Cubans feel betrayed by
tourist playground
Daily
Telegraph (UK),
February 13, 2007.
Carlos swung his legs over the sea wall
bordering one side of Havana's famous Malecon
seafront promenade and looked on curiously
as a 1957 Chevrolet with an open top slowed
to allow its passengers to photograph the
faded facade of a colonial building.
"They watch us and we watch them,"
he said with a resigned laugh as the tourists
turned their cameras to capture the image
of a young boy optimistically fishing in
the oily waters.
"It's a little like being in a zoo,"
sighed Carlos, a 24-year-old literature
student. "But that is the reality of
life here. We are caged while the world
looks on."
In the hushed tones that all Cubans adopt
when they talk about their ailing leader
Fidel Castro, who six months ago was forced
to hand over the reins of power to his younger
brother Raul after undergoing emergency
surgery for intestinal bleeding, Carlos
explained the continuing frustration of
a nation still firmly under Communist rule.
"Fidel has starved us," he whispered.
"Yes, there is a lack of food but it
is more than that. We are starving for information,
for opportunity, for freedom. We want to
enjoy the same things as those people over
there," he said as a fresh batch of
tourists spilled out of the doors of a tour
bus.
Cubans struggle to survive on an average
wage of less than £10 a month to supplement
the state rations which provide them with
basics such as rice and beans and either
one small bar of soap or tube of toothpaste
a month.
Visiting foreigners can spend almost double
that on a taxi ride to the airport or a
meal in one of Old Havana's state-run restaurants.
"It sticks in the throat," says
Oscar Espinosa, an independent economist
and dissident who was jailed in 2003 for
criticising the regime's economic strategy
and is now confined to his home on conditional
release.
"Such obvious inequality in a country
where for decades the people have laboured
in the mistaken belief that they are creating
a classless society. The truth is we have
created a paradise for tourists and those
that live off them, but for the rest of
us, daily life gets worse," he said
Cuba's society has been split into those
with access to the CUC, the convertible
currency used by tourists and sent in remittances
from those abroad, and the majority of the
population who must rely solely on their
salary paid in Cuban pesos.
Castro introduced the dual currency in
the 1990s as a means of the boosting the
economy after the collapse of the Soviet
Union when Cuba threw open its doors to
foreign tourists. Last year almost 2.5 million
foreign travellers, mainly from Canada,
Britain, Italy, Spain and Mexico, visited
the Caribbean island.
The changes are credited with keeping the
economy afloat but also created a vast and
troublesome gap between the population of
11 million dividing those who have the convertible
currency and those who don't.
"You can't buy anything with Cuban
pesos," said Mr Espinosa. "Anything
worth buying - soap, cooking oil, shoes
- must all be purchased in convertibles.
"We are in a situation where a bell
hop or a chambermaid can earn many times
the salary of a doctor or civil engineer.
What incentive is there now to train to
be such a thing?"
Mr Espinosa and many others hope that Castro's
younger brother will be less inclined to
rhetoric and more likely to address the
main sources of complaints from Cubans:
high food prices, the lack of transport
and dilapidated housing.
Nowhere is the divide more noticeable than
in the historic quarter of Old Havana where
crumbling edifices are being carefully restored
and converted into boutique hotels and high-price
restaurants.
The cobbled streets and palm shaded squares,
formerly the haunt of Ernest Hemingway and
Graham Greene, are once again frequented
by wealthy foreigners eager to sip Mojitos
in pavement cafes.
But two blocks from Obispo Street with
its newly opened designer shoe shops, Cuban
children play barefoot in the shadow of
crumbling tenement houses where a family
of seven might share one room.
"They are doing a wonderful job making
this place nice," said Susana Cruz
sarcastically as she waited to collect her
weekly ration of rice and beans.
"My sister used to live in a place
that was falling down. Last year the government
came and rebuilt the whole place top to
bottom," she explained.
"My sister and her two young children
live with me now in my place which is falling
down. But you should go and visit her old
place," she laughed. "It's a hotel
now and I hear it has a lovely bar on the
terrace where she used to hang out her clothes."
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