Oil, foreign investment, free enterprise, and golf courses are on their way
Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Sunday 12 February 2012
Fifty years ago this month, the United States began the embargo on Cuba
which continues to this day. But the country against which it was aimed
is rapidly becoming a very different one to the alleged communist menace
just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Under Fidel Castro's brother,
Raul, it is in the throes of a second Cuban revolution.
For a sign of the change which is turning life on their island on its
head, the people of Havana have only to peer into the night at the
northern horizon. This month, Repsol, the Spanish energy company started
drilling the first oil well from a massive and brightly lit rig, the
lumbering Scarabeo 9, built in China for ENI of Italy. This morning it
will still be grinding away seeking the billions of barrels of oil and
the trillions of cubic feet of gas that the US government, among others,
says lie under Cuba's offshore waters.
The Spanish oilmen working on the structure, which has been towed
halfway around the world amid US efforts to delay its progress, will be
followed aboard by a succession of Norwegians, Russians, Indians and
Malaysians.
Optimistic geologists reckon that within a few years the island – long
cursed by a lack of oil supplies, half of which it has had to import –
will actually be exporting the stuff. And it will be able to do so
without the aid of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who has kept the
island's motors, power and air-conditioning going with his subsidised crude.
Also, at the fine harbour in Mariel, a few miles to the west of the
Cuban capital, is another pointer to the future, the big island-changing
harbour that Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant, is building
with a large wodge of money provided by the booming South American nation.
The end of the first national conference of the Cuban Communist Party
set the seal last month on changes that President Raul Castro had been
building up to. Since he took over from his ailing elder brother, Fidel,
in 2006, the new president, himself an octogenarian, has pushed ahead
with measures which are turning the traditional Cuban lifestyle upside
down by decreeing that the party will henceforward cease micro-managing
daily life and confine itself to strategic matters.
Landscapers are working hard on matters of equally urgent national
strategy. Fifteen more golf courses and new marinas are being laid out
in Cuba and they can't be finished quickly enough: golfers from abroad
will even be able to lease chalets and timeshares. The island's hotels
are packed. European visitors are pouring in. After decades of
US-imposed isolation from high-speed internet, Cubans and their visitors
are finally beginning to receive it via a new cable laid from Venezuela.
Yet Raul's strategies are not confined to big infrastructure projects;
they reach down deeper into an effort to keep Cuban society together.
Senior Cuban figures make no secret of the fact that even more important
work has to be done to improve Cubans' ideological outlook and the
economic conditions.
"Whole generations have long since grown up with no personal knowledge
of the heroic days before and after what we call 'the Triumph of the
Revolution'," says one. New Year's Day 1959 was when General Fulgencio
Batista, a dictator armed and honoured by the West, fled with suitcases
of banknotes and valuables as Castro's forces got their hands on Havana.
Few remember the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, the tragi-comic
fiasco of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy to conquer the
country.
The US embargo, introduced on 7 February 1962, is a constant talking
point for island authorities, who blame it for shortages of everything
from medical equipment to the concrete needed to complete an eight-lane
highway running the length of the island. Cuba frequently fulminates
against the "blockade" at the United Nations and demands the US end its
"genocidal" policy. Every autumn, like clockwork, the vast majority of
nations agree, and overwhelmingly back a resolution condemning the
embargo. Last November, 186 countries supported the measure, with only
Israel joining the US.
Wayne Smith was a young US diplomat in Havana in 1961 when relations
were severed. He returned as the chief American diplomat after they were
partially re-established under President Jimmy Carter. "We talk to the
Russians, we talk to the Chinese, we have normal relations even with
Vietnam. We trade with all of them," Smith said. "So why not with Cuba?"
The United States actually does have significant trade with Cuba under a
clause allowing the sale of food products and some pharmaceuticals.
According to the most recent information available from Cuba's National
Statistics Office, the US was the island's seventh-largest trading
partner in 2010, selling $410m (£260m) in mostly food products. However,
that was down from nearly $1bn in 2008, as the island increasingly
turned to other countries that don't force it to pay cash up front.
As Raul gave his closing speech at the party's first national congress,
it was announced that new laws would allow people to sell their
crumbling houses and wheezing cars. With the lonely support of only one
ally, Israel, Washington has insisted on continuing six decades of
crippling boycott on trade with Cuba despite overwhelming condemnation
of it in the UN for the past 19 years.
But no longer will Cubans be obliged to leave their homes or their
vehicles to their children, or do dodgy swaps with strangers. More than
one million of the 4.3 million state employees will be encouraged to
form co-operatives or start private businesses in a mass of trades and
professions up to now reserved to the state.
"China is an example. No other country has lifted so many people out of
poverty. This is something of which the Chinese people and government
should be proud, and which the rest of the world admires," official
daily Granma said in October 2009, echoing Fidel's words. Like China, or
more likely Vietnam, the island will remain a one-party state.
"To renounce the principle of only one party would simply mean
legalising the party or parties of imperialism on Cuban soil and
sacrifice the strategic weapon of one party," Raul declared last Sunday.
The president added that he would be merciless in punishing corruption,
especially if the culprits were party members.
Next month the Pope, Benedict XVI, arrives on the island at the end of
an unprecedented religious act. In 2010 Raul allowed the public
veneration of a statue of the Virgin of Charity, the island's patroness,
which was driven for 425 days from one end of Cuba to the other on top
of a van.
Oil, mass tourism, private enterprise, broadband internet, organised
religion – the brakes are coming off a society which today looks less
towards Marx and Lenin and more toward its native-born 19th century
hero, José Martí, who died in the battle for Cuban independence from
Spain in 1895. God alone knows what's coming next.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is writing a biography of Fidel Castro for Signal
Books and Macmillan Caribbean
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