The array of massive black flags with single white stars fluttering in the Caribbean breeze gives the impression of a pirate fleet at full sail. Nothing better symbolises the confrontation between Cuba and the United States than the display on the waterfront of Havana outside the seven-storey building that houses the United States Interests Section, as the country tries to imagine life without Fidel Castro at the helm.
The Interests Section, a kind of de facto US embassy dedicated to the removal of Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who is temporarily running the country, has been broadcasting messages on an electronic ticker-tape display aimed at encouraging that outcome. The flags were erected by the Cuban government to try to hide the messages, with each one symbolising a year since 1868 that the island has been fighting for its independence.
In one recent message the Interests Section claimed that ”the regime keeps you artificially poor because it’s easier to maintain control of people who are too preoccupied with scrounging to meet daily necessities to think about politics. Consider this: the two million Cubans outside of Cuba have more wealth than do the 11,2-million Cubans in Cuba. That didn’t happen by chance.”
Signs of the damage done to the economy by the embargo put in place by the US in 1961 are not hard to find. Cubans are wearily used to shortages. Essential foods are rationed and in short supply. A few new ”bendy buses” are arriving to ease pressure on the overcrowded converted trucks known as camels that transport residents, many of whom routinely hitch to and from work. Some get lifts in the ancient Dodges and Chevrolets that miraculously still run. Two forms of currency operate, in recognition that what tourists can pay for goods and services far exceeds what the local population can afford. A massive rehabilitation operation may be under way in the world heritage site of Old Havana, but building materials remain scarce elsewhere.
The economy is now heavily dependent on the tourist industry, which attracts more than two million people a year, mainly from Canada, Europe and Latin America, and on remittances sent by families and friends from abroad. Nickel, sugar and tobacco top the exports table but all fall foul of the embargo, meaning the nearest and largest market is closed to them.
There is a blossoming bio-tech industry but it is strapped for investment cash because potential backers know that its products cannot find a US market. The alliance with President Hugo Chávez of oil-rich Venezuela has proved crucial for Cuba, which send doctors there as part of the exchange. Last week’s announcement of oil discoveries in the North Cuba Basin has been greeted, not surprisingly, with local enthusiasm.
Ricardo Alarcon, the president of the Cuban national assembly and a former ambassador to the United Nations, said that pressure from the US for their own style of elections was hypocritical.
”The Americans said, as early as 1959, that Mr Castro had the support of the vast majority of people. They had to undermine that support by denying money and exports to cause hunger and unemployment and massive suffering that would have a people so disgusted that they would want change. At some moment, US rhetoric changed to talk of democracy … With due respect to Europeans, the problem is that their perspective is eurocentrist, they believe that the world should be interpreted through a European lens, a colonial mentality that the world should fit into that pattern as if the rest of the world was living in Switzerland or Scandinavia, just as Bush pretends that he can transform Afghanistan into Kansas.”
Alarcon said that no country had the right to try to impose its forms of government on another. ”For me, the starting point is the recognition that democracy should begin with Pericles’s definition — that society is for the benefit of the majority — and should not be imposed from outside.”
Opinions as to the current state of the nation vary greatly. Marta González (73) was a student revolutionary and later worked with Che Guevara. ”A man like Fidel won’t come twice,” she said. ”The Americans will try and disrupt things but we don’t need more than one party … What would another party offer? Americans? They want to give the money back to the old owners and end the free health system.”
The Santa Rita church in the Miramar district of Havana is where the wives and daughters of the government’s political opponents, known as the Ladies in White, gather every Sunday morning to protest against their relatives’ imprisonment.
AlejandrÃÂa, whose husband, Diospado Gonzáles, was jailed for 20 years in 2003, said: ”It is very difficult for us to protest, there is a lot of repression.” She, like many Cubans who oppose the government, is critical of the US embargo as counter-productive. ”I don’t understand the blockade,” she said. ”It should be government against government not against the people, and it is used here as a justification for everything.”
The Economist intelligence unit’s report on Cuba in May concluded that there was ”little room for the US to inflict further economic damage on Cuba as it has already taken sanctions close to their limits”. – Guardian Unlimited Â