After the boat people, the sardine people

Press, 17 April 1980, Page 16

After the boat people, the sardine people

From the “Economist,” London

To the wall people of Berlin, the boat people of Vietnam, the hill people of Laos, and the camp people of Cambodia are now added the sardine people of Cuba. Maybe 10,000 of them are crammed into the compound of Peru’s embassy in Havana, enduring hunger, thirst, heat and possible reprisal in the hope of getting away from Latin America’s only MarxistLeninist State in order to go to backward and impoverished Peru.

Their Easter hopes were aroused when the Cubans withdrew their guards from the embassy, to teach the Peruvians a lesson for giving shelter to a handful of earlier refugees. The lesson went badly wrong. The rush to leave suggests that people enjoy life on communism’s slowmoving tropical showboat no more than they do on its East German powerboat. By contrast, those capitalist ills of class domination, inflation and .unemployment leave East European embassies in the West strangely

empty. Even the 60,000 people who fled from Chile’s Right-wing coup in 1973 seem a tiny number compared with the half-million Cubans in exile since the early 19605, the small flotilla of boats that has made it across to Florida since then, and now this attempt- at mass escape by diplomatic bag. The refugees are far too numerous to be dismissed, as Cuba’s official newspaper has it, as “delinquents, homosexuals, lumpen-proletarians, anti-social and parasitic elements and bums.” The Cuban Government has unwittingly allowed a glimpse of the realities of President Castro’s Cuba. It has long been impossible to glamorise life under the grey-faced apparatchiks of Eastern Europe. Somehow, though, that impetuous figure shambling around in the fatigues of a war fought 20 years ago has blown cigar smoke intothe eyes of a lot of people fn the West. Until very recently, even many non-Communists

looked on Cuba as an interesting experiment in Latin socialism made more palatable than the eastern version by Mr Castro’s pungent nationalism and bushybearded paternalism. The evidence is otherwise. Life for the very poorest Cubans is probably a little better under Mr Castro than it used to be, but even among them the rise in living standards has not been as great as in the more successful developing capitalist countries. For everyone else, life is much worse. After 20 years of gruelling sacrifice, the country’s economy is more dilapidated than ever. Not all of thise is Mr Castro’s fault. A blue-mould fungus has wafted over from Central America, destroying nine-tenths of the country’s tobacco crop. Rust disease has ruined a quarter of the sugar crop. Swine disease from Africa is decimating Cuba’s pigs. Yet there are human contributions to Cuba’s natural disasters. Mr Castro has had

to accept shoddy East European farm machines and consumer goods in exchange for his country’s agricultural produce, so that the country remains overwhelmingly non-industrial and dependent on disease-prone crops for its export earnings. There was virtually no industrial growth last year. The supposedly nationalist Mr Castro has wrenched his country found from being half-deper« ent on America in the 19511 s to being wholly dependent on Russia now. Russian subsidies amount to nearly half of Cuba’s annual wealth. Yet basic goods are so strictly rationed that the average Cuban enjoys a cup of coffee only every other day and a fried meal about once a week. Part of this is the result of the trade embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba. But Mr Castro’s powerful younger brother, Raul recently admitted that “indiscipline, lack of control, irresponsibility, complacency, negligence, and buddyism,” were equally to blame. Communism has been

yeast, too, to another Latin American vice as traditional as "buddyism.” A grisly Hogarthian picture of lite in Cuba’s jails was given by. the 3500 political prisoners released by Cuba last year (until then,- only Argentina and Uruguay in the whole of America had proportionately more people under lock and key for their beliefs than Cuba had). Some 500 prisoners may have died from malnutrition since 1960. When the repression was then momentarily eased, anti-Government posters and leaflets promptly appeared and. an opposition radio station sprang into life. A new 4000-strong security force has been set up to fight- these “counter-revo-lutionaries.” Much of the discontent is being generated by the country’s :four-year involvement in Africa. On Mr Castro’s own admission, there have been as many as 36,000 Cuban soldiers in Angola and 12.000 in Ethiopia. Maybe one in every 1000 Cubans has died fighting for a cause few of them understand. Cuba’s international

intervention machine seems to be the only part of the system working at full throttle — in Africa, central America, the Caribbean, Yemen. Afghanistan.

Yet Mr Castro takes it for granted that his people can be kept under control. No Marxist-Leninist regime once properly installed, has been overthrown anywhere since 1917.

Unlike the careless, coupprone despotisms of the extreme Right. Communism seems to offer no escape except to flee from it. Those trying to free themselves from local Caligulas elsewhere in Latin America should pause to make sure that the alternative is not a collectivist society where people rush for any glimpse of an exit.

Those who believe that the human spirit cannot be quenched altogether, despite Hungary and Czechoslovakia, should closely observe what happens in a country of Latin individualists, far from Russia’s border, which is now suffering unprecedented hardship.