Pobrecitos… quienes?

The BBC correspondent in Havana, Fernando Ravsberg, posted a blog entry last week titled “Pobrecitos los cubanos” (Poor Cubans). In it, he writes that the idea that Cubans live in poverty is a common misconception. Today, 50% of the population receives income beyond the oft-cited state salary of $17 per month, and some earn more than their counterparts in Miami. Others actually support their relatives abroad by sending remittances from the island. There are people, Ravsberg says, earning over $10,000 every month in Cuba. In fact:

Igual que en el resto de América Latina, esa clase de ricos son una minoría, pero también en Cuba existe una clase media compuesta por cientos de miles de personas que reciben mayores ingresos que el resto de los trabajadores y en moneda dura.

As in the rest of Latin America, the upper class is a minority, but in Cuba there is also a middle class composed of hundreds of thousands of people that receive higher incomes than the rest of the population, and in hard cash.

Even if that is true, it gives reason to worry about income disparities on the island; if half of the population has access only to the salary the state gives them ($17/month) while some Cubans can access and spend and consume as much as Ravsberg claims, then inequalities exist that (1) should be of concern; (2) Ravsberg does not address or seem to worry about; and (3) are not accounted for in the socialist system.

But an excellent response to the actual validity of Ravsberg’s assertion comes from a blogger on the island, Claudia Cadelo (a 25-year-old school teacher living in Havana), in her own post, “Pobrecitos los corresponsales extranjeros” (Poor foreign correspondents). She has traveled the city and the country and sees misery and poverty, she says, and lives in the very same building as a soup kitchen for the poor. And even if it were the case that many Cubans were better off than she knows, she says:

Even so I vote for the “Poor Cubans” who don’t have the right to dissent, who don’t have free elections, who have no political rights, who don’t have a free press, who cannot buy or sell houses, who can’t have Internet, who can’t make investments abroad, who can’t leave the country without permission, who need a “Yuma”–someone from the US–to take on their economic projects, who don’t have the right to contract as individuals with any company, who can’t move freely within the country, who need a temporary living pass to stay a few months in the house of a friend, who can’t change the government of their country, who have only one party, who can’t have more than two houses, who can’t buy a car, who can’t pay to ride in someone else’s car, who can’t rent or make arrangements in homes, who can’t recruit domestic workers… and who can’t, in the end, do what they wish with their own money.