Like the Energizer Bunny, Castro's Cuba just keeps going, though finally without Castro. Much of the American Left still admires Castro, and they talk endlessly about how good the free medical care is. So consider the report of one unreconstructed British socialist after his trip to the Caribbean paradise. Neil Clark tells the story in the British Spectator:
My wife and I, as unreconstructed paleo-lefties who support Clause Four, free school meals and NHS dental provision, had long wanted to visit Castro’s Cuba. All the people whose views we respect had said that the Caribbean island was a progressive model whose policies on education and healthcare ought to be copied throughout the world. We went there last April desperately wanting to like the place — after all, if George W. Bush and other right-wing nasties hated Cuba so much, then the country must be on the right tracks.
But we returned home terribly disillusioned. Neither of us had been to a country which was so utterly decrepit. ...Dilapidated buildings with wires hanging out, streets that haven’t been resurfaced for more than 50 years, balconies that look like they’re going to fall down at any minute. In my travels in the Middle East and Asia, I’ve certainly witnessed squalor, but nothing prepared me for the back streets of Havana.
But decrepitude is merely physical, however nasty its psychological impact. Poverty is a moral fact.
The average wage in Cuba is a pitiful $17 a month. The monthly ration which includes 283g of fish, 226g of chicken, ten eggs and 1.8kg of potatoes is barely enough for a fortnight, meaning most Cubans need to work the black market to stay alive. Things that we in Britain take totally for granted — such as toilet paper, toothpaste and pens — are luxury goods in Cuba. I’ll never forget the look of joy from an old lady when I handed her a couple of old marker pens and a coloured pencil.
A worker's paradise that feeds the workers fourteen days out of each month. But what really got Clark's biscuit wet was the "currency apartheid" in Cuba.
The heartbreaking consequences of Cuba’s currency apartheid were bought home to my wife and I on a Saturday afternoon visit to Havana’s Coppelia ‘Ice Cream’ park. To the right of the park gates was a long queue of Cubans who had only Cuban pesos. They have to wait on average two hours every weekend to get their weekly scoop of ice cream. On the left, there was walk-in access to tourists and the lucky locals who had convertible pesos. Fifty years on, the Cuban revolution has turned full circle in a truly Orwellian fashion. Once again the locals find themselves excluded from the best beaches in their country, as they were under Batista. And prostitution, so rife in pre-revolutionary days, is back — the jineteras being the only group of Cubans allowed to enter the new purpose-built resorts.
In fact, Cuba has preserved in fine fashion the brutal two class system that characterized so many Latin dictatorships. This is the system that so many British and American Leftist hold up as an ideal.
Like the Energizer Bunny, Castro's Cuba just keeps going, though finally without Castro. Much of the American Left still admires Castro, and they talk endlessly about how good the free medical care is. So consider the report of one unreconstructed British socialist after his trip to the Caribbean paradise. Neil Clark tells the story in the British Spectator:
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