The large audience had mostly come to show support for relaxing the current laws against commerce with Cuba. The embargo, its opponents aver, has not brought positive changes to Cuban society. An American economic presence in Cuba, they say, can only be more beneficial than its absence has been.
An abundant irony is that many people who make this argument are those who still sentimentalize Castro. At the San Francisco meeting, the loudest applause went to a speaker who restated the very litanies the regime has employed for nearly fifty years to justify itself. And in the face of conventional wisdom, one must clarify that the embargo law was never meant to cause reform in Cuba. Its purpose was to turn away from a regime that-under the guise of “socialization” -had just stolen about one billion dollars in U.S. properties.
The heart of the current anti-embargo stand is a plea for “constructive engagement.” Its advocates posit that when American citizens come face to face with Cuban citizens, mutual understanding will flower and democratic tendencies will spread. Actually, some of that did happen when Castro’s regime opened the door to family visits by Cuban exiles; but business-to-business relations are much more doubtful, because independent enterprise does not exist in Cuba. American companies would be dealing not with Cuban counterparts but directly-and whether they know it or not-with Castro’s security forces; a prospect that offers no hope of amelioration to ordinary Cubans.
Unlike U.S. companies, Cuba’s enterprises are completely dominated by government officials and informants. Any sign of disloyalty can bring the gravest consequence. Workers have no right to collective bargaining; any attempt to organize among workers is met with ostracism, demotion, dismissal, or with arrest and lengthy imprisonment. Foreign businesses that employ Cuban workers do not pay those workers directly. Payments are made to the state, which keeps nearly all the money and doles out a pittance to workers who receive, on average, about fifteen dollars a month. The fact that even so small an amount is paid in dollars makes the deal attractive to Cubans, who gladly accept jobs in foreign companies.
This setup is a potential boon to offshore investors who can acquire the services of skilled workers without labor troubles, and without concerns about how workers are treated. A further irony-given the extensive support Castro’s regime has enjoyed in the West-is that such arrangements, far from fostering a general welfare, have led to the kind of hyper-exploitation that once occurred in pre-capitalist, feudal societies.
Even if our Western countries have no current experience in this regard, we do have words for a condition in which people must do as they are told, say and think as they are told, work as they are told, consume as they are told, live where they are told-with one’s only chance for a self-determined life residing in escape. One of those words is serfdom; another is slavery. ***
As Colas described it: "I used Fidel's words to protect myself."
He started with more than a thousand books, many of them brought into the country by a friend authorized to travel abroad. Other materials had been provided by the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.
Colas, an intense man who is the son of peasants, said word of his audacious initiative spread quickly. Within 12 days, a counterpart library opened in Cuba's second largest city, Santiago. Before long, all 14 provinces had one.
From abroad, books started coming in from Sweden, the United States, Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Canada, Spain, Puerto Rico and Mexico.
In time, the authorities started cracking down. Colas, who had become a traveling salesman on behalf of his idea, was told to stay home.
His wife was fired from her job as an accounting professor. His two children, then 14 and 8, were shunned by their friends and were warned by school authorities that education in Cuba was exclusively for supporters of the revolution.
Colas applied for political asylum. The family received their U.S. visas in October 2000. The Cuban government granted them permission to leave in December 2001.
But his campaign for independent libraries persists, and he wants the Bush administration to embrace it. ***