One Castro Giveth….

The Other Taketh Away

I guess the drop in tourist visits to Cuba coupled by the more stringent remittances and travel restrictions imposed by the Bush administration are hurting Cuba’s cash flow.

The changes keep on coming. These changes are designed to both create good will and legitimacy for Cuba’s new tyrant and to siphon in some cash from across the Florida Straights.

But…

This latest reform of letting ordinary Cubans stay in hotels as long as they have CUC’s to pay for it, though, is more substantial and actually represents a real change.

Allowing Cubans to stay in formerly “tourist only” hotels, brings to mind the now famous video where University students challenged Cuban Assembly President, Ricardo Alarcon. One of their complaints was exactly this issue of Cubans not being able to stay at “tourist only” hotels even if they had the money. In Alarcon’s rambling rationalization of the now gone restrictions, he said something to the effect, if my memory serves me, that before the revolution, he was allowed to go to Tropicana, but couldn’t afford it, so what was the point of being “allowed” to go since in effect he couldn’t because he couldn’t afford it.

Back when I heard Alarcon defend the Cuban apartheid system to the Cuban students by using the affordability rationale, I winced at the intellectual dishonesty of his position. Though it is true that the majority of Cubans will not be able to afford a stay at one of Cuba’s resorts, they now can.

I’m not going to sit here today and play Alarcon and use his tired 50 year old dialectic.

This is an admission that Fidel’s policies have never worked.

So, here we are, back in 1958. After 50 years of prohibitions and restrictions and we’re right back where we started. Inequality