This is from The Daily, Rupert Murdock's online only newspaper.
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/18/021811-opinions-oped-cuba-symmes-1-3/
Enjoy!
Exploding cigar
Shortages and corruption make Havana regime vulnerableCoffee is about to have less coffee in it, the Cuban government announced this month. It will now be adulterated with some as-yet-undetermined vegetable matter, stretching the country's meager supply of joe a little further.
All Cubans are issued a single small packet of coffee every month, as part of the state ration system, the cornerstone of government economic control. The richest coffee grown on the island is roasted dark, labeled for export and sold for hard currency in dollar stores few Cubans can afford. The lesser stuff, a brown powder sold under the Hola brand name, is rationed out, and is the only coffee most Cubans ever taste. Now it will be diluted, perhaps with ground nuts, soybean leaves or, as rumor had it during my visit to Cuba last year, ground twigs.
Coffee is a good measure of Cuban identity, one of the few pleasures that was never taken away by the revolution. A hot, sweet jolt, it is not just a stimulant, but a vital drink that controls appetite on an island where meals are infrequent.
The coffee crisis encapsulates all that is wrong with Cuba: theft, hunger, black markets, bad food and a leader who cannot produce beans but says twig-sipping is patriotic. Yet the Cuban Revolution goes on after half a century, unchallenged internally, because it holds not just the police truncheon, but also the trust of some portion of the population. Supporters are a minority, but not a small one.
Taking away the coffee is part of a deeper trend, however — one more failure at a moment when the cost of stagnation, one-party rule and endlessly accumulating small insults are being recalculated worldwide. Burma's generals must be nervous. Central Asian dictators are sniffing for smoke from Tahrir Square. And in Havana, the Cuban Revolution must know, deep in its old bones, that it is too weak to withstand a wave of popular unrest like that coursing through Egypt.
Today the Cuban economy is nonexistent or stagnant, the young are educated, broke and frustrated, and after 50 years of one-party rule, stealing and corruption have become aspects of everyday life. Sound familiar?
The Cuban state totters on the edge of bankruptcy. A million Cubans will be laid off, Havana says, but there are no jobs and business is effectively illegal. Soap, potatoes and peas have all been removed from the minimal rations that keep Cubans alive. Seventy percent of all food is imported. If the government goes broke, as seems increasingly likely, people will go hungry, and crime and corruption will increase. In such tense conditions, the bond between any given people and a once-revolutionary government can break quickly.
Adaptation is the stepchild of necessity. Havana is already full of foreign corporations (European and Canadian, primarily) involved in tourism or in the massive import trade necessary to keep a country alive when it cannot feed itself. With foreign entities handling hundreds of millions of dollars and most of the valuable goods in Cuba, some islanders inevitably get their fingers in the pie.
The average salary in the country is less than $20 a month, and corruption has long been endemic among the lower classes, with stealing from state employers the main mechanism. But now corruption is also appearing at the highest levels of society. In 2009, two of Cuba's senior leaders, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Vice President Carlos Lage, were detained, humiliated at show trials and fired from the regime. Their offense appears to have been a luxurious, rum-fueled vacation with a wealthy Spanish lobbyist. In Cuba, political ambition and rivalry have always been involved in such purges. What is new is the certainty that, as the economy slips out of the regime's hands, large-scale financial corruption will be involved too.
Cubans mention the coming of corruption with certainty and fear: Top officials are already getting away with enriched lifestyles, and when this does become visible — larger houses, better cars and immunity from the police — then all bets are off. The regime fears financial corruption for a reason: It will break its bond with the Cuban public, a half-century-long narrative of all Cubans sacrificing equally. If some aren't sacrificing at all, that stings. If those people are high officials, it isn't a sting, it's a terminal disease. Hypocrisy was the downfall of Hosni Mubarak; the Cuban Communist Party could go the same way.
Most likely, it will be years before Cuban society confronts the crisis that unemployment, corruption and inequality will bring. But it starts now: A million Cubans will lose their state jobs before 2011 is over, simply because there is no way to pay them, nor any work for them to do. Left to their own devices, Cubans may develop successful ways of working, earning a living in one of the few narrow fields of self-employment allowed or on the traditional black market. Others will find new opportunities — if Cuba carries out a plan to provide raw materials and legalize the hiring of workers, many Cubans will become free of their total dependency on the state. However this economic future plays out, there is one certainty: Some will fall behind as others rise ahead, and in that gulf there is room for change.
What’s the American thing to do? Obama has embraced a Goldilocks policy, neither too hot nor too cold. He has increased cultural contact and eased restrictions on financial transactions. Both policies work against the Cuban government, disarming its propaganda and giving ordinary people some independence from the regime. Continuing the huge cash deals of the George W. Bush era for agricultural products — American exports of rice, wheat, apples and frozen poultry to Cuba have added up to $800 million in certain years — feeds the people while bankrupting the tyrannical state.
As for the faithful — the 7 percent of Cubans who are in "the Party" — they could try to hold tight. But the big bosses in Havana are already trying on their business suits, and today you can get an MBA at the University of Havana. The revolution has run out of patrons, and so business, with all its corruptions, is next. The new corruption will look very sour, very soon.
With such tinder, it takes only a spark: the capsizing of a fugitive boat, the immolation of a protester, the police revealed as criminals on viral video. Today's wave of popular unrest will be felt far from the Middle East.
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