THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, December 12, 1995 TAG: 9512120257
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 188 lines
A new Cuba is taking shape.
No one knows what it will look like when it is fully formed. Much depends on Fidel Castro, the aging revolutionary who has doggedly kept his country on its Marxist track for 36 years.
But the new Cuba is also being formed by people most Americans have never heard of. People like the Rev. Wayne Blythe, Heber Romero and Lisset Rodes.
They are among a growing number of Cubans and Americans who, after decades of estrangement between their governments, are slowly but surely building bridges toward each other.
Earlier this year, Blythe, associate minister at Freemason Street Baptist Church in Norfolk, traveled to Cuba with two other ministers to begin work on establishing a ``partnering'' relationship with a church in Lagunillas, a small village 90 miles southeast of Havana. They took along humanitarian aid, mostly medicine.
A group from the church plans to return to Cuba in March. Again, they will take humanitarian aid. ``But we do not presume to have something to teach these people,'' Blythe said. ``We look forward to sharing their hospitality and to learning from them.''
Romero and Rodes are members of KAIROS, an ecumenical Cuban Christian musical group making its fifth American tour. The tour includes the group's first South Hampton Roads appearance, a concert of Cuban Christmas music Wednesday evening at Freemason Street Baptist Church.
Blythe called the church-to-church pairing ``a fraternal rather than a paternal relationship.''
It is in such relationships, far removed from the ideologically charged enmity at the government level, that Cuba's best hope lies, Blythe and his new Cuban friends believe.
Their personal diplomacy comes at a time of desperate conditions in Cuba, aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and a punishing U.S. trade embargo.
To cope with the crisis, Castro has been forced to embrace some elements of the system he has long despised - capitalism.
And despite its atheist dogma, his regime is demonstrating a grudging acceptance of religion.
KAIROS is the first Christian musical group that has been allowed to tour nationally through Cuba. It has performed not only in churches but in theaters, museums and other public places.
The group has even been featured by government-owned Cuban newspapers and radio. ``They accept us because we are a fact,'' Romero, the group's composer and spokesman, said in a telephone interview from Atlanta last week. ``They cannot avoid us.''
``In the first years after the revolution,'' Romero said, ``they believed that religion was something of the past - that the church would disappear in the future because it was not scientific. Now they have to accept that it's not going to disappear.''
Growing religious tolerance is only one sign of a changing Cuba. There are many others in the economic sphere. They, too, spring from a reluctant recognition of reality.
Five years ago, Cuba's economy was plunged into crisis by the fall of the Soviet Union, long a vital source of the island nation's trade and aid.
From 1990, when the Soviet Union's trade and subsidies dried up as it neared collapse, through 1993, the Cuban economy contracted by 45 percent.
Cubans, accustomed to one of the highest standards of living in Latin America, suddenly had to contend with critical shortages of food, most consumer goods, gas and electricity.
Rodes, one of the KAIROS musicians, described the harsh conditions during a talk to a group of Baptists in Virginia Beach last month.
``The Cuban reality in the last five years has perhaps been the most difficult that we have lived in many years . . . ,'' she said. ``Suddenly we no longer make plans for the future, and life's meaning has become basic survival.
``For example: In Cuba the majority of people do not have breakfast, do not drink milk, nor have any protein. The only thing that is guaranteed daily is a piece of bread, without any fat, and every 10 days an ounce of coffee for each person.
``The desperation is behind the door of every home.''
Today it appears that Castro may be able to ride out the economic crisis by adopting some of the tools of his capitalist antagonists.
He has imposed taxes and reduced consumer subsidies. He has legalized the circulation of U.S. dollars, instituted farmers' markets, authorized 200,000 Cubans to start businesses and liberalized the foreign investment law.
Thanks mainly to foreign investors, Cuba's foreign trade will top $4 billion this year. Last year, for the first time this decade, Cuba registered economic growth - a scant 0.7 percent.
In the past two weeks, Castro has been on a tour of China and Vietnam, studying how those nations' communist leaders have managed to institute free-market reforms while keeping their monopoly on power.
The changes in Cuba have brought some unwelcome social inequities. The free circulation of U.S. dollars, for example, has created a topsy-turvy working world. Waiters, cab drivers, prostitutes and others with access to dollar-carrying foreign visitors earn many times more than engineers and psychologists.
``Teachers work practically for love,'' Rodes said. ``They do not have everything they need for their classes and they earn the equivalent of $10 to $15 a month. The doctors go to hospitals riding bicycles. . . . The only thing they eat for lunch is maybe some rice and soup, while their salary is $20 a month.
``Many professionals have quit practicing their professions to work carrying suitcases or serving in hotels for the tourists in order to receive tips.''
Last month, in an effort to narrow the widening income gap, the government announced the restoration of another staple of capitalism - the personal income tax. It will apply only to incomes earned in dollars and other foreign currencies.
Where will the changes lead? No one knows.
``In Cuba, people are very confused,'' Romero said. ``Five years ago, our world was turned around. The Soviet Union suddenly disappeared. We don't really know where we are walking to. . . .
``The government says they're going to save socialism. But we don't know what they're going to do. People are just trying to survive. Most of the time they don't have time to think. At the end of the day they are very tired.''
Cuba's political system remains authoritarian, with opposition parties outlawed and dissidents tightly controlled. Still, the government's change in economic tack has created a feeling that the country's leaders are at last acting to pull Cuba out of its tailspin.
A headlong rush to capitalism, officials warn, would almost certainly shred the socialist safety net that Cubans take for granted - such things as free medical care and university education, Latin America's highest literacy rate and a wide range of subsidies.
A major cause of Cuba's economic woes is the trade embargo that the United States has maintained since Castro seized power nearly four decades ago.
The future of the embargo is a question mark. A measure passed this fall in different forms by the House and Senate could tighten it still further.
The House version would impose penalties on countries that trade with Cuba, and allow U.S. citizens to sue foreign corporations that buy or do business on property expropriated from Americans by the Cuban government.
The Clinton administration opposes the bill, and in fact has taken some steps toward easing the frosty relations between the two countries.
This fall, the president relaxed restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, academics, clergy and students, and agreed to allow U.S. news organizations to open bureaus there.
``The problem is between governments, but it's the people who are suffering,'' said Romero, the KAIROS spokesman. ``The embargo doesn't affect the government. I don't think the embargo is going to take Fidel Castro from the government. He's a very determined person. He is using the embargo to get political support for his government.
``I'm against the embargo. We've had the embargo for 36 years; it has demonstrated that it's not succeeding.''
KAIROS is a Greek word that translates as ``time of God'' or ``the opportune time.'' The Cuban and American ``partners'' believe this is the opportune time to reach out and try to heal the longstanding division between their countries.
``One of our goals,'' said Romero, ``is to establish relationships with people here, whom we consider our brothers and sisters, so they don't see us through the window of the government but see us as persons and friends and Christians.'' MEMO: The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times contributed to this
report.
ILLUSTRATION: Members of KAIROS, an ecumenical Cuban Christian musical group
making its fifth American tour, from left, Alberto Hernandez, Lisset
Rodes, Lazaro Horta, Olga Margarita Munoz and Joel Brena.
CONCERT
The Cuban musical group KAIROS will present a program of
Christmas music in Spanish at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday at Freemason
Street Baptist Church, Freemason and Bank streets, Norfolk.
Admission is free; a love offering will be taken.
An interpreter will be present.
ABOUT CUBA
Area: 110,860 sq. km. (slightly smaller than Pennsylvania)
Natural resources: cobalt, nickel, iron ore, copper, manganese,
salt, timber, silica, petroleum
Population: 10.9 million (July 1995 est.)
Birth rate: 14.5 per 1,000 people
Death rate: 6.5 per 1,000 people
Infant mortality rate: 8.1 per 1,000 live births
Life expectancy: 77 years
Fertility rate: 1.6 per woman
Language: Spanish
Literacy (age 15 and older): 98 percent
Government: One-party communist state
Gross domestic product: $14 billion (1994 est.)
GDP growth rate: 0.7%
GDP per capita: $1,260
Exports: $1.6 billion (1994 est.) - sugar, nickel, shellfish,
tobacco, medical products, citrus, coffee
Imports: $1.7 billion (1994 est.) - petroleum, food, machinery,
chemicals
Defense expenditures: $600 million (1994 est.), 6.5% of national
budget
Source: CIA World Factbook, Dallas Morning News
by CNB