An eyewitness account of Cuba’s shocking wretchedness

Michael J. Totten: An eyewitness account of Cuba's shocking wretchedness

Michael J. Totten, National Post | June 6, 2014 12:01 AM ET



Neill Blomkamp's 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon

and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy

have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite — the Elysium of the title

— while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The

film works passably as an allegory for its director's native South

Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but

it's a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics

panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium's dystopian

world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing

socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.



I've always wanted to visit Cuba — not because I'm nostalgic for a

botched utopian fantasy, but because I wanted to experience Communism

firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was

startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp's

dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and

political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished

masses. Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model

succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that's because they never

left Cuba's Elysium.



I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials

at Havana's tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have

evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a

total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and

everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory.



Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there's nothing to buy. It

feels less natural and organic than any city I've ever visited.

Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn't supposed to

be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in

time. But the city wasn't pleasant for long, and it certainly isn't

pleasant for the people living there. It hasn't been so for decades.



Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though

it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the

Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart.

Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It's eerily dark at

night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles

through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single

tourist. Most foreigners don't know that this other Havana exists,

though it makes up most of the city — tourist buses avoid it, as do

taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to

eke out a life in the ruins.



Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. The

revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute

power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram.

The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the

methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan,

then and now, is "socialism or death."



Cuba was one of the world's richest countries before Castro destroyed it

— and the wealth wasn't just in the hands of a tiny elite. "Contrary to

the myth spread by the revolution," wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of

political science at the University of West Florida, "Cuba's wealth

before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few … Cuban society was

as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile."



More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in

Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more

Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground." Havana was home to a

lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical

European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not —

cannot — build such grand or elegant cities.



But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich

and the middle class down. The result was collapse. "Between 1960 and

1976," Cuzan says, "Cuba's per capita GNP in constant dollars declined

at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has

the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have

experienced a drop in living standards over the period."



Communism destroyed Cuba's prosperity, but the country experienced

unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies

after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba

resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban

Revelations. He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans "used to make

hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels."



By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim

needs an ambulance. Castro wasn't about to reform himself and his

ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece

of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced

by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in

much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren't going to tolerate

receiving ration cards for food — as the locals do — so the island also

needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars — restaurants

inside private homes — to open, though no one from outside the family

could work in them. (That would be "exploitative.")



Around the same time, government-run "dollar stores" began selling

imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba's

quasi-capitalist bubble created.



When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger

brother Raúl in 2008, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the

economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a

minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage — $20 a month for almost every job

in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a

whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get "free" health care and

education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, "All

slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have

the skills to perform their tasks."



Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don't get paid more.

The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá

International to manage Havana's hotels. Before accepting its contract,

Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban

government said fine, so the company pays $8–$10 an hour. But Meliá

doesn't pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the

compensation to the government, which then pays the workers — but only

after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if

that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers

don't get $8–$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day — a child's allowance.



The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not

allowed to have money; they're hardly allowed to have things. The police

expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live

miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom.

Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment

sarcastically in her book Havana Real: "Buses are stopped in the middle

of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese,

a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings."



Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba's state-enforced poverty is the

prostitution epidemic — a problem the government officially denies and

even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban

prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women — wives,

girlfriends, sisters, mothers — who solicit johns once or twice a year

for a little extra money to make ends meet.



A one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months'

pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary. As for the free health

care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets,

and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are

available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid

for in hard currency — and sometimes they're not available at all. Cuba

has sent so many doctors abroad — especially to Venezuela, in exchange

for oil — that the island is now facing a personnel shortage.



Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned

parts of Detroit for only $500 — which makes them practically free — but

no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds

neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but

almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in

roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.



Cuba is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez

describes an astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during

which he boasted that the economy was doing so well now that everyone

could drink milk. And yet Raúl's promise of milk for all was deleted

from the transcription of the speech in Granma, the Communist Party

newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to ensure that

everyone got some.



Cuba has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the

majority; and a quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each

has its own currency: the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the

capitalist bubble uses the convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth

nothing. They can't be converted to dollars or euros. Foreigners can't

even spend them in Cuba. The convertible pesos are pegged to the U.S.

dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents for each one — the

government takes 13 percent off the top. The rigged exchange rate is an

easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also enables

the state to drain Cuban exiles.



Castro created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba's little

capitalist bubble from the ragged majority in the Communist economy.

Until a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren't allowed even to set foot

inside hotels or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find

themselves exposed to the seductive lifestyles of the decadent

bourgeoisie from capitalist nations. A few years ago, the government

stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly

because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but

also because most Cubans can't afford to go to these places, anyway.



A single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month's salary. One

night in a hotel costs five months' salary. A middle-class tourist from

abroad can easily spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year.

I had dinner with four Americans at one of the paladars. The only Cubans

in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for the five

of us came to about $100. That's five months' salary.



I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I

were the president of some faraway minor republic

Leftists often talk about "food deserts" in Western cities, where the

poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If

they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went

to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba

Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to

supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for

a mall in Havana — a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with

malls I've visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken,

milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of

rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil — and

that's it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7-11 has a

far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba's "rich" to shop. (I

heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere

in Cuba for another four months.)



An advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant

on the top floor is "probably" the best in Havana. I had saved the

Sierra Maestra for my last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th

floor. I had my first and only steak on the island and washed it down

with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set me back no more than having a

pizza delivered at home would, but the total nevertheless exceeded an

entire month's local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate alone. Every other

table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of

some faraway minor republic.



I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine.

Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed

away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It

occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same — at night, anyway

— after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now.

I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already

free and that the tables around me were occupied — by local people, not

foreigners — but the fantasy faded fast.



I was all alone at the top of Cuba's Elysium and yearning for home —

where capitalism's inequalities are not so jagged and stark.



National Post



Michael J. Totten is a City Journal contributing editor and the author

of five books, including The Road to Fatima Gate. This essay is a

adapted from a longer article appearing in the Spring, 2014 edition of

City Journal.



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