The Wrongologist

This is
the first of three columns about the Wrongologist’s 7-day visit to Cuba. The
purpose of the trip was to look at Cuba’s health care system.

Today’s
postcard is an overview of the country, its people and daily life.

History and Demographics:

America’s view
of Cuba is based upon snapshots from history. Since the revolution in January
1959, and the subsequent embrace of the Soviet Union by Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile
Crisis,
and the Elian Gonzalez
Affair
have dominated our thinking. Some of us vaguely remember Mafia-owned hotels in
Havana that America’s rich visited in the 1940’s, Cuban cigars and American
cars of the 1950’s, the cars kept in pristine original condition and still on the roads like the 1956 ford thunderbird.

Cuba today
has a population of 11.2 million, while Havana has 2.2 million inhabitants. About
18% of the population are 60 or older while
just 17.2% are 14 or younger, so its population is declining. 78.3% of
jobs are in the state sector.

Cuba’s
culture blends the Spanish culture, brought about by a 400+ year period of Spanish
colonial control, with African cultures that arrived with the more than 1
million slaves brought by the Spanish to work the sugar cane fields. Spanish Catholicism
melds with a variety of syncretic religions of African origin.

Christopher
Columbus landed
on Cuba’s northeastern coast on October 28, 1492 and claimed it for Spain. It
remained a Spanish colony, (except for an 11 month period when it was captured
by the British), until the Spanish-American
War
in 1898. It was then administered by the US until 1903.

How did
the US get Guantanamo? After America won the Spanish-American War, as part of
the establishment of a Cuban-managed Republic, the US insisted on including the
Platt Amendment, which dictated
the conditions for the withdrawal of US troops remaining in Cuba. After Theodore
Roosevelt withdrew US troops from the island in 1902, Cuba signed the Cuban-American
Treaty
(1903), which specified the terms of a lease of land to the United States for a
naval station at Guantanamo Bay. The Cuban government regards the US presence
in Guantanamo Bay as illegal and insists the Cuban-American Treaty was obtained
by threat of force in violation of international law.

Most of us
have heard of the Cuban Embargo. It is a
commercial, economic, and financial embargo originally imposed on Cuba in October,
1960. However, the US makes no effort to block Cuba’s trade with third
countries. The Cuban embargo has been the most enduring in modern history. In
February 1962, the night before John F. Kennedy extended the embargo to cover all Cuban imports, he sent his press
secretary Pierre Salinger to buy 1,200 of his favorite petit H. Upmann Cuban
cigars. Despite the embargo, the United States is the fifth largest exporter to
Cuba, mostly of food (6.6% of Cuba’s imports are from the US). However,
Cuba must pay cash for all US imports, as no credit is allowed.

The Obama
administration made some changes to the restrictions on US travel to Cuba,
easing the travel ban, by allowing Cuban-Americans to travel freely to Cuba. On
January 14, 2011 he further eased the ban, by allowing students and religious
missionaries to travel to Cuba if they meet certain requirements. This is the
kind of sanctioned trip taken by the Wrongologist.

The old cars:

This
Chevy was parked at the Jose Marti International Arrivals building when the
Wrongologist landed in Havana:

What is
not generally known is that these old cars are mostly privately owned and
operated taxis that ply routes from one side of Havana to the other. These are
highly prized cash businesses for those Cubans who can afford them. The cars
trade at the value of the license to operate them, rather than at the value of
an antique car. They earn the peso equivalent of $1 for a trip all the way
across town. Cubans have evolved a form of sign language that lets the taxi
driver know where the person on the side of the road is heading before the taxi
stops to pick them up. Today, the cost of the license to operate a taxi can be
paid off in about 2 years of driving in Havana. This is what most of the old
American cars operating as taxis in Havana look like:

Many cars
are kept on the road by using Russian parts. Many have been modified with different
tail lights so that it can take a careful look to determine the original car
model.  Very few of the old cars look as
nice as this one:

Cars this
nice make up less than 1% of the antique American cars seen in Havana. The
beautifully restored cars are used by Cuban entrepreneurs to drive sight-seeing
foreign tourists. And those trips cost way more than the equivalent of $1!

Daily
life:

The
average Cuban appears to be cash poor. Few people own cars. Fewer own motor
scooters, so most use some form of public transportation, including buses and
trains run by the government. So, rush hour does not create traffic jams. Transportation
to work and to stores takes a major portion of each Cuban’s day. The longest
lines seem to be for bus transportation, which costs around a peso. During rush
hour, buses often arrive at stops already packed:

While ATM’s exist, less than 20% of people have bank accounts. Yet, the government
pays workers by debit card. While the cards can be used at larger markets, most
people shop locally, so the cards are quickly exchanged for cash. People get
ration cards for a subsistence amount of rice, but it does not cover the needs
of most families. Most food shopping is done in open air food stalls:

Gasoline
is subsidized as well. Many people have mobile phones that require a pre-paid card,
so there are long lines at mobile phone stores as people wait to replenish
their phone cards.

Most
people live in an apartment or a detached house that has been passed down from
their parents. All children share equally in the inherited building, so homes
are sub-divided into private spaces by the next generation.

Most buildings in
Havana are made of concrete and their outer walls are deteriorating from the
salt air and much deferred maintenance. There does not seem to be a
well-established concept of “curb-appeal” for private homes:

Most homes have
reliable electricity, TVs and washing machines, while clothes are dried
outdoors on a line. Municipal water supply can be problematic, with most homes
also having pumps and cisterns.

Cubans
seem optimistic about their future. They see recent liberalizations that allow
the purchase and sale of homes to be a positive sign.

200
types of businesses have recently been opened to private ownership, and this
gives many the idea that they will be able to make more income by opening a
private business while keeping their government job. People expect that it will
be only a few years until the US and Cuba normalize trade relations, and they
expect to see a huge increase in American tourism as a result. The
privately-owned tour companies are now hiring additional guides in anticipation
of trade normalization.

Tomorrow,
a Postcard about Cuba’s health care system.