What if Fidel Were to Survive Raul

What if Fidel Were to Survive Raul? / Cubanet, Rafael Alcides
Posted on March 13, 2015

Cubanet, Rafael Alcides, Havana, 10 March 2015 — Let's call him Hermes.
Everything he says is said in private. I will not reveal his identity
but, given the positions he has held, it is worth listening to what he
has to say.

We all know these are confusing times, but imagine how much more
confusing they would be if Fidel were to survive Raul. While hard to
believe, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. While respectful of
nature, for him it is the statistics that are significant.

We have in Havana fifteen thousand people living in provisional housing.
In other words people whose homes have partially collapsed and who are
more or less living in these places as best they can, some for twenty
years or more.

We also have some one-hundred fifty thousand people "approved for
housing." In other words people who should be in housing but are not due
to a housing shortage. That's one-hundred fifty thousand people whose
roofs could fall in on them even without a downpour.

That's one-hundred fifty thousand people who hug their loved ones before
they go to bed at night as though they were going off to war. One
hundred seventy-five thousand people, both in temporary housing and
waiting for housing, who — as architect Miguel Coyula pointed out at a
conference sponsored by the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC) —
is equal to the population of Matanzas.

Add to this political threat, says Hermes, the fact that Havana — with
the exception of Nuevo Vedado — has still not been fixed and is like a
wheel about to lose its spokes. Add to this the serious problems of
internal plumbing and electrical wiring and carpentry… Replacing a
window, just one (and most of them are rotted from termites), costs 100
CUC or more.

These problems are not unique to Havana; they are found throughout all
of Cuba. Exactly how this has happened is not clear, but it is worth
asking — adds Hermes — if, once Fidel and Raul are gone, will Cubans be
willing to continue living and dying under such conditions.

His salary does not allow him to carry out repairs on his house. Nor
would a bank be able extend him credit based on that salary, something
that might have been possible one-hundred fifty or two hundred years
ago. And even if it could, where would the country get the cement and
the wood for such a monumental reconstruction effort. We are, therefore,
faced with a problem created by socialism but for which socialism has no
solution.

That's the issue, says Hermes. That's it. In other parts of the world
there are the "landless." Here there are the "roofless," the ones who
need things repaired, the ones who cannot wait to have things repaired.
In these dramatic population figures, which encompass more than seventy
percent of the country's housing stock, he sees the inevitability of
change, of the transition to democracy. Of course, all of this depends
on Raul and Fidel not being around, as he points out.

Raul and Fidel were heroes. They were forged in war. The founded a
religion based on it. They started handing out houses, handing out cars,
handing out scholarships. For years they were like the Magi. For years
they could count on bad American foreign policy decisions and people
imagined themselves fighting alongside them. But aside from the legacy
of destruction left by the Magi, what will their hand-picked successors
and all those like them be able to offer?

Think about it, he suggests. Do the numbers. The path to the future will
be based on pragmatism, not ideology. It is a matter of survival.
Whoever comes after will not be able to imitate the Chinese. The country
has been disappointed with the future that was offered to them a little
over half a century ago.

Now the future as we imagnied it is gone. Anything with even whiff of
socialism will cause a Cuban to quickly and decidedly go for his
proverbial axe. We live in the age of the internet, says Hermes, and if
the level of development we have seen in those countries which have left
utopian socialist visions behind were not enough, we can now witness in
Cuba the financial well-being of those who struck out on their own and
began working for themselves.

For all these reasons Hermes is sleeping soundly. His digestion is good
and he is laughing at the pessimistic prognostications of today's
soothsayers. He knows, as his numbers indicate, that anyone who did not
seem to be political — the average guy who watched his house age without
being able to make repairs or who watched it fall down — will be at the
forefront of deciding the question of democracy's future, even in the
event that Fidel survives Raul.

Source: What if Fidel Were to Survive Raul? / Cubanet, Rafael Alcides |
Translating Cuba -
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