Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 30, 1994 TAG: 9404010007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSEPH L. SCARPACI
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Maybe this is why Americans would do well to take a closer look at the 33-year blockade against Cuba. Should market economics determine when we end blockades in one part of the world where we fought a long and nasty war, yet impose it in another? Poor Cuba. So close to the United States, yet so far from commercial trade with Miami and ports to the north.
Vietnam's consumer population is six times larger than Cuba's 12 million inhabitants. That bodes well for free-trade with Vietnam. Time has healed the wounds inflicted by the Vietnam War. How else could we lift an economic blockade against a nation where more than 50,000 American men and women lost their lives? In contrast, only a few Cuban exiles sent to the Bay of Pigs died in that ill-fated invasion of April 1961.
The Soviet bloc no longer buys Cuban sugar, the island's main export, at three times the market price. That economic diet, washed down with cheap Soviet oil, nurtured Castro's government for decades. When that prosperity vanished in the late 1980s, it sent the Cuban economy spiraling into an economic free fall, euphemistically called the "special period."
The economic malaise in the island is special all right, special enough to ration food and gasoline and bring cracks to a once world-famous health system. It forced an increase in Havana's bicycle census from 7,000 in 1989 to nearly 700,000 this year. Folks can't get to work any other way.
Cubans of all strata readily admit today that Soviet dependency was a mistake and that it's time to experiment with a new model of economic development. Although they cannot march in protest, they are at least talking a bit more openly about change in the streets, factories and parks.
Last July, I sat spellbound in the apartment of a well-known Cuban engineer along with a half dozen of his companeros - die-hard revolutionaries. Fidel, well-known for his long speeches, was celebrating the 40th anniversary of his attack against the Moncada Jail during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In less than 90 minutes, he explained why his government would allow some private enterprises and why possessing dollars would no longer be illegal: to tap into the millions of dollars circulating in the black-market economy. Casting Cuba as a victim of the global market, the Lider Maximo even proposed setting up interest-generating bank accounts in Cuba, and in dollars.
Tough medicine for those companeros in the apartment who had committed the better parts of their lives to the Revolution. Castro didn't take any questions from the press and the press couldn't ask any. From that point on, however, in no small way it has been "Adios socialism, hello free market!"
Spanish films have led the wave of new investments in Cuba since the special period began. Some Cubans even lament the "Second Conquest" of this Iberian invasion, especially in the tourist industry. The former Havana Hilton, for example, renamed Havana Libre during the first 33 years of the Revolution, goes by the Havana-Guitart name now. It symbolizes a new trend in Spanish investment. The Guitart chain, a Spanish consortium, streamlined personnel from 1,200 to some 400 within its first few months of operation.
These layoffs were truly revolutionary in a government that had guaranteed employment. It is questionable, though, whether even table service at the hotel's restaurants has improved. As a retired government economist told me after that July 26 speech, "The new capitalism here is third-, perhaps fourth-class capitalism, and even we can tell the difference."
To be sure, Cubans know little about pricing. Quality cotton T-shirts sell for as little as $2 while jewelers price coral as if it were diamonds. Store managers desperately need a quick course in Entrepreneurship 101. So why not allow U.S. entrepreneurs and tourists to partake in the inevitable?
Consider the following scenario: The United States eliminates the trade embargo tomorrow. Expectations among the Cuban people soar because the Cuban government can no longer use the embargo as a scapegoat for the island's economic woes. Rising expectations coupled with a lack of basic consumer goods demanded by most Cubans leads to political turmoil. The result: Within 18 months, political and economic change comes from within.
What kind of change? Maybe a multiparty system will develop such as the one in the former Soviet Union. Or perhaps an uprising from within. Regardless of the outcome, the United States gains access to a fascinating country just 90 miles from its shores, sanctifies its much-heralded policies of non-intervention and unfettered markets, and lets the communist government collapse from its own ineptitude.
Cuba is no Vietnam and Cubans won't make a lot of U.S. business people rich. The average worker earns only about 3 U.S. dollars monthly. But neither is Cuba the island of the 1950s with prostitution and illiteracy, nor is it the socialist vanguard it was during the 1970s.
In the 1990s, Cuba is fast becoming a two-tier society. Those who have access to dollars from working abroad or in tourism can secure items most Cubans don't have. These commodities are not, by most Western standards, the fare of conspicuous consumption: leather shoes, personal stereos, basic office supplies, car batteries and personal computers with sluggish 286 microprocessors. High school dropouts can earn more in a day of escorting tourists around town than what a prestigious surgeon earns in one month.
This contrast - some would say hypocrisy - has angered many die-hard revolutionaries who are posing serious intellectual and pragmatic questions about this new course in the socialist revolution. Theoretically, economic liberalism may bring parallel liberties in political discourse.
President Clinton will first have to contend with welfare and health-care reform at home before he takes on the powerful Cuban-American lobby in Miami. This lobby is willing to strangle its compatriotas at any cost, and this against a nation where we fought no war and where there was no Holocaust. Clearly, Cuba's human-rights record needs to be improved. But so does Vietnam's, which we will be monitoring.
If we have forgiven Vietnam for crimes I am not now sure of, surely we can do the same for Cuba. Perhaps we find it hard to forgive Cuba because it became a Marxist-Leninist nation right under our nose. The Cuban people don't have U.S. senators who fought in Cuba as they did in Vietnam to overturn the blockade. The American people need someone to tell them that it is all right to bury the sword, that we can, as Richard Nixon often remarked, "have peace with honor."
Why are we afraid of letting the free market, a concept we so strongly believe in, run its course in Cuba? That foreign policy would complement our initiatives under the North American Free Trade Agreement, remove a thorn that has been in the side of inter-American affairs for three decades, and show our commitment to exchanging guns for butter.
It may even help shape a country that values both the virtues of the marketplace and of quality education and health care; virtues not far from the pulse of the American people today. A foreign policy built on "Vietnam si, Cuba no" makes little sense in 1994.
Joseph L. Scarpaci of Blacksburg is associate professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech.
by CNB