Castro's Socialism Fails Workers

Wilson C. Lucom. NewsMax.com. Monday, Sept. 6, 2004.

Under Cuba's socialist system, the average working person earns about $10 a month - 34 cents a day, $120 a year - on which to live: to buy food and clothing and pay for rent for the entire month.

In Cuba, retirees on social security live on $4 a month - 14 cents a day, $48 a year.

The average wage of a working person living in the democratic, capitalist United States is about $520 a week, $2,080 a month, $25,000 a year.

Although Cuba has a good education system, once students graduate they cannot earn a decent wage. For example, a computer engineer graduate in Cuba earns $360 a year, compared with an independent computer engineer in the United States, who earns $60,000 a year.

A comparison between Cuba and the United States is made as follows:

The Cuban working person's human rights are grossly violated, but no one talks about these violations. It is time the world and its media started taking notice and talking about the huge differences to the working person between living under capitalism and living under socialism.

Cuba is only 90 miles from the United States and could enjoy almost similar wages, but the egomaniac Castro, for his own self-aggrandizement, has kept 11 million Cuban people in virtual poverty for 30 years. He was not elected by popular vote; he should now hold free elections with a socialist candidate (not Castro) and a capitalist candidate and let the people decide which system they wanted to work for and live under.

An article from Investor's Business Daily, July 19, 2004, best sums up the comparison:

Work Doesn't Pay in Havana, So Leisure 'Industry' Thrives

W. Michael Cox

Fidel Castro's socialist dictatorship has kept Cuba a poor place - especially when compared with the 77-year-old dictator's ideological adversary, the capitalist U.S.

Although many Cubans are well educated, they earn about $10 a month in farming or working in state stores, factories and offices.

Many of Havana's once stately buildings are crumbling, neglected for decades after Castro stole the nation's wealth and redistributed it to the poor.

For most Cubans, a good meal consists of rice and beans. Stores offer a bare-bones selection of maybe two dozen items - packets of sugar on one shelf, a few bottles of soda on another. Kids gratefully accept soap as a gift from tourists.

Despite material want, many Cubans pleasantly while away their time at leisure pursuits, becoming virtuosos at singing, dancing and playing instruments.

In one small-town library, for example, four saxophone players enchanted me with classical music on a Wednesday evening. It was my very own Buena Vista Social Club.

The grass-roots artistic flowering raises the conundrum of Cuba: How does a society on the brink of economic failure produce so many accomplished performers?

At first, I thought Cubans were just lazy, preferring to play rather than work. To an economist, that answer didn't cut it - if only because of the obvious energy Cubans put into enjoying themselves.

Cubans' real problem lies elsewhere - in socialism's perverse incentives.

When the state provides for its citizens regardless of how much they work, nobody's motivated to put much effort into their job. When work doesn't pay, precious little gets produced, so consumers don't have much to buy.

Bare shelves give individuals little incentive to forsake leisure in favor of work. Over time, the economy spirals downward, like water circling a drain, with living standards sinking toward subsistence and citizens inclined to work only the minimum.

Any initiative at all comes outside the system. Cuba's go-getters make a few extra pesos off the tourist trade by turning cars into cabs, or homes into restaurants and boarding houses.

Like Americans, Cubans strive for the most satisfying mix of consumption and leisure.

What's different is socialism has made leisure, when measured in terms of foregone consumption, incredibly cheap. So Cubans, quite intelligently, channel their time and energy into leisure activities.

In short, they've become connoisseurs of leisure - and they've done it despite the fact that Cuba's state-run economy doesn't provide the kind of recreational cornucopia found in America.

There are no multiplex movie theaters, amusement parks or shopping malls. Cubans indulge in what's available - music, dance, art, sports and games, becoming quite good at them.

Applying the same economic logic to the U.S., we see a very different trade-off between consumption and leisure.

Our free-market economy provides plentiful jobs and high wages, giving Americans ample opportunities to earn money.

No American has to worry about how to spend it. We live in a consumer's paradise, where grocery stores sell up to 40,000 items.

Americans don't work even more than they do because leisure time is a normal good. Most of us want more of it as we get wealthier, and we sacrifice some consumption to get more free time.

A rich variety of entertainment and activities compete for Americans' work time - movies, sports, concerts, television, video games, hobbies, shopping and so much more. Is there any wonder why few Americans have learned to sing, dance or strum a guitar as well as the Cubans?

Some Americans might regard singing and dancing through life as preferable to the workaday world of rush projects and bulging e-mailboxes.

They should remember that Cubans endure harsh living standards, a trade-off few Americans would make for added free time.

By finding some happiness in Castro's economic wasteland, Cubans show the resilience of the human spirit. What Cubans really want, though, is relief from a system that grinds them into poverty. They want opportunity.

If free to choose, Cubans would no doubt make themselves better off by spending more time working to consume and less time on leisure.

Wilson C. Lucom is co-founder, with Reed Irvine, of Accuracy in Media (AIM). Lucom's first grant started AIM. For over 25 years he was a vice president and a director of AIM. For many years Lucom was editor of Accuracy in Academia's newspaper, now called Campus Report. During the Roosevelt administration, Lucom served as an assistant to the Secretary of State in the State Department and Acting Chief of Mission, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

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