Posted on 12/30/2015 1:15:47 AM PST by Cincinatus
HAVANA - In the Alamar neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, the streets don't have names. To find an address, you need to know the zone, the block number and the apartment, because all the buildings look the same. Long and rectangular, five stories tall, their facades have been stripped by the ocean air and re-pigmented in curlicue patterns of mildew.
Alamar is the largest public housing project in Cuba, if not one of the largest in the world, with 100,000 residents. In a country sworn to socialist equality, it is arguably Cuba’s most equal place, because everyone pretty much has an identical apartment.
"It was a model city," said Roman Perez, 76, a retired bus driver who lives in Zone 8, block D52, apartment 21. He helped build D52 and two others with his own hands, as a member of a communist worker "micro-brigade." This was Fidel Castro's idea.
"We had everything then," Perez said. "Everyone looked after each other."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
My favorite quote: "A fraying system of cradle-to-grave benefits keeps Cubans living in a kind of state-administered, socialized poverty, earning high scores on U.N. human development surveys but little for Cuban wallets."
But but but with Bernie in charge, he will make it work in the U.S.
Inequality is growing in Cuba, threatening the legacy of Castro’s revolutionThat is the subtitle. Further down:
Communist Party elders want to keep a lid on market forces, but with every incremental opening, yawning income gaps emerge. The owner of a small private restaurant can earn hundreds of dollars a day, or more, in a country where three-quarters of the labor force works for the state and the average government salary is $20 a month. Tour guides and hotel chambermaids make more than scientists and doctors.Oh, that evil capitalism creating income inequality. If only the revolution were not betrayed!
Younger Cubans do not seem too troubled. But these disparities, authorities fear, bear the seeds of social tensions, resentments and crime. …
Yep, the Pest finds communism doesn’t work, but I notice there seems to be a mournful tone to the story. A wistful “oh, what could’ve been” theme. Liberals have wet dreams over arrangements like that Alamar project. Everyone is “equal,” all right.. equally miserable.
“Long and rectangular, five stories tall, their facades have been stripped by the ocean air and re-pigmented in curlicue patterns of mildew.”
For a moment, I thought the author was describing the scenery along the Dan Ryan in Chicago. Wait, no ocean in Illinois.
Who eats in these “small, private restaurants where the owners can make hundreds of dollars/day”? People on benefits of less than $1/day can afford to purchase meals? Is that $20/month all discretionary? Or does everyone have a side hustle, just like US welfare areas?
Even where enforced equality “works”, it takes an oligarchy to enforce and administer it. In other words, equality never works, ever.
Demanding equality is demanding a king to rule you.
That's the author's theme all right.
Not the earlier-mentioned fact that most Cubans make $20/month. No problem with that.
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