Journey to the 2nd World, Part 10 - Thoughts on Cuban/USA relations

Despite my current love of Cuba, I'm not blind to the fact that Castro is a dictator. He cracked a lot of heads to make the omelet that is now Cuban society. Cubans are not in any way free, except in the gross sense that they are free from obvious death due to starvation and lack of medical care. If they had any sort of mobility beyond the island there would be a mass exodus. The young (i.e. under-thirty) are especially volatile now according to people we spoke to - they want change and they want freedom. The sort of protests leading to the democratic revolutions that swept eastern Europe in the late nineties seems to be the likely thing to happen to Cuba in the future. I hope so. It'll be difficult but that path is likely to be the one that yields the biggest benefits to Cubans with the least bloodshed.

The US remains the elephant to their mouse - an analogy typically used by Canadians in their description of US relations, but it's probably more apt with Cuba. In Canada's case, the elephant is asleep. In Cuba's case it's awake and angry. That anger manifests itself as the embargo.

The embargo has a couple of major effects: It clobbers the Cuban economy. It keeps the Castro government in power.

Without the embargo, I'm convinced that the Castro regime would have fallen long ago. So why is it still there?

Americans seem to fall into one of several categories when it comes to Cuba.

• Those that don't give a rat's ass about Cuba. They don't like the embargo because they see it as pointless, but they aren't motivated enough to try to change things.
  
• Cuban-Americans and their sympathizers. They have a personal grudge against the Castro regime.
  
• Jingoists and cold-warriors. That Cuba is communist is enough to punish them. That Cuba continues to defy their will even after 46 years infuriates them into redoubling their efforts.

The latter two groups are in a shrinking minority that still gets its way largely because of the apathy of the first group. It helps that Cuban-Americans are a powerful voice in Florida. They can swing enough votes to control Florida's Electoral college. Florida in turn has enough Electoral seats to have a powerful affect on the US federal government. Thus a small group has enough leverage to force everyone else to help them grind their axes.

I read a particularly dumb online comment recently claiming that the embargo worked because it forced Fidel out of office. Apparently economic sanctions cause old age.

So when will it end? When Fidel and Raul are dead I expect. What little support exists for the embargo will fade when the name "Castro" is no longer associated with Cuba, even if the future regime has an unbroken continuity with the current one. Cuba will end up being like China (which the US has no problem trading with) only smaller and with awesome beaches. A democratic revolution could do the trick too. I have mixed feelings about this - on one hand I hope that Cuba joins the Western Democracies. On the other hand you just know that the US will take credit for it (citing the embargo specifically) despite all evidence to the contrary.

When the embargo ends it will hit the island like an atomic bomb. A few examples:

• The price for Cuban products will skyrocket as they gain 300 million new potential tourists/investors/customers. That wonderfully cheap rum I bought will no longer be so cheap.
  
• All those classic cars that are iconic of Cuba will get bought up by collectors.

Through it all the well placed will make a fortune and the turmoil will clobber regular folks. It's happened before and it will happen again. I wonder if the Cuban people will think it was all worth it in a hundred years.

Journey to the 2nd World, Part 11 - Snorkeling

The resort had snorkeling tours available for an additional cost. It wasn't much, just 20 CUC. You had to sign up for it, then they'd take you out for about an hour. This was actually the second snorkelling tour we had heard about. The first was more expensive and took about fifty people out. Ours was just five people from the resort's beach.

We went to talk to one of the lifeguards about this and learned a few things. They (the lifeguards) could take you out and back, but they couldn't do it if it was too windy. As it generally got too windy in the afternoon, they would only really be able to do it in the morning. Which was weird because the resort told us to sign up before noon for the 2 pm tour.

We signed up with Julio, who informed us of the weather-related issues. Would you like to go out right now he asked. After a bit of a scramble to get everyone interested assembled, that's what we did.

We piled onto the wee little catamaran and Julio sailed us a couple of klicks north of the resort. We ended up about midway between Cuba and a small island with a lighthouse that we could just make out from the beach.

Physically, this placed us about as far north as we'd been during the whole trip. The Tryp Peninsula resort is very near the absolute northern point of the Varadero peninsula, which is the northern-most of Cuba itself. This makes it a popular spot for Cubans who don't want to be Cuban to make a break for the USA.

garething: What's the deal with the lighthouse on that island out there?
Julio: That's a Cuban naval base. It's where they intercept refugees from.
garething: What happens to them?
Julio: They get taken back to Cuba.
garething: No, I mean are they punished or something?
Julio: You get your name taken down, but other then that, no one get's punished.

We got the impression this meant that there was no overt punishment for trying to escape Cuba, but at the same time, don't go asking the Government for any favours in the future.

Julio stopped the boat, dove down with the anchor and secured us so that the boat wouldnt' drift away. You could still see the bottom, but it was far enough down that I didn't try to dive down to it. Ten meters? Twenty meters? It was on that order.

He had placed us right over a mini reef and we were then set up with goggles and snorkels and just enough instructions not to drown ourselves. Then we checked out the fish!

Julio had brought along a bag of day-old bread from the buffet. The procedure for checking out the fish was simple. Hold a chunk of fish in your hand, stick it in the water and wait for the fish to notice. They would swarm your hand and ripped into the bread like it was fried chicken. Some of the dumber fish would bite the hand that feeds, but would back off when the realized that your skin was many times tougher then soggy bread rolls.

We saw many varieties of colourful fish that none of us could identify. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly exhausting. We were out there for around an hour when I suddenly realized that I was dog-tired. I went back onto the boat and was soon joined by everyone else. We sailed back and I realized i felt a bit nauseous. I figure that my overbite prevented me from getting a decent seal on the snorkle, so I ended up swallowing quite a bit of sea water (in dribs and drabs - I certainly wasn't going to suck back a mouthful of it). It took me the rest of the day to recover from that.

Also discovered that the ladies were checking out Julio. I was not surprised by this revelation - Julio was basically the ideal cross between the stereotypical Latin lover type and a lifeguard.

I am mildly curious to know how much of the 20 CUC each we paid made it back to the hotel. Given there was five of us, I'd be surprised to find that the lifeguards weren't skimming at least a little.

(yeah, this is a little late to post. I've got at least two more Cuba posts to make just to put the whole thing to bed. After a few days, I'll change their effective post dates to more closely match the trip)