Despite image, Cuba is evolving, scholars say
By Juan O. Tamayo . jtamayo@herald.com. Published Saturday, March 18, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Under a blanket of apparent immobility, Cuba has been taking slow but significant steps to modernize its government and economy, and to diversify its foreign trade, experts said Friday at a major academic conference in Miami.
Among the key shifts: a thorough rejuvenation of the upper ranks of the ruling Communist Party and an experiment with giving more autonomy to government-owned enterprises.
If successful, the changes could help improve a Cuban economy still hurting from the collapse of Soviet subsidies in 1991, and boost the regime's chances of surviving the eventual death of President Fidel Castro, who is 73.
``When people say nothing is happening in Cuba, that everyone is waiting for Castro to go, that's not true, Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez said at the conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Also discussed Friday at the conference were the repression of Cuban intellectuals, migration patterns, the effect of Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998 and the history of scientific development on the island.
The three-day event brought 5,000 university professors to Miami -- 124 from Havana and 46 Cuban exiles from the United States and other countries -- for 691 seminars on Latin America, including 36 on Cuba that represent the most intense X-ray of the island undertaken by academics.
Many of the Cubans from Havana stuck together in twos and threes at the seminars, although they mixed readily with exiles they met in the three downtown hotels hosting the LASA conference.
MUTUAL RESPECT
In one moving encounter, two famed writers forced by Castro to close a magazine critical of Moscow in the late 1960s -- one still a ``revolutionary, the other an exile -- warmly applauded each other's positions.
Jesus Diaz, 54, living in Madrid, said he now feels he was wrong when he decided to silently accept the closing of Critical Thought as part of his ``revolutionary discipline, and offered ``an apology to all younger Cuban writers who might have benefited from a different stand.
Aurelio Alonso, living in Havana, assured Diaz that he had acted heroically and said that while Cuba limits the freedom of intellectuals, Alonso remains a ``full revolutionary, which he considers the best option for all Cubans.
Diaz, who led the applause for Alonso, defected after his script for the Cuban movie Alice in Wonderland, a satire of Castro and Cuba, earned harsh condemnation from government cultural authorities.
On a less emotional note, several Cuban academics argued that despite the widespread perception that Cuba has all but stagnated in its economic and political development since the mid-1990s, change is taking place.
The average age of the members of the Communist Party's ruling Political Bureau dropped about 15 years from 1980 to 1997 as Castro tried to rejuvenate the hierarchy, Dominguez said. Two-thirds of the members were named to the Politburo after the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989.
POLITICAL LEADERS
``These are people ready to rule after Castro is gone, Dominguez said. They may succeed or fail, he added, but they will certainly try to continue the current system of government.
Cuba has also diversified its foreign trade -- once overwhelmingly dominated by the United States and later the Soviet Union -- and now no single country accounts for more than 25 percent of imports and exports, he said.
Havana-based economist Elena Alvarez said about 900 state-owned enterprises once run almost directly by government ministries were selected for an experiment beginning in 1998 that gives their managers increased autonomy.
Managers are getting more power to hire and fire workers, decide their finances, procure resources and market their products, she said. They can use part of their profits as they see fit, but are also held accountable for losses.
``There is less tutoring from above, and hopefully better decisions and more efficiency, Alvarez added. ``But there are also more demands, and more penalties for those who don't reach the goals.
Anti-Castro group wants full use of boat
By Jay Weaver.jweaver@herald.com. Published Saturday, March 18, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Anti-Castro activist Ramon Saul Sanchez met Friday with federal officials in an effort to settle a simmering dispute over the government's seizure of his Cuban exile group's boat in December 1998.
The U.S. government returned the fishing boat to the Democracy Movement in May 1999 on a temporary basis. Federal officials might allow the group to keep the boat permanently, as long as Sanchez agrees not to use the vessel, named Human Rights, for protests in Cuban territorial waters.
On Dec. 10, 1998, the U.S. Coast Guard confiscated the 35-foot boat just south of Key West because its crew was headed to Cuba without seeking permission. Seven group members said they had planned to sail to the island to distribute copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Sanchez, whose 20-day water-only hunger strike secured the temporary release of the boat, said he wants the boat back permanently. He also challenges the Clinton administration's establishment of a ``security zone'' around most of the Florida coast.
The Coast Guard can ask boaters in all Florida ports, except in the Panhandle, if they are planning to go to Cuba, and can detain or seize their boat if they plan to do so in violation of U.S. or Cuban law.
Sanchez said the presidential order might be meant to curb unauthorized forays into Cuban waters, but it's really aimed at the Democracy Movement. In late May or early June, his group plans to hold a protest against the policy -- involving boats, trucks and planes -- on Biscayne Bay.
``It's a statement we want to send to the president of the United States,'' Sanchez said. ``We feel this selective enforcement violates human rights.''
His group is known for organizing protest flotillas in the Straits of Florida against the Cuban government.
Sanchez's lawyer, Joseph Geller, argues the policy is illegal on constitutional grounds regarding prior restraint and self-incrimination.
``We want to preserve the right of the Democracy Movement to protest against the illegal Castro government,'' Geller said.
Another settlement conference is set for April 4.
Generations divided over the future
By Christopher Marquis. Herald World Staff. Published Sunday, March 19, 2000, in the Miami Herald
HAVANA -- Like the rancor of a bad divorce, the custody fight over 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez deepens the old raw splits between Cuba and America, between Havana and Miami, and even between Cuban generations.
No one's gotten over it. Everyone talks about it. Some long for reconciliation. Others fear it. Parents press their children to take sides.
In the evening, when Cubans usually seek refuge from their grinding reality in foreign soap operas, the airwaves are taken over by demands for his return.
On the street, billboards that used to offer encouraging slogans -- ``I'm 100 percent revolutionary!'' -- feature posters of the shy-faced shipwreck survivor whose mother died crossing the Florida Straits. Sometimes bars are painted around his picture, to depict his ``imprisonment'' by the Miami
relatives who are fighting his Cuban father to keep him in Florida.
In this crumbling country, Elian's image adorns new T-shirts, handed out free by the government and visible everywhere. Buses and military trucks habitually unload demonstrators at the plaza beside the U.S. mission in Havana, which crews are turning into a permanent protest site. City workers,
university teachers and seas of students fill out the crowds, waiting for the buses that brought them to take them home. They are too busy chatting, flirting and eating peanuts to listen to the speeches. But when asked, they are adamant that Elian must be returned.
One night, Fidel Castro sits rapt as a girl in a wheelchair is rolled onstage before hundreds of young pioneers of the revolution. Scarcely older than Elian herself, she props her tiny body against the too-large seat and demands his return. Elian, she rails, is a victim of the imperialist power
to the north that stole Cuba's independence and now seeks ``world hegemony.''
``We must teach these things to our children -- to keep the revolution alive,'' a senior Communist Party official tells me over drinks. ``It's what I teach my own daughter.''
He takes a sip. ``What would you have me tell her about?'' His voice is sarcastic. ``Snow White?''
Cubans, naturally gregarious, say that whatever dispute they have with the U.S. government or the ``Miami Mafia'' does not extend to the American people. Their knowledge of America is informed by Hollywood movies, dreadful news from places like Littleton, Colo., and calls and cash from relatives
in Florida.
AMERICAN VISITORS
But increasingly, Cubans' perceptions are shaped by direct contact. The Clinton administration has drastically expanded the groups of Americans -- including researchers, journalists, and humanitarian and religious workers -- who can visit the island, despite an effective ban on U.S. tourism.
About 122,000 Americans -- most of them Cuban exiles visiting family -- came to Cuba last year, officials say. Western diplomats say that makes America the fifth largest source of visitors here, after Canada, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Washington hopes the U.S. visits, dubbed people-to-people contacts, will foster ties among ordinary Cubans and Americans that will soften a transition someday. The visitors supplant American diplomats, who are largely cloistered in lavish prerevolutionary mansions and spurned by everyone but
colleagues and dissidents.
U.S. officials privately admit that the more open travel policy -- which has permitted a wide variety of visitors from the National Lawyers Guild to the Baltimore Orioles to the Yale Glee Club -- also is intended to get ahead of a growing trend in illegal American tourism.
VACATIONERS
Whether drawn by beaches, sex or the lure of a forbidden land, more and more Americans are traveling to Cuba simply to vacation. They fly to Mexico or the Bahamas, then catch direct flights to Havana. Cuban officials oblige them by refraining from stamping their passports. ``It's bizarrely
easy,'' said Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fla., on a recent undercover visit.
American sailors also skirt the law. Yachts from Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville line the docks of the Marina Hemingway.
Still, Cuba's tourism infrastructure is not ready for luxury-loving Americans. Much of the food is imported at great expense, and some selections -- such as horse meat at the Habana Libre hotel -- are risky. Workers badger visitors for tips; maids leave long notes about themselves with the fresh
towels.
But Cuban officials and foreign hoteliers are preparing for the day when the U.S. boycott is over. Cuba insisted that Canadian investors build Havana's gleaming new airport terminal with room to grow . . . for the Americans.
DIVIDED FAMILIES
Two generations of Cubans have grown up under the slogan ``Socialism or Death.'' As in many divided families, there are different notions and often fears of what reconciliation would bring.
In a Havana kitchen, a divorced woman in her 50s and her 33-year-old son argue about Cuba's future. Over thick, sweet coffee and cigarettes, she voices hopes that the Castro experiment would be wiped away like East Germany. But her son, who lived in Miami for 18 months -- and whose father is a
Cuban government official -- wants to be protected from an American deluge.
Mother: ``This country doesn't produce anything but circuses and spectacles. . . . We don't even know what we're waiting for -- a huge catastrophe, maybe. Or an explosion of the world. . . . Fidel runs this place like his own farm. . . . Along came Elian: They interrupted a TV movie for
important news. There was Fidel saying, `I give 72 hours for him to be returned.' I thought the world had caved in. It was a good movie, too. I can't remember the name.''
Son: ``I lived in capitalism. The only ones who get paid attention to are the ones who have money. . . . [In Miami] you work like a slave, and you think you're a king. It's a little room, and you call it a studio or an efficiency. You have a car that isn't yours; it's leased. Your house isn't
yours; you rent it. There are so many debts. The bad word in Miami is bills.''
Mother: ``At least [Americans] respect private property. . . . After I'm gone, I don't know where you'll live.''
Son: ``This country is going to have a plague of consumerism you've never seen before.''
Mother: ``Cuba in '59 was the most advanced country in Latin America. We had five channels of television.'' (Now there are two.)
Son: ``After a year of watching 180 channels, tell me what you've seen. It's all the same.''
Mother: ``There, you can change the government after four years.''
Son: ``The politicians aren't in charge. It's the big corporations.''
Mother: ``I'm dying for a chance to change things.''
Son: ``I'd like to see the end of the embargo while [Castro] is alive. [So he can manage it.] I don't want [Miami exiles] to use it as a tool to exploit the situation.''
Mother: ``You get up in the morning and you start from zero. You invent your day. I'm so tired of inventing.''
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