After Fidel: Looking Forward to the New Cuba

by Liz Stitzel

Wednesday February 14, 2007

It is amazing the new perspective that can be gained by spending four months in a country within rafting distance of the United States.

There are no commercial flights from the United States to Cuba. The dollar cannot be used, and American companies are restricted from trade. Yet, twenty Sarah Lawrence students spent the fall semester studying at the University of Havana.

Since May of 1961, Cuba has been a socialist republic. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the United States enacted a diplomatic and commericial embargo against Cuba. From then until 1991, Cuba was protected by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba experienced a severe economic depression but did not give up its socialist government. Presently, Cuba has normal trade and diplomatic relations with Canada, Latin America, and some other countries in Europe. U.S. companies and their subsidaries are still restricted from the Cuban market . The visual of Cuba created by this history and the information released by the American government paints a seemingly one-sided viwe of life in a socialist state.

At an open forum on January 23, a panel of students discussed and answered questions about their time in Cuba. The image that they created had very little in common with the description provided by the U.S. Treasury Department of a “totalitarian police state which relies on repressive methods to maintain control.”

After the forum, junior Taylor Pavlik answered some more specific questions. When presented with the quote from the Treasury Department, Pavlike responded with a knowing and disgusted smile. He acknowledged that “There are a lot of police in Havana, but they’re not going around beating people up in broad daylight.”

He told a story about a friend who had refused to show his ID card to a policeman because he was within 300 yards of his home and the law allows citizens to not have their ID’s with them at that range. The image created by the Treasury Department would lead one to believe that this man was about the be hauled off and locked up but instead the police officer acknowledged his rights and apologized. The general feeling of most of the S.L.C. students seemed to be that there were police, they would regularly ask for identification, but in general they were just trying to keep everyone safe and not forcefully put down dissenters.

The talk of dissenters quickly brought the conversation to censorship. The censorship of the information provided to Cuban citizens is often cited by the U.S. government as proof of the ‘totalitarian regime.’ Pavlik once gain took a different stance and replied that “To understand it all you have to understand the mentality of most Cubans. To them being Cuban means fighting for the revolution every day, and therefore counter-revolutionaries are no longer seen as Cubans.”

“They’re not unaware of the censorship, but they don’t see it as Americans would. For them Socialism is their chosen way of life, and they don’t see why they should give time to someone who is trying to destroy that.”

In the early 1990s, when the collapse fo the Soviet Union almost did destroy Cuba, Fidel Castro allowed anyone who did not want to stay in the socialist state to leave. Because of this and other periodic immigration, there is a large antisocialist population in Miami, Florida. Pavlik briefly discussed the importance of these Cuban Americans.

“A lot of Cubans have family in the U.S. and it makes for a weird dichotomy,” Pavlike said. “To be a ‘patriotic Cuban’ you’re expected to stay and fight for the revolution; it’s okay to leave, but leaving means you’re giving up on the revolution.”

He expained that in Cuba there are two kinds of money: the national peso (what everyone who works for the government is paid with) and the convertible peso (there are 24 national pesos to one convertible peso). “The problem,” Pavlik said, “is that only the people in the service industry can get ahold of the convertible pesos. Tourists use convertible pesos, so a bellhop can make more in tips than a doctor (who is paid by the state) ever will.”

In a socialist state people do not use money the way it is used in a capitalist democracy. In Cuba, the state provides housing, healthcare, and education for everyone. Also, the state is on a ration system where the citizens apply to the state for their basic needs.

Pavlik closed with the musing that “Cubans are really just like everyone else. Here in the U.S. socialist are seen as so foreign, but realy they’re just people. All they want is to live their lives and enjoy their families.”