Robaina, considered by many cigar aficionados to produce the finest cigar tobacco in the world on his farm in Pinar del Rio Cuba, has died of cancer at the age of 91. He smoked cigars for 81 years and “was the only Cuban to have a cigar brand named after him”.
Here’s a photo I took in 2004 while visiting his farm. At the time he spent his time sitting on his porch greeting visitors with cigars and rum.
The Miami Herald reports of the Cuban government’s privatization of beauty salons.
I remarked in a September 2008 commentary relative to the Cuban government’s move to lease farm land to private farmers.
Private farmers, working the leased lands for themselves, in cooperation with relatives, or within a collective structure, are able to profit from their labors; and in doing so will further the development of private markets, by farmers planting what they think will sell and by freely selling a portion of their produce to whomever they wish for whatever they can get.
I hope similar reforms will be effected throughout the Cuban economy. If, for instance, the employees of state owned restaurants owned the business, collectively, the restaurants would be cleaner, and the food and service better, as the employee/owners would have an incentive to ensure the customers return. Likewise such an ownership arrangement would reduce theft, as it the cost of the lost product would directly effect the income of the employee/owners. Black market products would probably no longer be know as “gifts from Fidel”.
And in a May, 2009 commentary I remarked.
I have said before that the Cuban government now needs to turn state owned restaurants and retail outlets over to the employees who work in the enterprises. The “state” could enter in agreements with employee cooperatives to transfer the ownership of the enterprises and equipment, while retaining public ownership of the real property upon and within which the enterprise is located. The employee coops would buy the enterprise and equipment from the public upon favorable financial terms over time, would pay taxes to the government, and would most assuredly improve the quality of the products and services while eliminating the theft (self-awarded bonuses) which plagues the state owned enterprises. Employee/owners would be stealing from themselves.
A system of employee ownership of the enterprises within which they labor, it seems to me, is real communism. The Cuban economy has been based upon a state capitalist system which, in all but a few enterprises, discourages competition which encourages the innovation which results in greater productivity and better quality of products and services.
So, with the privatization of beauty salons, the Cuban government takes another tentative step toward embracing the benefits of private economic incentives.
Lilliam Riera, writing for Granma, reports of Cuba’s 1st world biotech industry which invents, produces, and markets biotechnically engineered vaccines and other pharmaceuticals. It’s quite impressive.
The AP reports more good news relative to the Obama administration’s reapproachment to Cuba.
Bisa Williams, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, met with Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Dagoberto Rodriguez, visited an area affected by hurricanes in the Western province of Pinar del Rio and toured a government agricultural facility during a six-day trip to Cuba this month, the officials told AP.
What is really significant about this news is that it was a very high level State Dept. official who visited Cuba and she spent six days traveling around the country and speaking to a wide range of Cubans.
Though I believe that Obama, Clinton, and a whole range of other administration officials understand just how silly USA policies toward Cuba have been, the reapproachment has been made politically possible by changes in the attitudes of Cuban Americans, particularly in South Florida. Particularly amongst younger Cuban Americans, and those who have arrived here after 1980.
President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act, I think, largely for political purposes, not because he necessarily thought it was a good idea. Rather, I think, he signed the bill with his eye on the 2000 election and the importance of winning Florida held to the, then prevailing, DLC inspired democratic campaign strategy. The credibility of the DLC strategy was shaken by Dean in 2000 and dispatched by Obama in 2008.
None-the-less, this latest meeting between USA and Cuban officials is more change I can believe in.
The Washington Post on line edition includes this very good report by William Booth reporting on the Cuba government’s efforts to increase food production by providing fallow land to private farmers.
CEIBA DEL AGUA, Cuba — Faced with the smothering inefficiencies of a state-run economy and unable to feed his people without massive imports of food, Cuban leader Raúl Castro has put his faith in compatriots like Esther Fuentes and his little farm out in the sticks.
If Cuba is searching for its New New Man, then Fuentes might be him. The Cuban government, in its most dramatic reform since Castro took over for his ailing older brother Fidel three years ago, is offering private farmers such as Fuentes the use of fallow state lands to grow crops — for a profit.
Capitalism comes to the communist isle? Not quite, but close. Raúl Castro prefers to call it “a new socialist model.” But Fuentes gets to pocket some extra cash.
“The harder you work, the better you do,” said Fuentes, who immediately understood the concept.
Castro’s government says it has lent 1.7 million acres of unused state land in the past year to 82,000 Cubans in an effort to cut imports, which currently make up 60 percent of the country’s food supply.
Cuba spends hundreds of million of dollars each year to import food, yet there are vast areas of fallow land in the country which may be farmed without irrigation. So long as Cuba enjoyed food, fuel, and industrial development subsidies from the erstwhile Eastern Bloc the Cuban government was able to pretend that the state farm cooperatives were an effective means of feeding the population. Meanwhile the country pursued industrialization, much of which failed to survive the demise of Eastern Bloc subsidies.
Just as during “the special period”, following the end of Eastern Bloc subsidies, Cuba moved to partner with private enterprises from around the world to improve its utility infrastructures and in other sectors of the economy, allowing their private partners no more than a 49% stake, Cuba is recognizing the private capitalist incentive in attempting to increase agricultural production.
Just as Sr. Fuentes noted – “”The harder you work, the better you do,”
I hope, as I’ve often opined, that the Cuban government will expand its employment of the private incentive to include other sectors of the economy. If, for example, the employees of the now state owned restaurants owned the business (not the land or building), the restaurants would be cleaner, the food and service better. Just as it is now in state owned restaurants patronized by tourists, who tip. The employees recognize that the better the food and service and the cleaner the place the more tips they receive.
Additionally, if the employees owned the enterprise, theft, for diversion to the black market (gifts from the commandante, as Cubans have put it) would end, as the employees would be stealing from themselves.
There is no reason, it seems to me, to think that the same wouldn’t hold true at the cement manufacturing enterprise, for example, or almost any other currently state owned enterprise. Though I hope that the publicly owned enterprises which provide utility, health, and education services will remain in public hands.
Granma reports on a meeting between USA and Cuban government officials aimed at normalizing “direct mail delivery between the two countries.”
The USA suspended direct mail service between the countries in 1963, as one of many punitive, often quite petty, actions taken by the USA in response to the refusal of the Cuban revolutionaries to bend their knees to USA hegemony.
The AFP provides additional information.
The BBC has a great report from last Saturday of urban farming in Havana. The report includes a video with a transcript following.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs reports that Microsoft, AOL, and Google have terminated instant messaging service to Cuba and asks whether the actions were encouraged by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the USA State Dept.
Cutting Off an Isolated Island
During the last week of May 2009, Microsoft abruptly and inexplicably banned access to its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service in Cuba. In response to several inquiries, the company defended its action by asserting that “Microsoft has discontinued providing Instant Messenger services in certain countries subject to United States sanctions. Details of these sanctions are available from the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).” In other words, the company claimed to be complying with the provisions of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR), the federal statute first issued on July 6, 1963 which had the responsibility for regulating the now-anachronistic trade embargo with the Caribbean island. Specifically, Microsoft was referring to the section of the CACR delineating that “no foreign subsidiary or branch of a U.S. organization may export products, technology, or services to Cuba or to any Cuban national, wherever they may be located, or broker the sale of goods or commodities to or from Cuba or any Cuban national.” The status of Windows Live as a downloadable software program categorizes it as transferable technology, thereby making it subject to the regulation.Carrying Out Orders?
The lack of transparency shrouding this incident makes it difficult to ascertain the true motives behind Microsoft’s actions. At first glance, however, the abruptness of the termination by Microsoft raises suspicions of whether the company was pressured into doing so by OFAC, an agency within the U.S. Treasury Department that traditionally has overseen the enforcement of the embargo. Such an assertion is bolstered by the fact that both Google and AOL quite quickly followed suit by ceasing their own instant messaging services in Cuba later in the week. Furthermore, the fact that Windows Live had been utilized as a means of communication on the island for the past decade – in spite of the existence of the embargo – strongly suggests that some form of government intervention caused the surprising ban to all of a sudden kick in.Despite the lack of truly incontrovertible evidence, the Cuban government believes that the service’s termination was at the behest of the U.S. government. Quite predictably, on May 29, Havana condemned the ban as “a truly harsh violation of Cuba’s rights,” with the state youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde going so far as to admonish the action as “just the latest turn of the screw in the United States’ technological blockade against the island.”
And
A Puzzling Circumstance
Despite the likelihood of government intervention, a puzzling circumstance complicated the issue, with it, perhaps tenuously, suggesting that Microsoft’s termination of instant messaging services was both entirely voluntary and premeditated, with OFAC regulations providing a convenient pretext for their actions.
Featured on the homepage of MSN Spain (a Microsoft portal) on July 14 was a slide show of nine world leaders, with each photograph accompanied by a small paragraph lambasting them for what Microsoft perceived were their undemocratic and illiberal principles. The opening slide of this compilation featured a montage of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez embracing former Cuban President Fidel Castro – both adorned with crowns atop their heads – and to their left was the following title (translated from Spanish): “When power corrupts…Striving to be kings.”The description accompanying the picture of the Castro brothers was:
“Fidel Castro remained in power in Cuba since 1959, first as Prime Minister (1959-1976) and later as President (1976-2008). When his health started to waver, he, in a purely monarchical style, temporarily delegated power to his brother [Raúl], only to definitely divest it to him in 2008.”
Chávez’s caption reads:
“Oh to what lengths Hugo Chávez goes. He has altered the laws according to his whim and for his own interest. He did the same with the Constitution he himself formulated in 1999, but he had committed an error: term limitations. With his elections in 1999, 2001, and 2007, the law would not allow him to run for the Presidency again. And instead of accepting this, he changed the law. This change occurred at the beginning of this year and it also strips term limitations from governors, mayors, and city councilmen.”
The other admonished leaders included: Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, Nestor and Christina Kirchner of Argentina, Hu Jintao of China, Evo Morales of Bolivia, King Juan Carlos I of Spain, Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, and former French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The inclusion of Kim and Bonaparte – undisputed tyrants on their own right – was, justifiably or not, intended to taint the other leaders – a sort of guilt by association.
This voluntary negative online propaganda staged by Microsoft obviously demonstrates the company’s disdain for the targeted leaders, and it could be construed – though quite weakly – that this preexisting contempt fueled Microsoft to act voluntarily in the termination of Windows Live in Cuba. Nevertheless, the plausibility of U.S. government involvement is overwhelming, as why would Microsoft’s competitors in instant messaging services – Google, AOL, and Yahoo – follow the lead of its competitor in the face of an increased share of the Cuban market.
This is a very strange story, I think. It’s curious that the three companies terminated IM service at about the same time. And why is Microsoft displaying propaganda, related to international relations, on its website?
Reuters reports that the USA government has turned off the 5 foot high reader board installed outside the fifth floor of the US Interests Section building which fronts on the Habana malecon.
The reader board, used to present Cubans with USA propaganda, was erected in 2006 by the Bush administration. Responding, the Cubans erected fifty or so flagpoles upon which they hoisted large black flags to obscure the reader board. It was quite a sight; and an indication of just how clueless were those managing Cuban affairs during the Bush administration, many of whom also managed Cuban affairs in the Bush I and Reagan administrations.
The presumption that Cubans would pay the least attention to USA propaganda belies a pathetic lack of knowledge of Cuba. Cubans are presented everywhere with state propaganda, revolutionary slogans, murals of revolutionary heroes, and exhortations to defeat the empire. Every Cuban I know pays no attention to propaganda, as they recognize it for what it is.
It is indeed refreshing to have an adult serving as USA president and adults managing USA foreign affairs.
Remember the reports this past March, which I passed on here, that Cuban president Raul Castro “removed from their positions foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque, Vice President Carlos Large as Cabinet secretary, and twenty some other top Cuban government officials”?
Both Large and Roque have been long-time, loyal associates of Fidel and both were assumed by commentators to be amongst the next generation of Cuban leaders.
The Financial Times is carrying this fascinating report that the Cuban government has produced a video presenting video and audio recorded evidence against those dismissed from their government positions.
The FT report, in fairness, is based upon conversations with unnamed party officials, who, I assume, have some interest in portraying the actions of the dismissed government officials in the worst light.
None-the-less, I find it interesting. It seems that Jorge Castañeda may have been on to something when he opined in March in Newsweek suggesting that the ousters of Deputy Prime Minister Carlos Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque ensued because they were involved in:
“…a conspiracy, betrayal, coup or whatever term one prefers, to overthrow or displace Raúl from his position. In this endeavor, they recruited—or were recruited by—Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who in turn tried to enlist the support of other Latin American leaders, starting with Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic, who refused to get involved.”
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