In all the arguments surging about Fidel Castro, I have noticed the lack of simple, even tourist-level observation, of what his country has been like in recent years. This can tell you more than disquisitions on land reform or geopolitics. A friend who went there this year reports that the level of goods available to citizens is even more limited than he remembers from visiting communist Romania in the 1970s. He entered one local-currency government food shop in Havana. Three staff sat at the counter, but there was literally no food to buy. There was a Havana-wide shortage of eggs at the time, and when a box of eggs appeared at one end of the town, mobile phones brought crowds rushing with the news.
As always in communist countries, people with capitalist money are relatively well treated. Tourists use euros etc to buy ‘CUCs’ (Cuban Units of Currency) which can procure a limited number of things at western-style prices. (January’s visitors had a glut of lobster, but little else.) The official currency, the peso, is worthless and sharp traders often pass it off on tourists as change for the CUCs they have handed over.
The immensely grand state-run Hotel Nacional served ‘the worst food I’ve had since prep school’. You may have heard it said that Cubans are so hospitable that they invite you into their homes to cook for you. The reason is that private-enterprise restaurants are allowed only if they are classified as people’s houses. My friend hired a guide round Havana. She turned out to be a doctor. The allegedly first-rate healthcare system pays doctors about $45 a month, she told him (hence her guide work). The consequence is that patients who have CUCs ‘help’ doctors in addition to their salaries — another way of saying that the system goes private in order to work.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article can be found here.
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