Cubans Lament Shortages as Castro Celebrates His 75th Birthday

By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer

HAVANA -- Towering above the Plaza de la Revolucion like a bony Washington Monument with pagoda scallops stands Cuba's most prominent and least aesthetic
physical memorial.

Technically, it honors Jose Marti, the father of Cuban independence, but as a backdrop for Fidel Castro's endless speeches, it may be better known as a symbol of
his Marxist revolution.

Bad advertisement.

Located as it is atop the highest ground in Havana, the monument has become a prime roost for the city's vultures. On any given day they can be seen soaring out
from its pinnacles to circle the moribund remnants of Castro's anti-capitalist economy.

Jesse Helms, George Will and William F. Buckley together couldn't fashion a more negative -- or emblematic -- insignia of Cuban socialism's demise.

Fidel Castro turns 75 today. Forty-two of those years have been spent as architect and leader of a social revolution that many Cubans have literally been dying to
escape. Despite a few impressive achievements, his country has fallen victim to the Achilles' heel of almost every Marxist state: It can't feed its own people.

Three successes of the Cuban Revolution? asks a popular joke here. Education, medical care and sports.

Three deficiencies of the revolution? Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Food is rationed by the government, but there's never enough. Travel the length of this restive, physically unspoiled, achingly beautiful countryand you'll soon
encounter,even in privileged hotels for tourists, profound shortages of at least two homegrown staples of Cuban cuisine -- rice and coffee. The bowl of soupy black
beans endemic to any Cuban American meal in the United States is hard to find in some places, for either Cubans or tourists. There aren't enough beans.

"Eating one decent meal a day appears to be one of the sins of the past for which we must atone," sighed a professional in Camaguey after a rare ample lunch.

Twenty years ago, Fidelistas boasted better housing as one of the hallmarks of the Revolution. No more. Since the fall of the Soviet Union 10 years ago and the end
of its $5 billion annual subsidy for Cuba, there has been little money for housing or much of anything else. The cramped and crumbling state of even much
middle-class housing in Cuba's cities will break your heart. The worst housing project in Anacostia, by comparison, looks like the Watergate.

To visit one art professional in old Havana, you climb three stories up a narrow stairway of decaying concrete that smells of urine. It is pitch dark even at noon on a
sunny day: There are no lights. The shabby one-bedroom apartment at the top has a living/dining room scarcely large enough for two chairs, a small table and a
television set. The family considers itself lucky.

In two cities in eastern Cuba, the pattern repeats itself. One middle-income family perches two floors up in a mildewed project set in a dusty, grassless field. The
sparsely furnished living/dining room wouldn't shelter a compact car. In the other dwelling, the largest room, approximately 9 feet by 12 feet, houses six people from
three generations for most of the day. In the back yard, among scattering chickens, the family breadwinner retools the copper tubing in a rusting 15-year-old air
conditioner, proud of the Made in U.S.A. compressor -- bought on the black market -- with which he'll bring the machine back to life.

Similar lives can be glimpsed through the tall windows of Havana's old buildings, where children play on floors of cracked tile and peeling linoleum among sagging
lines of drying clothes.

And in both the rolling country of the northern coast and the rich land of the eastern plains,the roofs on the mud-and-concrete huts tell a graphic story of retreat from
the industrial age: Prerevolutionary terra-cotta tiling has been patched with rusting corrugated metal, which, in turn, has been covered with hand-woven palm thatch.
Often, nearby, a farmer plows with oxen and a wooden plow.

Most of these conditions, of course, have existed for years and were even worse in the early 1990s. What's different now is that the country's swelling flood of
tourists -- 1.8 million last year, 2 million expected in 2001 -- has given more and more Cubans something to measure themselves and their government against. And
the measurement doesn't look good.

Much of Cuba remains stunningly beautiful countryside: green pastureland rimmed by tall, graceful royal palms; small, picturesque farmyards fenced with neatly
trimmed cactus hedges; sun-washed riverine marshes, like soft green impressionist paintings dabbed with the white of stalking herons.

But in the small towns and cities of the eastern plain, color is a political exile. Featureless, yardless concrete houses crowd the dusty, cramped streets, and the only
visible paint has been used for the relentless wall slogans proclaiming "Forward Fidel, Cuba Is With You!"

In such defeated surroundings, German and Italian tourists in rental Fiats and Peugeots arrive like time travelers from another planet. They spend more for a cheap
hotel room than most Cubans earn in two or three months, appear astonished and indignant at everyday shortages, and expect basic furnishings -- like a simple seat
on a flush toilet -- that loom like decadent luxuries in Las Tunas or Camaguey.

Yet there's little apparent resentment against the tourists, who spent $2 billion in Cuba last year. The inevitable backlash in public opinion,most Cubans will tell you, is
against the Castro government, which, theysay, has not only caused their economic plight but considers them stupid enough to believe the U.S. blockade alone is
responsible.

"The government has painted itself into an impossible corner," said a former Fidelista in Santiago. "They desperately need tourism," which now makes up 43 percent
of the economy. "But every tourist who comes in exposes the lies the government tells." Cubans, he says, see they are not getting closer to the living standards of the
rest of the world, but further behind.

"Twenty years ago a room in the Hotel Nacional in Havana cost Cubans about $15 and anyone could afford it," said a 60-year-old in Ciego de Avila. "Now my
government has spent millions fixing it up and I'm not allowed to go there."

It's a bitterly ironic echo of the social and economic polarities against which Castro once took up arms.

The defensive government reaction has been a renewed onslaught of propagandizing billboards, wall slogans and images, much photographed by tourists as
high-camp artifacts, to the bemusement of Cubans themselves.

"I think Che Guevara once said something like 'ideology is more important than beans,' " said aone-time revolutionary in Havana who has long since lost faith. "He
meant it figuratively, but for Fidel now, that's literally true . . . Yet the government has planted the seeds for its own opposition. Whatever else the revolution has done
wrong, the educational level of the Cuban people is very, very high. You can't teach a people to think and then fool them with empty political slogans."

Despite the grumbling impatience, there is still widespread -- if often grudging -- respect for "Fidel." But loyalists and skeptics alike say his hold is entirely a matter of
personal charisma and has little to do with the Marxist ideology in whose name he rules. Everyone is just waiting for his death and the inevitable acceleration of
long-needed economic changes they finally see underway.

One rarely remarked factor corroding Cubans' belief in Fidelism was the war in Angola. Some 400,000 Cuban soldiers were dispatched to fight in that civil war
between 1975 and 1989, and while it's probably overstating things to describe the war as "Cuba's Vietnam," it remains a bitterly painful subject to many. Men in all
parts of the country raise the subject without being asked.

"I was not sent but lost three good friends who were," said a man near Santiago. "The government has never admitted how many Cubans were killed, but we all
know thousands never came back. I can't tell you how upset it makes me to talk about it. Most Cubans just refuse to deal with it at all. It's our dirty secret: We can't
admit we sacrificed so many. And for what? To pay back Russia? I don't want to talk about it."

But you can speak to all sorts of people, pro- and anti-Fidel, in all parts of Cuba these days and get surprising unanimity on several topics.They all agree socialism
will die with Fidel.They all agree his brother Raul will take over, but not be able to hold power.They all seem to think the subsequent governmental shakedown will
be accomplished without bloodshed or military coup.

Perhaps the greatest unanimity of all involves "the Miami Cubans."

"Whatever mistakes we've made in the revolution, we want to work out our own destiny after Fidel," said a professional in Santiago. A young anti-Fidel cabdriver in
Havana and a pro-Fidel academic in Holguin said the same thing, in almost identical words.

It's not, they said, that they resent the Miami Cubans, hundreds of whom flock to the country every day as tourists, according to government surveys. "It's just that
we don't want them making our decisions for us," said the cabdriver. "Those people are frozen in the 1950s. They don't have any idea what we've been through here.
They've mostly become American citizens and made a lot of money. I don't blame them for that. But they don't plan to come back and share our fate, whatever that
is. They won't have to live with the decisions they want to make for us."

Yet there's a curious and almost poignant innocence about Cubans' conviction that they'll be able to control their destiny in the face of billions of dollars in
development money poised and ready to pave and high-rise their green and strikingly unspoiled land. Only occasionally do you hear someone suggest one form of
control may succeed another when the revolution ends.

Informed that the ultramodern filling station where he'd stopped for gas, near Las Tunas, looks just like those in France, a doctor remarked: "This one's owned by
someone in the government. He's getting ready for the changes we all know are coming. Maybe the same people in power now will have all the businesses like this
tomorrow. Maybe it will be just like Russia."

                                               © 2001