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I was in Havana, visiting the world’s poorest book fair (held in February). Very few guest authors, few books on show … and yet it was a most attractive fair, perhaps for the rock-bottom prices. Some books were going for the equivalent of 1 U.S. cent, with the priciest books, like a Monteávila (Venezuela’s prestige publishers) hardback, costing around a U.S. dollar. A Cuban student might have left the fair with a good few books in his or her satchel.
The economic situation is critical there. There is a shortage of everything… even of jineteras or prostitutes targeting foreigners. I saw very few of them and none spotted me. I was looking more like a writer than a German tourist alas..
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Given the situation, Cubans are excellent at conjugating the national verb, which is to “resolve.” They know how to swap a pack of rationed cigarettes for two pounds of rice, or work a piece of Soviet-era metal in a friend’s workshop to turn it into a part for a Cadillac from 1959. The country is developing its fourth vaccine for the COVID virus, somehow keeping up standards in international sports and running one of the world’s best preventive health programs.
Pain of U.S. sanctions
Havana is safer than Washington, D.C. Nobody mugs anybody, though, admittedly, why would they bother if hardly anyone carries anything of value? The country’s politicians are not excitable. When asked about the reasons for the crisis, they respond with admirable serenity: it’s the blockade and poor administration. And that’s the truth. The Castro brothers and their paltry little successor (President Miguel Díaz Canel) were and are a historic fiasco.
Cuba should be cherished and kept as a social laboratory.
With the slightest of nuances, all U.S. presidents have been mean and nasty with Cuba; but this one, Donald Trump, will likely set a new record. In less than two months, he has taken several insidious measures, openly or surreptitiously, to restrict research, scientific and sporting visas, block access to U.S. findings on AI, and threaten the firms sending back remittances, currently the population’s main source of income.
Cuba is a beautiful social paradox. It is a poor country with the lowest crime figures, with levels of courtesy and cultural inclusion as high as those of imperial Japan, and social cohesion that cannot fail to move.
When you think of human history, where people have sought for millennia to find the “perfect formula” for the commonwealth that is the state, trying slavery, feudalism and mercantilism, and vainly trusted the “wisdom” of the hereditary principle, then the separation and “balance” of parliaments and institutions or supposed intelligence of markets, and in a world where communism failed and capitalism is teetering, Cuba should be cherished and kept as a social laboratory. Strangling the island as if we were still in the Cold War is not so much a policy as a mix of paranoia, idiocy and “SOByness.”
Beyond restrictions
If by some miracle Cuba could free itself of the Castros’ grand mistake, freely trade with the world and sell or exchange the enormous assets of its intellectual and human talents, we would see what that beautiful and singular people can actually do. The “resolution” here is to be freed of internal restrictions imposed by a couple of dogmatists and their followers, and external restrictions like U.S. interventionism.
I am not asking for handouts… just to stop screwing the country. That island may yet show it had the seeds of a politico-economic model as successful as China’s or a variant that successfully conjugates — or if you prefer, “resolves,” harmonizes and balances — the vigor of market economics with the social safety net. The key here is the role of its social capital or the people of Cuba.
Now back home, I miss the few days I spent in an environment free of frenzied advertising, consumerism and class tensions. I am grateful to have lived a valuable spiritual experience, yet also fearful that a unique social laboratory could be destroyed.
