Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201120239
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANNE-MARIE O'CONNOR
DATELINE: HAVANA LENGTH: Long
FACING LIFE WITHOUT MOSCOW
Never before has the Cuban Revolution seemed so gripped by desperation.Post-Soviet bloc Cuba is a puzzling place divided by tension, friction and fear, as Cubans brace for a highly uncertain future in which the very survival of the 32-year-old one-party state is at stake.
Bearded Cuban leader Fidel Castro, 65, is now gray-haired and strained by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist just before its 1991 trade protocol with Cuba expired.
"What Hitler couldn't do, what imperialist intervention couldn't do in the early years of the October Revolution - liquidate the Soviet Union - human error has done," Castro lamented in speech not long ago.
The future flow of the most basic necessities from the East Bloc - like petroleum - is now uncertain. Soviet oil supplies came to a dead halt at the end of November. Alarmed party officials know that even if any shipments are renewed, they will be at a fraction of previous levels.
As oil stocks dwindle, Castro is asking Cuban socialists to prepare to cut their energy consumption to a third. Tractors are being replaced by oxen pulling plows, and donkey taxis are a familiar sight. Some 750,000 bicycles have been imported from China to replace taxis and buses.
Grim warning: Option Zero
He has warned Cubans that they must be prepared for a total energy cutoff, for which Cuba has a grim-sounding contingency plan called "Option Zero."
"Zero energy, zero electricity, zero transport," explained an official.
"In the Sierra Maestra there wasn't petroleum or electricity," Castro said in a speech in December, referring to the eastern mountains from which he waged the 1959 Revolution. "Our enemies should know that we are ready to defend our ideas and our cause - at whatever price - that we are ready to struggle endlessly."
At the same time Castro, desperate for overseas investment, is inviting foreign capitalists to cavort at austerity-free enclaves from which common Cubans are often excluded.
"I went to the Havana Libre [Hotel] the other day and they wouldn't even let me in," said Hilda Guevara, the oldest daughter of Castro's comrade-in-arms, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, laughing good-naturedly.
It was an odd scene in a country where Che's image of proud defiance stares down from countless billboards, often with the admonishment, "Be Like Him." In Havana Libre tourist shops, his rugged, matinee-star good looks cover everything from T-shirts to key chains.
It epitomizes something many Cubans complain about bitterly: the way efforts to maintain orthodox Marxist-Leninism often clash head-on with the goals of revolutionary egalitarianism.
Turning to foreign investors
Castro's survival strategy rests heavily on foreign investors, whom he is inviting to set up businesses in Cuba with capitalist-style management practices.
Cubans are barred from setting up private ventures, though a prominent member of the Council of State, Consumer Demand Institute chief Eugenio Balari, repeatedly has advised that all small business be privatized to improve service and efficiency.
To a growing number of Cubans, such contradictions call into question the logic of Castro's refusal to embark on the path of reforms which he has dismissed as "capitalist garbage." They fear that a two-tier society is being set up, with top Communist Party officials and foreigners enjoying a dramatically different standard of living - and liberties - than the rest of Cuba.
Few lives are untouched by the brewing crisis. As opportunities dwindle and scarcities grow, most people try to simply survive.
Cuban concert pianist Silvio Rodriguez Cardenas apologizes that visitors to the spacious two-story home he shares with Castro's elderly sister, Agustina, must sit in the dark because of the light bulb shortage. "Everyone feels that Cuba is on the brink of something, but no one knows what," said Rodriguez, who shares his home with Agustina and her new husband because of the housing shortage.
"Everyone is afraid. The Revolution made many social achievements here, and people fear losing them," he said. "Look at the Soviet Union and EasternEurope - no one wants that kind of chaos here. No one knows what the future will bring.
"These are the most tense times Cuba has ever lived, because there's no solution in sight," he said.
Rodriguez said that if it wasn't for his family, he would be tempted not to return from his upcoming concert tour of Russia and Europe, and join the stream of deserters that is draining the country of talented professionals.
Just then, Agustina burst into the room to chastise Rodriguez for talking to a reporter. "She's afraid," he said apologetically. "You know very well weshouldn't be making statements," she retorted.
She is afraid for their children. Two years ago her son, Angelito, gave a boat to two friends, Pedro and Frank Guelmes, so they could flee to Florida. But they were caught, and he was placed under house arrest for a year for assisting them. He is still unemployed.
"He's on the blacklist and he always will be. It's forever," a family friend said. "She's very worried - everyone is. But Angelito makes her more vulnerable."
Her daughter, Lina, finally got a job at the University of Havana recently, five years after she graduated. "People were afraid to give her a job because she was a niece of Fidel's," the friend said. "They were afraid that she'd inform on them."
Official suspicion and mistrust has grown in the face of widespread defections, often by officials who had claimed loyalty to the system. The author of the Option Zero plan is said to be the most recent such defector.
The growing paranoia has ruined careers.
A year ago, deputy foreign minister Jose Viera dropped from sight just months after he was the high-profile government spokesman for a crisis over a rush on foreign embassies by Cubans seeking asylum.
Officials say Viera was removed because he was suspected of planning to defect with his family, though he still protests his innocence.
Viera was placed under house arrest until sometime in 1991, when he was given a lackluster job at a state publishing firm that has been rendered all but defunct because of paper shortages.
"Acts of repudiation" against government critics are multiplying, but some Cubans are beginning to resist them.
A mob of party supporters recently dragged prize-winning dissident poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela out of her house by her hair and stuffed some of her writing into her mouth. Many Cubans were shocked; such public mistreatment of a woman is deeply frowned on.
Neighbors rise in defense
When a mob came several weeks later for Jorge Crespo, an artist and human rights activist, his neighbors told them to go away, shouting "This is a decent family," according to Alina Fernandez Revuelta, Castro's daughter.
The crisis is increasing the gap between top party officials and common Cubans.
"We will all sink together before we betray the Revolution," proclaims a gloomy radio message that sums up the official position.
But actually, high-level Party officials - the most resistant to reforms - are not enduring the same hardships.
With power comes perks.
While common Cubans wait in lines for bus service that has been slashed in half, top party officials have cars.
They can shop at special stores for food and consumer goods.
Medicine and ambulance shortages abound, but not at the special hospitals of the Communist Party Central Committee, the Politburo and the Interior Ministry.
"There they have everything. It's another world," sighed the son of a veteran of the Sierra Maestra.
Nowhere is the disparity so dramatic as at the tourist enclaves, where the Cuban revolution appears to have come full circle.
As in the Batista dictatorship of the '50s, tourist prostitution is abundant, though it is not officially sanctioned.
The resorts have been transformed into enclaves of civil liberties. Cable television provides pirated U.S. and Spanish network news, HBO movies and television programming from Ted Turner's broadcast operations.
There are no "acts of repudiation" against those who openly criticize the state.
Common Cubans are effectively excluded from the havens of material luxury by so-called "dollar apartheid." Unless they are specially authorized, these Cubans can go to jail for simply possessing dollars, the official currency of the tourist industry.
The Communist nomenclature administers Cuba with the same paternalist rationale that they run the AIDS sanatorium on the outskirts of Havana, where those suffering from the virus are effectively quarantined. As long as they treat the people humanely, they feel justified in withholding their civil liberties.
"In many ways, life here is very easy," one European diplomat said of Cuba. "In the Western capitalist world, you can buy a lot of things, but you must work hard." The real gains
Citing Cuba's high marks in public health and education, the leadership has always argued that the socialist system guarantees the well-being of the majority of Cubans.
And they have made tremendous gains. Cuba's literacy rate is almost as high as the United States, its infant mortality rate is nearly identical, and the average Cuban life span - nearly 76 years - is the longest in Latin America.
Many Cubans still seem satisfied with the tradeoff.
"I'm faithful to [Fidel]," said 21-year-old Jose Angel Rodriguez, the driver of a mule-powered carriage taxi in the southeastern city of Santiago de Cuba.
"We don't want capitalism here. The gusanos treated black people badly," he said, using the slang word for wealthy Cubans who fled to Miami after the 1959 Revolution. The word means "worms."
But living standards have fallen drastically since the crumbling of the Soviet bloc.
And Castro is hinting that increased official emphasis will be placed on the agriculture farms to which thousands of Cuban workers have been transferred.
"What is being debated here is whether we are going to be a society of intellectuals or a society of workers," Castro said in a recent speech. "I think that some day, the top salary must go to the agricultural worker."
Now, even some of those who once saw Castro as the champion of a better future for Cuba are beginning to view him as an obstacle to reforms that they believe are desperately needed if any of Cuba's impressive social gains are to be preserved.
"If there are no changes, this will all be over. That's the tragedy," said one privileged Cuban socialist, who did not wish to be named. "Because two generations have sacrificed their lives to create this."
The argument most used against implementing reforms and greater liberties is the U.S. threat. Alone against the world
At the Fourth Party Congress in Santiago de Cuba in October, Castro depicted Cuba as a "little island of revolution . . . surrounded by capitalism.
"We're invincible . . . and if they have to kill our entire people to crush the revolution, then the people, behind the party and their leaders, are ready to die," Castro said. "We're ready to water our ideas with our blood."
Cuban dissident Elizardo Sanchez has urged the Bush administration to ease the U.S. economic blockade that bars trade with Cuba to encourage reform, saying that would deprive Castro of his main excuse for social control. But the administration has said it will not budge.
With the waning of Soviet sponsorship, Cuba, whose revolutionary government has long championed Latin sovereignty, is finally facing true independence.
After a history of Spanish colonialism, life as a virtual U.S. protectorate and then as a Soviet strategic ally, Cuba is ill-prepared to meet the challenge.
Instead of diversifying its agricultural production 32 years ago to move toward food self sufficiency, the revolutionary government continued its role as the world's largest sugar producer, trading in its U.S. sugar quota to become the supplier of the Soviets.
The experience has been painful. After 32 years of absolute power, an aging Castro is not the same man who led his nation down the path of Cuban Communism.
One worker in Cuba's tourist industry said he supported the socialist system but was unsure whether common people like him could play a role in the country's future.
"The world has decided that socialism must end in Cuba. And alone against the world, you cannot hope to win," he sighed with resignation.