By Christopher Marquis. Knight Ridder News Service. The Salt Lake Tribune. Tuesday, March 7, 2000
HAVANA -- A decade after it lost its Soviet patron, the government of Cuban President Fidel Castro is emerging from economic collapse and is likely to survive indefinitely.
To be sure, the reality of most Cubans continues to be a daily struggle to get to work, shore up decaying homes and make ends meet. But Cuba's success with limited capitalist reforms has disappointed those who predicted the changes would lead to Castro's downfall.
By welcoming foreign investment, legalizing the U.S. dollar, expanding farm cooperatives and allowing small-scale self-employment, the government has charted modest economic growth without scrapping its socialist orientation. The signs that Castro will pull it off are evident across the
island.
In Havana, streets that were empty four years ago are clogged with cars -- not just ancient Chevys and Fords but also new Japanese and Korean models. Along the oceanfront, long-idle bulldozers clear ground for European-financed resort hotels. Teens wear imported athletic shoes and spandex
shorts. Tourism -- primarily from Canada and Western Europe -- has surpassed sugar exports as the government's top source of revenue, at more than $1.5 billion annually.
Like China's Communist rulers, Castro has coupled modest economic reforms with strict social and political control, carefully regulating coveted jobs in tourism and other branches of the dollar economy and continuing to ostracize or imprison government critics. Like the Chinese, he appears
to be betting that even modest economic progress will stifle demands for political change.
Cuba's halting but unmistakable economic recovery is not what Washington expected, and it poses problems for U.S. policy. For four decades, Washington has clamped one of its strictest trade embargoes on Cuba -- and tightened it twice in the past eight years -- in the expectation that
economic distress would oust Castro, or at least moderate his behavior.
But now important U.S. constituencies -- including business leaders, religious groups and some politicians -- argue that the United States is senselessly depriving itself of a natural and growing market and squeezing a struggling population on its doorstep, fueling the prospects for social
conflict or another mass exodus of refugees.
Cuban officials, meanwhile, express a confidence bordering on cockiness that they have defied both Washington and the political winds that toppled communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. And they are as determined as ever to resist U.S. dictates for democratic reforms.
"I know that some people in the U.S. would like to have a different Cuba," said Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba's National Assembly and a Castro confidant. "I know many Cubans who would like to have a different United States."
Asked whether Havana contemplated any moves to patch up four decades of non-relations with Washington, Alarcon replied: "Nothing, absolutely nothing should Cuba do in order to have normal relations with the United States."
Cuba's confidence is based in part on improvements in key sectors, including transportation, energy, communications and tourism.
Daily transportation is still a grind for many Cubans, but buses do run more regularly. Gas is expensive at nearly $4 a gallon, but Canadian and French investors are extracting more oil for local consumption from wells off Cuba's Matanzas coast. In addition, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez
recently signed a deal for Cuba to refine and distribute Venezuelan oil.
Rolling blackouts, which once left entire neighborhoods of the capital in darkness for as much as eight hours at a time, are now infrequent and brief. Food is more plentiful in the cities, thanks to Chinese-style markets where farmers are allowed to sell food they produce in excess of
government quotas directly to consumers. Luxury goods such as TVs are available to those with access to U.S. dollars, who by American estimates are anywhere from one-third to half of Cubans.
The U.S.-built telephone system, which became hopelessly unreliable under Castro, is working smoothly, thanks to an overhaul financed largely by an Italian telecommunications firm in a joint venture with Cuba. Construction of luxury condos and hotels is under way in desirable areas such as
Havana's Miramar neighborhood and Varadero Beach on the island's northern coast.
Cuban-Americans and exiles in other countries, willing or not, have bankrolled the recovery by sending relatives here as much as $900 million a year, aided by a U.S. easing of restrictions on remittances.
The price for Castro's government is a daily struggle against its own contradictions. To save itself, the regime has ushered back many of the ills it once sought to erase. Its greatest claims of revolutionary success -- universal education and health care -- are undermined by Cubans' daily
scramble for U.S. dollars, the currency of the enemy.
Some snapshots from Castro's neo-Marxist economy: A cabdriver confides that he is really an engineer. A history professor on Cuba's southern coast quit her job to sell trinkets to tourists. Cubans with family abroad live on charity. A doctor in Nuevo Vedado sells honey to complement his
dollar-a-day salary. Patients arrive for elective surgery in a Havana hospital equipped with their own sheets and soap.
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