In the most recent issue of Harper's (October 2010), Patrick Symmes writes about the thirty days he spent in Cuba. Thirty days he spent living on the wages of an official Cuban intellectual--$15 a month.
Now, here are some illustrative quotes and reasons I'm a capitalist: (1)
"Some money?"
"I don't have any."
"But foreigners always have so much money."
"Yes, in my country I have money. But here, I live like a Cuban."
"Give me a peso?"
I can't. I'm playing a game, my dear. I'm pretending to be broke. I'm living like your parents for a while. I haven't eaten in nine hours. In the past eleven days I've missed 12,000 calories of my normal diet. My teeth hurt so badly.
Or, in Spanish, "No."
(2)
This was no island for amateur thieves.
(3)
Unlike most Cuban functionaries, Leal [Spengler, the city historian] had actually made a difference in people's lives. He rebuilt the old hotels; my friends took 540 pounds of cement for their new tourist bungalow. He restored a museum; they looted tin sheeting for roofs. He sent trucks of lumber into the neighborhood; they made half the wood vanish.
The State owned all. The people appropriated all. A ration system in reverse.
(4)
I used to say that 10 percent of everything was stolen in Cuba, to be resold or repurposed. Now I think the real figure is 50 percent. Crime is the system.
(5)
I worked hard and often at my own projects--I hauled cement and shoveled gravel for food, and wrote a lot--but it was not state labor, not the kind of work that is counted in the columns of official Cuba, where more than 90 percent of people are state employees. Why should I get a job? Nobody else took theirs seriously, and the oldest joke in Havana is still the best: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
(6)
"It's impossible," she said of my attempt to be officially Cuban. For survival, everyone had to have "an extra," some income outside the system. Her husband rented a room to a Norwegian sex tourist. Her neighbor sold lunches to the workers who'd recently lost their canteen meals. Her own mother wandered the streets with pitchers of coffee and a cup, selling jots of caffeine. Her friend around the corner stole the cooking oil and resold it for 20 pesos a pint. Another neighbor stole the ground chicken and resold it for 15 pesos a pound. ("Good quality, a very good price, you should get some," and I did.)
(7)
[Says Oswaldo Paya, "one of Cuba's most important dissidents"] We're all worse off than the guy who sells dogs in the gas station on the corner" ... "I don't say everything in Cuba is bad, or terrible. That's because we have distribution schemes to feed the poor, to give benefits. But that's another way of domination, keeping peiple eternally poor. Free my hands, I'll start a business and feed myself."
There it is. I'm reading this not in the way that conservatives in the Senate do. That is, I'm not reading this as "feeding the poor makes them lazy," but, rather as, "look at these people; they are already running businesses. Let's let them actually do it."
It's important to note, the "capitalism" I'm talking about here is about as close to that dream of Americana capitalism: small businesses, family businesses, entrepreneurship; I'm not talking about bloated multinationals.
Indeed, the current system of Cuban rationing and State labor seems little different than the almost-feudal system of massive corporations and company towns.
Well, let's remember that I said this next time someone calls me a socialist. And let's not remember that I said this next time I'm talking to an OSCA-ite Obie.
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