Karen Kraft
29
- Joined
- May 18, 2002
- Posts
- 36,253
You can't turn back the clock. Cuba was a great vacation and resort destination for several very good reason (between 1920s and 1960s):
First, Las Vegas was in the middle of no place, filled with cowboys and 50-year-old prostitutes with TB, Atlantic City, Indian Gaming, and Riverboat slot boats were just a twinkle in Guido Spadavechio's wet dream. The informal union of one of the major five New York families with the duly seized government of Cuba was a match made in heaven for the mob and Batista, hell for El Pueblo Cubano. Gambling without taxes, male and female prostitution for ten bucks a throw, kinky sex parlors where men, women, and yes, children could be used and abused to death (if you like that sort of thing) for your enjoyment -- for a relatively small amount of money. Great place!
Second, Cuba had beaches: white sands, cheap drinks brought to you while you lay on the sandy beach. No place had any classy, up scale resorts where you could enjoy the sun and the salt and sand and the sea and the surf by day and hear the greatest American and European music by night.
But uh oh, what else did Cuba have? Nada. A lot of tobacco and sugar. And what do they have now? A lot of tobacco and sugar, but no mafia casinos, classy hotels, etc. And there are far better beaches in Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Cancun, St. Martin, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, Montserrat, Trinidad & Tobago, etc. All have much better beaches, modern up-to-date hotels and resorts, many with Corporate owned gaming, great food, etc., than Cuba can ever hope to have. Plus, it's a little late to invite the mafia to return to the gaming business in Cuba -- they have all they can handle in Nevada and New Jersey, not to mention the more lucrative urban drug trade. They don't need needs Cuba.
So... how is Cuba to burst onto the international scene once there is regime change? It's not. The infrastructure is still in the 1940s since, God knows, Batista did nothing to improve said infrastructure on his watch. No, he and his buddies were far too busy forcing moms and dads watch their kids being tortured because somebody's uncle forgot to pay a bride last week. Now, if Cuba were as small as some of the above referenced islands, it would be simple -- just bring in a whole lot of money and make everything brand new! Well, what most people don't realize, is that Cuba is huge! Nearly 111 sq km (about the size of Pennsylvania), with only 8,700 sq km of irrigated land, with less than 7% permanent crops. It has about 11 1/2 million people, most of whom are educated to approximate NorthAmerican and European level equivalents (99.8%), with a life expectancy of just under 80 years. Even with this tremendous workforce and a totally planned economy, Cuba cannot make ends meet. An open market with the United States might help a little, but not much. Presently, the Cubans are avoiding starvation only because Hugo Chavez is sending enormous amounts of money to help them out. The large sums of money that sugar and tobacco once brought are not likely to be seen again, for a couple of reasons: Sugar beets, Hawaiian cane sugar, and the ability of the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean islands to produce much higher quality long-leaf tobacco (hand rolled cigar grade) than can Cuba.
Non-tourist shops in Cuba have nothing to sell. In Havana, I once walked through what would be considered the “hardware” section of town, and one shop had about fifty feet of used rope, about a dozen nylon weave carrying bags with handles, twenty or thirty AAA batteries, and a tire iron. Next door, however, one could choose between eight candles, one actually having blue wax, four used combs, a box of 11 #4 pencils, about 50 sheets of letter size paper, about 200 paper clips, and a toothbrush (new, from France, I was told). Across the street, the automotive shop had two rolls of reflective tape, about two dozen tail light type bulbs, three spools of electrical wire (all red in color), a plastic bottle of SAE 30 motor oil, and an old Planter’s Peanut canister from which patrons could attempt to find the bolt and/or nut/ washer they might be looking for, and a used pair of pliers. Next to the Auto Parts Emporium was the light bulb palace: one box of 4’ fluorescent tubes (about 6 left in the box), a bag of 40 watt incandescent bulbs (about to in the bag), and one 3-Way Sylvania bulb, new and in the box, which was kept in the shop’s window to attract customers. In the window of the light bulb store, there was a meat grinder sitting atop its 1930s green and white printed box. As it is illegal for Cubans to purchase meat, it was not likely to sell right away. There is no litter on any of the streets in Cuba, since there is nothing to drop on the ground. You think I’m joking? I have pictures!
One of my friends was (is) a magician. He always had a pocket full of that kind of long colorful balloons those guys use to make hats, animals, etc. One evening we were walking along the Malecón (seafront wall) and a group of about 8 kids, between 5 and 10 years of age, came by to look at us. My friend took out a balloon and with a mighty puff, blew it up into a two-foot long shape. The kids all jumped back in horror – they had never seen a balloon before. He made some sort of dog-shape hat and gave it to one of the kids. The kid looked like the kid gazing at the roasted turkey in Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving Dinner picture. He had to make hats for everyone, of course, and it was the hit of Havana. A girl maybe 11 or 12 inquired if he might be interested in having sex with her (for five dollars and another balloon hat for her sister). Get the picture? A good friend of mine was the daughter of the her Middle Eastern country’s ambassador to Cuba. Like us, she lived in a nice community with lovely colonial style homes; we got driven around in Mercedes and ate at the particulares in Vedado Habana, where only foreigners are allowed.
The other problem is that whole deal about the nasty land grab of the early 1960s. Not nice at all. Essentially, rich people were thrown out of their homes and their homes were re-occupied by other people. Now, you have to understand, this was not some sort of nationalization of property, as might happen in Mexico, Brazil, or even in California. No, the registry books in Havana still show the owners as those folks now living in Florida, who are all welcome to come back and work at the job the government will assign to them, but they will have to share their house with all the people who are presently in residency there. But since there was not official “taking” of the land, the Cuban government sees no reason why anyone needs to be paid. People don’t realize that the U.S. has traded with plenty of Communist, Socialist, and State Capitalist countries. So it’s not about disliking Communism exactly. It’s about “taking” the land, the homes, and the businesses of people, all of their worldly possessions, and giving them nothing in return. The policy of the U.S. government has been to embargo the regime responsible for doing that until it agrees to compensate those who were robbed. But from the Cuban point of view, those folks just left of their own accord, and are free to come back and cut cane in the fields, if that’s where they are assigned to work, and live at the same level of poverty everyone else enjoys there (except foreigners and diplomats). Needless to say, however, were they to return, they would not be allowed to leave (there are some special exceptions to that, but that’s more or less the idea).
Even today, one of the most popular songs at the discos (the ones that play something other than salsa) is The Eagles – Hotel California. You have to realize that, at the clubs and discos, everyone dances. Nobody stands around and watches. Hundreds of people, all dancing and, when appropriate, singing the Spanish songs as well. I mean even the bartenders and security guards dance at their stations. It’s amazing. For the most part, although a lot of kids my age speak English, they don’t sing the lyrics to the English language songs, just the Spanish language songs. The exception is Hotel California: they don’t sing any part of it except: “You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!” And that line they sing at the very top of their lungs.
The French, Italians, and Germans made substantial progress in trying to breathe some life into the Cuban economy, but except for tourism, which keeps the boat afloat, nothing really seems to take hold. It’s sad to read the back of the phone directory left in the hotel rooms for guests. In the back there’s a plea by the government to invest in Cuba: Invest here… cheap labor… take up to 40% of your net profit back home every year… etc. If interested, there’s name and number of some guy in downtown Havana who is in charge of selling Europeans on the great investment deal Cuba offers them. So far, no serious takers.
In an earlier thread, I mentioned that people my age are well read, understand more U.S. history than most Americans I've met, can tell you who Millard Fillmore’s vice president was, etc., and a few of my friends were members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). Outside the macro level, Cuba runs on a fairly decentralized cell system, with every two-to-four block are (in the cities) having its own Committee. They handle petty crime, neighbor disputes, discipline people for inter-familial indiscretions, and so on, leaving the nasty stuff for the real police. They tend to control who gets permission to buy certain special things (meat for example), and besides being like a governmental Homeowners Association, the people elected to the Committees are your good, hard working, loyal friends from school and work. They may be the guy or gal you drink beer with on Friday night, or you dated in high school. But when they are doing the Committee’s work, it is serious business and they tend to go by the rules. A guy I was dating was the head of one of the local CDR cells and, being a member of the Party, he was able to come and go when he wished (presuming he had a good reason for doing so). My friends could never understand why he would go to Canada for some reason (sports or agricultural event), and not just stay there. People presumed that some KGB type dude would be assigned to ensure that he didn’t “defect,” but that was not the case. Some people thought that he had family that would be harmed in some way were he to fail to return. That also was not the case. The reason he didn’t “defect” was much simpler: All the kids he went to school with, all the kids he played baseball with, all the girls he had dated and guys he had suffered the rites of adolescent passage with (each local CDL cell represents about 150-200 people) trusted him not to betray THEM – not the government, but his friends. Everyone suffers in Cuba. It would be unthinkable for him to go live in Canada or the U.S. knowing that all of his friends are left in their misery. It wasn’t that he was putting country over self, not at all. It was that he valued and respected the trust of his comrades and would not abandon them for his own personal comfort. People who don’t understand Cuba think of it as a concentration camp. Not exactly. It’s more like the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s where people banded together to weather the storm of relentless oppression. But to Cubans my age, the oppression is viewed as economic, not political. People in their 20s are isolated from the other Cuban generations, from Americans and Europeans in their own age group, from any hope or expectation of a better life within the existing economic structure, and don’t think that normalizing relations with the United States is going to reap benefits sufficient to trickle down to their dismal level.
Cuba is not Mexico. You can’t just build a VW or Ford assembly plant there and suddenly bring an entire city into some sort of middle class through corporate employment. Cuba is agricultural – and not very good at it, either. But for tourism, massive aid from the USSR, and later Venezuela, everyone would have starved to death long ago. And the tourist draw of Cuba is actually quite small. Outside Havana, there’s nothing to see! Yeah, there’s Ernest Hemmingway’s house. Big deal. You can’t build a viable tourist industry sufficient to compete with the sophisticated resort businesses in the rest of the Caribbean with comparatively crappy beaches, no modern or reasonable water, power, or highway system; given the huge choices available for the American and European dollar/euro, Cuba doesn’t stand a chance. If it weren’t for the mafia and international shipping, it wouldn’t have made it out of the 1940s.
So, you’re in charge. What exactly ARE you going to do with 12 million well educated unemployed people? Put them all to work on some sort of import substitution scheme to replace Korea, China and Mexico as the assemblers of consumer goods? Okay, why? Why not leave those services where they are? Geographic proximity is meaningless these days, and what influence will Cuba have that won’t be easily trumped by Korea, China, and Mexico? None.
Should the U.S. normalize with Cuba? Okay, great. Poof: everything is open and normalized. Did you notice the big change? Nope. You never will. Sure, in the first year or so, American will flock to Cuba just because it was the “forbidden land” for over forty years. And what will they see when they get there? Some very nice, artistic, and friendly people (no fat people, I might add), some lovely albeit mostly ruined early Spanish architecture in Habana Vieja, and a few nightclubs that would make The Elbow Room in Reno look like Mandalay Bay Las Vegas by comparison. They won’t come back. Maybe ClubDead would open an all-inclusive resort for octogenarians. Who knows.
The problem of Cuba is not, (listen up, Senators Obama and McCain), a political problem. It is an economic problem, and the U.S. already has too many money pits, too many black hole projects that suck bucks out of an already failing U.S. economy to take on Cuba as yet another enormous welfare child. At least Iraq has some oil. Cuba has a lot of sugar and crappy tobacco.
One thing Cuba does have: some of the sexiest people on earth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZsBgo3LvPU
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Cuban+girl&hl=en&sitesearch=#
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3xOltzs_Us0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cfCQXEOYNOg&feature=related
First, Las Vegas was in the middle of no place, filled with cowboys and 50-year-old prostitutes with TB, Atlantic City, Indian Gaming, and Riverboat slot boats were just a twinkle in Guido Spadavechio's wet dream. The informal union of one of the major five New York families with the duly seized government of Cuba was a match made in heaven for the mob and Batista, hell for El Pueblo Cubano. Gambling without taxes, male and female prostitution for ten bucks a throw, kinky sex parlors where men, women, and yes, children could be used and abused to death (if you like that sort of thing) for your enjoyment -- for a relatively small amount of money. Great place!
Second, Cuba had beaches: white sands, cheap drinks brought to you while you lay on the sandy beach. No place had any classy, up scale resorts where you could enjoy the sun and the salt and sand and the sea and the surf by day and hear the greatest American and European music by night.
But uh oh, what else did Cuba have? Nada. A lot of tobacco and sugar. And what do they have now? A lot of tobacco and sugar, but no mafia casinos, classy hotels, etc. And there are far better beaches in Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Cancun, St. Martin, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, Montserrat, Trinidad & Tobago, etc. All have much better beaches, modern up-to-date hotels and resorts, many with Corporate owned gaming, great food, etc., than Cuba can ever hope to have. Plus, it's a little late to invite the mafia to return to the gaming business in Cuba -- they have all they can handle in Nevada and New Jersey, not to mention the more lucrative urban drug trade. They don't need needs Cuba.
So... how is Cuba to burst onto the international scene once there is regime change? It's not. The infrastructure is still in the 1940s since, God knows, Batista did nothing to improve said infrastructure on his watch. No, he and his buddies were far too busy forcing moms and dads watch their kids being tortured because somebody's uncle forgot to pay a bride last week. Now, if Cuba were as small as some of the above referenced islands, it would be simple -- just bring in a whole lot of money and make everything brand new! Well, what most people don't realize, is that Cuba is huge! Nearly 111 sq km (about the size of Pennsylvania), with only 8,700 sq km of irrigated land, with less than 7% permanent crops. It has about 11 1/2 million people, most of whom are educated to approximate NorthAmerican and European level equivalents (99.8%), with a life expectancy of just under 80 years. Even with this tremendous workforce and a totally planned economy, Cuba cannot make ends meet. An open market with the United States might help a little, but not much. Presently, the Cubans are avoiding starvation only because Hugo Chavez is sending enormous amounts of money to help them out. The large sums of money that sugar and tobacco once brought are not likely to be seen again, for a couple of reasons: Sugar beets, Hawaiian cane sugar, and the ability of the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean islands to produce much higher quality long-leaf tobacco (hand rolled cigar grade) than can Cuba.
Non-tourist shops in Cuba have nothing to sell. In Havana, I once walked through what would be considered the “hardware” section of town, and one shop had about fifty feet of used rope, about a dozen nylon weave carrying bags with handles, twenty or thirty AAA batteries, and a tire iron. Next door, however, one could choose between eight candles, one actually having blue wax, four used combs, a box of 11 #4 pencils, about 50 sheets of letter size paper, about 200 paper clips, and a toothbrush (new, from France, I was told). Across the street, the automotive shop had two rolls of reflective tape, about two dozen tail light type bulbs, three spools of electrical wire (all red in color), a plastic bottle of SAE 30 motor oil, and an old Planter’s Peanut canister from which patrons could attempt to find the bolt and/or nut/ washer they might be looking for, and a used pair of pliers. Next to the Auto Parts Emporium was the light bulb palace: one box of 4’ fluorescent tubes (about 6 left in the box), a bag of 40 watt incandescent bulbs (about to in the bag), and one 3-Way Sylvania bulb, new and in the box, which was kept in the shop’s window to attract customers. In the window of the light bulb store, there was a meat grinder sitting atop its 1930s green and white printed box. As it is illegal for Cubans to purchase meat, it was not likely to sell right away. There is no litter on any of the streets in Cuba, since there is nothing to drop on the ground. You think I’m joking? I have pictures!
One of my friends was (is) a magician. He always had a pocket full of that kind of long colorful balloons those guys use to make hats, animals, etc. One evening we were walking along the Malecón (seafront wall) and a group of about 8 kids, between 5 and 10 years of age, came by to look at us. My friend took out a balloon and with a mighty puff, blew it up into a two-foot long shape. The kids all jumped back in horror – they had never seen a balloon before. He made some sort of dog-shape hat and gave it to one of the kids. The kid looked like the kid gazing at the roasted turkey in Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving Dinner picture. He had to make hats for everyone, of course, and it was the hit of Havana. A girl maybe 11 or 12 inquired if he might be interested in having sex with her (for five dollars and another balloon hat for her sister). Get the picture? A good friend of mine was the daughter of the her Middle Eastern country’s ambassador to Cuba. Like us, she lived in a nice community with lovely colonial style homes; we got driven around in Mercedes and ate at the particulares in Vedado Habana, where only foreigners are allowed.
The other problem is that whole deal about the nasty land grab of the early 1960s. Not nice at all. Essentially, rich people were thrown out of their homes and their homes were re-occupied by other people. Now, you have to understand, this was not some sort of nationalization of property, as might happen in Mexico, Brazil, or even in California. No, the registry books in Havana still show the owners as those folks now living in Florida, who are all welcome to come back and work at the job the government will assign to them, but they will have to share their house with all the people who are presently in residency there. But since there was not official “taking” of the land, the Cuban government sees no reason why anyone needs to be paid. People don’t realize that the U.S. has traded with plenty of Communist, Socialist, and State Capitalist countries. So it’s not about disliking Communism exactly. It’s about “taking” the land, the homes, and the businesses of people, all of their worldly possessions, and giving them nothing in return. The policy of the U.S. government has been to embargo the regime responsible for doing that until it agrees to compensate those who were robbed. But from the Cuban point of view, those folks just left of their own accord, and are free to come back and cut cane in the fields, if that’s where they are assigned to work, and live at the same level of poverty everyone else enjoys there (except foreigners and diplomats). Needless to say, however, were they to return, they would not be allowed to leave (there are some special exceptions to that, but that’s more or less the idea).
Even today, one of the most popular songs at the discos (the ones that play something other than salsa) is The Eagles – Hotel California. You have to realize that, at the clubs and discos, everyone dances. Nobody stands around and watches. Hundreds of people, all dancing and, when appropriate, singing the Spanish songs as well. I mean even the bartenders and security guards dance at their stations. It’s amazing. For the most part, although a lot of kids my age speak English, they don’t sing the lyrics to the English language songs, just the Spanish language songs. The exception is Hotel California: they don’t sing any part of it except: “You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!” And that line they sing at the very top of their lungs.
The French, Italians, and Germans made substantial progress in trying to breathe some life into the Cuban economy, but except for tourism, which keeps the boat afloat, nothing really seems to take hold. It’s sad to read the back of the phone directory left in the hotel rooms for guests. In the back there’s a plea by the government to invest in Cuba: Invest here… cheap labor… take up to 40% of your net profit back home every year… etc. If interested, there’s name and number of some guy in downtown Havana who is in charge of selling Europeans on the great investment deal Cuba offers them. So far, no serious takers.
In an earlier thread, I mentioned that people my age are well read, understand more U.S. history than most Americans I've met, can tell you who Millard Fillmore’s vice president was, etc., and a few of my friends were members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). Outside the macro level, Cuba runs on a fairly decentralized cell system, with every two-to-four block are (in the cities) having its own Committee. They handle petty crime, neighbor disputes, discipline people for inter-familial indiscretions, and so on, leaving the nasty stuff for the real police. They tend to control who gets permission to buy certain special things (meat for example), and besides being like a governmental Homeowners Association, the people elected to the Committees are your good, hard working, loyal friends from school and work. They may be the guy or gal you drink beer with on Friday night, or you dated in high school. But when they are doing the Committee’s work, it is serious business and they tend to go by the rules. A guy I was dating was the head of one of the local CDR cells and, being a member of the Party, he was able to come and go when he wished (presuming he had a good reason for doing so). My friends could never understand why he would go to Canada for some reason (sports or agricultural event), and not just stay there. People presumed that some KGB type dude would be assigned to ensure that he didn’t “defect,” but that was not the case. Some people thought that he had family that would be harmed in some way were he to fail to return. That also was not the case. The reason he didn’t “defect” was much simpler: All the kids he went to school with, all the kids he played baseball with, all the girls he had dated and guys he had suffered the rites of adolescent passage with (each local CDL cell represents about 150-200 people) trusted him not to betray THEM – not the government, but his friends. Everyone suffers in Cuba. It would be unthinkable for him to go live in Canada or the U.S. knowing that all of his friends are left in their misery. It wasn’t that he was putting country over self, not at all. It was that he valued and respected the trust of his comrades and would not abandon them for his own personal comfort. People who don’t understand Cuba think of it as a concentration camp. Not exactly. It’s more like the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s where people banded together to weather the storm of relentless oppression. But to Cubans my age, the oppression is viewed as economic, not political. People in their 20s are isolated from the other Cuban generations, from Americans and Europeans in their own age group, from any hope or expectation of a better life within the existing economic structure, and don’t think that normalizing relations with the United States is going to reap benefits sufficient to trickle down to their dismal level.
Cuba is not Mexico. You can’t just build a VW or Ford assembly plant there and suddenly bring an entire city into some sort of middle class through corporate employment. Cuba is agricultural – and not very good at it, either. But for tourism, massive aid from the USSR, and later Venezuela, everyone would have starved to death long ago. And the tourist draw of Cuba is actually quite small. Outside Havana, there’s nothing to see! Yeah, there’s Ernest Hemmingway’s house. Big deal. You can’t build a viable tourist industry sufficient to compete with the sophisticated resort businesses in the rest of the Caribbean with comparatively crappy beaches, no modern or reasonable water, power, or highway system; given the huge choices available for the American and European dollar/euro, Cuba doesn’t stand a chance. If it weren’t for the mafia and international shipping, it wouldn’t have made it out of the 1940s.
So, you’re in charge. What exactly ARE you going to do with 12 million well educated unemployed people? Put them all to work on some sort of import substitution scheme to replace Korea, China and Mexico as the assemblers of consumer goods? Okay, why? Why not leave those services where they are? Geographic proximity is meaningless these days, and what influence will Cuba have that won’t be easily trumped by Korea, China, and Mexico? None.
Should the U.S. normalize with Cuba? Okay, great. Poof: everything is open and normalized. Did you notice the big change? Nope. You never will. Sure, in the first year or so, American will flock to Cuba just because it was the “forbidden land” for over forty years. And what will they see when they get there? Some very nice, artistic, and friendly people (no fat people, I might add), some lovely albeit mostly ruined early Spanish architecture in Habana Vieja, and a few nightclubs that would make The Elbow Room in Reno look like Mandalay Bay Las Vegas by comparison. They won’t come back. Maybe ClubDead would open an all-inclusive resort for octogenarians. Who knows.
The problem of Cuba is not, (listen up, Senators Obama and McCain), a political problem. It is an economic problem, and the U.S. already has too many money pits, too many black hole projects that suck bucks out of an already failing U.S. economy to take on Cuba as yet another enormous welfare child. At least Iraq has some oil. Cuba has a lot of sugar and crappy tobacco.
One thing Cuba does have: some of the sexiest people on earth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZsBgo3LvPU
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Cuban+girl&hl=en&sitesearch=#
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3xOltzs_Us0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cfCQXEOYNOg&feature=related
You are a bag of BONES, woman!! 
