CUBA

Hard slog

DAVID BUCHAN

The isolation of Cuba hits you even before you reach it. You must fly from either Mexico City or Prague or Madrid. I went on a Cuban government invitation as part of a group from Geneva, and we flew from Madrid. If you fly on a Cuban propeller aircraft across what is the widest part of the Atlantic, the sense of isolation and the obscurity of Cuba is heightened. The route is Madrid-Azores-Newfoundland—then a careful avoidance of American air space— Havana, and the time is a minimum seven- teen hours.

What really irks Cubans is not being able to visit the rest of Latin America. As one said to us 'as we believe our revolution sets an example to all Latin America, we must know what conditions are really like there'. Of course all Latin American regimes are terrified that any contacts with Cuba, even cultural delegations, could lead to guerrilla activities. Even Mexico, which does have relations with Cuba, collaborates with the us State Department in giving Americans going to Cuba from Mexico a rough time. American tourism in Cuba has revived since the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for an American to have his passport taken away because of a visit to Cuba. But citizens of Latin American countries have no such liberties. There were two Chileans in our group : they could only get to Cuba via Europe.

The redistribution effect is always a fascinating aspect of a newly communist

country, and the most striking symbol of this is the nationalised Hilton—the largest building in Havana. Now called the Habana Libre, it houses East European technicians. who spend long periods there because of delays to their equipment, official guest, (such as our group), and honeymoon couples of all classes. The vast ground-floor lobby, with its indoor plants, is open to everyone, and as it is the coolest place in Havana it is more crowded than the street outside. All enter to boggle at Mr Hilton-, extravaganza.

The meal service was abominably slow. I calculated we wasted five hours a day in the dining room. You have to eat there funks, otherwise organised officially) because there are no alternatives—places at restaurant, are rationed and non-Cubans have no ration books. Perhaps if bourgeois tipping were brought back, the service would be speedier. Or perhaps not: one of the waiters was a judge in a popular tribunal three times a week, and it would no douhi be unseemly for a judge to be too good :: waiter.

The saddest sight in the hotel was group of eight Haitians who had been in the hotel for the past six months (nine hundred hours in the dining room). Thc■ had had the misfortune to be shipwrecked on the Cuban coast and now the Cuban government is holding them to ransom. The Haitian shipping company refuses to pay the exorbitant price demanded for them, so they remain and will probably grow old and die in the hotel—speaking French and no Spanish.

All the hotels at the beach resort of Veradero have been turned over for holida■N for cane cutters who have done long stretches in the fields, or those who base done large amounts of voluntary work. Building continues in order to house more and more holidaying cane cutters. The arrive in weekly batches and the whole idea is well organised by Cuban standard, During his holiday practically every cane cutter has the chance to dine out at a splendid Spanish-type mansion, belonging formerly to an American Dupont. Even the library, with its beautifully bound book, and old wedding photographs of paq Duponts, is used for dining, with Cuban peasants gingerly trying to decide which knife and fork should be used for which course.

The engines of the revolution are the Communist party, the army, and, at a lower level, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. The army is pretty well omni- present. Even when we visited school,. lunatic asylums, and the national librar■.

there was always an army captain in charge. The head of the national library in Havana was hunched over a card catalogue with a revolver in his belt.

Where the army is not, the party is. All factories have a communist cell, N,hich manages the workers' council, which, in turn, enforces discipline. The names of `exemplary workers' are put forward for membership of the Party by the worker, themselves, and then the candidates niu'l give a public justification of their merit, before they are elected.

The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution are action committees set up in each quartier all over the country. Ther duties are maintaining national securih against counter-revolutionaries, helping with vaccination programmes, fighting absentee- ism in factories and schools and other social duties. The CDRS do not carry guns. TheY

are more like a system of snooping, wittE2+ million members. Out of a population of 8 million this makes a very high proportion of watchers to watched.

Cuban isolation was broken for a brief spell on 20 July, when the first Russian naval squadron to visit Cuba arrived at

Havana. The Cubans went wild with delight at the line ahead display the Russians put on in Havana harbour and they promenaded

banging drums while the missile carriers steamed by. I felt sorry for the Russian sailors who, instead of being given the freedom of the port, were invited to cut cane to belp 'the Year of Decisive Effort', which is the name for 1969-70 in the Cuban revolutionary calendar.

The Year of Decisive Effort is an attempt to redeem the economic failure of the early years of revolution. The chief target is to produce 10 million tons of sugar. According to Castro this will enable Cuba to buy a

decisive amount of capital goods for economic development v'ith the foreign exchange earned by the sugar sales. There is

a statistical fiddle here in that something like 4 million of the 10 million will be 1969 sugar and two sugar harvests will be

included. The 1968 harvest was about 5.2 million : the last years of Batista produced more than this.

I suspect a lot of the sugar earnings of 1970 will, in fact, be spent in repaying debts

to the socialist camp rather than buying new

equipment. Oddly enough it is the posthu- mous hero Che Guevara whom the Cubans have most to blame for the lost ground.

While Guevara was Minister of Industry, the Cubans embarked on their industrial diversification programme: things like the setting up of a pencil factory to produce in one day as many pencils as Cuba could consume in a year, at costs which rule out exporting to world markets.

1969-70 is also austerity year. Imported consumption goods are non-existent or severely rationed anyway—one tube of

toothpaste a month. But in addition the plentiful products of the island, sugar and tobacco, are now rationed to increase the maximum amount for export. A Cuban is allowed two cigars a day and a packet of cigarettes a week. In justification Castro harps on the external dangers to Cuba and the necessity of austerity to beat these dangers.

The threat of American or OAS interven- tion is used to keep tension high. Acts of

sabotage, and even mistakes in economic

planning, are attributed to as agents or counter-revolutionaries encouraged from the Florida mainland. The 'liberation fronts",of the countries of Latin America, as well as Korea and Vietnam, are given all the

advertising space on roadside billboards

that is not used for the Cuban sugar cam- paign, and the anniversaries of these coun-

tries, so distant culturally and geographically

from Cuba, are kept with surprising fervour by the Cubans—if the anniversary is an anti- American one. For instance on our first night in Cuba, we were treated to a t mnastic display in memory of the entry of American forces into North Korea in 1951.

Still, it will take a lot of hostility to the us to keep up enthusiasm throughout the Year of Decisive Effort, which runs for eighteen months parallel with the sugar cane harvest, till the middle of next summer. There will be no Christmas or Easter, nor any state holidays till- the state production targets are reached.

Some reward more permanent than the

month of holidays which Castro has promised will be necessary after the summer of 1970. The Cubans first tightened their belts ten years ago, and the pinch must now be getting wearisome. Presumably Castro does have in mind some permanent reward. Yet perhaps he has over-played his hand— promising something he cannot give. In that case there could be serious discontent in Cuba next year.