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<font size=3><br>
</font><font size=4><b><a name="1"></a>Understanding the difference
between pobreza and <a name="1"></a>miseria <br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>Posted: 25 Mar 2010 10:33 PM PDT<br>
<a href="http://machetera.wordpress.com/" eudora="autourl">
http://machetera.wordpress.com/<br><br>
</a><i>Just back from Cuba where he attended the launch of the Spanish
translation of his book,
<a href="http://www.booknoise.net/sciencehistory/index.html">A People’s
History of Science</a>: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks” at the
Havana International Book Fair, Cliff Conner posted a brief note about
his visit at the CubaNews listserve. (The other People’s History
guy, Howard Zinn, called Conner’s book “a delightfully refreshing new
look at the history of science” and judging from the standing room only
reception Conner received in Cuba, I’m guessing it’s likely well worth
the read.) At any rate, Conner’s note apparently stirred up a
hornet’s nest of outrage from a couple of ex-Cubans, who it seems
responded with the usual tired diatribe about “dissidents,” defectors,
etcetera.<br><br>
Conner’s response is gracious, far more gracious than I would have been,
but then this blog is called Machetera for a reason. I asked for
permission to re-post his letter here because I think it is well worth
having as a reference, especially for those who’d like to make a case
about the Cuban revolution failing to address poverty in Cuba.<br><br>
People like for instance, Darsi Ferrer, the State Department’s new “Cuban
dissident” poster child, who aside from his interest in secondhand
cement, is also an aspiring filmmaker. Really, I’d rather not call
even more attention to this guy but his
<a href="http://www.cubaencuentro.com/es/multimedia/videos/vivir-en-albergue">
film</a>, co-produced with help from CANF and some German and Czech
“NGO’s” (the Czechs, always the Czechs) would make you laugh if it were
not so deadly serious. Darsi, dressed in a white doctor’s coat,
with a stethoscope draped around his neck – in case you forgot he was a
doctor – complains to the camera in all seriousness about the “miseria”
everywhere in Cuba, caused by inadequate housing and lack of common
medicines. He does this monologue without ever breathing a word
about the blockade, while his wife paws through grocery bags full of
clothing straight off the boat from Miami (was that a magenta thong or
brassiere near the end?), doling out pieces one by one to their very
ordinary and quite healthy looking Cuban neighbors. The film begins
and returns to shots of people collecting water from pipes coming out of
a wall, as though this is something terribly shocking, and you have to
think that it is tragic really that Ferrer couldn’t go do a medical
mission in Haiti so he could learn how people get their water
there. The whole production is scored with haunting music from the
Holocaust genre in case you still didn’t get the point, and I’m sure it
plays very well in drawing rooms on Capitol Hill but it’s junk.
Pure, expensive, U.S. bought and paid for junk.<br><br>
Here’s Conner:<br><br>
</i>* *
* *<br><br>
A few weeks ago <i>CubaNews</i> published a report I wrote of a visit in
February to the Havana International Book Fair, in which I offered some
observations about what I had seen in Cuba. I received (via some friends
I had sent the report to) a set of thoughtful comments on it from a
couple of Cuban ex-pats. I thought their commentary was worth a reply, so
I wrote one; it is appended below. (The names of the people I addressed
it to and the names of the Cuban ex-pats have been changed because I do
not have their permission to use them.)<br><br>
Hi Rhonda and George,<br><br>
Greetings from Mexico City.<br><br>
Thanks for sending me Jaime and Alejandro’s comments on my “report” from
Cuba. Yes, I did find them very interesting and worthwhile,
although I am quite sure that they and I would have to “agree to
disagree” about a number of things regarding their former homeland. I
will try to respond to what they wrote point-by-point, and will ask you
to kindly pass this on to them.<br><br>
Marush and I entirely agree with them about the tackiness of the
Tropicana show, but I described it the way I did because I didn’t want to
seem like a cultural snob. Besides, on a certain level, if you suspend
your critical judgment, it can still be quite enjoyable. I also agree
that the renovation process going on in Habana Vieja is better described
as “restoration” than “reconstruction.”<br><br>
I certainly don’t think of all Cubans living in the United States as
ultra-right-wing fanatics. I do think that an ultra-right element
dominated the first generation of post-revolutionary refugees, and still
has a lot of political clout, but it seems that the younger generation
(which apparently includes Jaime and Alejandro) is not nearly as
politically homogeneous as their elders.<br><br>
Although I wrote my report in a somewhat neutral voice, I am in fact a
strong partisan of the Cuban economic system in contrast to the system
that afflicts our country and most of the rest of the world. I adopted
the neutral tone because in the context of the current (abysmally
uninformed) American political discourse, even that will seem shockingly
pro-Cuba to most of the people I sent it to. I wasn’t trying to be
deceptive; I simply didn’t intend it to be an ideological
manifesto.<br><br>
Of course I recognize that Cuban society is not simply an abstract
“system” but is organized and governed by fallible human beings. Although
I obviously went there with certain preconceptions, and with hopes of
seeing more positive than negative, I didn’t go with blinders or
rose-colored glasses on. I was prepared to see it “warts and all,” and I
did see some warts.<br><br>
However, I think my preconceptions also “unblinded” me to a number of
things that most apolitical tourists would never notice. For example
(speaking of blindness), it only occurred to me today, after walking
around in Mexico City for an hour and seeing a shockingly large number of
blind people, that we had walked around the streets of Havana for ten
days and did not see a single blind person.<br><br>
A cynic might want to believe that the Cuban government simply hides its
“problem people,” but I think a much better explanation is that there
actually are fewer problem people per capita in Cuba than there are in
other poor countries, and that is due to a health care system that really
works, and really serves the interests of the population. (And I did
notice indications confirming my previous research findings that Cuba is
especially advanced in the field of eye care.)<br><br>
Another small point: the “classic cars” are, as Jaime and Alejandro say,
a stereotype, but if you think about it, they are indicative of a very
profound and important difference between Cuba and the United States.
They reflect the character of a society organized according to “waste
not, want not” principles as opposed to one organized according to the
principle of “planned obsolescence.” That in turn is an indication of an
economy based on rationality as opposed to the irrationality of the
market system. What a magnificent example of irrationality planned
obsolescence represents!<br><br>
I’ll take that further and say that this is what I see as Cuba’s most
positive aspect: it has a “system,” including its government, that
operates according to priorities that are rational from the standpoint of
the vast majority of the population. Contrast Cuba’s universal health
care with the absurdity of the so-called debate on that subject in our
country. How embarrassing is that comparison for us? And after universal
health care is universal education.<br><br>
Then there is the governmental support for the arts that I mentioned in
my “report.” (One libertarian friend replied that he would rather not
have any governmental support for the arts because it could only be a
corrupting influence. I think that is an unduly cynical point of view,
but I acknowledge its legitimacy. As for me, I would rather see the NEA
increasing arts funding rather than cutting it. Ditto the NEH.)<br><br>
Here is what in my opinion separates Cuba from every other country in
Latin America and the Caribbean. There are two Spanish words that are
usually translated into English as “poverty”: pobreza and miseria. They
are not the same thing.<br><br>
Pobreza is a meager existence, a life of continuous hard work and
struggle to make ends meet.<br><br>
Miseria, on the other hand, is to be perpetually mired in filth,
degradation, squalor, and hopelessness (think “slumdog”). There is plenty
of pobreza in Cuba but virtually no miseria. In all of the other
countries a substantial proportion of the population is wallowing in
miseria, and most of the rest are in pobreza, alongside small middle
classes and extremely small layers of the obscenely wealthy. But even the
pobreza in Cuba is qualitatively different from – and preferable to – the
pobreza elsewhere.<br><br>
In the other countries, those in pobreza live in constant terror of being
dragged down into miseria. In Cuba that fear has been eliminated by the
most solid “social safety net” in the world. No matter how hard the daily
struggle for existence, no Cuban has to fear that an unexpected illness
will drive them into miseria, or that their children will be
malnourished, or not be well educated. And although there is plenty of
substandard housing in Cuba (a problem exacerbated by the 2008
hurricanes), Havana is still the only capital city in Latin America that
doesn’t include a large, fetid tin-and-corrugated-cardboard shantytown in
its midst.<br><br>
The whole idea of a rational economy implies one that is guided by human
intelligence, which is to say, the economy has to be planned. And that
opens up the problem that anything human beings are involved in can turn
out bad. I am fully aware (as I said clearly in my book) that the planned
economies of the Soviet Union and China were severely perverted by
entrenched bureaucracies.<br><br>
So what the discussion over Cuba comes down to is whether the Cuban
government, like the Soviet and Chinese governments, has turned the
planned economy into a machine of self-enrichment by an entrenched
bureaucracy.<br><br>
It is my considered position that the answer is “no”; that the Cuban
economy actually does prioritize the human needs of its population. That
is something that I believe cannot be said about any other government on
the face of the earth. (It is also why I think the U.S. government is so
adamant about isolating Cuba as much as it can from the rest of the
world. It fears its example and the spread of the “rationality
virus.”)<br><br>
Jaime and Alejandro are not entirely accurate in assuming that our trip
to Cuba was simply a visita dirigida. In the first place, I would never
be so naïve as to think that I could actually make solid scientific
pronouncements about the state of a society based on a few days visit,
dirigida or otherwise, or even one of several months.<br><br>
My observations were admittedly impressionistic and any evidence I cited
is anecdotal. But even impressions and anecdotal evidence can be
worthwhile as long as they aren’t made out to be more than they are. I
also deny that our visit was fully dirigida. As invited Book Fair guests,
we were offered a number of wonderful opportunities by the Ministry of
Culture, which we could have turned down, but why would we?<br><br>
On the other hand, all of the people we visited, including Georgina, the
CP Central Committee staffer, were on our own initiative and not foisted
upon us. (She happened to be a friend, based on time she had spent
in the United States, of one of our American friends.) And finally, we
did visit the homes of several people to whom we were in no sense
“directed.”<br><br>
I knew about the classic cars before we went, of course, but meeting and
riding around with a man who owned and lovingly cared for one was a
revelation. I also knew about the dual currency system, but actually
experiencing it was worth a thousand second-hand accounts.<br><br>
We could see the world-famous Coppelia ice-cream parlor from our hotel
window, so one evening we ventured forth to check it out. As we
approached what we thought was it, we were shooed by a security guard in
another direction and wound up facing a small ice-cream stand that did
indeed bear the name “Coppelia,” but which we could not imagine was the
one we had heard about, so we turned around and went back to the
hotel.<br><br>
The next day we returned with our friend Walter and the mystery was
cleared up. The security guard apparently thought he was doing us a
favor. He could tell at a glance that we were foreigners, so he had
directed us away from the main facility that was for Cubans with moneda
nacional in their pockets and toward the one that was for those of us
privileged folk with C.U.C. The little stand had the great advantage of
having no lines, while the main facility had long, long lines. Waiting in
lines is one of the things that is most annoying in the lives of ordinary
Cubans.<br><br>
As for other socioeconomic “warts,” what about prostitutes, beggars, and
petty street criminals? I am told that the increase in tourism has led to
a rise in prostitution, and I have no reason to doubt it, but it was not
obvious.<br><br>
By comparison, when we were in Beijing recently, the prostitutes around
our upscale hotel were not at all shy about advertising their
wares.<br><br>
As for beggars, we were not once directly asked for handouts, but on two
occasions after we had told a street peddler we weren’t interested in
what he was selling, he shifted to a request for money to feed his hungry
children.<br><br>
By comparison with the streets and subways of New York, that was rather
minimal begging. And as for street crime, we were warned not to carry
expensive cameras or wear flashy jewelry in some neighborhoods, and I
assume the warnings had some basis in reality, but we neither saw nor
experienced anything that made us feel unsafe.<br><br>
On the other hand, nobody warned us against hailing cabs in Havana, and
we took quite a few, but we have been sternly warned not to do that here
in Mexico City. It seems that it is not uncommon here for a cab ride to
end in the passenger being robbed or worse.<br><br>
Jaime and Alejandro wrote that “The Cuban sense of humor is legendary” in
the context of telling a joke the point of which was to make fun of the
shortages and other shortcomings in Cuban society.<br><br>
The Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, told us a number of similar jokes.
We heard from others that he has written and published a book about that
genre of humor. His thesis, if I understood it right, was that the
uptight purists who label such jokes “counterrevolutionary” are wrong to
do so; that those jokes are a manifestation of legitimate popular
dissatisfaction that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. If he really did
write such a book, I say bravo for him.<br><br>
Again, what it comes down to is this: Are the Cuban Ministers of X, Y,
and Z simply bureaucrats with no concern for the principles they pretend
to uphold (like politicians in every other country in the world), or do
they continue to act in accord with the principles of the 1959
Revolution? My observations, based not on a ten-day visit to the island
but on forty-plus years of close Cuba-watching from afar, suggest that by
and large the latter is the case.<br><br>
The one thing I found offensive in Jaime and Alejandro’s comments was the
placement of the word “fascist” in a sentence about Georgina, suggesting
that Cuban CP Central Committee members may be no better than
fascists.<br><br>
If I am right about Cuba having a sociopolitical system that is worth
defending, then Georgina and her fellow CC workers are in the front lines
of that defense, and I applaud them for it. But if I am wrong and Cuba is
just another run-of-the-mill “corrupt politics as usual” country, that
still would not justify a comparison with fascism.<br><br>
Yes, Cuba has a single political party, but nobody tries to disguise that
fact. The U.S. “two-party” system, on the other hand, which offers
us a “choice” between two candidates hand-picked by corporate interests,
is an attempt to bamboozle us into thinking we have a voice in
government. (I almost said “an obvious attempt,” but it is obviously not
obvious enough, because it still seems to be working.)<br><br>
Jaime and Alejandro say they are proud of young Cuban doctors who do such
good work around the world, and also of Cuban athletes who do so well in
international competitions, but they are troubled by the fact that so
many defect. They think it can’t just be about the money, can it? Well,
trouble yourselves no more; the defections are perfectly understandable
if you take into account the context in which they occur.<br><br>
First, consider the athletes (and you might also have mentioned ballet
dancers). When we were at the Cuban National Ballet school we met an
American woman named Mary Jane Doherty who is making a documentary film
about the ballet school. She told us the story of the recent defection of
a rising teenage star dancer whose parents encouraged her not to come
back from a competition in Canada.<br><br>
It was a devastating blow to the school and highly demoralizing to her
fellow students. Why did she do it? Undoubtedly because her parents were
tired of living in pobreza and saw their daughter’s talent as their
ticket to a better life. As Mary Jane said, who can blame them? But it
had nothing to do with yearning for artistic freedom or anything as noble
as that; it really was all about the money, and it’s the same with the
athletes.<br><br>
El Duque as a standard bearer for democratic rights? Give me a break. My
own greatest sports hero was Teófilo Stevenson, who Howard Cosell
ceaselessly castigated as an idiot for refusing to defect and thereby
losing out on the millions he could earn in the United States.<br><br>
By the way, although we shouldn’t put too heavy a moral burden on the
young dancer who defected, let’s not forget that she took with her a
major investment that the rest of the Cuban people had made in preparing
her for stardom. The National Ballet School gave her, for free, several
years of world-class training without which her great talent could not
have developed.<br><br>
That gave her an opportunity that girls and boys from poor families in
most other parts of the world would not have had. If you want to put a
dollar value on that training, we’ll have to wait to see what value the
market rewards her with. But if she gets rich as a ballet star, she will
really owe it all to the millions of ordinary Cubans whose sacrifices
subsidized her free training.<br><br>
Most people in the United States will unthinkingly take the position that
the girl had an unqualified right to defect – no ifs, ands, or buts. That
is a reflection of the reigning ideology of extreme individualism in
which the individual is everything and the collective is
nothing.<br><br>
In North Korea, the collective is everything and the individual is
nothing. It seems to me that Cuba has managed to strike the best balance
between the needs of individuals and the needs of the collective.
(Ironically, it is the place where the abstract individual is exalted to
the sky that allows millions of real flesh-and-blood individuals to fall
through the cracks.)<br><br>
It must be remembered that the high-profile defections only have to do
with a miniscule number of highly talented individuals. Just as
basketball can only be the road out of the ghetto for an infinitesimally
small percentage of the millions of young men dreaming that they may be
the next LeBron James, neither can defection to the land where streets
are paved with gold solve the social problems of millions of ordinary
Cubans. And yet they are encouraged to pursue those irrational
dreams.<br><br>
(An aside: Did you ever stop to think about why so much attention is paid
to the relatively small number of poor Cubans who emigrate to the United
States when at the same time a million poor Mexicans cross the border
into the United States every year?)<br><br>
As for doctors who defect, that is a particularly sordid story. Are you
aware that the United States runs a special project devoted to luring
those very Cuban doctors you are proud of away from their overseas
missions that serve poor people who have no other medical care?* There
has to be a special circle in hell reserved for the despicable officials
who thought that one up.<br><br>
[*]See:
<a href="http://www.uscis.gov/files/pressrelease/CubanMedPrf091906.pdf">
http://www.uscis.gov/files/pressrelease/CubanMedPrf091906.pdf</a><br><br>
What I said about tourism and the Cuban economy was really just an
impressionistic riff; I didn’t intend it to be taken as authoritative. I
do remember that at one time the Cuban economy’s dependence on sugarcane
production made it a classic example of third world monoculture. And I
continue to believe that tourism will play a significant role in Cuba’s
ability to survive.<br><br>
I don’t know whether Jaime and Alejandro are correct in their claim that
exile family remittances account for more income than tourism at present
– I suspect accurate and reliable figures on that score are hard to come
by – but even if it is true I don’t think it reflects badly on Cuba. The
remittances are usually cited to suggest that the Cuban economy is
artificial and would collapse without them, but at best they only
partially offset the negative impact of the U.S. economic blockade. Given
the choice between the remittances and ending the blockade, I’m sure the
Cubans would gladly take the latter.<br><br>
Furthermore, I would like to offer an alternative reading of Jaime and
Alejandro’s statement that “Cuba’s dependence, until 20 years ago, was
not on sugarcane but on the largesse of the Soviet Union.”<br><br>
First of all, the collapse of the Soviet Union did indeed deal a harsh
blow to Cuba’s noncapitalist economy, but the fact that the latter has
survived for two decades “on its own” should put to rest any notion that
Cuba’s dependence on the USSR was in any sense absolute. I would suggest
that Cuba’s relationship with the USSR was not one of dependency but one
of equal trading partners.<br><br>
Free-market ideologues assert that when Cuba swapped sugar for Soviet
oil, the USSR was “subsidizing” Cuba by selling them oil at a
below-market price and buying sugar at an above-market price. That,
however, implies that the world market prices of commodities are the
“fair” price.<br><br>
I would argue that they most decidedly are not. Historically, wealthy
countries have had the financial power to control the terms of
international trade. As a result, prices of things that poor countries
produce – raw materials, agricultural products – are held low, and prices
for things they have to import tend to rise.<br><br>
This is a phenomenon known all too well to the poor countries as the
“deteriorating terms of trade.” There is nothing at all “fair” or
“natural” about world market prices. The terms of trade that the USSR and
Cuba worked out were far more equitable and, from a moral point of view,
far more fair.<br><br>
I’m afraid I can’t add much more to what I already said about Cuba’s
Jewish community, although I can say that what Dr. Altshuler told us
supports what Jaime and Alejandro said about its small size.<br><br>
As for Jaime and Alejandro’s comments about human rights abuses in Cuba,
this is obviously a hugely important issue for two reasons. First,
wherever people are being victimized, that should be brought to light,
protested, and stopped. Second, to the extent that such charges are
true, they damage Cuba’s moral standing in the international community,
and Cuba’s very survival as a positive example of postcapitalist society
depends in large part on that moral standing.<br><br>
When I first became a partisan of the Cuban Revolution more than forty
years ago, the charges I heard of human rights abuses disturbed me
profoundly, so I made an effort to investigate them the best I could.
After a few years of finding that they were almost all bogus claims of
right-wing exiles, I stopped bothering to investigate.<br><br>
The one big exception was charges of institutional repression of gay
Cubans, which was indeed a stain on the Revolution. Over the years,
however, it seems that the situation has changed for the better. Not to
say that there isn’t still a great deal of anti-gay prejudice in Cuba (in
what country is there not?), but at least the problem is no longer one of
active institutional mistreatment.<br><br>
Cuban gay rights advocates continue to make demands on their government
to be more proactive in defending gays against injustices, and it is
encouraging that the loudest of their voices belongs to none other than
Mariela Castro, the daughter of president Raúl Castro.<br><br>
The fact that I found most earlier charges of human rights abuses in Cuba
to be unfounded does not mean that I now simply dismiss Jaime and
Alejandro’s allegations out of hand. I don’t find it impossible to
believe that human rights abuses exist in Cuba.<br><br>
Pobreza breeds social conflict everywhere, and Cuba is no exception. And
wherever there are police, the police mentality can lead to human rights
abuses that are simply intolerable. In the past few days I have seen
reports in the Mexican press of the “women in white” protests in Havana
being broken up by police.<br><br>
I also note that usually trustworthy international human rights
organizations such as Amnesty International have been critical of recent
Cuban judicial practices. As for the “women in white,” I see from CNN
reports that after they were arrested they were not jailed but were taken
to their homes.<br><br>
I have not heard the official explanation, but I suspect it will be that
the women were detained “for their own protection” from much larger
groups of angry counterdemonstrators. I would have rather seen the police
defend the women’s peaceful protest against the hostile
counterdemonstrators, but I can’t say more than that because I wasn’t
there.<br><br>
Jaime and Alejandro specifically cited the case of a prisoner named
Zamora. I think they are referring to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died in
a Cuban prison recently as the result of a hunger strike. I don’t want to
minimize the seriousness of this case, but anything more I say about it
would simply be talking off the top of my head.<br><br>
I hope if his death did arise from an injustice on the part of Cuban
authorities, steps will be taken to prevent such things from happening
again. (It’s too late to help him.) I am somewhat encouraged by a CNN
report that quoted Cuban president Raúl Castro as saying that he
“lamented the death of Cuban prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died
after leading a hunger strike.”<br><br>
Jaime and Alejandro asked whether Nadine Gordimer might write a protest
letter on behalf of political prisoners in Cuban jails as she did for the
Cuban Five who are now imprisoned in the United States. I can’t speak for
Nadine, but I can say that my own experience suggests that she would not
ignore a request to intercede on their behalf.<br><br>
When I returned home from Cuba I wrote to her and asked if she would
issue a statement protesting the incarceration of an American prisoner of
conscience, Lynne Stewart, the courageous defense attorney who the Bush
administration prosecuted for conspiring with terrorists because she had
served as the lawyer for a man accused of terrorism.<br><br>
I received a rapid response indicating that Nadine would investigate the
case herself and let me know her decision. I don’t think that was a
brush-off. She undoubtedly receives hundreds of similar requests from all
over the world every year, and she is far too independent-minded to
simply rubber-stamp them.<br><br>
At the press conference I attended, I saw her tell the Cuban press
officials she would not speak until they showed her the Spanish
translation of her statement. She told me she wanted to make sure
they weren’t slipping in anything she hadn’t actually said.<br><br>
In general, rank-and-file human rights activists like myself tend to
confine ourselves to protesting the abuses of our own respective
governments. That is not a matter of hypocrisy or double standards. Human
rights abuses are intolerable wherever they occur, but our primary duty
is to stand up against those that are committed in our own
names.<br><br>
As Cubans, Jaime and Alejandro understandably feel most strongly about
abuses committed against their countrymen and countrywomen, but as
ex-pats they do not have any more standing in the eyes of the Cuban
government – probably even less – than I do to protest them. Nadine
Gordimer is a rare exception whose international reputation forces
governments everywhere to at least hear her protests.<br><br>
Well, Rhonda and George, when I began this e-mail I had not intended to
hold forth at such length, but I guess it’s one of those “don’t get me
started” things. The abysmal state of our poor planet earth is such that
tiny Cuba is the only bright spot I see anywhere. If I had a magic wand
and could wave it and transform all of human society into one big
Cuban-style society, would I do it? Even if it meant that my own living
standard would decline into pobreza? In a heartbeat!<br><br>
To raise the billions of humans who are currently in slumdog miseria
would be well worth it. Besides, if the rational Cuban economy were a
worldwide system, there’s no reason to think that even pobreza could not
soon be eliminated. As John Lennon sang, “Imagine!” But since I don’t
have a magic wand, I suppose the world will either have to find some
other way to free itself from the grip of the market system or else
continue muddling on along its current path to self-destruction.<br><br>
Cliff<br><br>
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