“Wait, why is socialism bad again?” I bet I heard someone say that or was it a quiet voice at the back of my head? We were walking away from an art store to our bus in a small community in Las Terrazas, in Artemisa province in Cuba. We had visited the community in the Sierra del Rosario Mountains to see the Las Terrazas reserve and also experience what life was like in a small village. As we walked, we could see to our left small white-painted bungalows (maybe 2-bedroom houses) with red brick roof tiles beautifully dotting the lush green hillside. To the right was a calm pond, some kind of water treatment plant protruding from the center. It was a commercial fish farm for breeding tilapia and catfish. There was a school, a health center, recreational parks etc. To understand that question; doubting the evils of socialization, you needed to see the villages we saw in the Dominican Republic (DR): bateyes left over from the sugarcane plantations. These bateyes were settlements with no income generating activities, and no immediate or reliable access to schools or health care centers. From this reference point of what a village looked like in the DR, this Cuban village easily ignited debate about the outcomes of capitalism and socialism from the villager’s perspective.
On our next stop, those who had started to romanticize socialism were reconsidering that stance. We were fortunate enough to stop and observe activity at a food-rationing center. We stretched our necks and peered over the counter to examine the fresh loaves of bread that just came in for grain count, on the chalkboards for information on inventory and pricing, on the shelves to examine the variety of products on display; all trying to empathize with the locals on what grocery shopping could look like. I immediately decided that I would greatly miss my Stop and Shop and Market Basket grocery stores here in the US if I relocated to Cuba. I would miss the variety of apples to choose from and if I wanted a cookie, a shortbread cookie, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy having one or two options instead of the seven choice options I am used to having. What would life even look like if you could not get Walkers shortbread cookies to buy!? We had heard there was discussion of replacing the food rationing system for individuals with food vouchers for families in need. I wondered how individuals would survive in such a system.
The trip back to Havana was reflective. The road was in good condition, we drove under well-maintained overpasses; we drove over the new 65km rail link between Havana and the port of Mariel which was being developed into a new container terminal, a major development in two decades. We got to Havana in time to go to the art market where every other art piece had something to do with that iconic image of Che Guevara.. From there, we waded through what felt like a traffic scene in an outdoor museum – pre-1959 American automobiles, 1980’s Russian- and 2000’s Chinese made vehicles– to dinner at one of the many privately owned restaurants on the 6th floor of an apartment block, only accessible by a narrow stairwell. The living area of this four bedroom apartment was converted into a bustling restaurant with a great Cuban menu and a breezy view of the city. The restaurant license was one of over 200 that the government has provided since 2010 to encourage growth of private business. We learned of a decreasing government workforce and the private sector representing about 40% of current total employment. Considering the fact that barber shops were previously government owned, you realize that the number of licenses for private business will only grow. The only sectors that are not open to entrepreneurs are defense, health and education. There is no private business advisory, education or training services except those set up by the Havana Archdiocese. In that sense, Cuba looked like a huge field experiment for entrepreneurship with no institutional structures to support the private sector.
The food was about 15 Cuban Convertible Currency (CUC) per plate (1 CUC = $1 USD), which was about half of an average Cuban’s monthly salary. Yes, there were two economies in the country: the foreign tourist economy which accepted CUC and the local economy which used the Cuban Peso at a third of the value of the CUC. This made it impossible to know the true size of the overall economy even as it was projected to grow at 2.2% in 2014. At $15 a plate, clearly, the average Cuban was not eating at this restaurant, at least not regularly, unless, this person had relatives in Miami who sent over remittances. After government taxes, recipients would buy a license to start an enterprise or to buy temporary property like clothes and electronics or more permanent property such as land and housing. Since President Obama lifted Bush-era restrictions on travel and remittances starting in 2009, coupled with Cuba’s changes to remittances policies, Cuba has seen remittances of US $1.4-$2 billion/year (The Havana Times reported US $2.605 billion in 2012).
Before we arrived in Cuba, the students used design thinking tools to hypothesize on what they expected to experience in Cuba. We used an empathy map to empathize with the average Cuban and a 2×2 matrix to hypothesize on the socioeconomic environment.
Most students struggled to find the average Cuban they hypothesized and were surprised to find the socioeconomic environment much more complex than they had anticipated. It was all very confusing. One could argue that you would not find the ‘average’ Cuban’s in the tourist circles of Havana but the Cubans on the Malecón and at Las Terrazas didn’t fit the empathy map either. The Cubans we met were warm, proud, enterprising and resilient, in contrast with what the students hypothesized.
Further, the socioeconomic situation was on an upswing. Something was loosening to the paternalistic fiber. There were new laws to open the economy to foreign investment through the setting up of joint-venture companies, in which the Cuban government owned own at least 51 % of the shares. We debated whether Cuba was following Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika of top-down loosening of the socialist ideals or whether it was following Deng Xiaoping’s bottom-up economic reforms. Most Cubans we spoke with said the country was charting its own path. The argument? The American embargo. They argued that every attempt at reform had to be in concert with American response to how others responded to reforms. That just made it all the more confusing. What most Cuban’s agreed with however, was that the US needed to lift the embargo, at least so that no one in Cuba could use it as a pretext for not effecting change. However, most were worried of a scramble if the embargo was lifted tomorrow. They took solace in the realization that it was not going to happen during President Obama’s term in office since current American policy seem to suggest that there would not be a Castro in power for embargo-lifting discussions to commence and that was not likely to happen before 2016. In effect, they wanted the embargo lifted but they did not want a scramble for Cuba. We wondered if they were more confused than we were. By the end of the discussion, we agreed that our confusion about Cuba was organized but ongoing. We reflected on what our guide said on the first day, “You come to Cuba to enjoy it but not to understand it.”
