| | |  Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
The End of the End of the Revolution - 4
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
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THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT gave me a courteous welcome. I was escorted to a few official meetings, but otherwise left without a minder (as far as I could see) to do what I wished. One official stop was with Elena Álvarez, who was 15 when Fidel’s revolution came and now, at 65, works as a top official at the Ministry of Economics. She tried to make sense for me of the voodoo economics I’d seen.
Here’s what she wanted me to grasp. Cuba, at the time of the revolution, was “one of the most unjust, unequal and exploited societies on earth.” Illiteracy was running up to 40 percent, a quarter of the best land was in U.S. hands, a corrupt bourgeoisie lorded it over everyone else. Fidel’s initial objective was a more-just society, but U.S. pressure radicalized his revolution and pushed it toward all-out socialism within the Soviet camp.
Álvarez reeled off some numbers. There were 6,000 doctors in Cuba at the time of the revolution; there are now close to 80,000 for a population of 11.3 million, one of the highest per-capita rates in the world. The U.S. embargo has cost Cuba about $200 billion in real terms. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, 80 percent of Cuba’s international trade was with Soviet-bloc countries. About 98 percent of oil came from them. Back to the Communist bloc states, at inflated prices, went Cuba’s sugar and rum.
“We’ve had to reinsert ourselves in the global economy twice in 30 years, once in 1960 and again in 1990,” Álvarez said.
O.K., I said, that shows some resilience, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, why didn’t Cuba do what Moscow’s other satellites did: take down totalitarianism, become a market economy and set people free? The real totalitarianism, she countered, was Batista’s. Cuba now has different values. Despite scarcities, attributable in large part to the embargo, it’s a society that wants to protect everyone. The rationing system guarantees that all citizens have a minimum. Everyone gets low-cost food at work. Free health care and education mean a $20 monthly salary is the wrong way to view the quality of Cuban life. Going to a market economy in 1990 would have meant wholesale factory closures, as in East Germany, and 35 percent unemployment. “We decided we had to protect our workers,” Álvarez said. “We have another philosophy.”
That “philosophy” has produced results. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy for men and women in Cuba is 76 and 80 years, respectively, on par with the U.S. The comparative figures in Haiti are 59 and 63, and in the Dominican Republic they are 66 and 74. The probability of dying before the age of 5 is 7 per 1,000 live births in Cuba — nearly as good as the U.S. figure — compared with 80 per 1,000 live births in Haiti and 29 in the Dominican Republic. Illiteracy has been eliminated. United Nations statistics show 93.7 percent of Cuban children complete high school, far more than in the United States or elsewhere in the Caribbean.
That raises the question: Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, travel and the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life? Why not at least offer a Chinese or Vietnamese model, with a market economy under one-party rule?
Álvarez said there was some “space for the market.” She insisted, “We are not fundamentalist.” But the bottom line, of course, is that the authorities are scared: opening the door to capitalism on an island 90 miles from Florida is very different from doing that in Asia.
In the so-called Special Period, initiated in the 1990s, Cuba did open to foreign investment in sectors like nickel and tourism, allowed tourists in, introduced the convertible peso and began putting more farmland in private hands. But it stopped there. Just how much land is now private is disputed, although one thing is clear: not enough to prevent Cuba from having to import more than $1.6 billion worth of food a year. Those imports, in a development remarkable even by upside-down Cuban standards, have included sugar. Domestic production has collapsed.
So I put it to Álvarez: At the half-century mark, with Fidel fading, was it worth persevering with a revolution that has left Cuba with dilapidated buildings, deserted highways and a need to import sugar?
“The revolution has been a success,” Álvarez said. “It overthrew a tyrannical regime. We got our national sovereignty. We got our pride. We survived aggression by the most powerful country in the world for 50 years. We preserved the essence of what Fidel fought for.”
But did he really wage guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains so that countless talented Cubans might sit idle, plotting means to get out?
The challenges were great, Álvarez said, but Cuba would again prove Miami wrong. She pointed to joint-venture oil exploration off the northern coast and a growing “knowledge economy” that has produced patented vaccines and medicines sold throughout the world. Cuba would now export services, like that of the 30,000 medical personnel it sent to Venezuela in an innovative barter deal bringing in 90,000 barrels of oil daily.
“We are an example to others,” she said, “an example to all those looking for an alternative to capitalism.”
I did sense something hard to quantify, a kind of socialist conscience, particularly among doctors. When I met Dr. Verena Muzio, the head of the vaccine division at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology — another official stop — she said her commitment to the revolution’s achievements outweighed the knowledge “that I could go to Chicago and earn $300,000 a year.” Her salary is $40 a month.
At the Latin American School of Medicine, founded a decade ago to educate doctors unable to afford school in other countries in the Americas, Dr. Juan Carrizo, the rector, spoke of the universal right to health as the new humanist banner of the Cuban revolution: out with Angolan guerrillas, in with the medical brigade. Among the students are more than 100 U.S. citizens. Pasha Jackson, 26, an African-American from South Central Los Angeles, told me: “I came here because I could get an education for free for just being me. I feel more valued here than where I grew up. And when I finish, I’m going to go back to my community and bring that same philosophy.”
These young U.S. medical students have joined a growing number of foreigners, tourists and businesspeople. Sherritt International, a Canadian natural-resources company, has made major investments in nickel mining and oil. Sol Meliá, the Spanish hotel operator, has opened a number of properties. Tour buses are a frequent sight, ferrying groups that take in Hemingway’s Havana bars (La Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio) and the Che memorial in Santa Clara before heading back to the beach. Although this invasion has brought Cubans more contact with foreigners, its impact has been limited by the fact that the Cuban government does rigorous background checks on any job seekers in the international sector. Over all, most tourists seem happy with sun, sand, rum and cigars — and to heck with totalitarian politics.
At a time when Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela has replied to Fidel’s “Patria o Muerte” with its own “Socialismo o Muerte”; and Evo Morales is pushing Bolivia toward socialism; and Steven Soderbergh’s epic-length “Che” is about to hit American theaters, it’s hard to argue the revolution has lost all its glow — especially with Wall Street bloodied. A moderate Latin left that is friendly with the Castros, most conspicuously President Lula da Silva in Brazil, has also emerged. But Fidel claimed he wanted to free Cubans from oppression. Instead, his revolution has oppressed them.
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