Cuba: Eileen's Reflections after a Visit February 2008

for my Global Citizenship class, Sociology 433A, by Eileen Dombrowski
Traffic is light on the highways because Cuba has so few working vehicles. Cubans get around however they can. They manage to keep the old cars from the 50's running or use horses and bicycles. Hitchhiking and sharing rides are built into people's expectations, so that trucks often pass with their backs crammed full of riders. The environmental benefit and the physical fitness are side effects of necessity.
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Starving the economy through the embargo has not, over nearly 5 decades, induced Cubans to rise up against their government nor prevented other countries from some trade and aid. (Canada has maintained relations with Cuba.) It has, however, hurt Cuban people.

So too have the policies of their own Cuban government - policies that have failed to enable citizens to make ends meet economically, and policies that prevent them from criticizing what's in place or developing legal alternatives. No one is starving or suffering absolute poverty, but life is hard. At present, Cubans earn $25/month and need roughly $100 to live on. The gap is closed in part by state rations of basic groceries (though not all groceries are always available), in part by remittances sent by Cubans in Florida to their families, in part by limited legal capitalism, and in part by the risky black market. The black market apparently circulates many goods diverted from state production: workers chronically under-produce with no incentive of personal satisfaction or financial reward, but do manage to produce a bit extra to sell privately for immediate benefit, gaining cash for shopping for other goods made available in the same way. Black market exchanges are illegal and undermine the state system of providing for its citizens, but Cubans struggling for a basic living often resort to this alternative to meet their own immediate needs. They generally live in overcrowded and dilapidated accommodation, face shortages of basic goods, and endure inefficient, ineffective bureaucracy. They are immensely resourceful in maintaining machines and constructions from more affluent eras - strikingly the old cars of the 50's - but cannot generally get spare parts, building materials, or even tins of paint as things break down and crumble around them. Apparently, many, many Cubans would gladly leave home for that land of opportunity, the United States.

Some changes in political/economic policies have already taken place in Cuba in response to need. With loss of aid from the Soviet Union as it collapsed at the beginning of the 1990's, and with loss of income from exports as the global sugar market also collapsed, Cuba was in a desperate position. At that point, the Castro government turned to a limited capitalism and promoted tourism in order to bring in money from abroad as profits for state-owned resorts and for people initiating small tourist businesses (making income that is heavily taxed and distributed).

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