Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (14 page)

I knew that the potential for disaster lurked in socialism, but what had caused this potential to be realized in Cuba and not in Sweden? I asked Carlos and Donna, Was there something fundamentally different about Cuba’s socialist ideology? Or had evil people simply taken control of socialism in Cuba?

“Neither,” said Carlos. “It’s because of power. They have total power. Think what you yourself would do if you had total power over everyone.”

Not a pretty picture, I admit. And I’m not even a socialist. Socialists think of society as a giant, sticky wad. And no part of that gum ball—no intimate detail of your private life, for instance—can be pulled free from the purview of socialism. Witness Sweden’s Minister for Consumer, Religious, Youth and Sport Affairs. Socialism is inherently totalitarian in philosophy.

The Swedish socialists have exercised some degree of self-restraint. The Cuban socialists haven’t bothered to. In Cuba, the authorities have a Ken Starr grand-jury-like right to poke into every aspect of existence, no matter how trivial. Imagine applying marxist theory to rock and roll, this being what the
Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba,
or UNEAC, the official labor organization for creative types, is supposed to do. Karl Marx said in
Das Kapital,
“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.” Roll over Beethoven, and how.

Professor Dr. Jose Loyola, who was, according to his business card, “
Compositor y Musicologo
” and “
Vice Presidente Primero
” of UNEAC, talked to me about utility. Specifically, he talked about trying to get Cuban elements into rock and roll to offset imperialist U.S. influences. Sex, drugs, and cha-cha-cha? Professor Dr. Loyola’s office was in a splendid nineteenth-century town house, the kind of digs that should belong to a rock star. Although I had visited an actual Cuban rock star, Santiago Feliu (who I assume is a major genius because I couldn’t find any of his cassettes or CDs, and the good things are always missing from the shops in Cuba). Anyway, Feliu lived in what looked like a graduate student’s off-campus apartment.

The UNEAC town house had been spoiled by the cheap partitions and wobbly chrome-leg chairs loved by bureaucracies everywhere, and by photographs of Fidel where art used to hang. While we sat in the part of the former dining room that was now the professor-doctor’s stuffy office, the power went out repeatedly.

I asked how musicians got into this union. They submit an application with
curriculum vitae
listing their important concerts, the rewards and prizes they’ve won, and the recordings they’ve made. Then a commission made up of three or four “prestigious musicians” meets and decides upon acceptance or rejection. Which is just the way people get into the business everywhere.

 

LEAD GUITAR WITH BAND, “THE DRIVEWAYS
”

PLAYED: STEPMOM’S REC ROOM; OPEN-MIKE NIGHT, THE PATHETIC BEARD COFFEE SHOP

MANY CITATIONS, MOSTLY FROM SEATTLE POLICE

ATTACHED: INDIE DEMO CUT, “LIFE SMELLS
”

 

Mick? Elton? Do we let him in?

I asked what UNEAC did for its members. “The prestige of the organization opens many doors,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “It promotes the work of the artists and takes care of some of their, ah, material problems.” In other words, you starve if you aren’t in UNEAC.

“What if you aren’t a member?” I asked.

“Oh, most artists aren’t members,” said Professor Dr. Loyola. “There are fourteen thousand professional artists in Cuba. Only four thousand are members. The other ten thousand have the government’s Ministry of Culture to promote their work.” The way our government’s National Public Radio plays “Life Smells” by The Driveways on
All Things Considered.

“What kind of problems do musicians face in Cuba?” I asked.

“Material problems.”

“Material problems?”

“Maybe,” said the professor doctor, “if we had stores where they could buy their instruments, it would be better.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Some people get musical instruments from the Ministry of Culture,” he ventured and changed the subject. “Before, there were many empirical musicians in Cuba. Now they have formal training. Now there is a kind of upgrading school for empirical musicians.” And what a shame this wasn’t the practice in America’s rural South during the time of Huddie Ledbetter and Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins. They wouldn’t have been so “downbeat” if they’d been able to get work in the New York Philharmonic orchestra.

“What does UNEAC do,” I asked, “if an artist gets in trouble with the government?”

“If he is right, we will help him out. And if he is not right, we will help orient him in the correct direction,” said Professor Dr. Loyola with a perfectly straight face.

Since 1959 the Cuban government has been “orienting” everybody in “the correct direction,” thereby making a total mess of the Cuban economy. And one of the things that’s so messy about it is that there’s no way to measure how messy it is.

There are simply no reliable Cuban economic statistics. Perhaps one of the things that keeps Sweden from turning into Cuba is that, when it comes to publishing honest reports about everything government is doing, the Swedes can’t stop themselves. The Cubans have resisted this temptation. The Cuban government realizes that it has no motive to tell the truth about economic conditions, even to itself. And as for measuring Cuba’s black-market economy, criminals don’t issue annual reports.

Everybody, Cuban officialdom included, agrees that Cuba’s economy has shrunk by at least a third since the 1980s. But a third of what? Cuba’s per-capita gross domestic product for the year 1995, for example, has been calculated at $2,058 by dissident Cuban economists, $2,902 by the Cuban government, $3,245 by wishful-thinking pinko American academics and—the highest estimate of all—$3,652 by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Now the per-capita GDP in Cuba is about $1,200, according to the National Bank of Cuba, or $1,480, if you believe the CIA, while the
Columbia Journal of World Business
thinks the figure may be as low as $900. Nobody knows. Just as nobody knows what the peso is worth.

The official exchange rate for the peso is the same as that for the new
peso convertible:
one peso equals one dollar. Not even the Cuban government pretends to believe this. The black-market rate in March 1996 was 21 pesos per dollar. But there was something wrong with that also. Just two years before, the rate was 150 pesos per dollar. And dollars hadn’t gotten any less necessary or much more available. Latin-American scholar Douglas W. Payne thinks the Cuban secret police took over the black market. Or maybe the Cuban government was using the convertible peso—which, though printed in bright tropical hues, is essentially counterfeit U.S. money—to flood the currency exchanges. Odd things can happen when the government is more corrupt than you are. The real answer to the exchange-rate conundrum may be that there is no exchange rate. Only a lunatic would trade a U.S. dollar for anything the Cuban government prints, except exit visas. “There will arrive the day when money will have no value,” Fidel Castro once said in a fit of marxist utopianism. But apparently he meant it.

More was to be gleaned by looking around in Cuba than by trying to do imaginary math. I went into the Ministry of Trade’s product showroom, and there, offered for wholesale export to the world, were coconut shells painted to look like turtles, baskets that seemed to have been woven by people wearing catcher’s mitts, posters for obscure brands of rum, pictures of Che Guevara, and Aunt Jemima rag dolls in half a dozen sizes.

The Cubans may not be good with their hands, but they’re very skillful with blame. They blame the Soviet Union. And not without reason. When the Soviet bloc collapsed, the Cubans lost somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion a year in grants, subsidies, and trade concessions. Taking the low figure, that’s a dollar per person per day for everyone in the country. You can live for less than that in Cuba, and almost everyone has to.

Of course, the Soviets got something in return for this aid. They got sugar and cobalt and nickel. Which is why it was always easy to get a plate of sugared cobalt and nickel at Moscow restaurants in the 1980s. Plus, the Soviets got to be a huge pain in the ass to the United States. But what the Cuban government got was the luxury of perfect shiftlessness. The Castro government took boatloads of money from the Soviet Union and took all the businesses, industries, and land in Cuba, too. Sweden may be borrowing prosperity, but Cuba tried to beg and steal it.

So the Soviet Union is to blame for Cuban poverty because the Soviet Union fell apart, which means that everything is really America’s fault. Everything usually is. Cubans have been blaming their troubles on the United States at least since independence in 1902 and probably since Columbus set course too far south and missed becoming an American citizen. Even as José Marti was leading the struggle for freedom from Spain, he was denouncing the United States as a “monster.” And he was living in the United States at the time.

My tour guide Roberto told me that the explosion of the battleship
Maine
was just an “American pretext to get into the Cuba-Spain war.” No matter that’s how Cuba won.

On the other hand, the United States has been less than an ideal next-door neighbor. “Just at the moment I’m so angry with that infernal little Cuban Republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” said Teddy Roosevelt in 1906. American armed forces occupied Cuba from 1899 to 1902, and from 1906 to 1909. There was further military intervention in 1912 and threats of plenty more, plus an invasion by proxy at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. And a U.S. trade embargo, in force since that year, certainly looks to the Cubans like a “wipe its people off the face of the earth” gesture.

The Cubans estimated that as of 1996, this embargo had cost them between $38 billion and $40 billion. That happens to be much less than they’d received from the Soviets for doing the things that got them embargoed. But no quibbles. We’re talking politics here, not sense. Then in 1996 came the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, or Helms-Burton Act, as it’s called, after its respective sponsors in the U.S. Senate and House. This passed by whopping majorities because Cuba had just shot down two private planes carrying anti-Castro exiles who had a habit of dropping leaflets on Havana. Probably the leaflets contained dangerous information about the price of mattresses in Miami. Helms-Burton tightened the embargo by imposing sanctions not only on those who trade with Cuba but on those who trade with those who trade with Cuba and those who date them and their friends and pets. Or something like that. It’s harsh.

And the Cubans were steamed. All over Havana, walls had been painted with six-foot cartoons depicting Senator Jesse Helms as Hitler and Uncle Sam as Hitler, and Jesse Helms as Hitler again. The Cubans didn’t seem to know what Rep. Dan Burton looked like. Come to think of it, I don’t, either.

Of course the embargo is stupid. It gives Castro an excuse for everything that’s wrong with his rat-bag society. And free enterprise is supposed to be the antidote for socialism. We shouldn’t forbid American companies from doing business in Cuba, we should force them to do so. Bring them ashore with Marines if necessary. Although I guess we’ve tried that.

And the Cubans are stupid for rising to the bait. There’s another little island next to a gigantic, powerful country that threatens to invade and enforced an embargo for decades. And Taiwan has done okay.

I went with two American newspaper reporters to interview a Cuban economist, Hiram Marquetti, a professor at the University of Havana and an industrial-planning consultant to various state companies and government agencies. I wanted to see what it was like talking to an “expert” who wasn’t allowed to tell me the facts and maybe wasn’t allowed to know them.

Marquetti, looking grave, said the U.S. embargo had cost Cuba $42 billion, upping the amount a couple of billion dollars from what Cuban Foreign Ministry advisor Pedro Prada said in his book,
Island Under Siege
(available in English in hotel gift shops and complete with an appendix: “Opponents of the Blockade,” listing Danny Glover, Cindy Lauper, and Cheech Marin).

Marquetti, looking graver, admitted things were lousy. Malnutrition was evident in some sectors of the population. During the last few years, he said, the average Cuban’s intake of vitamin A was down 35 percent, iron down 40 percent, and vitamin C down 15 percent. The last item is interesting in a country where citrus trees are basically weeds. Marquetti, looking graver yet, said, “The highest percentage of disposable income goes to food, usually more than 50 percent. We need the free market to complete the supply.” But he also said that this free market and the dollars that make it work “do not necessarily have to do with the opening of the economy.” He claimed that “dollarization” was about Cuba acquiring “new technology, expertise in company management, and access to new markets.” It was not about any actual Cubans acquiring any actual money.

“Total foreign investment, including contracts, has been $2 billion since 1992,” said Marquetti, now looking proud. Though my European journalist friend thought only about $750 million had ever really been spent, and a
New York Law Journal
article cited estimates as low as $500 million. “Nickel mining provides $50 million a year in salaries alone, though such figures are not usually released, for security reasons,” said Marquetti, looking sly and confidential.