There is such a thing as a free lunch, at least for a little while longer. For decades, Cuban workers have had access to free lunches provided by the Cuban government by more than 20,000 cantinas. However, according to Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, new reforms initiated by Raúl Castro will soon shut down the cantinas.
This comes after four government ministries in Havana already shut down several cantinas, and their workers were given the equivalent of a 60 cent wage increase. The wage increase, according to the government, is meant to encourage workers to provide for their own food by buying it from restaurants or bringing it from home.
This all follows several other large-scale island-wide meetings, designed to help cut services and thus decrease Cuba’s immense debt.
According to a report in The Economist, Cuba is near bankruptcy.
At first glance, we may say that it is wonderful that Raúl is reforming the Cuban economy. I am the first to admit that Cuba is long overdue for reform. Fidel’s Cuba, for better or worse, was fundamentally changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of its financial support and economic aid. Cuba seems never to have been able to deal with that collapse.
Yet I ask Americans, those anti-Cuba or at least anti-Castro, to look at Cuba’s sum accomplishments.
According to the World Trade Organization, it has the world’s 39th best health care system — the U.S. is ranked 37.
Cuba is 51st on the Human Development Index, and has the 64th highest GDP in the world.
Regionally, for all its flaws, Cuba is a Caribbean powerhouse. To claim that socialism has done only ill to Cuba, is to conveniently forget the days of Batista’s dictatorship before the revolution, in which the economy was largely dominated by the mafia and foreign interests.
Are the reforms that we are seeing Raúl implement really in the best interest of Cubans? Personally, I would love to have a free hot lunch every day. I would also love free health care, free housing, free university education, etc. Cubans now receive all of these benefits from the government.
Does Cuba need reform? To that question I must unequivocally answer yes, but at the same time it must be tempered reform. Rather than the unfeeling state capitalism that developed in China as it embraced reform, perhaps Cuba will find a path that preserves the “New Man” of Fidel and Che’s Cuba.
Cuba has a long way to go, not only with its economy, but also with human rights, but it does no service to the Cuban people if the work of a revolution ostensibly designed to create a workers’ paradise, is done away with in the name of expediency and rapid economic growth. Let the Cubans have their free lunches and as an aside … I’d like one too.
Reach Max at maximilian.feldhake@asu.edu.
