Paul Solman. PBS. July
18, 2001. Online NewsHour Focus.
Paul Solman explores Cuba's market reforms and the effect of the U.S.
trade embargo.
Paul Solman. PBS. July 18, 2001. Online
NewsHour Focus.
PAUL SOLMAN: Dr. Erminia Valenzuela is a cardiac surgeon with a message.
DR. ERMINIA VALENZUELA: I don't want to end this interview without asking
the people of the United States to help us to end with the block.
PAUL SOLMAN: The blockade.
DR. ERMINIA VALENZUELA: The blockade.
PAUL SOLMAN: The embargo.
DR. ERMINIA VALENZUELA: The blockade, the embargo. So I'm asking the people
of the United States to help us to end the blockade.
PAUL SOLMAN: She runs this ward at Havana's top pediatric hospital, where
children with serious heart defects come for surgery they can't get in the
provinces. The care tops anything in the third world, she says, but could be
much broader.
DR. ERMINIA VALENZUELA: If we are able to operate on 500 patients in a year,
it would be enough in order not to have a waiting list.
Cuban health care
PAUL SOLMAN: They used to do 500 operations a year back when the Soviet
Union subsidized the Cuban economy, including its medical care. They don't,
however, blame the Russian pullout for the waiting list, but the U.S. blockade,
or "block."
DR. ERMINIA VALENZUELA: With all these difficulties of the block, we had
less money, and we had to decrease the number of operations to 50 percent or 60
percent.
PAUL SOLMAN: "Stop the blockade." It's a refrain we heard at
almost every stop in Cuba, including Lenin High School.
STUDENT: Cuba is open to the world, and the world is almost open to Cuba,
but we have, how can I say, a door closed for us.
PAUL SOLMAN: But isn't it socialism that prevents Cuba from becoming richer,
we asked.
STUDENT: We got education, hospitals, medicines, all free, and if we want to
be richer, we don't have to stop to get all of that. We only have to... You only
have to stop this blockade.
The U.S. position
PAUL SOLMAN: We could go on, but you get the point: Even though Cuba now
gets goods from all over the world, the U.S. embargo is still the number one
excuse for Cuba's economic failings. Now, Cuba has actually lived with the
embargo about as long as it's lived with socialism. In fact, the two are
inseparable. When Fidel Castro first descended from the hills and toppled the
Batista dictatorship in 1959, the Republican Eisenhower administration never
imagined Cuba would soon be sleeping with the ideological enemy.
But within a year, Castro began nationalizing U.S. businesses. President
Eisenhower-- a longtime friend of Batista-- retaliated by severing diplomatic
relations, while the CIA initiated plans to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba.
Eisenhower also set in motion an embargo on trade, made law by President Kennedy
and Congress in 1962.
There have been opponents, like Jimmy Carter and the UN, which condemned it
just last year by a vote of 163 to 3. But Miami's Cuban exile community and its
allies in Congress have always prevailed. In 1996, Congress passed, and
President Clinton reluctantly signed, the Helms-Burton Act, which among other
provisions extended the penalties on trade with Cuba to companies and nations
outside the U.S.
SEN. PHIL GRAMM: Our position has always been a commitment to isolation, the
isolation of Cuba, and a commitment to overthrowing Fidel Castro. Today, with
this bill, we go back to that policy and we hit Fidel Castro where it hurts the
most. We hit him in the pocketbook.
PAUL SOLMAN: It's been a 40-year campaign, then, of U.S. economic pressure
to topple Castro and install democratic capitalism, a campaign Castro has used
for dramatic effect.
FIDEL CASTRO (Translated): What the imperialists want for us is nothing but
capitalism, and worse still, the capitalism of the third world, of Guatemala and
Honduras. But we'll defend our socialism at any cost.
PAUL SOLMAN: And defend it he has. But if Castro isn't quitting, neither is
his opposition. (Crowd chanting) The key, according to anti- Castro forces
outside Cuba, is to support anti-Castro forces inside the country-- build an
anti-socialist opposition, like solidarity in Poland.
REP. LINCOLN DIAZ-BALART: There is a growing internal opposition movement
that is being oppressed and repressed, thrown in dungeons on a day-in and
day-out basis, and yet it has demonstrated extreme courage and is growing. That
has to be the focus of our policy.
PAUL SOLMAN: To find out what the internal opposition itself makes of this
approach, we went to see Cuba's best-known dissident. Elizardo Sanchez spent
eight years in prison for crimes against the state. And yet, this is what he
said:
ELIZARDO SANCHEZ (Translated): For 15 years, I have been in a group that has
opposed these sanctions. They're unilateral actions of Washington against Cuba.
For a long time, I was alone among dissidents in this view, but now nearly all
of us oppose the U.S. policy.
PAUL SOLMAN: Arrested at gunpoint in the middle of the night for opposing
Castro, Sanchez also opposes the policy on which his U.S. supporters pin their
hopes.
ELIZARDO SANCHEZ (Translated): I believe the embargo is the best ally this
totalitarian government has, because it justifies its failures. When there's no
medicine or transport, or food, everyone says, "it's Washington's fault."
Blaming the embargo
PAUL SOLMAN: Indeed, the embargo is widely blamed for many, if not all of
the country's economic woes. We heard that argument, among other places, at
Cuba's version of the Federal Reserve, its Central Bank, where revolutionary
hero Che Guevara once presided as the country's first Alan Greenspan. Francisco
Soberon is now in charge, and maintains the embargo has cost Cuba decades of
development.
FRANCISCO SOBERON: It's a terrible cost, you see. It has to be measured in
hundreds of billions, already.
PAUL SOLMAN: Hundreds of billions, you mean cumulatively?
FRANCISCO SOBERON: Accumulated during these 40 years.
PAUL SOLMAN: Soberon reorganized the bank to help implement market reforms
after the Soviet Union-- and its huge subsides-- vanished in the early '90s. But
he's still a devout socialist who blames the embargo for crippling Cuba's
economy.
FRANCISCO SOBERON: We cannot go to an American bank to ask for a loan. But
not only that, foreign banks, a lot of them have very close links with the
American markets, and a lot of them feel that if they do business with Cuba, it
could hamper their relations with the United States, and then they don't want to
do business with us.
PAUL SOLMAN: Finance from abroad is key, says Soberon, because Cuba's own
major investments have been in health care and in education; investments, that
is, in "human capital," in Cuba's people, an asset of professional
talent just waiting for the financial capital to make it world-class productive.
FRANCISCO SOBERON:700,000 professionals, we have.
PAUL SOLMAN: 700,000 professionals.
FRANCISCO SOBERON: 700,000. And when I say "professionals," I mean
people who have a university degree, you see?
PAUL SOLMAN: At a baseball game one night in Havana, we got yet another
example of the embargo's cost.
MAN (Translated): You know, we've got this fight with the U.S. to buy oil,
we have to get it all the way from Russia. Imagine if we could just get it from
you, 90 miles away, how much easier and cheaper it would be.
PAUL SOLMAN: So then, the embargo would seem to be working, just as its
supporters claim. But when we trekked to a far-off Havana neighborhood to
interview another dissident, we again heard the message that the embargo is
letting socialism off the hook and that trade with the U.S., according to Marta
Beatriz Roque, would actually speed economic and political reform.
WOMAN: I'm against the embargo. I would like that the embargo will be
lifted.
PAUL SOLMAN: Because?
WOMAN (Translated): Because I believe Cuban society needs contact with North
American society. We need to be in touch with capitalism.
Supporting the economy
PAUL SOLMAN: To the extent that Cuba is changing, many think, it's because
of contact with the capitalist U.S., for better, or sometimes worse. And
certainly, says Roque, economic contact with U.S. capitalism keeps the dissident
community alive.
WOMAN (Translated): I have family outside. I have support. Many friends in
the U.S., especially in Miami, help us.
PAUL SOLMAN: As it happens, it's not just dissidents who get help from
friends and family in the U.S. In Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, business
at Western Union is brisker than ever these days.
MAN (Translated): With Western Union, you can send up to $100 a month to any
one person.
PAUL SOLMAN: This Cuban exile, who preferred not to give his name, came to
the states 12 years ago and has been sending dollars back home ever since.
MAN (Translated): I sent money to my parents so they could come and visit,
and they did. Now I have to wait three more months before I can send any more.
PAUL SOLMAN: Again, back in Havana, dissident Elizardo Sanchez:
ELIZARDO SANCHEZ (Translated): I would say that 20 percent to 30 percent of
what Cubans manage to get to survive comes from remittances -- my family
included.
PAUL SOLMAN: What percent of your income-- family income-- comes from
remittances?
MAN (Translated): Eighty percent. It's been that way for 20 years.
PAUL SOLMAN: Remittances-- what the Cubans call ramesas-- may actually be
the single biggest source of dollars in what's becoming a dollarized country.
You can use them to buy your own car, or to take a taxi instead of waiting for
the so-called "camels," the trucks modified to haul people that most
Cubans are forced to rely on.
If you pay in dollars at Coppelia's ice cream parlor, you can skip the long
peso line and sit in comfort with the tourists. The burgeoning well-stocked
supermarkets are dollars-only, which relegates those without dollars to the
state's own meager food stores, where the pickings are generally slim and where
they wouldn't let us take pictures. What's more, the dissidents say, the
government itself relies indirectly on remittances, via heavy taxes on the
dollar economy, to help finance, among other things, the costly Cuban safety net
in health care and education.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you think remittances are keeping the government in
business?
ELIZARDO SANCHEZ (Translated): Definitely. Remittances coming from the U.S.
have substituted in part for the huge subsidy we got from the Soviet Union.
Today the remittances represent more than sugar exports and tourism. They're the
principle source of income for the government. The total now comes to between
$800 million and a billion dollars a year.
PAUL SOLMAN: Moreover, exile economic support doesn't stop with wiring
dollars from the U.S. While some who fled have vowed never to return, many do
come back, as tourists, and tourism now makes up fully 5 percent of the Cuban
economy. And furthermore, when the exiles return, they bring not just first
world cash, but bundles of first world stuff for their families-- TV's,
toasters, VCR's.
When you add it all up-- the purchases, the care packages, the tourism, the
remittances-- it seems the exile community is tossing a lot of money over the
wall they themselves helped build-- between 5 percent and 10 percent, by some
estimates, of the entire Cuban economy. So Castro's foes outside Cuba support
the embargo politically while perhaps undermining it economically. And Castro's
supporters inside Cuba condemn the embargo, though it arguably serves as their
best excuse.
ELIZARDO SANCHEZ (Translated): For decades, the government has liked to
present an image of itself as a little David against a giant Goliath. The day
they lift the embargo and normalize relations as you've done with Hanoi, for
example, or China, that will be the beginning of the end for this government.
PAUL SOLMAN: Now, it's possible that dissidents like Sanchez may be wrong
about the embargo's effects, that the government's efforts to end the blockade
are genuine. At the same time, the message we kept hearing-- from street level
to the highest ranks of government-- was that the policy intended to bring Cuba
to its knees may in fact have done quite the opposite.
FRANCISCO SOBERON: The blockade, or the economic war of the United States,
has been terrible for us, no? But the good part of it is that it has made us
stronger, because we have... When you have to fight, when you have to face more
big challenges, then you become stronger.
PAUL SOLMAN: A sobering thought on a U.S. policy that Cuba, after four
decades, appears not only to have survived, but to have turned to at least
rhetorical advantage.
JIM LEHRER: On Tuesday, President Bush announced he would not enforce a
section of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. It allows Americans to sue foreigners who
invest in properties confiscated by the Cuban government.
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