The people of Cuba were much the same during my trip last week as they were all the years before: smart, tough, resilient and funny.
The revival of a Cuban opera we saw on Friday night was nothing short of amazing. The show was held in a repurposed bank building built at the height of pre-revolution Cuba.
Restaurants and jazz clubs catered to us all week and served wonderful food in amazing settings.
But Cuba, the country, has changed.
What was already a difficult place to live, has regressed further.
While no one really seems to be starving, there is a decided difference in the economic situation and the care given to living conditions.
We stayed in a convent near the Plaza Vieja which is in the oldest part of the city of Havana.
Outside the walls of the convent and the plaza, Havana was filthy. It was as though the garbage service was on a permanent holiday.
It stank. It was in awful shape.
Cuban Pesos are no longer the currency of choice. There are no cruise ships parked in the harbor of Havana. Restaurants and bars are mostly empty, save for us.
The group of seven of us who spent the last week in Cuba building a clean water system are all, save one, veterans of time on the island country.
We’ve seen it when there was hope for rapprochement during the last years of the Obama administration and then the return to a hard-line stance during Trump and Biden.
Those lines are even drawn darker now with the return of Trump to the White House and the people of Cuba openly joke about it.
While our country’s embargo against the Cubans continues to make their life difficult, they aren’t without their own failed policies.
Leaving aside the failure that is a planned communist economy, the first regime not led by a Castro attempted the march toward a more open system on the model of the Chinese.
The government used incentives to encourage small, commercial enterprises.
Those enterprises focused solely on buying wholesale items and selling them on the retail market in Cuba.
There was no innovation or production. Those means had long left the island.
The burgeoning retail market began to create a wealth gap the Cuban government found untenable.
They retreated from the incentives offered for small businesses and what had begun to look like a private enterprise economy collapsed.
As a friend of mine said about the situation, “You can socialize capitalism and retain some measure of economic freedom. It doesn’t work in reverse.”
In China, the state let go of the reigns on ownership of the means of production, but Cuba had little to no means of production. Every hard good that was bought and sold in Cuba was made somewhere else.
Some may say the same about our country, but that’s absurd. There are plenty of items still made in this country. Other than rum and cigars, there are no items made in Cuba for export.
The embargo placed on Cuba by our nation has been one of the great international crimes committed in our lifetime.
While I do believe we should lift the embargo on Cuba, I don’t believe it should be with an eye to making the country an extension of our values in the Caribbean.
The Cuban people should have access to our marketplace of commerce and ideas, but they should also be able to choose to access it as necessary.
I would like it if I didn’t have to take dexamethasone and Zofran to Cuba for a friend of mine whose aunt is having chemotherapy for cancer because none can be found on the island. Or having to take in large amounts of Tylenol and ibuprofen for friends because they too are not available on the island.
Some say, “They should be able to take care of themselves.”
They may have been able to take care of themselves when life was simpler and we didn’t have the modern conveniences of today.
But who wants to live in the dark ages?
This is a global economy and we have spent the last 60 years doing our best to keep one of our closest neighbors out of it.
We should be ashamed.
Jon Alverson is proud to be publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.com or call him at 662-82-8341.
