Cuba

...The units by which the West measures democracy have become questionable...

...There were election booths and a folded ballot...

...No, these were not democratic elections following the Western model...

...Shop windows are empty or else they display a few dreary wares, testimony to the growing shortages...

...To be sure, they were carried out properly, as we observed in the town of Trinidad...

...Of course it can be shown—the evidence is plentiful—that the isolated island's dependence on the Soviet Union (forced upon the Cubans not least by the blockade) left Cuba with a centrally planned economy whose chronic tendency toward shortages cannot respond to the present emergency...

...And something that remains unforgettable: on this so fortunate and unfortunate island, descendants of all those who came over the ocean, whites, blacks, and mulattos, know how to live together without the aggressive racism that results in daily killings in Cuba's neighbor...

...Now all this recognition...

...This is supposed to be a humanitarian measure, intended to promote human rights in Cuba at long last...

...The world has no shortage of wars and civil conflicts, but it has a desperate need for socially equitable redistribution...

...In not one reply did I run up against the standard cynicism of which Herman Kant had been the exemplary exponent in GDR times.* Basically our discussion *Herman Kant headed the East German Writers' Union...

...It was his first time running for public office: he had always been an outsider, not only as a Christian, but as someone who had not been allowed to publish any of his books in the seventies—those had been the worst years...

...I reminded them that the letter signed by GDR writers to protest the expulsion of the balladeer Wolf Biermann also had to be published in the West because the Communist party newspaper Neues Deutschland had refused to print it...

...Hurry to visit before the last traces are obliterated, for the victors will not put up with any leftovers, and in Miami people are already fighting over the spoils...

...Even Fidel Castro was not a communist when he, along with a few other men and women, and eventually with popular support, launched the revolution and in 1959 overthrew the dictator Batista...

...But there is no mistaking the fact that the winner of the cold war wants to starve out Cuba, which means eleven million people...

...The difficulties he experi414 • DISSENT Politics Abroad enced at the hands of the party and the Writers' League did not lead him to turn his back on his country and escape animosity by going into exile...

...They suspect that one is just waiting in Miami to hop on a plane...

...And they all alluded, more or less tentatively, to the need for reforms...

...The results are reflected in reports issued by the United Nations and the statistics compiled by other respected international organizations: the low infant mortality rate and high life expectancy could provide a model, not only for the so-called underdeveloped countries but perhaps even for the United States, whose new president, responding to the scandalous conditions in his country, has begun a search for reforms...

...He sees what cannot be overlooked—that the established revolution is painfully attempting to free itself of its inherited dogmatic rigidity and no longer wants to be confined to patterns imported from the Soviet Union...

...I mentioned both cases to a large number of members of the Cuban Writers' League, among them the chairman, Abel Prieto, who belongs to the central committee of the ruling party...

...Yet I do not feel confident that my intervention did any good...

...focused on one question: had publishing the open letter to Fidel Castro in the foreign press, namely in Miami, justified treating the authors as criminals...

...If political insight is in short supply, perhaps Christian neighborly love—an item not much in evidence nowadays—will come into play: pity for Cub& After a short visit I know that this pitiable and lovable island has something to offer besides shortages and a nice climate...

...from German Democratic Republic days the airport still has that penetrating Prussian-socialist odor of Lysol that no Western chemicals have been able to dissolve...

...The healthcare system available throughout the country provides one general practitioner, whose services are available at no cost, for every eight hundred families...

...Maria Elena Cruz Varela is in a prison hospital...

...The triumphal reports in the Western press are quite right when they tote up the successful outcome: Havana looks wretched...

...We had no sooner left the isolated island than we witnessed unmistakable deprivation in the Maya villages of the Yucatan Peninsula and the slums of Mexico City, which seem to spread further every day...

...In each village we saw a two-story house (usually the only one) that had living space upstairs for a doctor and a nurse with their offices on the ground floor...

...TRANSLATED BY KRISHNA WINSTON q...

...To put in a word for Cuba also means bringing up the unavoidable figure of Fidel Castro...

...Instead—as was stressed again and again—for the first time voters had a choice of candidates, among them surprisingly many who did not belong to the ruling party of this one-party regime: doctors, scientists, artists...

...Today, Europe's shameful failure teaches us to judge Tito's accomplishments more generously...

...Today he is out on parole, forbidden to leave the district in which he lives until his sentence is up (some time this year...

...They suffered an injustice, an injustice that is not at all diminished by the fact that in countries committed to North American interests—Turkey or South Korea, for instance—far greater injustices are perpetrated every day...

...Nobody—not Miguel Barnet, nor anyone else with whom we spoke in Havana, Trinidad, and Pinar del Rio—wants a second Batista...

...His books are now widely distributed...

...People said that about Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito as well, until one day he was no longer there...

...For example, there was the ninety-four-year-old woman who still sorts tobacco leaves, as she has since she was ten, right next to the little platform in her cigar factory, where they still read aloud to entertain and instruct the workers, as they once did for Hamburg's cigarwrappers...

...Deliveries of powered milk to Cuba, begun in the days of the GDR, have been cancelled, while Chancellor Kohl has chosen to provide that model democracy Indonesia with a number of leftover warships from the GDR fleet...

...Yes, it's true...

...The revolution had given these people a self-respect and a measure of social security, and they were less likely to notice the absence of liberal rights than would foreigners on a brief visit or those Cuban intellectuals who, more than two years ago, wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro in which they rightly demanded full freedom of expression...

...The blockade imposed by the United States decades ago and recently tightened includes medical supplies...

...The intellectuals were dealt with harshly...

...The allied countries—with the Federal Republic of Germany in the lead—stalwartly support this stupid and inhumane goal...

...If it has learned anything from the most recent calamities and from the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia, Europe might take the first step and lift a blockade that will result in untold hunger and suffering...

...These people do not express any particular faith in communism, yet a few days later they will participate, albeit reluctantly, in something called an election...

...I would think that the powerful United States of America has enough misery at its own doorstep—whether in Mexico or in Haiti—not to mention the rising curve of social distress within its own borders...

...The results, after a turnout alarmingly close to 100 percent, cannot but confirm the existing power structure, which has undergone only slight and all-too-cautious changes...

...Shortly before Pomar was arrested by the police, he was beaten up by the infamous "rapid commandos...

...But who would be helped by the restoration of Cuba's old power elite...

...The hypocrisy of the victors knows no bounds...

...We can only hope that the much touted "new course" will lead to liberalized behavior...

...Or there are some of the thirty thousand Cubans who studied in the GDR, learned German and now look after tourists, who flaunt their prosperity with their hard-currency dollars...

...For close to four hours opinion clashed with opinion...

...Her term, too, is scheduled to end this year...

...Yet it was not just my lone protest against a solid front...

...EDS...

...Instead, the revolution is harking back to its origin and finding the beginnings of its tradition in the example of the liberal bourgeois revolutionary Jose Marti...

...No other third world country offers such coverage...

...We will soon witness the results of this get-tough policy: the pharmacies with bare shelves, the desperate resort to the natural methods of healing espoused by "green" medicine, the pitiable condition of old people especially, who in any case show the marks of the rationing of all foodstuffs—which is barely keeping famine at bay...

...Now that capitalism alone, with all its liabilities, remains, it should become evident that in many areas Cuba not only stands up well in comparison to capitalist countries but that it has accomplished some exemplary things through its revolutionary transformation...

...Where foodstuffs—vegetables here, bread elsewhere—are sold for ration coupons calculated in local currency, people have to stand in line...

...The poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela and the poet and translator Jorge Pomar were condemned to two years in prison...

...Barnet has often traveled abroad...

...Perhaps the comparison with the narrow-minded behavior of the GDR functionaries and my principled protest caused some of the assembled Cuban writers and even Abel Prieto to reflect...

...Bookstore shelves do not groan under belletristic overproduction...

...Our trip to Cuba began at East Berlin's SchOnefeld Airport...

...views changed in the course of the discussion...

...Someone asks us to take two packages of medicine to Havana...

...In their stupidity, the cold war's victors keep looking for reassurance that the enemy has been extirpated root and branch...

...Whether or not Maria Elena Cruz Varela and Jorge Pomar will suffer further harassment will probably only become clear after their terms are up...

...But no one, I was told, could be allowed to turn the results of the revolution into its dreaded opposite...

...Perhaps, although his rhetoric still has vitality, he has outlived himself...

...Surely not the Cuban people...

...Such things are lacking on the isolated island...

...I am referring not to showy things like high-tech model clinics or organ transplants—Cuba has those, too, by the way—but rather to a socially equitable system of FALL • 1993 • 415 Politics Abroad care, of a sort that Mexico has not even begun to realize...

...I know that an exemplary health-care system means little in a period when ideological stubbornness insists on the elimination of social safety nets...

...This look back at our stay in Cuba allows me to remind the Cuban Writers' League and its chairman of their promise to give both writers a hearing...

...the intended recipient, a doctor, is identified by his address on the packages...

...But nothing like a recognizable opposition was allowed to present itself to the voters...

...Take, for example, the writer Miguel Barnet, who won 98 percent of the vote in his electoral district, yet received the news of his landslide diffidently, saying this represented too great a responsibility...

...Anyone who wants to see Castro gone should think carefully about how to fill the vacuum that this large and flawed man (like Tito) would leave...

...He felt crushed—so much was expected of him...

...I heard this from older men and women working in the tobacco fields around Pinar del Rio...