Somewhat skilled, don’t mind pulling down$100/month and love baseball, crave tropical climates, hate air conditioning and believe that public transportation without “fragrance” is for wusses? Speak Spanish? Have I got a country for you?! Just wanna check it out? If you can convince the Department of State that you have a legitimate reason for going: have family there, conducting humanitarian work, a cultural or religious exchange, perhaps a research trip, wanna buy incredible cigars and great aged rum? Oh, on the latter two, as of now, you can’t. But most of Cuba is waiting for the day – and they have been waiting a long, long time – for Cuba and the United States to restore normalized relations. Hey Fidel is out there apologizing for that Cuban missile thang four decades ago, telling the world he made a lot of mistakes in US-Cuban relations along the way… he can taste it!
For an island that pretty much doesn’t make anything, despite high literacy rates, and relies heavily on two major crops – sugar cane and tobacco, life is hard… very hard. In the 60s, we imposed an embargo that continues to this very day. Soviets stepped in and guaranteed that they would buy what Americans used to…. But when the Soviet Union fell in the early 90s, the market collapsed, and what frail semblance of a Cuban economy went with it. A moderately successful artist can out-earn just about every physician in the country, the latter pulling down a huge three figures a month, on average. Healthcare is free, the country is abysmally poor, and folks don’t tip their doctors… but bathroom attendants expect a touch before you do! There’s a little wiggling in Cuba these days, as the government is letting small private businesses try mini-capitalism, but for those hundreds of little restaurants struggling to get started, there is this little complication: the government totally controls the food chain.
For the most part, except for large farms, folks that stayed after the Revolution back in 1959/60 got to keep title to their homes (you can have a city house and a country house, and that’s it). You are legally allowed to swap a house, but not sell it… if you really want to sell, the government is first in line (at a really reduced price)… but the regulations are officially loosening next month, and we may witness the beginning of a land grab (within the above limits), as true selling will be allowed. Not that the country doesn’t have a tremendous underground real estate market (where brokers gather in a town square to arrange what will look like a swap, but is really a cash transaction)… not to mention a huge underground market in… er… everything.
I recently got back from almost a week in Havana as part of a group of American Bar Association arts, sports and entertainment lawyers traveling to understand what’s there, and the trip was among the most interesting I have ever experienced. Music was everywhere, but money – except for foreigners – was not. Almost everybody makes less than $100/month (many a lot less), and for those permitted foreign joint ventures and permitted foreign commercial operations, unless the consumer were other foreigners or the government, investment in anything that requires local consumer spending has pretty much been a bust. Discretionary income? Forget about it!
Old beautiful buildings, tons of them and most desperate for restoration, are everywhere. Havana, especially Old Havana where those ugly “Soviet-era” block buildings are nowhere in sight, is charismatic and filled with really old structures, some dating back to post-Columbus “new world.” Pre-1960 U.S. cars – with rebuilt engines and interiors as the ravages of time have eaten away – belch soot and exude charm on the worn streets of Havana. Cubans like Americans, but they cannot wait until the economic opportunity that has circled Russia and China becomes their lot too. However, emotions still run high among Cuban émigrés in the U.S., particularly those who lost relatives in purges and executions for which Castro is known in this community. They want nothing to do with this Caribbean nation as long as there is a Castro at the helm and have successfully pressured every American administration in power since the Cuban Revolution to keep the diplomatic and trade doors shut. Cuban folks are waiting for an aging and frail Fidel to pass on… and hope that Raul Castro will be enough for the U.S. to open a door.
Hardliners are looking over their shoulders. Official Cuba feels isolated and abandoned by the once powerfully anti-American communist regimes in the Peoples Republic and Soviet Union… the North Korean embassy is a sad link to the doctrinaire dictatorial communist past. Cheap movie tickets (ten cents, and American movies are everywhere… but they are pure copyright infringements since American movie companies are proscribed from doing business here) and beer-less baseball (twenty cents) are momentary distractions from a life that yearns for so much more. With labor costs that make China look expensive, when the walls do come down as they inevitably must, it is easy to see what the early stages of a “new economy” are going to look like. Oh, if you do go, take lots of cash! No U.S. credit cards. Change your currency into Canadian dollars (which are treated reasonably well), since anything where a U.S. conversion is required gets a 20% penalty… for being American.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it is ironic in a universe of sweeping anti-American feelings to linger in a country that we don’t recognize diplomatically where the people seem really to like us.
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