopia, a better world, and one doesn’t repeat the mistakes and horrors and that characterised (and ruined) the first attempt, scarring the 20th century.

For this reason I believe that, in a Cuba that finally carries out conceptual and structural changes of its socialist system, it was necesary, and a visceral issue for me, that I write a novel on a crime that occurred 70 years ago and tells the story of three men -a Soviet, a Spaniard, and a Cuban- who, however different, shared that most human trait of loving dogs. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Sep 14 2010 (IPS)

If any of the world’s major polling firms dared conduct a macro survey of the 11 million Cubans, asking only where they thought their country was headed, I think the overwhelming majority would respond,”I have no idea, mate.”

There is, however, something that stands out clearly in the fog: the fact that the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party, government, and country is not considering among the possible alternatives a change from single-party socialism, the same system that dominated the Soviet Union and the socialist republics of Eastern Europe in the 20th century and that remains alive in certain communist Asian countries, from North Korea to China, although with very different characteristics that are in my opinion not very desirable as models for development and life for a country like Cuba.

In recent months we have seen the appearance in Cuba’s alternative media -emails and blogs- a serious debate about ways in which the economy of the island could be changed to lift it out of the current crisis of unproductivity and inefficiency that is the direct result of five decades of operation under the current model, insufficient controls, and a general lack of motivation among producers caused by salaries that for the last two decades have been too low to live off.

The latest subject of debate is the announced opening of the Cuban tourist industry to high-level visitors. This will include, it is said, the construction of marinas for luxury yachts, 18-hole golf courses, and even houses and apartments with 99-year leases for purchase by foreigners (according to a decree from July 19). The decision has generated a wide range of reactions, from that of the party orthodox, who say they didn’t carry weapons and make a revolutions to sell their country to millionaires, to those who argue that a few golf courses will change nothing if nothing of real importance changes.

Already in the 1990s during the profound crisis that engulfed the island after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and socialism in Eastern Europe, foreigners were allowed to purchase real estate built with foreign-Cuban government financing. But this possibility virtually disappeared before long. I even remember hearing the phrase that not a centimetre of the country would be sold to foreigners. Now the new decree gives extraordinary momentum to opening up investment in the housing and tourism sectors for foreign visitors -a particularly curious development in a country where the citizens are not allowed to buy or sell their own homes and where they need an inconceivable number of permits to build one with their own resources, or even to exchange theirs with another.

There has been a similar flurry of change is spheres in which state control has long been overwhelming, from the elimination of subsidies for the monthly ration of cigarettes for all Cubans born before 1956, to the imposition of taxes on street vendors selling mangos or avocados from their own gardens (they will now pay a 5 percent tax on sales and a contribution to social security) -this from the very clandestine vendors (of mangos and avocados!) who up until now were prosecuted and fined by the police.

The need to find work alternatives for the million-plus employees whose jobs in state agencies will have to be eliminated is but one of many reasons for the effort to revitalise freelance work and, it would seem, microbusinesses. But no sooner does this conversation begin than complications arise: Who in Cuba has the capital necessary to start a small business? Can the funds come from relatives or partners living abroad who want to give the Cuban economy a boost? How would it be possible to restore the entire structure that was dynamited in the “Revolutionary Offensive” of 1968 that converted Cuba into a socialist country with more state workers and fewer possibilities for non-state employment? And what about the supply of products, the market, or taxation, the health care system, or the police force, for all of which it would be necessary to open up an apparatus that has been sealed off for four decades?

A recent programme on Cuban television showed the situation of a clearinghouse for agricultural goods near Havana where because of the lack of transportation, huge quantities of plantains and yams that had just been harvested were lost. Could the private sector help to prevent such situations? The answer should be yes, but in this country in which the only vehicles that can be bought or sold are those manufactured before 1960(!), it is hard to imagine anyone succeeding in organising a cooperative or small business for private transport.

Assuming that the government is not trying to bring about political changes, the only possibility for opening certain economic doors will have to involve such an extensive restructuring of the Cuban system that, even if it remains the same, it will never be the same again. Meanwhile the image it projects of the future is a fog within which it is barely possible to make out certain vague figures. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Aug 9 2010 (IPS)

One of the most thankless and complicated exercises required of Cuba specialists is having to divine what lies behind -or beneath- developments in the country.

The most recent developments in Cuba-let’s say, since the announcement of the liberation of 52 prisoners, counterrevolutionaries to one side, conscientious resisters to the other- has set off a veritable avalanche of speculation intensified by unexpected factors like the reappearance of Fidel Castro after a four-year absence due to illness; the decision by President Raul Castro to not make a major speech for the July 26 anniversary, considered until now the most important public event of the year in Cuba; or the presidential announcement during the last meeting of the legislature of a broadening of the forms of freelance work permitted as a way to ease the economic troubles and absorb a portion of state workers that need to be "rationalised" (more than a million, or a staggering 20 percent of the country’s labour force).

The questions most frequently asked by reporters and specialists -and put to anyone that might have an interesting hunch- relate to the possibility that at the upper reaches of Cuban politics there is a struggle for power or at least for a different economic orientation (including tensions between Raul and Fidel); to the new economic model that Cuba might be inching towards; and to the possibility that economic change might trigger political change.

The most prominent element of Cuban reality is without a doubt the critical economic and financial situation, caused not only by the US embargo/blockade and the global crisis but also, and especially, by the exhaustion or unsuitability of its current economic and trade structures, which will have to be changed sooner or later.

Thus the decision of the government to broaden the possibilities for private enterprise (though it is not yet known in which sectors or with what conditions) is doubtless a response to the current calls for change. President Raul Castro himself admitted in his last pronouncement that it was no longer possible to maintain the image (or reality) of Cuba as a country where one could live without working and yet, as the president also recognised, not be able to live on what one makes from working (even for the most highly-trained professionals). This demonstrates the existence of serious deformations in the economic system of a country which granted itself the luxury of maintaining full employment at the cost of inefficiency, unproductivity, the creation of unnecessary jobs, and, as a consequence, the payment of salaries that are more virtual than real. This saps workers’ motivation and forces many to support themselves in the most twisted ways, which, in general, derive from and lead to corruption, stealing from the government, or the black market.

It is also clear that Cuban social policy, while retaining certain standards of social security, has ceased its "paternalism" (a creation of the state) in response not to political will but rather to economic necessity. The effects of this change are felt in the educational sector (cuts in scholarships and dropping university enrolment, for example) in pensions (the retirement age has been raised by five years), and in the taxes will be imposed on land that is not cultivated or barely so.

Finally, though equally important, there is the fact that the form of governance has not changed in Cuba and will not in the short term. The government has warned that the single-party political system and socialist economic planning will not be effected by the changes that are being made or by the introduction of specific measures, like the liberation of the 52 prisoners.

What is undeniable in the mix of predictions and the lack of information is that the Cuban government is seeking economic alternatives that could shore up its political position. There is no other way to interpret the encouragement of free-lance work (reestablished and at the same time denigrated in the 1990s), or plans for opening up tourism, including not only the 16 new golf courses and the construction of marinas for yachts but also the sale of homes to foreigners (another practice from the 90s that had virtually disappeared) And, to not seem out of place, we might also ask the oracles, What foreigners will the houses be sold to? Might some surprise be brewing in US-Cuban relations? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Jul 6 2010 (IPS)

A year and a half ago when democrat Barack Obama became president of the United States, Raul Castro was already president of Cuba. On both sides of the Florida Straits, the winds of renewal seemed to blow, for domestic and international matters, in both style and policy. Both leaders spoke of the need for change. One area thought to be a likely focus was Cuban-American relations. The most optimistic spoke of loosening and even eliminating the embargo, given its failure to achieve its goal of toppling the regime in Havana and its repudiation by the international community. Moreover, the new Cuban president spoke of his openness to dialogue on any issue with the sole condition being respect for the independence and sovereignty of the island.

Obama’s first sixteen months as president have been a trial, consumed by fundamental problems like the economic crisis, his attempt to modify the health care system, and grave political and military problems in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Even so Cuba has had a place on the agenda, and this period has seen a beneficial drop in tensions and a rollback of the most extreme measures imposed by the Bush administration regarding family visits by Cuban exiles, remittances, and visits by Cuban academics and artists to the US. Things returned more or less to the way they were under Clinton -and stayed there.

In Cuba, meanwhile, there has been movement domestically that, while not as deep as hoped (and needed, above all in finance and the economy, both in real crisis) has brought change to certain areas of life in the country: from numerous personnel shakeups in the power structure to the reduction of social handouts and the elimination of restrictions that kept Cubans from having cell phones or patronising beach resorts on their own island.

The latest and most important shift in the politics of the island, however, was the beginning of a dialogue between the Cuban Catholic church and the government to address (as far as is known) issues as sensitive as suspending the harassment of the “Women in White” -wives of political prisoners- and the status and physical condition of political prisoners (not recognised as such by the government), an area where there have been slow but important first steps.

The death of a prisoner on hunger strike and another similar protest (which has already gone on for four months and seemed headed for a catastrophic and lamentable end) have turned up the heat on Cuban politics, especially in relation to international opinion.

On the other hand, the complex economic situation of the island is evident in the shortages that complicate daily life (especially given the impossibility of meeting the needs of a family with a state salary), the state’s inability to resolve major problems like the housing shortage, the government’s inability to pay debts to foreign suppliers of merchandise, or disasters like the last sugar harvest. Then there are problems like corruption, the extent of which is unclear because it is known only through rumour; together these form a chilling panorama that seems impossible to address with political decisions alone.

The easing of positions by the Cuban government (who would have imagined a few months ago that a march like that of the Women in White would have been allowed, or that steps would have been taken to save the life of a dissident on a hunger strike?) and the entry of the Catholic church into the realm of Cuban politics create a new context for an eventual opening of the continuously-postponed dialogue between the US and Havana.

Thus it would not seem unreasonable to see as another step forward the recent visit to the US of Cuban cardinal Jaime Ortega, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, keeps a “low profile” despite -still according to the Journal- rumours of meetings that he had in Washington, including one with Arturo Valenzuela, who heads the Bureau for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Though there has been no confirmation of this meeting, it has not been denied either.

Similarly former president Jimmy Carter has asked Obama again to reconsider the issue of the embargo and begin to lift it. Meanwhile a group of 74 Cuban opposition members has called on Obama to allow US citizens to travel freely in Cuba, arguing that the arrival of massive numbers of Americans on the island would cause a domestic destabilisation. In this context, there was progress elsewhere in the form of a law passed by the Agricultural Committee of the US Congress that would allow Americans to visit the island and lift restrictions on agricultural exports to Cuba.

Meanwhile inside Cuba, there are more and more voices close to the government that are calling for an opening of dialogue, oppose the requirement of official permission to travel internationally, and call for a deepening of economic reform, including the introduction of different forms of production and of non-government property, among other things.

Given the current climate and the mix of tensions feeding it, I believe that if there is sufficient political will and realism, on both sides, this might be the moment to take additional steps to improve a political relationship that has festered like a sore. Of course it will not be easy to change course, when so many political and economic interests are involved, and so much resentment, justifications, and wounds. But, as someone has already asked, if this is not possible now, will it be in a future when instead of Obama there is another figure like Bush in the White House? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, May 26 2010 (IPS)

History is addicted to the creation of cliches, drawn generally from a more or less visible reality held up as typifying a society, an age, or a country. And so with Cuba, known in certain periods known as the “Key of the Gulf” (of Mexico) because of its geographical location, or the “Pearl of the Empire” (the Spanish empire of the Americas), has been identified for much of the last century with sugar above all else.

Perhaps the most striking example of the historic importance of sugar for Cuba is the fact that the island will not be celebrating the bicentennial of its independence with the majority of the other Spanish-American republics precisely because of sugar. Cuban wealth in the 19th century was based on this industry, which required the labour of millions of slaves imported from Africa who around 1820 constituted (blacks and mestizos) about half of the island’s population. With their presence these blacks introduced into the Cuban bourgeoisie (also called the sugarocracy) the fear that a change in political system would lead to a revolution like that which shortly before had swept neighbouring Haiti, until then the largest producer of sugar in the world.

Equally important is the fact that the independence uprising that finally solidified in 1868 would take place at a sugar mill and that its first revolutionary act was the liberation of the black slaves of the owner, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes.

In 1970, in the full bloom of the revolution, the new regime bet on the sugar industry, which was supposed to produce 10 million tonnes a year, as the machine that would pull Cuba up to a higher level of development. The failure of this wager not only weakened the economics of the country but also changed many social and cultural structures (from the alteration of traditions like birthday parties and carnivals to the imposition of iron-fisted orthodoxy over artistic creation which subsequently entered the so-called black decade or five years of grey.)

This is why the news that this year’s sugar production was the weakest since 1905, when the country was just recovering from the devastation of the war of independence (1895-1898), is more alarming than many could have imagined. It is also an unequivocal sign that the Cuban economy generates its own crises, independent of those that arrive from afar, like embargoes.

A few years ago, when sugar prices fell drastically and productivity on the island was already lamentably low, there was a restructuring of the sugar sector and dozens of sugar plants were shut down and large areas land were reassigned for other crops. This was a heavy blow to the sugar industry, so integral to the island’s identity and the country’s production of wealth in other periods. It found itself knocked from its preeminent position in Cuban economic life.

Reality will demonstrate, stubbornly, that the land previously used for sugar cultivation was not indispensable to the development of other crops. After the redistribution of these zones to cooperatives, there are still between 1.2 million and three million hectares of fallow land. Meanwhile the crisis in Cuban food production does not seem to have improved and the island still imports 80 percent of what it eats. It had also been demonstrated that efficiency is not easily revived in the sugar industry.

Just a day after the removal/resignation of the then minister of agriculture, the Cuban press finally began to report on the sugar disaster of 2010 and announced ill-fated plan for the future. A range of problems brought on what an expert in the field called the self-delusion of those in charge of the sector. In addition to the economic costs of this setback at a time when the price of sugar on world markets is high, there is a strange sense of frustration that has assailed me as a Cuban from the moment I learned of the news. The economy of the island is in serious conflict with the forces of production and even with Cuban workers (there are thought to be a million surplus state employees, almost a fourth of the active work force).

However, harking back to the days when the pain of the African slaves and the oppression of the Chinese labourers was more intense, the sugar fiasco is also a blow to the pride of a nation, a society, and a spirituality which the country owes almost everything that it was: including even the cliche from, I think, the 1940s that without sugar there is no country. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Apr 7 2010 (IPS)

It will soon be three years since Cuban president Raul Castro acknowledged the necessity of introducing structural and conceptual changes in the social and economic model of the country, which is plagued by endemic inefficiency, contradictions, unpredictable factors, and bureaucratic measures and countermeasures that block any movement towards a possible tapping of the creative and productive potential of the island and its people.

Although from the beginning, on July 26, 2007, the then interim government warned that immediate implementation of these modifications was impossible and asked for a grace period to take steps to avoid making new mistakes, Cuban life today is in ever more urgent need of change in a wide range of the country’s social structures and modes of production.

What is clearly necessary are measures that can guarantee, above all, an elevation of living standards for a population that since the early 1990s has seen drastic reductions in its levels of consumption, in its access to material improvements and basic services, and especially in food and housing, which constitute the largest headaches for the millions and millions of Cubans who must struggle day after day just to get by.

True, there have been some changes in this period, almost all of an economic nature, some intended to collect currencies held by certain sectors of the population by allowing Cubans to patronise centres of tourism and open cell phone accounts. Various subsidies and handouts were eliminated -in particular, middle school scholarships and free workers cafeterias in certain ministries- while the number of subsidised products available with the ration card was slashed.

There were attempts to increase the efficiency of the agricultural sector by dividing up a part of the numerous state land holdings that had (unbelievably) lain fallow as a result of a highly regulated land-use system, and by creating more direct connections between producers and consumers.

An initiative was undertaken to fight corruption and a lack of state control by creating a central regulatory agency that would -or should- oversee the prosecution of certain categories of theft, “misuse of resources”, and the unimaginably varied range of schemes that have grown up in every area and every level of Cuban production, services, and bureaucracy.

In reality all of these moves -though both obvious and necessary- have barely affected Cuba’s centralised state apparatus and done almost nothing to relieve the basic problems of the people, which remain for the most part unchanged over the last two decades: the low purchasing power of state salaries, which forces people to find alternative sources of income or to live off of “inventions” outside of state labour regulations; the shortage of products at farmers markets and high prices (a kilogram of pork costs a worker three days’ wages) caused by a system that has failed in every possible way; the near eternal and seemingly unsolvable problem of the housing shortage and overcrowding (with all of the social fallout it causes).

Add to these problems the ever more alarming flaws of the healthcare system (the most dramatic example of which was the death from cold of tens of patients in the Havana psychiatric hospital, an event supposedly still under investigation), the educational system (the decline in the quality of instruction is evident at first sight and was noted eventually in the official press) and even the field of sports (where there have been inconceivable debacles, even in Cuba’s traditional strengths, like baseball and boxing).

Many families benefitted from the Obama administration’s move to lift limits on travel to the island by Cubans living in the US and on remittances from the US to family members back home. But the resources introduced as a result, though they ease daily life for many in the country and fill state coffers, do not carry over into a strengthening of economic structures outside the centralised state system because there are no mechanisms in place to accomplish this.

What is contradictory in this situation is the fact that this influx from abroad always generates differences in economic advantage, further exacerbating the disparities in Cuban society and leading to the emergence of a privileged class not as a result of its own abilities and efforts but rather its access to currency. As a result, while certain young Cubans have enough money to invest a thousand dollars to receive breast implants, the majority live counting every devalued peso just to survive.

While in recent months the political temperature of the island has risen notably, the essential changes that many hope for have not materialised, and daily life remains as arduous and complicated as in previous years. In addition, there are even threats that social benefits may be cut further by a state that is trying to end its paternalism without abandoning the essence of this political and philosophical approach. As a result, although it is now possible to buy aspirin in pharmacies, the headaches of daily Cuban life go unrelieved because, as I think everybody knows, it will take more than a simple analgesic to treat them. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Mar 8 2010 (IPS)

With books in hand, the Russians have returned to Cuba.

For thirty years they were an indispensable presence on the island. The then Soviets provided socialist Cuba with international political, economic, and military support in a world clearly divided between two blocs and swept by the frigid winds of the Cold War and threats of atomic conflagration.

We Cubans had electricity and watched television (innumerable films and even “Russian” cartoons) thanks to Soviet oil; we read books and periodicals printed on the paper they sent us; we built up a defence with their weapons and equipment, baked our bread with Soviet wheat, and ate tins of “Russian meat”. During these three decades, tens of thousands of Cubans studied in Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and other cities of the gigantic country, and thousands returned with Russian brides -not all of whom were Russian, strictly speaking.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and with it the indestructible friendship, the oil vanished as well, and the paper, and the wheat. The new countries that sprung up from the ruins of the union unanimously opted for a return to capitalism, and capitalistically demanded money for trade. Cuba had to maintain its system of socialism in the most desolate solitude. There followed the awful crisis whose official and historical name -the Special Period in Times of Peace- doesn’t begin to convey the intensity of the hardship, the shortages, and the desperation that average Cubans suffered through.

The reaction was immediate: as soon as this provider of technical assistance and resources collapsed, its previously suffocating and expanding presence in the Cuban culture and daily life ended in an instant. Of the Russian women married to Cubans, most fled, unable to take the chronic blackouts and shortages. No visible traces were left of the thirty-year social, cultural, and political marriage: not a single custom, popular dish, or even military base, all of which vanished as well. The Russian footprint in Cuba was simply wiped clean, and in no time at all nothing remained of the complicity between the two countries aside from a few ideological notions and political practices that even the Russians would eliminate in their own country but that Cuba’s leaders chose to retain.

In recent years, Moscow has initiated a rapprochement with Cuba, urged by prime minister and former president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who has sought to revive Russian pride and greatness and its prominence on the political map. Cuba, crippled by a tightening US embargo, has long needed all the political support and economic and trade help it could get. It responded enthusiastically to this gesture. The exchange between the countries revived, though in a different form: it was no longer a product of socialist geopolitics but rather a group of tactical, trade, and political agreements based on common interests between two countries with different, if not antagonistic, economic and ideological systems.

This new contact has brought with it various psychological and historical advantages: a nostalgia for the old days of brotherhood, or the fact that virtually no historical analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union in its 70 years of socialism, deeply scarred by the political methods of Stalin, was to be found in Cuba -nothing about ethnic cleaning, the forced displacement of populations, terror as a state policy, ecological disaster as the price of development at any cost, or even the shady extraterritorial adventures (Poland, Spain, the Caucasus, and certain Baltic countries) planned by the Georgian secretary general and continued by his heirs.

Now, with books in hand, the Russians are returning to the island. The Russian Federation was the guest of honour at the Cuban Book Fair (February 12-March 7). The event was transformed into a platform for a massive disembarking of figures from Russian politics and the contemporary Russian art scene. Books (in Russian), films (Russian and Soviet), and dance companies were at the forefront of this attempt to restore the closeness between the two countries shattered for almost two decades, during which insults and accusations of disloyalty were exchanged in abundance.

Though the Cuban press may at times filter, for example, commentaries on the devastating effects of socialist realism on Russian art, it is clear that the image Russia is presenting of itself and its present bears little relation to what it was in the 1990s, when the country tipped into the void, and the cradle of the socialist revolution renounced the principles that it had proclaimed for 70 years, opening its arms and soul instead to the most savage form of capitalism in what we in Cuba called the “desmerengamiento”, or the collapse of the great meringue.

This stable and prosperous country, respectful of the differences between us today, is nonetheless, a capitalist country, and for reasons of dialectical and economic logic, it must carry along with it the characteristics of the system studied and condemned by Marx which led the Bolsheviks to foment revolution so many decades ago. Perhaps the most unexpected lesson generated by these developments is that we are learning, now, that there are evil and less evil (indeed almost good) forms of capitalism, and that the past is a book from which we can lift favourable chapters and skip over those that stir contention, for the benefit of politics. Always politics. (END\COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura, Jayantha Dhanapala, and - -
KANDY, SRI LANKA, Feb 3 2010 (IPS)

The only viable normative approach regarding nuclear weapons is their total and universal elimination under strict verification. This cannot be achieved by incremental steps but only by the negotiation of a Nuclear Weapons Convention as advocated by the UN Secretary-General.

Today, there are some grounds to hope for a reconciliation of the broken marriage between nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Both US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev have repeatedly indicated their support for achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. We may be heading for a new age of de-proliferation, a reversal both of the spread of these weapons and of their perpetuation and further improvement.

The concept of nuclear-weapon ‘proliferation’ has two dimensions: horizontal (geographical spread) and vertical (improvements of existing arsenals). The nuclear-weapon states (NWS), supported by states in NATO and others under the ‘nuclear umbrella’, have long stressed the importance of preventing the former while promoting the latter.

Here’s how it works. The NWS express alarm over the prospect, real or imagined, of new nuclear-weapon states. This leads them to engage in desperate efforts (such as the illegal invasion of Iraq) to prevent this from happening, hence the need for ever-increasing controls against horizontal proliferation.

Yet this contrived foreign threat has a dual-use: it also serves the NWS as grounds for rationalising the improvement (‘modernisation’) of their nuclear arsenals, and the indefinite postponement of disarmament.

The selective narrative of the NWS has even further obfuscated matters with the conspiracy of silence over the undeclared nuclear-weapon capability of Israel, which some of them have assisted. Moreover, an arbitrary distinction has been drawn between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ proliferators. The 1995 Resolution on the Middle East -without which the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) would not have been achieved- has been ignored.

Thus India, a longstanding holdout of the NPT but a ‘good’ proliferator, has been rewarded with supplies of technology and material under its nuclear co-operation deal with the US. Likewise the stationing of US nuclear weapons in five European countries despite the objections of the public in some of them is justified as ‘nuclear sharing’.

A new dimension is the possible acquisition and use of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups, which, while being frighteningly real, is another form of proliferation that the NWS have seized upon to distract attention from their own nuclear weapons -which, of course, have no conceivable military value in combating terrorism. The fundamental issue is that nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous in anybody’s hands.

This upstairs/downstairs division of responsibilities between nuclear have’s and have-not’s is also pernicious in masking the reality that disarmament and non-proliferation are two faces of the same coin. They have to be mutually-reinforcing parallel processes.

The emergence in the 20th century of nuclear weapons as the most destructive weapon of mass destruction and terror marked a watershed. This weapon proved to be vastly more destructive of human life with long-lasting ecological and genetic effects. Thus the elimination or control of nuclear weapons became the priority of the UN and the international community.

Bilateral treaties between the two largest NWS (US and Russia, which hold an estimated 95 percent of these weapons) and multilateral treaties banning nuclear tests (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty or CTBT) and proliferation (NPT) have sought to regulate their vertical and horizontal proliferation. So have the nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties forged by non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS). It is estimated by SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) that today there are more than 23,300 nuclear warheads in the world and that the US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel have 8,392 deployed warheads ready to be launched within minutes.

The normative structure with regard to all weapons has two aspects. One is to seek universal bans on inhumane weapons or particular categories of weapons for humanitarian and collective security reasons. The other is to seek arms control in terms of levels of arsenals or prevention of new possessors. Disarmament requires verifiable destruction of existing weapons, cessation of production, sale, storage, transfer, or acquisition.

Thus the outlawing (as distinct from limitation or reduction) of biological and chemical weapons, anti-personnel land mines, cluster munitions, laser weapons, and other categories has been achieved globally even though the multilateral treaties negotiated for these purposes may not be universal and their verification is not always reliable.

The one treaty which attempts a combination of disarmament and arms control is the NPT, which is the world’s most widely subscribed to disarmament treaty. It openly accepts two categories of state parties -the NWS and the NNWS.

NWS are obliged, as treaty parties, to negotiate the reduction and elimination of their weapons. NNWS are totally forbidden to acquire such weapons and the International Atomic Energy Agency is empowered to enter into arrangements with them when peaceful uses of nuclear energy are involved.

As far as arms control is concerned, NWS are permitted to retain their weapons with the restraints that apply through other bilateral and multilateral treaties. But instead of fulfilling their obligations under the NPT, the NWS are trying to impose more restrictions on the NNWS in preparation for the May 2010 NPT Review Conference by seeking to limit the Article X right to withdrawal and to impose new conditionalities for the Article IV right to their peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

The discovery of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapon programme in the early 1990s; the withdrawal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from the NPT and its subsequent nuclear weapon tests; the acknowledgment and rectification of Libya’s non-compliance; the persisting questions about a reported Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel; and the continuing tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme have certainly weakened the NPT as a non-proliferation instrument.

At this juncture, only a reunification of the disarmament and the non-proliferation approaches can save the treaty. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Jayantha Dhanapala, former Ambassador of Sri Lanka, presided over the 1995 NPT Review & Extension Conference. He was UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs from 1998-2003 and is currently President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs. These are his personal views.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Feb 1 2010 (IPS)

At times it seemed like he was long dead, and the news that he had died on January 28, just past his 91st birthday, does not dispel the strange sensation of being but not living (or living and not being) that this man generated. Because for almost half a century J.D.Salinger may have been dead the way writers usually die: they stop writing. And yet no one can deny that thanks to what he had written, this death was impossible, because Salinger was, is, and will always be terribly (to use one of his favourite adverbs) immortal.

His last breath (or the step necessary to reach a new Buddhist reincarnation) he took exactly as he had decided: far from the world, in total silence, in that distant corner of New Hampshire called Cornish, where he had voluntarily, and unwaveringly, exiled himself to live in peace and meditation.

He died, as he had lived, in a Salingerian way. Because no writer had ever resembled his characters so viscerally: until the end, Salinger was a mixture of the adolescent Holden Caulfiend of The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass brothers that frequent various of his novels and stories: a tormented man who never finds, or found, a home on the physical earth and who sought his place in the sunya (emptiness) of Zen Buddhism when he adopted this philosophy.

A writer who considered himself the most important figure in American letters since Herman Melville, who knew war and literary failure in his 20s, who won fame and fortune at thirty, who at forty turned his back on the trappings of celebrity and all social activity, and at 45 cut the last tie with the publishing world when he sent the New Yorker magazine the story “Hapworth 16, 1924”, Salinger is, without a doubt, more a literary character than a real man.

With the existential weariness that led him to the practice of Zen and the terribly (yes, terribly) dramatic decision to live in isolation and publish nothing more when he was considered a classic author in universal literature and the icon of an entire generation and the traumas of a country, he came to resemble more a work of fiction than a flesh-and-blood life. But the fact is that for Salinger everything was literature and everything that was bequeathed to us was literature too. Perhaps -and regrettably- not as much as it should be.

Because the true mystery of his existence, which is now being transformed into expectation, is whether his silence was only in publishing or was creative as well. The assurances of certain people that they heard him say he was still writing, but only for pleasure, not for publishing (similar to the case of Juan Rulfo and his non-existent next novel, which has been announced for decades) glitter like a light at the back of a cave. What would he have written, if indeed he was writing? More stories of the Glass brothers? Thoughts from his Buddhist meditation and contemplation?

Like many people today who have read Salinger, my first exposure to his work occurred after he had broken with the world of publishing. It was a brutal encounter: after the commotion unleashed in me by The Catcher in the Rye (the work that made him famous in 1951), I moved on to Nine Stories (published in 1953) which made me almost die with envy, then the dazzling Franny and Zooey (my favourite of Salinger, from 1961), and finally the apocalypse of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (his last work, almost agonizing, published in 1963). Since then I have been a militant Salingerian and read these books again and again. I have slipped into the lives of his characters and even borrowed from one of his stories (For Esme with Love and Squalor) to try and write “moving and squalid works” like those the adolescent Esme preferred.

Since then, for many years, a dream has pursued me: that Salinger, in his refuge in the north, dedicated himself not only to meditation but also to writing (like some said). Because a man capable of creating such beauty, and provoking such unease through his work, of attaining a level of perfection the rest of us would never even dream of, creating beings capable of changing our perception of the world, does not have the right to close up shop and leave us thirsty. Salinger had to keep on writing: and if he didn’t, he is guilty of one of the most unpardonable crimes in the history of literature.

But since I know -of course I do- that he had to write during these years of silence, I hope that someone will put his manuscripts in circulation and, on this side of the world where we look forward to the moment of our next incarnation, I wish J.D.Salinger a pleasant transition to his new state. I wish him this “with love and squalor”. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Jan 15 2010 (IPS)

Haiti was the first independent country of Latin America. In the last years of the 18th century the French colony of Santo Domingo, which occupied the western half of the island of Hispaniola saw the coffee and sugar cane plantations that had produced such immense wealth for Europe set ablaze. The fires were started by black slaves, whether brought over from Africa or born in the colony, who had the audacity to think that the enlightenment dream that liberty, equality, and fraternity were possible for all men applied to them as well, the most exploited and unequal, though men nonetheless.

The challenge presented to the world and history by black Haitian ex-slaves seemed too audacious and was promptly reduced to a secular curse. Since that time Haiti would be the site of invasions and occupations, dictatorships and violence, misery, suffering, ignorance, fear, and fanaticism. The dreams of utopia extinguished, Haiti would become a window into hell on the face of the earth.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the most illiterate, the most afflicted by violence and disease, hunger and ill health. Nine million men, women, and children, almost entirely black, live on a rough and depleted stretch of land periodically overrun by the kind of violence that erupts among the poorest, least educated, and dispossessed: radical and without limit. In Haiti, hundreds of children, women, and old people die each day of hunger, malnutrition, curable diseases, and desolation.

Until the fury of nature devastated the Haitian capital on January 12, leaving a toll of the dead still impossible to quantify, who talked about Haiti? Who remembered Haiti and its eternal agony?

Today the governments of many countries are expressing their concern and offering humanitarian assistance to the ravaged country. Thanks to an earthquake that seems straight out of the Book of Revelations (though fury of this nature cannot be divine), Haiti is being talked about, helped, and remembered. The assistance and rescue teams that reach Haiti will certainly save lives, feed the hungry, and shelter the homeless and dispossessed. But when the crisis is past, who will continue to help Haiti?

The tens of thousands of dead that now lie beneath the ruins of a catastrophically poor city, in open improvised ditches and even in the streets, are moving in a particular way. But what of those who died of hunger and despair the day before? Who was moved by them?

Now when we speak of Haiti we should use words not only of condolence but also of hope. Haiti needs the help that is arriving today, but it has needed this help for a long time -help to extract itself from its ancestral misery, its intense ignorance, and its poverty, which are as if not more devastating than the most destructive earthquake.

The fury of nature has reminded us that Haiti exists. Let us hope that tomorrow, when the tragedy no longer dominates the headlines and the appeals of international organisations, when the dead are buried, we will not forget that Haiti still exists, poor and miserable, and that its people will continue to die unless a real effort is made to change the tragic destiny that an unjust world inflicted on the descendants of the slaves who two centuries ago fought for liberty, equality, and fraternity among men. As if it were possible. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

Excerpt:

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Jan 11 2010 (IPS)

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to see Katyn, the latest film of the great Polish director Andrej Wajda. Since then I have been haunted by the final scenes in which we “see” what we already know: the execution of 20,000 officers of the Polish Army by the soldiers of the occupying Soviet Army which, in mid-1939, in keeping with a provision of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, invaded eastern Poland.

But how long have we known about this massacre? Only since the release of the film, or since we looked up information about what happened in the Katyn forest? or before? If it was before, how many people knew the truth about what happened, and for how long. It is worth noting that Churchill, an ally of the Soviets in 1944, accepted for reasons of basic political exigency the account blaming the massacre on German fascists.

The images from the film stayed with me less because of what happened in Katyn, horrifying and shocking as it was, than because another more awful and wide-ranging question: how was it possible to hide this event, twist the historical truth, impose silence, and propagate the deception that was practised for decades?

Very recently, in periodicals and on television, I came across other images related to the execution of the Polish officers which reinforced my question as to the extreme vulnerability and prolonged manipulation of historical truth.

These images are related to what happened in Moscow in the last days of December when large numbers of Russians celebrated the memory of Josif Vissioronavich, better known as Stalin, on the 130th anniversary of his birth. People wound through the streets of Moscow with portraits of the leader (retouched, as is well known, to eliminate any of his Georgian features) while newspapers, including Pravda, organ of the communist party which Stalin headed in his day, wrote of him in a tone we had thought had long disappeared and that, given what has been revealed about his actions, could seem repulsive at the very least.

But the celebrations demonstrate that even after so many of his crimes have been made known to the world, “the grave digger of the revolution”, as Trotsky would soon call him, still has his followers and admirers. Some of them even asked for the anniversary to be made a day of “grace” during which no one could harm the memory of the “leader of the peoples”.

The process by which the truth about the history of Stalinism was made known was long and difficult. Though in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev presented the Central Committee of the Communist Party his report -in no way secret- exposing the “errors” and “arbitrary acts” of the Secretary General, it would take decades before the world would have a clear idea of the nature of these “errors”: the terror and psychological cruelty which each Soviet citizen was subjected to, the economic, ecological, and ethnicidal disasters, the betrayals and machinations, the destruction of great Russian art and artists, the perversion of the utopia of equality, and above all the millions and millions of deaths that he caused or assassinations he ordered as head of the party.

Yet there are still men for whom these facts are irrelevant to the historical judgement of the man. The worst result of this sort of amnesia is that, to avoid admitting that they had been fooled, manipulated, and even perverted -especially the latter- these keepers of Stalin’s memory have to shower praise on one of the most destructive men in history.

I had already read that in May 2009, the current Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, urged the creation of a committee of experts to safeguard the “historical memory”, with the intention of “countering attempts to falsify the history and interests of Russia”. One of these “experts” declared that it was necessary “to decide which history books would tell the truth and which wouldn’t”. And to censor. And a law was proposed to punish with fines and even prison those who dared question the acts of Stalin’s regime during the Second World War.

The whitening of the memory of Stalin and his system is completed with the closure of certain archives holding material relevant to the crimes committed during the war and to the deportations of various nationalities. It is no accident, thus, that history texts are appearing that refer to Stalin as an “effective leader”.

Although in Russia there are voices protesting this attempt at erasing historical truths that were brought to light in recent decades, and while the Ukrainian government is demanding that the land collectivation process imposed by Stalin be recognised as an act of “genocide” (it caused the death of about ten million people, some in acts of cannibalism generated by starvation), pressure against the vulnerable historical truth remains strong, and I do not doubt that it will prevail, as there are clear political interests involved.

In his monumental novel Life and Fate (as or more devastating than Wajda’s Katyn), Vasili Grossman comes up with this observation, among other pearls: “Neither tens of thousands, or even hundreds of millions, but enormous masses of people were involuntary witnesses to the massacre of innocents. But they were not only involuntary witnesses: when necessary, they voted for the annihilation in a clamour of approving voices.” Is it this clamour, now growing stronger, that is seeking to wall in a creature as vulnerable as historical truth? Is it the inheritance of guilt,genetically-transmitted fear, and submission to the powerful that drives them to march in parades and maintain silence about atrocities? What fate awaits this, and other, historic truths? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

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By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Nov 18 2009 (IPS)

A little over a year ago the world was swept by surprise when it learned that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. We had been witness to a change that many felt was unthinkable: a young black man renowned for his intelligence became president of the most powerful country on earth, one that had been a bastion of racism and that in recent years has become a hotbed of conservatism, an exporter of war, and neo-liberal economic Eden.

The election of Obama ignited widespread celebration and hope for change in Cuba too, whose people, simply because they were Cuban and (in many cases) wanted to live where they were born, have suffered since 1962 under a US-imposed financial and trade embargo which in its time (one of the peaks of the Cold War, the apparent end of which the world just celebrated) was supposed to break the country with hunger and topple its government.

For three -or more- generations of Cubans, the standoff between the governments of Washington and Havana has been like a nightmare seemingly impossible to awake from. In addition to the material shortages that the embargo/blockade may or may not have caused (it did, and many) its existence has raised along the Florida Straits a wall of intransigence and hostility that has affected millions of lives. The blockade has been used again and again to justify every shortage on the island and has eroded chances for a better future for the Cuban people, who are the real victims of this policy which in fifty years has failed to overturn the Cuban government.

When in April 2009 the Summit of the Americas was held in Trinidad and Obama made his debut as president and introduced his promised policy of closer relations with Latin America, he listened patiently to the demands of almost all countries of the region to end the blockade and normalise relations between the two neighbours. This fanned the hopes of many Cubans. Obama rightly lifted restrictions on travel to the island by Cubans living in the US and on sending remittances. Academic and cultural contact was extended, and there was talk of various agreements, like reestablishment of direct mail service between Cuba and the US, or improving communications by giving Cuba access to the American fibre optic network.

The wall that had outlived the Cold War moved, and the steps taken, though not particularly profound, revived the hope that the embargo might be lifted and relations normalised between Havana and Washington.

Then on October 28 the US government declared before the UN General Assembly that it would maintain the current embargo and do so for the same reasons cited by the previous eight administrations, since 1962. Cubans’ hopes were dashed and many asked themselves, “Is this the same young and charismatic Obama that promised change and was elected just a year ago? Is this Obama, who extended a policy intended to vanquish a country with hunger, the same man who just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize? Can this champion of easing tensions sincerely think that the embargo of Cuba, condemned by almost the entire world, including the harshest critics of the Cuban regime, is more likely to induce change than it is to harden its stance? Is this clearly intelligent man not capable of grasping that in fact it is lifting the embargo that will bring about change in Cuba?

Until October 28 I had a dream: that the US representative to the United Nations, backed an administration committed to intelligence and opening, announced that his country was going to lift the embargo. This decision would have been an act more in keeping with the Obama who moved the world with his victory. But this dream did not come to pass, and we Cubans will continue to suffer under the nightmare that has oppressed us since 1962, when President Obama was less than a year old, and the political system still in power was already in place, despite the embargo. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

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By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Nov 3 2009 (IPS)

If a person’s past is the accumulation of the life experiences that made him who he is, the future embodies the dreams and the expectations of what this person wants to be and what he needs to have a better life, materially and spiritually. This ability to direct one’s gaze forward and try to extract from the present the qualities of the future is one of the intrinsic components of the human condition and the source of people’s and societies’ ability to endure.

For the men of my generation who grew up and lived in Cuba over the past five decades, the idea of a better future was one of the motors that carried us forward in our ever more distant youth. The desire for personal advancement, animated by the winds of a revolution that transformed life in the country in the 1960s, led us to imagine the future as a tangible period in which the most driven, capable, and intelligent (or the best at exploiting their efforts and skills) would not only enjoy the spiritual satisfactions made possible by a more just and educated society, but also material compensation that would be difficult if not impossible to come by: a decent salary, a comfortable house, maybe even a car issued by the Cuban state (the only source of this and other goods for the last fifty years) as a reward for one’s social labour and personal achievements.

The economic and structural crisis that upended Cuban society in the 1990s as a direct consequence of the disappearance of its protector the Soviet Union, almost the only trade partner and source of finance for the island, created a rupture in Cubans’ image of their future: from one day to the next the hopes than animated us disappeared and were replaced by a struggle to survive in which we managed to make it through one day with no idea how we would make it through the next. Individuals’ abilities and intelligence often lost their connection to collective aspirations, and since that time only the most skilful and daring have been able to forge for themselves a better present -though even they have rarely been able to hold on to strategy for the future. The impossibility of knowing where the island is headed has almost always prevented realisation of their dreams.

Cuba has changed in recent years. It has changed to the point that the need for structural and conceptual changes has been accepted. It has changed so much that many of the benefits of the past, once identified with the qualities of the socialist model, are now considered paternalistic excesses, unsustainable perks and subsidies. On this note, more changes have been announced, like the possible elimination of the ration card, now seen as an unaffordable subsidy for a state in serious financial straits, the elimination of the dual currency system (the Cuban peso and the “convertible” peso), which complicates the operation of shops and the daily life of the people, in particular those who have no access to the convertible peso, used largely in the tourism sector. And there are yet other transformations about which little information is available and which the government has asked for more time to implement -time taken away from the future of every Cuban.

Among the recent changes put in motion, one of the most revealing was the elimination in various governments ministries of workers restaurants, which were also subsidised by the state and the site of a permanent “diversion of resources”, a euphemism for stealing. In these places, a meal now costs a worker 15 pesos, or 360 pesos per month (24 work days), at a time when the average monthly salary was just lowered to 400 pesos. Is it possible to plan a future with a margin like that?

Even the Cuban government has recognised that it is impossible to live on the salaries it pays. And on the basis of even less evidence it has also acknowledged the numerous shortcomings of an economic model that does not guarantee productivity (Cuba imports more that 70 percent of the food the country consumes) and many of the symptoms of social disintegration visible on the island, from the resurgence of prostitution, corruption, increased manifestations of marginalisation, to the drive to emigrate that consumes many young people.

And yet there is little talk, almost none, of the impossibility of forging models or aspirations for the future beyond those that would be guaranteed by the state (health care, education, which are so essential and yet arouse other expectations in individuals and societies for whom they are guaranteed). For example, the dream of having something as necessary as a home -and there are many Cubans who live in deplorable conditions or warehoused in tiny spaces- is an unattainable utopia in a country where a bag of cement costs more than a third of the average salary. After graduating from university, what can a person aspire to?

Cubans today, even if they have more room to express their dissatisfaction with the present, are incapable of imagining a future that is different, or how or when it might come about. The costly paternalism that the state has created and is now trying to eliminate is also tied to this process of imagining a possible future, which is tied to the decisions and actions the government takes, in yet another expression of its paternalism. How and when will things change? How will we be affected, and how much will this alter our future? No one knows the answers to these questions. Meanwhile the years go by, and what might have been a future is stranded in the past, inaccessible and irrecoverable. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

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By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Sep 23 2009 (IPS)

Cuba’s official newspaper and organ of the Communist Party recently published a story that stunned the populace: in a country where the lack of food has become endemic and causes the people dire economic hardship, it happened that tonnes of agricultural products were left to rot outside the city of Havana because there were neither the containers nor the vehicles nor the organisational capacity to transport them.

This time the disaster (in Cuba, with its central economic planning, organisational disasters also seem endemic) was due to the failure of certain mechanisms after a change of the entities responsible for the collection and redistribution of products.

Meanwhile, forecasts of the island’s economic growth in 2009 have been drastically revised downward (from an initial festive 6 percent per year to 2.5 and now 1.7 percent), partly because of a drop in the prices of the island’s exports (nickel and tobacco) and services (tourism), the fallout from the previous year’s hurricanes, the effects of the world economic crisis, and the trade complications caused by the US embargo. To resist collapse, the authorities are demanding increased productivity and savings, which they are trying to achieve through significant cuts in social benefits and so-called “freebies”. There is even movement towards elimination of the ration system which, curiously, has become the opposite of what it was supposed to be: a mechanism to foster equality in poverty. Today the state finds it almost impossible to pay for these few, meagre offerings –enough to feed a person for about twelve days of the month- with an agricultural sector so weak that Havana must import 70 percent of the food consumed in the country, though the land is fertile and the climate tropical.

The Cuban economy and society are crying out for the “conceptual” and “structural” changes that were announced over the last three years but have been introduced in tiny steps and for the most part in the form of cuts rather than moves to strengthen or diversify the economy.

Now the leadership of the country has called on the people, for the second time in three years, to hold a discussion on the problems, shortages, inefficiency, and disfunction in Cuban society, politics, and the economy from the perspective of each citizen. And it is insisting, again, that the debate be held without fear of voicing dissent -a real novelty in a country that in its official statements always vaunted its unanimity and is known for its top-down formulation of domestic policy.

Two years ago, after a speech given by current president Raul Castro, a similar discussion was held and more than one million comments from the population were received on a wide range of national issues. The number of suggestions and complaints is sure to balloon given the illusion that the government might be listening and with the accumulation of so many unmet needs, an economy in crisis and hamstrung by its own defects, no hope that Barack Obama will make any real changes in the decades-old embargo, and after the people saw the defenestration of a part of the state leadership (vice president Carlos Lage and foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque were the best known) and can feel in their bones the slowness of change and the loss of certain benefits.

The list of problems the government must address is formidable: the need to bring real salaries in line with the cost of living, the chronic and growing shortage of housing, the economy’s rock- bottom efficiency and productivity, the overabundance of idle arable land, the high price of food in both the state and non-state markets, the irrationality of the dual-currency system in which people are paid in Cuban pesos -an average of 400 per month- yet have to purchase much of their food with the far more valuable so-called “convertible peso” (CUC), which equals 24 national pesos. One litre of soybean oil costs the average Cuban an eighth of his monthly salary. A bag of cement costs 6.60 CUC and a gallon of paint more than 20. In addition, there are problems of marginalisation and violence, deterioration of the health care system (particularly with primary care), the requirement of authorisation for anyone wishing to travel outside the country, the flight of young people with talent (scientists, artists, athletes), the physical decay of cities like Havana, and many other challenges that require both immediate attention and long future commitments.

There is an urgent need to debate the current situation in Cuba, but only if the debate is real and if the critical analysis is used as more than a political thermometer or collective catharsis. It must be channelled into the effort to implement structural and conceptual changes that will make it possible not only to grow more plantains and vegetables but also, and most important, to make sure that they make it out of the fields and to the people at prices they can afford -among other needed solutions.

Since the early 1990s when their protector the Soviet Union disappeared, Cubans have lived under constant and debilitating economic pressure, with chronic shortages that have made mere survival a daily struggle. Dreaming of a better life and having a right to express this dream and to identify the problems impeding it can be considered a reward for their prolonged resistance. So let the debate begin – a real debate. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

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By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Aug 11 2009 (IPS)

Cubans are used to living with crises, limits, shortages, emergency plans, “special” -and less “special”- periods. That may be why for a number of months many Cubans have been watching with detachment the economic and financial crisis that has been battering the world for two years now. Even politicians and the media contributed to this sense that in Cuba there would be no job cuts, no foreclosed homes (because no one can legally buy one, for a start), and no gutting of social programmes.

However, three savage hurricanes that devastated half of the island in 2008 (affecting over half a million homes), prolonged and acute systemic economic inefficiency that makes it necessary to import 80 percent of the food consumed on the island (in an agriculturally rich country in which, however, half of the land lies fallow), in addition to oil price fluctuations, the difficultly of obtaining international credit, the choking of trade by the American embargo, as well as the waves of economic depression that reached Cuban shores as well, all have reduced the economy to near paralysis and convinced those minding the state coffers that they are headed for bankruptcy.

The caution with which Raul Castro introduced changes in the country’s economic and financial structure during his three years as president seems to have ended: circumstances now require Cuba’s leaders to approach the economy with greater realism and, as a consequence, to reshape certain structures inherited from the old Soviet-style socialist model which, though they vanished with the USSR, lived on in Cuba.

What then is the new socialism that will be adopted on the island? Perhaps the Chinese model? What can be predicted is that even if no major political changes are introduced -altering the single-party system is not on the table- and even if the state monopoly remains in place, in the social sphere there will be transformations that, as the president has warned, will involve cutting “unsustainable” subsidies and spending.

Thus far it has been announced that a sector as sensitive as health care will not be touched, though it is certain that the Cuban health care system has greatly deteriorated in past years because of the lack of personnel -thousands of Cuba’s doctors work outside of the country- and the alarming state of many medical clinics and shortages of supplies and medicine.

In education and culture, perhaps there will be changes beyond the simple and much hoped for elimination of the system of pre-university institutes located in rural areas (long known for their unproductiveness and visibly negative effect on young people separated from their families at a crucial stage in their development) and cuts in various subsidies and free programmes.

But where cuts are most certain to be felt is in social benefits directly related to consumption and the economy. For months there has been discussion of the unsustainability of the system of ration cards, which assures the entire population of the island a certain quantity of subsidised goods that the state must buy on the international markets and then sell at low prices. There is also talk of eliminating the dual currency system -an emergency measure introduced in the crisis of the 1990s when the possession of currency was decriminalised- which resulted in the creation of a dual economy, one using Cuban pesos, the other, the convertible Cuban peso (CUC). The problems created by the dual system can be resolved only by weakening the Cuban peso vis a vis the other currencies or maintaining the CUC at its current level of 24 pesos, or about USD 0.90.

With prices of services and products likely to rise, there has also been discussion of broadening taxation, given that now only the self-employed and employees of foreign companies pay taxes.

The announced official elimination of the egalitarian system is more than a necessity: it is a well-established reality. Those in Cuba who have access to currency -whether because of work (the fewest), corruption (many more), or remittances from abroad (the most, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Cubans)- have a standard of living . (END/COPYRIGHthat is infinitely superior to those who must live on state salaries alone (the average salary of 500 pesos comes to a mere 25 dollars, a quarter of what would be considered a small remittance of 100 per month. What is most sad is that in the majority of cases, these economic differences have nothing to do with hard work, inventiveness, qualification, or talent but merely the flaws of an economic structure that makes it more profitable to be a porter at a hotel than a neurosurgeon.

Whatever changes or economic cuts are in the offing, it seems clear that the time for protectionism and egalitarianism is long passed. Cuban socialism will reduce subsidies and perks and impose stricter rules for a society that is taking in water from every side. In the end, Cuba’s new model seems to be this: more socialism, but with fewer social benefits. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

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By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Jul 29 2009 (IPS)

When in 1982 Ridley Scott filmed his prophetic and futuristic Blade Runner and showed the city of Los Angeles devastated by acid rain, sealed off, and darkened by a ceiling of clouds of a dense gas, that future (November 2019, in the film) seemed so remote and so poetic that few would have ever imagined it could come true. Now, ten years from that date, the world has deteriorated to the point that the images from Blade Runner amaze us less and frighten us more because we know how close we are to living on a planet similar to the one shown in the film.

For years the field of science fiction has sought to show the future, near or distant, as a catastrophic phase that man was cast into either by interventions from afar (aliens or meteorites) or by a nuclear event or the gradual and boundless degradation of the environment that humans brought about without even being aware of it.

Since the origins of literature and science, catastrophes that would cause the disappearance of civilisations and even of the world have been an obsession of man. The most famous book in western culture, The Bible, ends with the revelation of an apocalypse written by Saint John in which he predicts a devastating battle initiated by celestial powers and destined to bring about the disappearance of a perverted and doomed humanity to make way for another. Another culture, the Mayans of Central America, prophesied on the basis of their astrological research an end of time, though not as a result of a divine punishment (though some futurologists include this factor) but as a result of a devastating cosmic event that would kill the sun. Moreover, this event has a date, which is around the corner: December 22, 2012.

But contemporary art has stressed with despairing insistence the importance of human attitudes and decisions in causing the catastrophes that await us. If for the ancient prophets and apostles ethical behaviour weighed most heavily in the search for the causes of punishment, people today (without dismissing this indisputable factor, because ultimately this is a matter of ethics) also have science as a source for verification: the world is hurtling towards catastrophe, and modern man, who for 200 years has polluted, desertified, and poisoned the planet and separated atoms to convert energy into weapons, is the only possible party responsible for what is happening.

I once read that Confucius warned than man is most stubbornly obtuse when he knows the solution to his problems but doesn’t implement it. Today human stupidity seems to have reached heights the Chinese sage could never have imagined.

Almost twenty years have passed since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero first raised the alarm: we must change or die. Twelve years have passed since the half-hearted Kyoto protocols were presented to the international community, and the richest and most powerful countries have failed to take the draconian steps that nature requires. The problem is well known, and so is the solution; the stupidity and laziness that keep it from being adopted is beyond measure.

Of course, for governments and scientific institutions and informed citizens, these years have created an awareness of the risks to the earth and its dominant species. Moreover, each day brings to light more incontrovertible evidence of the effects of global warning which have become part of our degraded reality: stronger hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps, islands swallowed up by the sea, the extinction of hundreds of animal and plant species and the mutation of many, many others, etc.

Is enough being done to stop the deterioration of the environment? Is the appetite for wealth stronger than the warnings of approaching disaster, with or without the prophesies of the Maya or the Bible? What is the limit of this stupidity which keeps our species from acting to halt its own self-destruction?

The world conference on global warming and its effects, set for December of this year in Copenhagen, will take place at what can only be called a point of no return. The answer to whether or not the ancient and modern predictions will come true lies in the concrete actions that governments take after the conference in both rich countries and the developing world, where hunger and poverty are growing exponentially, partly as a result of environmental degradation.

If we do not change, Blade Runner may well have a final projection on the screen provided by the dense cloud cover that will suffocate our condemned planet. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

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