Castro's Promise: A Future Without Poverty; Now Only the Poor Remain

The Humble

I had not yet been born in April 1961, when the socialist character of the Cuban process was declared. "This is the socialist revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble..." Fidel Castro announced near the foreboding gates of the Colon Cemetery. Many who listened to him, jubilant and optimistic, assumed that the first revolutionary objective would be to stop having humble people. With this illusion, they went out to champion a future without poverty.

Observing the present audience for what was announced nearly fifty years ago, I wonder when prosperity will stop being seen as counterrevolutionary. Will wanting to live in a house where the wind doesn't tear the roof off stop being, some day, a petty bourgeois weakness? All the material shortages that I observe beg the question of the common sense of this colossal upheaval in the history of the country, only to stop having the rich, at the expense of having so many poor.

If, at the very least, we were more free. If all these materials needs were not also expressed in a long chain that makes every citizen a servant of the State. If the condition of the humble was a choice, voluntarily assumed and practiced, in particular, by those who govern us. But no. The renewed exaltation of humility launched by Raul Castro this January first confirms for us what we learned in decades of economic crisis: poverty is the road that leads to obedience.

(Yoani Sanchez blogs from Havana, Cuba. The English Translation is here.)

 

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Comments

[ReeseErlich]

I think Yoani reflects the frustration of many Cubans I met who complain about the lack of consumer goods in Cuba. But in this post she doesn't explain why such shortages exist. Partly, it's the US economic embargo (blockade) that drives up the cost of goods. Partly it was the collapse of the old Soviet Union, for which Cuba is still paying. And partly, the over centralized economy means Cuba has not developed enough initiative from below.

I look at Cuba's economic pluses and minuses in my new book Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba. (January 2009, Polioint Press) There are very exciting experiments in organic farming for example, but other sectors are constipated.

Reese Erlich
journalist and author

[Antonio Varona]

reese-

thank you for your comment. i dont think that the author is lamenting so much the lack of consumer goods as she is lamenting the inability to be able to improve one's life and the fact that wanting to live in anything other than poverty is somehow seen as being counter-re­volutionar­y in Cuba. she really doesn't get into the whole reason why there is a lack of consumerism.

i hope that when you publish your book, you do not fall for the cuban propaganda - that the embargo is solely to blame for their economic woes. cuba is free to trade with any nation in the world and the US is the top provider of food and medicine. Their economic problems lie within their socialist system. nothing else.

[av2ts]

at the expense of having so many poor.

Yoani must not know what real poverty is. The real poor people of this world (like those in 1958 Cuba) do not have clean drinking water, they do not own their homes, they do not go to graduate school, they do not have free health care, they are not able to attend baseball games and the opera, they do not have decent jobs, they can not read and write, they are malnutritioned, they are desperate and exploited, etc. etc. Raul Castro is right. Cubans don't appreciate all their freebies and subsidies and maybe Cubans need to start seeing what these things cost.

Will wanting to live in a house where the wind doesn't tear the roof off stop being, some day, a petty bourgeois weakness?

Oh come on. Raul Castro has been going around the country urging the construction of homes with better roofs.