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 Americas & Beyond | April 2008 
Raúl Castro Employing a Bit of Capitalism to Freshen up Cuban Communism
 Associated Press
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| | Raul Castro gestures during a meeting of the National Assembly in Havana. (Prensa Latina/Reuters) | | |
Havana - It's not the stuff of Marx or Lenin, or even of Fidel Castro, but it's hardly free-market capitalism, either. In fact, a series of new steps to encourage a Cuban spending spree may help the Communist system and its new president survive.
In rapid-fire decrees over the past week, President Raúl Castro's government has done away with some long-despised restrictions, lifting bans on electric appliances, microwaves and computers, inviting average citizens to enter long-forbidden resorts and declaring they can even legally have their own cellphones.
More changes could be on the way. Rumors are widespread that the government could ease travel restrictions and tolerate free enterprise, letting more people start their own small businesses. And hopes that it also might tweak the dual-currency system - which puts foreign products out of reach for most Cubans - have sparked a run on the peso.
"We're going to get out and buy more and more," said Roberto Avila, a retiree. "That's the future in Cuba, and it is a strong future."
Cuba is still far from a shopper's paradise. Nearly everyone holds government jobs, earning an average of $19.50 a month, although many get U.S. dollars from tourism jobs or relatives abroad. It would take the average Cuban five months to earn enough to buy a low-end DVD player that an American could buy with about two days' work at the federal minimum wage.
By doing away with rules that ordinary Cubans hate, Raúl Castro may defuse a clamor for deeper economic and political change in the single-party Communist system.
On the other hand, even these small changes could just whet Cubans' appetites for more.
"These measures to allow Cubans to buy DVDs and everything else are just to entertain the people," said Maite Moll, a 45-year-old state engineer. "It's not really important because it resolves nothing."
Some Cubans worry that even the small measures already taken will create class tensions and increase resentment between those earning state salaries and those with access to dollars, given the new opportunities for conspicuous consumption. Raúl Castro is clearly hoping that greater buying power will distract from any friction.
Certainly, the 76-year-old president has bolstered his popularity, addressing for now the doubts that Cuba's government can survive without his charismatic brother, Fidel, who stepped aside and appointed Raúl in February.
"If low-income groups have access to essential goods like food, clothing and construction materials, and can sell and buy homes and use them as collateral, it doesn't matter if you have a significant income gap. People are better," said Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba economics expert at the University of Pittsburgh. "That's what happened in China and Vietnam."
Raúl Castro is said to be an admirer of free-market reforms that allowed those countries to revolutionize their economies while maintaining Communist Party control, although top officials have said Cuba is not about to follow a Chinese or Vietnamese path.
The food part of the equation could be profoundly affected by another initiative promoted this week. The government is lending uncultivated, state-controlled land to private farmers and cooperatives to plant cash crops like coffee and tobacco. It also will pay producers more for basics including milk, meat and potatoes.
Over time, this could reduce chronic food shortages and change the face of Cuban farming.
It is not new for the government to let private farmers take a crack at putting state land to good use. But this time the government is letting farmers more easily buy equipment and supplies at government stores, removing a key impediment to their success.
The changes, implemented barely a month into Raúl Castro's presidency, are measures that Fidel had opposed for decades, declaring that even small initiatives to increase economic and social freedoms could create a "new rich" and destroy the island's hard-fought social and economic equality.
And while people are excited to walk around stores and hotel lobbies, they will soon become frustrated that they cannot afford to do more than look, said Juan Antonio Blanco, a Cuban scholar based in Canada.
"This government is totally myopic and shortsighted if it doesn't understand that it's sitting on dynamite," he said. "They have to do more than the things that will play in the international media." |
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