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    My Summer in Havana: Coffee, Tobacco & Capitalism in Rural Cuba 1959-1985
    My Summer in Havana: Coffee, Tobacco & Capitalism in Rural Cuba 1959-1985
    My Summer in Havana: Coffee, Tobacco & Capitalism in Rural Cuba 1959-1985
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    My Summer in Havana: Coffee, Tobacco & Capitalism in Rural Cuba 1959-1985

    By Lauren Burnhill

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    In 1985, I received a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Cuban Studies Program to spend two months in Havana researching the last vestiges of private sector agriculture. The summer of 1985 was when the US launched Radio Marti, a Voice of America program intended to somehow catalyze the anti-Castro revolution that 34 years of blockade had never managed. Nevertheless, the Castro regime was making noises about how Radio Marti was an insult to Cuban domestic sovereignty and for a while, my visa was in question.

    Once the visa came through, another round of letters and phone calls was required, this time to the US Treasury Department, to get permission to spend money on soap, beer or whatever necessities I might require while in Cuba. Although it is not actually illegal for US citizens to travel to Cuba, it is illegal to spend money while in Cuba, which I suppose was some clever bureaucrat's solution to certain First Amendment issues that might otherwise be raised. In any event, I was duly authorized to spend a minimal amount of money during my stay in Cuba and off I went.

    Open-minded and well-educated in political science and international relations, I was determined to see Cuba with my own eyes before forming an opinion on the Castro regime and what it had or had not accomplished for the people of Cuba. As I discovered, the realities behind the sugar cane curtain, I formed my own, often conflicting, views of tropical communism. The journal I kept during that two month period, interspersed with my research findings, forms the basis of this book.

    Although it was tempting to edit my journal, the naiveté and optimism of my 23 year old self was real. My words remain as they were written and for the most part, they're kind of funny. Was the metal canister I found in the backyard a listening device? Why did my colleagues automatically join any line they saw in downtown Havana? Can imperialist pigs make long distance phone calls? Dive in to "My Summer in Havana" and you'll find out!

    What did communism do - or not do - for the majority rural population in Cuba? Wealthy landowners generally fled the revolution, often making their way to nearby Miami. What happened to the small farmers and other rural inhabitants? Was there a private sector in Fidel Castro's Cuba? The data available in the early 1980s suggested that there was still a private sector in key crops like coffee and tobacco and in some areas of transportation, primarily trucking. Given recent work in rural development, I leapt at the opportunity to explore how private sector agriculture differed from centrally planned and owned farming.

    What I learned was both heartwarming and a bit astonishing! Over several decades, the government moved increasing resources into producer's cooperatives and state-owned farms, but the private sector farmers remained more productive even as their resources were constrained. Intellectual freedom was virtually non-existent, but literacy, education and health care were made widely available throughout Cuba.

    I left Cuba with mixed feelings and I wonder to this day why massive social change remains the purview of communism and populism. Is there something inherent in democracy that makes us care less about the well-being of our fellow man / woman? How is it that the Castro managed to create a fully literate society in a few years and our "No Child Left Behind" initiative is more "Not All Children Left Behind All of the Time"? Why didn't a literate, well-educated population lead to a more vibrant economy? Would central planning have worked if done "better" or are the politics of communism an insurmountable obstacle to sustainable growth? You won't find the answers to these questions in "My Summer in Havana", but you will find a thought-provoking picture of a world rarely seen by those of us who are not Communist party members!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLauren Burnhill
    Release dateJul 2, 2014
    ISBN9781311381903
    My Summer in Havana: Coffee, Tobacco & Capitalism in Rural Cuba 1959-1985
    Author

    Lauren Burnhill

    Lauren began working in social finance and “multiple bottom line” (MBL) investing in 1983 at the OAS. Over time, she has held increasingly responsible positions in emerging markets investments at the IIC, Barclays Bank (BZW), Ariel Ventures and more recently as Chief Investment Officer at ACCION International, a global leader in microfinance and access to finance for poor and disadvantaged populations. In 2009, Lauren left ACCION, confident that access to finance was on everyone's radar and concerned that access to life sectors (health, education, affordable housing, clean water, renewable energy) would require innovative financial structures to reach the majority of the world's population.Currently, Lauren is the Managing Director of One Planet Ventures (OPV), a consultancy that brings innovative thinking to MBL strategies and financial product innovation, particularly those that can improve the quality of life for the working poor. Lauren’s blog on impact investment, “The Money in the Middle”, can be found at tmitm.wordpress.com. @LaurenOPV shares other people’s thoughts and research on #ImpInv. OPV works with a broad range of clients including multilateral development finance organizations, international non-profits, venture capital associations, development and investment advisory firms and private, for-profit businesses.Lauren holds an MBA in Finance & Strategic Planning from Wharton and an MA in Social Change & Development from Johns Hopkins SAIS. She is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

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      Book preview

      My Summer in Havana - Lauren Burnhill

      Introduction: Lauren A. Burnhill

      May 1,1999

      Miami, Florida

      In 1985, I received a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Cuban Studies Program to spend two months in Havana researching the last vestiges of private sector agriculture. Dr. Wayne Smith, head of the Hopkins Cuban Studies Program, had served as US Chief of Mission at the non-embassy we maintain in Havana. Much beloved by the Cubans for pointing out the stupidities in US and Cuban policy alike with an even hand, Dr. Smith had organized an exchange program between Hopkins and the University of Havana, with Ford Foundation funding for specific research topics.

      Prior to starting my graduate studies, I had worked at the Organization of American States on integrated rural development programs and small-scale community development projects. The latter involved working with indigenous communities to identify local resources and conceive of ways to use these resources to generate jobs and income. The work was most interesting and the development challenges identified were to shape my career from then onward.

      Successful economic development programs, in my view, at any rate, require firm grounding in market realities. A project in Dominica to make sulfur tiles fell apart post implementation when we discovered that there was no market for sulfur tiles that could be reached in a cost-effective manner. Shipping costs from the tiny island of Dominica were simply prohibitive. If only we had known sooner.

      Another project in the West Indies, raising chickens and selling the eggs to school lunch programs, was derailed temporarily due to market pricing inefficiencies. It seems that the project participants found their meager wages discouraging to the point of apathy, primarily because they could see the drug runners' boats leaving in the morning and returning with television sets and other goodies in the afternoon. The purchasing power of the profits on a couple of dozen eggs might get you a movie rental at Blockbusters, but certainly not the TV set to watch it on. Telling the poor to just say no to drugs begs the question of what there might be left for them to say yes to.

      The summer of 1985 was when the US launched Radio Marti, a Voice of America program intended to somehow catalyze the anti-Castro revolution that 34 years of blockade had never managed. Nevertheless, the Castro regime was making noises about how Radio Marti was an insult to Cuban domestic sovereignty and for a while, my visa was in question.

      Once the visa came through, another round of letters and phone calls was required, this time to the US Treasury Department, to get permission to spend money on soap, beer or whatever necessities I might require while in Cuba. Although it is not actually illegal for US citizens to travel to Cuba, it is illegal to spend money while in Cuba, which I suppose was some clever bureaucrat's solution to certain First Amendment issues that might otherwise be raised. In any event, I was duly authorized to spend a minimal amount of money during my stay in Cuba and carefully made several photocopies of the Treasury Department letter so that I could have one handy at all times.

      That same year, I was awarded an Organization of American States scholarship to spend five weeks at a special Summer Institute at the University of Belgrano in Argentina. If Buenos Aires is, or was, the Paris of Latin America, the University of Belgrano is the Sorbonne, only privately owned.

      My scholarship included housing with an Argentine family, very upper crust. Their apartment occupied the entire 25th floor of a swank building in Palermo and the country house occupied swathes of land in the Entre Rios province. There were enough automobiles for every licensed driver in the family (four) and miraculously, enough parking spaces as well. The family owned a large stake in one of Argentina's top wineries, the fruits of which we consumed with gusto. Had I asked for a Latin American counterpoint to the Castro regime, I could not have been shown any finer example than life with the Argentine elite in the summer of 1985.

      Politically open-minded and well-versed in the hidden biases of Western journalism, I was determined to see Cuba with my own eyes before rendering an opinion on the Castro regime and what it had or had not accomplished for the people of Cuba. As I discovered, the realities behind the sugar cane curtain, I formed my own, often conflicting, views of tropical communism. The journal I kept during that two month period, interspersed with my research findings, forms the basis of this book.

      Why put this book together now, fifteen years after the fact? For any number of reasons, starting with the fact that, living in Miami, the Cuba question always looms large. The Elian Gonzalez saga should never have happened and perhaps if people knew (and cared) more, the next such fiasco could be avoided. Then too, Castro's new market based initiatives are in large part the same initiatives that I saw being tested in the summer of 1985. The market worked then, and it will work now, assuming there is anything to be sold.

      If the Cuba I saw wallowed in genteel poverty, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Castro's failure to promote adaptive reforms can only be creating conditions of intense misery. With the United States considering tighter blockades and additional retaliatory measures (retaliation for what? Daring to run a communist regime 90 miles off the US coast?), or perhaps closer relations and a shared baseball league, depending on who you talk to in Washington and on what day of the week, the time seems ripe to share my experiences.

      Oh, and one more thing. In case you weren't aware of the fact, Cuba was anything but a democracy before Castro. It was a dictatorship, pure and simple. A dictatorship that encouraged roughly two dozen wealthy families to build their sugar cane, rum, coffee and tobacco empires on the backs of a much beleaguered peasant class. The next time you hear someone mouthing off about getting Castro and the commies out of Cuba, you might want to ask yourself what kind of alternative government would fill the void. Democracy? Don't bet on it.

      My view, then and now, is that they way to change Cuba is to drop the blockade and let the consumer goods flow freely. Repressed materialistic urges, given new found outlets, should topple Castro within a year. As for the Cuban emigré community in Miami, those that want to return home should go home. Those who want to stay should stay. But the land and businesses that some of them owned forty years ago are gone for good, as are the assets of the Jews who fled, or died, in the holocaust. Should there not be some form of compensation for the Cubans (or the Jews) who fled their homes many years ago? Perhaps, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the odds of compensation are better in a flourishing Switzerland than in a disintegrating Cuba.

      Let capitalism wash up on the Cuban beaches once again and then, at least, there may be some goodies to divvie up. For I can assure you, if there was nothing of value in Cuba in 1985, then those living in Cuba today are living on the need to outlast a hated enemy alone (and that would be us, by the way). Maintaining the blockade against Cuba is a human rights violation, because it is not Castro and the Communist party elite who suffer, it's Juan and Juanita Everyman.

      Read my journal, skim through the research and see if your feelings about Cuba aren't just the tiniest bit different once you are done.

      Foreword: Dr. Wayne S. Smith, Head of Cuban Studies

      Johns Hopkins SAIS

      November 12, 1985

      Washington, DC

      Lauren Burnhill spent several months in Cuba in 1985 as the first American scholar under the academic exchange agreement between SAIS and the University of Havana --an agreement made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation. This monograph is the result of her research. Other SAIS scholars are scheduled to carry out research projects in Cuba during the 1985-86 academic year, and two Cuban scholars will spend the spring semester of 1986 at SAIS. Other scholars will follow them in the years ahead. Given the dearth of contacts otherwise between institutions of our two countries such exchanges are of vital importance if the gap of misunderstanding between us is ever to be bridged.

      A good deal has been written in the United States about Cuban agriculture, but so little of it has had

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