NYT
May 24, 2011
Revolutionary Cuba Now Lays Sand Traps for the Bourgeoisie
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
MEXICO CITY — One of Fidel Castro’s first acts upon taking power was to get rid of Cuba’s golf courses, seeking to stamp out a sport he and other socialist revolutionaries saw as the epitome of bourgeois excess.
Now, 50 years later, foreign developers say the Cuban government has swung in nearly the opposite direction, giving preliminary approval in recent weeks for four large luxury golf resorts on the island, the first in an expected wave of more than a dozen that the government anticipates will lure free-spending tourists to a nation hungry for cash.
The four initial projects total more than $1.5 billion, with the government’s cut of the profits about half. Plans for the developments include residences that foreigners will be permitted to buy — a rare opportunity from a government that all but banned private property in its push for social equality.
Mr. Castro and his comrade in arms Che Guevara, who worked as a caddie in his youth in Argentina, were photographed in fatigues hitting the links decades ago, in what some have interpreted as an effort to mock either the sport or the golf-loving president at the time of the revolution, Dwight D. Eisenhower — or both.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who maintains close ties with Cuba, has taken aim at the pastime in recent years as well, questioning why, in the face of slums and housing shortages, courses should spread over valuable land “just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois can go and play golf.”
But Cuba’s deteriorating economy and the rise in the sport’s popularity, particularly among big-spending travelers who expect to bring their clubs wherever they go, have softened the government’s view, investors said. Cuban officials did not respond to requests for comment, but Manuel Marrero, the tourism minister, told a conference in Europe this month that the government anticipates going forward with joint ventures to build 16 golf resorts in the near future.
For the past three years, Cuba’s only 18-hole course, a government-owned spread at the Varadero Beach resort area, has even hosted a tournament. It has long ceased to be, its promoters argued, a rich man’s game.
“We were told this foray is the top priority in foreign investment,” said Graham Cooke, a Canadian golf course architect designing a $410 million project at Guardalavaca Beach, along the island’s north coast about 500 miles from Havana, for a consortium of Indians from Canada. The company, Standing Feather International, says it signed a memorandum of agreement with the Cuban government in late April and will be the first to break ground, in September.
Andrew Macdonald, the chief executive of London-based Esencia Group, which helps sponsor the golf tournament in Cuba and is planning a $300 million country club in Varadero, said, “This is a fundamental development in having a more eclectic tourist sector.”
...
Read the full story HERE in the NYT.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Havana: The State Retreats
New York Review of Books
Havana: The State Retreats
May 26, 2011
José Manuel Prieto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
1.
When I picked up my ticket for the only nonstop New York–Havana flight, I was given a list of the goods I could take: ten kilos of medicine and up to twenty kilos of food, duty free. While it’s true that Cuba suffers from the US embargo, it’s also the US and its Cuban exile community that keep the country afloat. The day of the flight, many of my fellow passengers were loaded down with heavy bundles of food and medicine, plasma TV sets in their original packaging, audio equipment, and domestic appliances. In 2010, 324,000 visitors arrived in Cuba on direct flights from the United States like this one, and several economists calculate that remittances to Cuba from the US total more than a billion dollars annually, about 35 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange inflow.
All that help still isn’t enough. After landing at José Martí International Airport, I find the city in a virtual state of blackout, the celebrated corner of 23rd and L, Havana’s Times Square, empty at 10 PM. It’s as if a catastrophe has struck. There is a constant, ominous feeling of abandonment and crisis. My impression doesn’t much differ from the diagnosis delivered on December 18—days after my arrival—to the Cuban Parliament by the country’s current leader, Raúl Castro: “Either we rectify our course or the time for teetering along on the brink runs out and we go down. And we will go down…[with] the effort of entire generations.”
Certainly the signs of this deep crisis have been in the air for at least twenty years. What’s clear now is that it’s not enough to go on blaming the American bloqueo or the fall of the Soviet Union. Something is wrong with the system itself. This could be glimpsed in the startling comment made by Fidel Castro to the US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the Latin American scholar Julia Sweig last August: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
NYR / NYR Tote Bag
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What model is he talking about? The Soviet model of forced nationalization. The Cuban Revolution was among other things a cure for the chronic weakness of the Cuban state prior to 1959. The new, postrevolutionary state would take upon itself all that previous governments of Cuba had done so badly. The example of the Soviet Union, with triumphs such as the 1957 launch of Sputnik, seemed to indicate that this was a promising way forward, and it had the added appeal to Cuba’s unelected rulers of calling for government by a single party, virtually without opposition, and the pulverization of civil society.
Now, on my first visit to Cuba in ten years, I had the chance to observe the first signs of the inverse process: the dismantling of this gigantic state, visibly in retreat. I saw the detritus left behind: the disaster of a dysfunctional economy and a deep financial crisis aggravated by a dual currency system. All amid the growing discontent of the population and surging dissidence.
2.
In Havana I buy every bit of printed news on sale at the kiosk near the casa particular where I’m renting a room. Such an unusual interest in publications almost no one reads immediately gives me away as a visitor from abroad. I ask for the recently released official publication “Proyecto de Lineamientos de la Política Económica y Social” (“Draft Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy”), but it’s sold out, the elderly vendor informs me: “All Havana is reading it.” In the end, I buy it secondhand, for ten times the original price, from a passerby who has overheard the conversation.
It’s a twenty-nine-page pamphlet whose 291 points set forth the coming “update” of the Cuban model. These points, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma affirms, were distilled from the vast consulta, or survey, Raúl Castro declared would take place on July 26, 2007, when “more than four million Cubans raised more than a million points.” By and large, the guidelines attempt to reduce the cumbersome size of the state to make it more compact and less costly.
The crux of the debate, I gather, after penetrating the technical jargon all Havana is reading and discussing as if it were a best-selling novel, is whether a new role can be assigned to the state: Can it be imagined more as referee than as star player while ensuring that it doesn’t lose control? There is of course no question that the governing party must remain in power and “safeguard the conquests of the revolution.”
I come to see that in fact the Party is trying to adjust to a transformation that began without much government participation, something the Cuban people started doing on their own. The government is like a general who mandates an “orderly retreat” when his army is being crushed. The “Guidelines” are for keeping up appearances.
............
Read the full story HERE.
Havana: The State Retreats
May 26, 2011
José Manuel Prieto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
1.
When I picked up my ticket for the only nonstop New York–Havana flight, I was given a list of the goods I could take: ten kilos of medicine and up to twenty kilos of food, duty free. While it’s true that Cuba suffers from the US embargo, it’s also the US and its Cuban exile community that keep the country afloat. The day of the flight, many of my fellow passengers were loaded down with heavy bundles of food and medicine, plasma TV sets in their original packaging, audio equipment, and domestic appliances. In 2010, 324,000 visitors arrived in Cuba on direct flights from the United States like this one, and several economists calculate that remittances to Cuba from the US total more than a billion dollars annually, about 35 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange inflow.
All that help still isn’t enough. After landing at José Martí International Airport, I find the city in a virtual state of blackout, the celebrated corner of 23rd and L, Havana’s Times Square, empty at 10 PM. It’s as if a catastrophe has struck. There is a constant, ominous feeling of abandonment and crisis. My impression doesn’t much differ from the diagnosis delivered on December 18—days after my arrival—to the Cuban Parliament by the country’s current leader, Raúl Castro: “Either we rectify our course or the time for teetering along on the brink runs out and we go down. And we will go down…[with] the effort of entire generations.”
Certainly the signs of this deep crisis have been in the air for at least twenty years. What’s clear now is that it’s not enough to go on blaming the American bloqueo or the fall of the Soviet Union. Something is wrong with the system itself. This could be glimpsed in the startling comment made by Fidel Castro to the US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the Latin American scholar Julia Sweig last August: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
NYR / NYR Tote Bag
Advertisement
What model is he talking about? The Soviet model of forced nationalization. The Cuban Revolution was among other things a cure for the chronic weakness of the Cuban state prior to 1959. The new, postrevolutionary state would take upon itself all that previous governments of Cuba had done so badly. The example of the Soviet Union, with triumphs such as the 1957 launch of Sputnik, seemed to indicate that this was a promising way forward, and it had the added appeal to Cuba’s unelected rulers of calling for government by a single party, virtually without opposition, and the pulverization of civil society.
Now, on my first visit to Cuba in ten years, I had the chance to observe the first signs of the inverse process: the dismantling of this gigantic state, visibly in retreat. I saw the detritus left behind: the disaster of a dysfunctional economy and a deep financial crisis aggravated by a dual currency system. All amid the growing discontent of the population and surging dissidence.
2.
In Havana I buy every bit of printed news on sale at the kiosk near the casa particular where I’m renting a room. Such an unusual interest in publications almost no one reads immediately gives me away as a visitor from abroad. I ask for the recently released official publication “Proyecto de Lineamientos de la Política Económica y Social” (“Draft Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy”), but it’s sold out, the elderly vendor informs me: “All Havana is reading it.” In the end, I buy it secondhand, for ten times the original price, from a passerby who has overheard the conversation.
It’s a twenty-nine-page pamphlet whose 291 points set forth the coming “update” of the Cuban model. These points, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma affirms, were distilled from the vast consulta, or survey, Raúl Castro declared would take place on July 26, 2007, when “more than four million Cubans raised more than a million points.” By and large, the guidelines attempt to reduce the cumbersome size of the state to make it more compact and less costly.
The crux of the debate, I gather, after penetrating the technical jargon all Havana is reading and discussing as if it were a best-selling novel, is whether a new role can be assigned to the state: Can it be imagined more as referee than as star player while ensuring that it doesn’t lose control? There is of course no question that the governing party must remain in power and “safeguard the conquests of the revolution.”
I come to see that in fact the Party is trying to adjust to a transformation that began without much government participation, something the Cuban people started doing on their own. The government is like a general who mandates an “orderly retreat” when his army is being crushed. The “Guidelines” are for keeping up appearances.
............
Read the full story HERE.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Young Cubans deal with the unimaginable: pink slips
Young Cubans deal with the unimaginable: pink slips
'We have to think differently' to deal with new reality brought in by reforms
By Mary Murray
NBC News
updated 5/4/2011 9:15:41 AM ET
HAVANA — Last hired, first fired – one of those golden laws of free market economies most workers know by heart.
But not Adrián Chacón and Alejandro Ortega, two young repairmen who found themselves on the losing end of the fight for their jobs. The best friends were knocked off balance when the Cuban government changed what had been a hard-and-fast rule for the last 50 years.
Like all Cubans their age, these young men were told all their lives that a tough job market had nothing to do with the Cuban reality – that only capitalist workers faced layoffs. That, under the island’s state controlled socialist economy, work was a guaranteed right.
Sure, the state might not pay people enough to put much food on the table, but anyone looking for work would always be welcomed at some public company or government ministry.
Not so fast …
That promise went out the window last year when Cuban President Raul Castro told people to take a hard look around them.
Cuba, he said, must stop being the “only country in the world where it is not necessary to work.” The only way to heal Cuba’s battered economy, he insisted, was to start producing more, and with fewer people.
Castro first took aim at Cuba’s bloated state payrolls and state-run companies failing to turn a profit. Both drain the public treasury, he argued, at a time when the country’s very survival was at stake.
While promising a wholesale overhaul of Cuba’s financial system, Castro had the state start by laying off workers in droves. His plan was to cut 500,000 jobs by the first quarter of 2011 and more than one million by 2015 – effectively eliminating one in every five jobs.
While that frenetic pace has slowed considerably (perhaps someone figured out that throwing so many people out of work in such a concentrated time could end up fueling social unrest), thousands of younger workers, including Chacón and Ortega, were among the first to go.
Initially, both had similar reactions to the layoffs: anger. Months later, the friends have adapted differently to their circumstances.
Read the full post HERE.
'We have to think differently' to deal with new reality brought in by reforms
By Mary Murray
NBC News
updated 5/4/2011 9:15:41 AM ET
HAVANA — Last hired, first fired – one of those golden laws of free market economies most workers know by heart.
But not Adrián Chacón and Alejandro Ortega, two young repairmen who found themselves on the losing end of the fight for their jobs. The best friends were knocked off balance when the Cuban government changed what had been a hard-and-fast rule for the last 50 years.
Like all Cubans their age, these young men were told all their lives that a tough job market had nothing to do with the Cuban reality – that only capitalist workers faced layoffs. That, under the island’s state controlled socialist economy, work was a guaranteed right.
Sure, the state might not pay people enough to put much food on the table, but anyone looking for work would always be welcomed at some public company or government ministry.
Not so fast …
That promise went out the window last year when Cuban President Raul Castro told people to take a hard look around them.
Cuba, he said, must stop being the “only country in the world where it is not necessary to work.” The only way to heal Cuba’s battered economy, he insisted, was to start producing more, and with fewer people.
Castro first took aim at Cuba’s bloated state payrolls and state-run companies failing to turn a profit. Both drain the public treasury, he argued, at a time when the country’s very survival was at stake.
While promising a wholesale overhaul of Cuba’s financial system, Castro had the state start by laying off workers in droves. His plan was to cut 500,000 jobs by the first quarter of 2011 and more than one million by 2015 – effectively eliminating one in every five jobs.
While that frenetic pace has slowed considerably (perhaps someone figured out that throwing so many people out of work in such a concentrated time could end up fueling social unrest), thousands of younger workers, including Chacón and Ortega, were among the first to go.
Initially, both had similar reactions to the layoffs: anger. Months later, the friends have adapted differently to their circumstances.
Read the full post HERE.
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