The Dangers of a Cuban Collapse

The Dangers of a Cuban Collapse

It could happen sooner than we think. Is Obama ready?

By DANIEL SERWER March 26, 2014



Cuba's 1950s cars and Havana's crumbling facades have long been its

iconic symbols in the American imagination. They don't disappoint, as I

discovered on a trip to Cuba last week. But I didn't expect zippy

Hyundais with Miami FM on their radios or a private collection of

contemporary Cuban art, installed floor to 20-foot ceiling in a fabulous

apartment with a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Both the

apartment and the art would put many wealthy New Yorkers to shame.



Cubans remain poor. It would be no fun to live on the $15-35 per month

that is paid to most government employees. Even with subsidized (and

rationed) staples as well as free rent, health care and education, many

neighborhoods of Havana are decrepit. Balconies fall off apartment

buildings. Whole buildings collapse into the street. People wait in long

lines to collect remittances at Western Union, whose window has a faded

poster of Fidel and Raul Castro declaring, "The Revolution, thriving and

victorious, is moving ahead." The woman in line wearing American flag

tights—stripes on one leg, stars on the other—is no doubt in the

revolutionary vanguard. Cuba depends for hard currency on remittances

from the United States and Europe, as well as payments and subsidies

estimated at $9.4 billion per year from Venezuela. Caracas is not in a

position to continue that much longer, raising the specter of economic

collapse and a massive outflow of people that could present the United

States with an unexpected foreign policy crisis on its own doorstep.



But for now, no one is starving and few are homeless. Life expectancy is

over 79 years, higher than Puerto Rico's. Everyone can read. In an all

too apparent display of wellbeing, men and women dress in tight-fitting

clothes that display ample belly fat. Tourists walk safely, even at

night. Restaurant hawkers and pedicab drivers tug at their elbows but

shake off easily. The Havana Historian's Office has tastefully restored

three or four of the oldest squares in the city to something like their

former glory, as well as most of the surrounding cobble-stoned streets.

There is music everywhere: American for young Cubans, Cuban for the

Americans and Europeans.



This relative prosperity is a sharp contrast to the Cuba of 25 years

ago. Already decimated by three decades of revolution and embargo, the

economy collapsed when the Soviet Union broke up and its subsidies

ended. Cuba entered its "special period" in the early 1990s, when food

and fuel were scarce. For a while, the dollar was in circulation,

because no one had confidence in the peso. Now Cuba has two currencies:

the convertible peso (known as the CUC) and the peso, worth far less and

nonconvertible. Eighty percent of transactions are now said to be

conducted in CUCs.



The eternally youthful revolutionaries Che Guevara and Camilo

Cienfuegos, both long dead, grace many more walls in Havana than the

Castro brothers, who are rarely seen or heard in public but cast long

shadows from their wooded estates in upper-crust Miramar. Their

political control is still unchallenged, but they don't need to

demonstrate it often. Cubans, who complain a lot about the system,

rarely organize against it or even have clear ideas of how they would

want it to change. A painting in that fabulous apartment expressed the

feeling well: It showed a massive demonstration surrounded by high

walls. The demonstrators held signs with nothing written on them. Like

Mario Comte, the detective anti-hero of novelist Leonardo Padura's

masterful Havana series, ordinary Cubans see the seamier side of things

and want to hold miscreants responsible, but they offer no viable

proposition for systemic political change. Asked whether they would want

more direct elections or political parties, Cubans shrug.



Daniel Serwer is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International Studies and a scholar at its Center for Transatlantic

Relations. He blogs at www.peacefare.net and tweets @DanielSerwer. He is

the author of Righting the Balance: How You Can Help Protect America.



Source: The Dangers of a Cuban Collapse - Daniel Serwer - POLITICO

Magazine -

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/cuba-dangers-of-a-collapse-105081.html#.UzP7ufldUx4