Cubans debate changes, but ask where's the beef
Cubans debate changes, but ask where's the beef
By Anthony BoadleMon Nov 12, 3:59 PM ET
Change is a word that can still get you into trouble in communist Cuba, yet it is on everyone's lips these days.
As the nation debates a future without ailing leader Fidel Castro, expectations are rising that change will come, at least in the way the one-party state runs the economic life of its 11 million people.
But 15 months after the 81-year-old Castro fell ill and his brother Raul became acting president, few policy changes have been made and Cubans are wondering when they will come.
In meetings held over the last two months in neighborhoods, work places and Communist Party cells, Cubans criticized the shortcomings of the socialist system born from Castro's 1959 revolution, venting their frustration with 16 years of hardships since the Soviet Union collapsed.
People stood up to complain about low wages, high food prices, poor housing, restrictions on travel and, above all, a two-tiered monetary system that limits access to consumer goods to those Cubans with hard currency.
"We want deeds, not words. Before we had money and there was nothing to buy. Now the shops are full, but we have no money," said a Havana housewife who did not give her name.
Raul Castro, who is considered more open to market reforms than his brother, has encouraged media exposes of glaring faults in the 90-percent state-owned economy. His call also paved the way for the nationwide process of public meetings.
In a July 26 speech this year, the younger Castro, 76, said "structural changes" were needed in agriculture to kick-start Cuba's deficient food production.
Yet in recent weeks at least 20 youths wearing wristbands with the word "CAMBIO" --meaning political change-- were detained by police for several hours and reprimanded for wearing "counter-revolutionary" propaganda allegedly supplied by the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.
"Cubans want a change of mentality, because this system doesn't work anymore," said Luis Miguel, a state employee who hitched a ride on Havana's Malecon sea boulevard.
"No one owns anything, so they don't look after anything and steal from the state to get by," he said. "Things must change, everyone said the same at the meeting."
"They have to do something now that they have heard people speak their minds," said Jose, a travel agency manager who did not want to be fully named for fear of losing his job.
Like many Cubans, both men agreed that a bureaucratic state should not be running small businesses, from restaurants and bars to shoe-shines and barber shops.
WHERE'S THE BEEF?
Cuban officials say they are processing thousands of reports on proposals made at the meetings between August and October, and decisions will be taken in due course.
Economists expect the thrust of reform will be to expand the role of private farmer cooperatives to raise production and reduce reliance on imported food, including purchases from Cuba's ideological arch-enemy, the United States.
Under Raul Castro, arrears have been paid to farmers and prices trebled for their milk and meat, boosting output.
Inhabitants of Cienfuegos, 160 miles southwest of Havana, were startled last month to receive half a pound (227 grams) of beef per person in their monthly ration for the first time since Cuba's post-Soviet crisis began in 1991.
"We were so happy, because it showed we are recovering from the big crisis," said teacher Yairma Perez. Beef rations have long been restricted to children, the elderly and ill people.
Devastating floods in eastern Cuba following Tropical Storm Noel two weeks ago set back farming and should lead the government to speed up policy changes, according to dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who said Cuba must hand out vast tracts of unused land to private farmers.
Chepe does not, however, expect political changes in the near future, since the state can easily repress discontent.
Speculation about the future of Fidel Castro, who has not appeared in public since intestinal surgery last year, has centered on the first session of the National Assembly next March, which could announce his retirement.
A European businessman in Havana said that was not likely.
"They will keep Fidel Castro as the formal head of state as long as possible, because when he is gone the pressure for changes will build up faster," he said.
*I wonder if the rationing and absense of resources could be from the 50 year old embargo imposed by the most powerful nation on Earth? I also wonder why we can't travel to Cuba to see if this is true? And I wonder what would happen if the embargo was lifted? Are we afraid to find out? LS*
Castro nominated for Cuban parliament
By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer 19 minutes ago
Fidel Castro was nominated for a seat in Cuba's parliament Sunday, leaving open the option for the ailing 81-year-old revolutionary to stay on as the communist-run island's president.
A National Assembly seat is a prerequisite for seeking the presidency, and if Castro had failed to be nominated it could have heralded a decision to remove himself from the office after almost a half century as Cuba's undisputed leader.
The Cuban leader was nominated Sunday by city council officials in his eastern home province of Santiago, a step in a multitiered process that will eventually determine his political status.
There was no immediate word on whether Castro will accept the nomination. If he wins a parliament seat during national elections Jan. 20, he would remain in the running to retain the presidency of Cuba's supreme governing body, the Council of State.
Castro still officially heads the council, but has not been seen in public since emergency intestinal surgery forced him to cede power to a provisional government run by his younger brother Raul in July 2006.
In recent government videos, the elder Castro has appeared lucid but extremely frail. Cuban officials say he is recovering and on top of political events.
Members of municipal assemblies across the island gathered to nominate candidates for the 614-member parliament, which is known here as the National Assembly and is chosen every five years.
Several weeks after a new assembly is chosen, its members convene to select the Council of State. Castro has held the council's presidency since it was created in 1976. Previously Cuba's prime minister, he has been the nation's unchallenged leader since leading the 1959 revolution.
"He will have my two hands vote," National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon said in broken English, meaning he would raise both hands to vote in favor of Castro as head of the council.
Vice President Carlos Lage said if Castro is a candidate for deputy, "I am sure he will be elected."
Raul Castro, 76, is currently the Council of State's first vice president, though he has run Cuba's government since his brother stepped aside.
The elder Castro's illness and condition are state secrets. Recuperating in an undisclosed location, he has been seen only in official photographs and videos, though he also regularly released essays on mostly international themes.
Even if Castro relinquishes the presidency, he could still play a key role in the nation's leadership in his current position as Communist Party general secretary — arguably a more politically powerful job — or in a new emeritus position.
Detractors of Cuba's electoral process complain the country's president is not directly elected by citizens and say voters feel heavy pressure to support pro-government candidates.
Cuba claims its system is more democratic than most, as evidenced by the more than 8.1 million voters — 95 percent of those registered — who cast ballots in late October to elect more than 12,000 delegates to 169 municipal assemblies.
*In great contrast to our election system that relys on coporate contributions who invariably demand repayments in their favor. I ask you which system is more democratic? LS*
A Health System’s ‘Miracles’ Come With Hidden Costs
Patients at the Ramón Pando Ferrer eye hospital in Havana.
HAVANA, Nov. 16 — A shiny new tour bus pulled up to the top eye hospital in Cuba on a sunny day this month and disgorged 47 working-class people from El Salvador, many of whom could barely see because they had thick cataracts in their eyes.
Dr. Eric Montero with Reina López, of El Salvador.
Among them were Francisca Antonia Guevara, 74, a homemaker from Ciudad Delgado whose world was a blur. She said she had visited an eye doctor in her home country but could not pay the $200 needed for artificial lens implants, much less pay for the surgery.
“As someone of few resources, I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “With the bad economic situation we have there, how are we going to afford this?”
Cuba’s economy is not exactly booming either, yet within two hours Ms. Guevara’s cataracts were excised and the lenses implanted, with the Cuban government paying for everything — including air transportation, housing, food and even the follow-up care.
The government has dubbed the program Operation Miracle, and for the hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, Central America and the Caribbean who have benefited from it since it was started in July 2004, it is aptly named.
Yet the program is no simple humanitarian effort, and it has not come without a cost. The campaign against vision loss serves as a poignant advertisement for the benefits of Cuban socialism, as well as an ingenious way to export one of the few things the Cuban state-run economy produces in abundance — doctors.
Cuban doctors abroad receive much better pay than in Cuba, along with other benefits from the state, like the right to buy a car and get a relatively luxurious house when they return. As a result, many of the finest physicians have taken posts abroad.
The doctors and nurses left in Cuba are stretched thin and overworked, resulting in a decline in the quality of care for Cubans, some doctors and patients said.
The Cuban authorities say they have treated more than 750,000 people for eye conditions like cataracts and glaucoma since the program started.
At the same time, Cuban doctors have set up 37 small eye hospitals in Latin America, the Caribbean and Mali. Twenty-five of the centers are in Venezuela and Bolivia, whose leaders have close ties to the Castros. The hospitals are staffed with more than 70 top-notch eye surgeons from Cuba and hundreds of other nurses and ophthalmologists.
Dr. Sergio M. Vidal Casali, 84, has worked at the Ramón Pando Ferrer Cuban Institute of Ophthalmology for more than 50 years, specializing in diseases of the retina. He said the heavy flow of foreign patients through the hospital, combined with the exodus of several physicians to other countries, had hurt his department. “I don’t like it, really,” he said. “It’s wonderful for the people, but not for us. It disturbs our work.”
Dr. Reynaldo Rios Casas, the director of the institute, said the first days of the program were hectic. Eye surgeons worked in three shifts, keeping the hospital’s operating rooms going all day and all night. It was not uncommon for a single surgeon to perform 40 operations in a shift.
“It was really heroic,” he said. “We were operating day, afternoon and night.”
Since then, Dr. Rios says his hospital has been training new eye doctors at an astounding rate of 2,100 this year, half of them surgeons. The hospital’s budget has been increased tenfold and its equipment upgraded. It now has 34 operating theaters with state-of-the-art equipment, including two outfitted for advanced laser surgery techniques.
One advantage of the program is that it has given young surgeons a steady flow of patients on whom to hone their skills. Just this year, they have performed 394 cornea transplants at the hospital, he noted. “Our specialists have an incredible amount of experience,” he said. “What specialist in the world can do dozens of cornea transplants a year?”
In recent years, the program has allowed Cuba to use its doctors as barter for subsidized Venezuelan oil and to forge closer relations with other countries in the region, including those, like El Salvador, that have not been historically close to the Communist regime here.
Of course, the people who have their sight restored could not care less about the political and economic repercussions of the program. For them, the offer of free surgery was a dream come true.
Mrs. Guevara, whose husband is a retired construction worker from San Salvador, said she had given up hope of seeing again. She heard about the Cuban project on a Mayan radio station. “I never imagined anyone would help me the way they have helped me,” she said as she waited for surgery. “I thought I was going to end up blind.”
Near her in the waiting room was Reina López, 58, of San Vicente, El Salvador, who has not been able to see for 13 years because of cataracts. Her daughter, Adilia Reyes, 33, said she had cared for her mother since she lost her sight. The family, including four children, survives on her father’s salary of $3 a day, plus whatever fruit can be sold at a market on Saturdays.
“For the poor, this is a tremendous benefit,” she said, as she guided her mother to a presurgery test. “If it works, we’ll be so grateful.”
Downstairs in the cafeteria, Manuel Agustín Isasi, 33, a professional fencing coach from Islas Margaritas in Venezuela, was eating a lunch of pork, rice and beans, able for the first time in years to see his food with both eyes. Three years ago, he had been whitewashing his home when he accidentally burned both corneas with a bucket of quicklime. The accident ended his fencing career.
He had been one of the first to receive a cornea transplant in his left eye when the program started, he said. Then, in early November, doctors in Havana replaced the cornea in his right eye. He was unabashed in his praise for the Cuban government and for President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
“I would have remained completely blind,” he said, fixing a reporter with a swordsman’s gaze. “Vision is half of one’s life.”
