The New Cuba
Posted by Portia Siegelbaum| Comments1
Portia Siegelbaum is a CBS News producer based in Havana. This morning's
traditional massive march through Havana's Revolution Square marked
International Workers Day, and it might make you think that nothing is
changing in this Caribbean island of 11 million people.
But under the flag-waving surface, young people and workers are closely
watching their new President Raul Castro.
He's opened a crack in the door for consumerism—cell phones, DVD players
and slow cookers. Everyday items that could make life easier but that
are still priced out of the range of the average Cuban's salary.
The new measures, says a 50-year old actress Yudith, are good for people
"because they make people feel a little freer…whether or not you have
money to buy is another question but you know you have the right, the
access just like anybody else in the world."
A bigger change is the reorganization of agriculture to get farmers to
produce more, to make the country self-sufficient in food production.
Juan Antonio Perez owns a 30 plus acre truck gardening farm in Guira de
Melena about a 40 minute drive south east of the capital. He credits
Raul Castro with making sure he gets paid on time for the crops he sells
to the State. "Before there were delays in payment, no idea why, up to
six and seven months. Now we get paid monthly and they're talking about
moving payment up to every 10 or 15 days."
In addition, the government is now paying private and coop farmers more
for their harvests, offering them more land and services.
These measures, Raul Castro has made clear, are not a dismantling of
what Cuba calls its "Revolutionary Project" but changes necessary to
shore up the socialist system.
So which way will he take the nation? What existing country might he
want to borrow from?
"I would say that it would be a combination of Nordic socialism,
Vietnamese socialism, Chinese socialism," suggests Cuban academic Rafael
Hernandez, with a pinch of Venezuela and Bolivia thrown in.
Top on the wish list of nearly every Cuban we talked to was the desire
for increased purchasing power. Their wages are barely enough to scrape
by. Young workers and university students are particularly vocal about
this and they are not waiting for the government to solve their
problems. Four Cubans ranging in age from 19 to 26--a second year
engineering student, a fourth year dentistry student, an economist and a
computer specialist—tell us they have to make their own future. They
don't want to be like their parents, the four say.
"Our fathers and mothers have dedicated their whole lives to the
Revolution and are frustrated, still scraping by, unable to give us what
they would like to."
Whether or not Raul Castro and the measures he is taking will respond to
the yearnings of this younger generation is an open question.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/05/01/couricandco/entry4063342.shtml
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