Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
February 1, 2003

Fidel Castro worked miracles after leading the Revolution that liberated Cuba from the dictator, Batista. The statistics are there, for any fool to see.

Soon after Castro came to power in 1959, he decided to eliminate illiteracy in the island nation. As he stated in an address to the United Nations the following year, “Cuba will be the first country in America that in a few months’ time will be able to say that it does not have a single illiterate person.” Castro was as good as his word. He launched his Great Campaign for literacy in January of 1961 and ended it in victory in December that same year. Cuba is a “territory free of illiteracy,” he declared, triumphantly announcing an end to “four centuries of ignorance.”

In a mere 12 months, Cuban government data demonstrated, socialism had given the gift of learning to the Cuban people. This eradication of widespread illiteracy is widely regarded as one of his Revolution’s two stupendous social policy successes.

The other stupendous social policy success came in health care, where Castro gave his people the gift of health and a long life. By investing in doctors, hospitals and other medical services geared to the poor, Cuba’s official statistics show, Cuba achieved one of the world’s best performances in terms of broad statistical indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality. In controlling AIDS, Cuba also has one of the world’s best showings. Among Castro’s most celebrated medical successes was the absolute eradication of dengue fever, a dreaded disease transmitted by mosquito that has plagued Cuba and other tropical countries through time immemorial.

To these two stupendous well publicized successes must be added a third, even more stupendous accomplishment, albeit little appreciated outside Cuba. Castro’s accomplishments are a hoax; his statistics have been fudged or fabricated; his admirers abroad, from heads of state to movie makers to social activists, have been duped, dazzled by a beard in a military suit.

Castro’s regime has excelled in only one area, as seen in statistics from independent agencies such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The government claims it takes no political prisoners. The numbers provided by human rights agencies – an estimated 500,000 since 1959, with thousands executed – tell a different story. In Castro’s Cuba, it is a crime to meet to discuss the economy, to write letters to the government, to report on political developments, to speak to international reporters, to advocate human rights, to visit friends or relatives outside your local area of residence without government permission. Cubans are arrested without warrants and prosecuted for “failing to denounce” fellow citizens, for general “dangerousness,” and, should some crime not be covered by these criminal code provisions, for “other acts against state security.”

The courts, under Cuba’s constitution, are formally subordinate to the governing elite and cannot protect the innocent. Neither can lawyers, who lost their right to work in private firms in 1973 and have been forced to work either for the government or in collectives. Lawyers who had defended dissidents were refused membership in the collectives.

Cubans found guilty under this criminal justice system – and their fate is rarely in doubt – often serve 10 to 20 years in jail for political crimes. But most Cuban criminals are not political. A large proportion of the estimated 180,000 to 200,000 common criminals in Cuba’s 500 prisons are people who broke the law by killing their own pigs, cattle and horses and selling the excess meat on the black market.

To maintain discipline inside prisons, prison guards appoint hardened prisoners to “prisoners’ councils.” Reports Human Rights Watch: “The council members commit some of Cuba’s worst prison abuses, including beating fellow prisoners as a disciplinary measure and sexually abusing prisoners, under direct orders from or with the acquiescence of prison officials.”

Despite this appalling human rights record, Castro has been courted and condoned by a fawning international intelligentsia that includes Harvard lawyers and statesmen who have made their reputations defending civil liberties. These include former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau – Castro was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral, no less – former South African prime minister Nelson Mandela, and, more recently, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. One world leader who has not been duped is Czech President Vaclav Havel, himself a political prisoner before the fall of communism in Europe, who sponsored a resolution condemning Cuba at the UN Commission on Human Rights.

DUPED: Fidel Castro with Jimmy Carter as honorary pallbearers at Pierre Trudeau’s funeral . . . Credit: Jacques Boissinot, CP Photo

. . . and with Nelson Mandela in Johannesberg. Credit: Jose Goitia, AP Photo

. . . (Pierre Elliott) Trudeau

. . . (Barbara) Walters

. . . (Peter) Jennings

Although Castro forbids collective bargaining or even independent unions, Western labour leaders endorse him. Although Castro makes the top 10 “Enemies of the Press” list produced by the Committee to Protect Journalists’, journalists such as Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters have covered him uncritically. Although artists in Cuba must toe the government line, Harry Belafonte and others who should understand the importance of artistic freedom hold him up as a paragon.

Those who cavort with Castro forgive him his transgressions, reasoning that his feats outweighed his faults, or that human rights abuses were necessary to achieve his towering accomplishments in literacy and health. But there were no great ends that justified his brutal means. Castro’s feats are all modest or non-existent.

Literacy did improve under Castro but the tale is hardly heroic – illiteracy was neither high prior to the Revolution, as Castro claimed, nor was it much changed after Castro’s Great Campaign. In fact, since Castro came to power, other Latin American countries made far greater gains in literacy than Cuba, largely because Cuba didn’t have as far to climb – it already had one of Latin America’s highest literacy rates.

Neither can Castro’s health claims be taken as credible because the health system, like the legal system, is subordinate to his regime’s need for propaganda. In 1997, a major epidemic of dengue fever, which causes hemorrhaging, broke out in Cuba. Patients were bleeding from every orifice of their bodies and choking on their own blood. Public health authorities and the government’s Institute of Tropical Medicine called the disease “an unspecified virus” and denied its existence, partly to protect the reputation of Castro, who had personally declared the disease’s extinction, and partly to protect the tourist industry, which was becoming a major earner of foreign exchange.

One physician, Dr. Dessy Mendoza Rivero, recognized the disease as dengue fever and tried to alert the authorities, only to find a cover-up underway. Dr. Mendoza, the president of a medical college, blew the whistle by calling a Miami radio station and telling the outside world of the disease. “There are approximately 13 dead, 2,500 hospitalized patients and 30,000 afflicted,” Dr. Mendoza revealed. Soon after, the Cuban State Security police arrested him. He was sentenced to eight years in prison for “disseminating enemy propaganda,” leading Amnesty International to declare him a “prisoner of conscience.” Ironically, one week after his sentencing the government admitted that the epidemic was dengue fever.

Anecdotes abound of the government cooking the books to prove the glories of the Revolution to the world, with many academics distrusting the official government figures. A demographer from the National Academies of Sciences found that the Cuban government’s own data was at odds with official overall statistics for child mortality: If anything, it indicated a growing, not a falling, infant mortality rate, a suspicion supported by other statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Health which showed high rates of several childhood diseases that generally correlate with high infant mortality. Other scientists doubt the claims made over HIV, noting the many Cubans who had served in African wars, the many African students in Cuba, the rampant sex trade in Cuba, and the high rate of HIV among Cubans who escaped from the island. A secret 1987 Cuban Communist Party survey of 10,756 respondents showed 88% of the public in one province to be disappointed with their health-care system. When the Cuban suicide rate skyrocketed – it’s now twice the typical rate in Latin American countries – the Cuban government stopped reporting suicide statistics in a way that allowed international comparisons.

To the extent that the Cuban government’s health claims are credible, the results often came at a price no civilized society could countenance. Patients with AIDS were forcibly removed from society and isolated in sanitaria. Expectant mothers with AIDS were coerced into aborting their babies. Abortions were similarly used to improve infant mortality statistics in general – Cuba has twice the abortion rate of most countries – by terminating high-risk pregnancies. To obtain co-operation from doctors, their compensation was tied to their patients’ infant mortality rate. Many Cuban mothers claim that their doctors killed their baby at childbirth – babies who die at birth do not show up in Cuba’s infant mortality data.

At the same time that some of Castro’s admirers deny claims that the medical system is failing Cubans, other admirers admit to the disastrous health outcomes, but blame them on food, drug and other shortages caused by the Cuban embargo. One such study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, lamented “several public health catastrophes [including] more than 50,000 cases of optic and peripheral neuropathy . . . A 1994 outbreak of the Guillain-Barré syndrome in Havana was caused by water that had been contaminated with Campylobacter species because chlorination chemicals were not available for purification.”

The American embargo on Cuba did harm the Cuban economy, but to a modest extent – the most comprehensive study of its economic effects showed a mere US$84-million to US$167-million a year in lost exports. The real harm to the Cuban economy was self-inflicted: The economy collapsed shortly after Castro took power, partly because Cuba lost a staggering number of managers and professionals who fled the country and partly because Castro’s central economic plan – The First Economic and Social Plan of a Socialist Nature of 1962 – was ruinous, as Castro would later admit. Food rationing began the same year.

Cuba, once an important rice producer, now produces less than it did before the Revolution, its rice fields half as productive as those of neighbouring Dominican Republic. Cuba also produces less sugar than before the Revolution because, admits Castro, it costs more to produce than it’s worth. Because Cubans can no longer efficiently grow food – not because the United States won’t provide Cuba with food exports – Cubans consume less food today than before the Revolution, and less food than citizens of any other Latin American country.

Castro and others who argue that the embargo hurt Cuba point to Cuba’s shortage of food, medicines and other necessities, as if these could not be readily imported from Canada, Europe and other nations. These economically confused people, perhaps, are the greatest dupes of all.

Related articles by Lawrence Solomon :

Fidel Batista!
Bad Cuban medicine
Cuba’s cruel joke
Triumph of freedom

A reader’s response to this article:

Feb. 10, 2003

Letter to the Editor
National Post

Lawrence Solomon puts in doubt Cuban health and literacy statistics, but doesn’t bother to cite any statistics to the contrary. In Cuba, there is a doctor for every 167 inhabitants (the highest per capita average in the world, compared with 1/358 in the United States and 1/437 in Canada). In 2001, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 6.2%, lower than Canada’s and comparable to the United States’. If these numbers were even half true, they would still be major.

However, Cuba’s achievements in health care are shown by means other than statistics. For example, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has shown great interest in bringing down the embargo to get access to Cuban medical techniques and knowledge. The U.S. government recently insinuated that Cuba may possess biological weapons – purely because Cuban health sciences are so advanced. The Cubans recently shipped, free of charge, much-needed vaccines to stop a meningitis outbreak in Uruguay. They import doctors from other developing countries for training and they export their own doctors to needy locations all around the world. These accomplishments really are stupendous.

Vincent J. Guihan, Ottawa

National Post
January 27, 2003

Re: Lawrence Solomon’s article, “Bad Cuban medicine,” published in the Jan. 18, 2003, issue of the National Post

Lawrence Solomon’s columns are a gross misrepresentation of facts with a very creative spin. Cuba is a developing country, undergoing severe economic constrains. It is not a country with rich natural resources and it has suffered for the past 44 years a relentless economic war carried out by the world’s most powerful nation.

It is no surprise for most observers that the standard of living of Cubans is below typical expectation in North America, and that the country faces uncommon challenges in its development objectives. Cuba is perhaps the only developing country that receives absolutely no financial loans from the World Bank or the IMF, that receives no preferential financing from any bilateral source whatsoever and that is forcefully exempted from accessing the most lucrative and dynamic market for the export of its goods and services.

Without pretending to answer every misrepresentation in the column, historical facts must be recalled. The Economic Commission for Latin America, UNESCO and the World Bank recorded in the 1950s their assessment of Cuba, and it was far from the heavenly picture that the article tries to portray. Cuba was a playground for foreign interests, with a backward economy and a corrupt and extremely unequal society, where crime, prostitution, gambling, drugs and racism coloured the landscape. Today that is certainly not the case.

The core message of the article seems to be in the last sentence, calling for the government to do “much, much less.” Such a call reflects more an ideological impulse than an informed understanding of Cuba and the region in which we live in. However, it does not explain the motivation behind the untruthful depiction of a country striving to do better for its people.

In Mr. Solomon’s Jan. 18 column, “Bad Cuban Medicine,” Mr. Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in May, 1998, that “Cuba’s national health system, with its emphasis on primary health care managed by a “health team” is widely considered to be exemplary. Few developing countries have adopted such a comprehensive range of health policies, geared to priority needs and the capacity of health workers to meet them, on behalf of all Cuban people, particularly the most vulnerable and impoverished.”

The following figures can give an idea of how wrong Mr. Solomon’s characterization is. The Panamerican Health Organization, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the CIA World Fact Book 2002 have all published their assessments of health care conditions in Cuba and other countries of the world. Among the findings:

•   Child mortality/per thousand live births:
Cuba, 6.5; United States, 6.7; Mexico, 24.9; Argentina, 16.6; Brasil, 31. 8.
•   Life expectancy:
Cuba, 76.6 years; Russia, 67.3; Nicaragua, 68; Colombia, 70.7.
•   Medical doctors/10,000 inhabitants:
Cuba, 59; United States, 27. 9; Chile, 13; Colombia, 1.5.
•   Hospital beds/1,000 inhabitants:
Cuba, 6.3; United States, 4; El Salvador, 1.6; Guatemala, 1.
•   Proportion of under-five registered deaths due to intestinal infectious diseases:
Cuba, 2%; United States, 1%; Mexico, 6%.
•   Proportion of under-one population vaccinated against poliomyelitis:
Cuba, 100%; United States, 91%; Mexico, 89%.
Vladimir Mirabal, press attaché, Cuban embassy, Ottawa.

Like Lawrence Solomon, I too have been stopped in the street by people begging for money for medicine and have also experienced desperate fathers asking for help in getting their asthmatic child’s puffer refilled. I also recently talked to a “health tourist” from the United States taking advantage of hospital services.

These incidents all happened not in Cuba, but in Ottawa, a city where government officials and military get excellent treatment and the government confiscates any foreign currency we earn.

Cuban panhandlers seem to be as enterprising as ours. If their leaders are indeed as fit as Mr. Solomon has been led to believe, then at least they are ahead of our sorry looking lot.

Keith Richardson, Ottawa.

While Mr. Solomon raised some important questions, I found his article on the whole to be not only unbalanced but unfair.

His description of Cuba’s pre-1959 health system is untrue, and would more accurately describe the situation of the health system during the years of the Revolution.

There is no denying the shortages that the Cuban health system has suffered in recent years, but these have not altered the country’s priorities in terms of social spending. In fact, the percentage of GDP spent on the health sector has increased in recent years despite the country’s severe economic crisis.

Curiously absent from Mr. Solomon’s article is reference to the fact that the U.S. economic blockade of the island greatly hinders Cuba’s access to medicine.

Dr. Alexander Gray, Centre for Peace and Development Studies, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

What Mr. Solomon should have reported is that the health of the Cuban population is not primarily determined by what its citizens can buy by way of care and medicine, but rather what is given free of charge to everyone in that society. Using every reasonable index of the key factors determining the real health of a nation – infant mortality rates, vaccination rates and life expectancy – Cuba clearly wins out over every other relatively poor country in the world.

Marvin Glass, Canadian Network on Cuba, Ottawa.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 25, 2003

Over at the Museo de la Revolucion, Fidel Castro’s case against the dictator he overthrew 44 years ago is vividly on display.

Fulgencio Batista was evil incarnate, the museum earnestly instructs visitors in room after room of the once-magnificent building, formerly a presidential palace built in 1920 and decorated by Tiffany’s of New York. Under Batista and his predecessors, we learn through photos and text, Cuba became a playground for crass tourists who came for sex, drink and gambling, and who crowded the country’s pristine beaches to the detriment of ordinary folk. To drive home the immorality of pre-socialist times, the museum displays an original National Lottery of Cuba ticket from early in the century, a symbol of the country’s fall from grace.

We learn that Batista was an illegitimate leader, the election he won stolen by manipulating the press. Worse, Batista intimidated, even jailed or killed, political opponents.

But Batista also failed Cuba by failing to invest government funds wisely. One damning display berates Batista’s priorities with a list of budget line items that show government expenditures on frills such as roads, promenades and buildings. Batista’s sky-high spending on telecommunications – which the display dubs as military – comes in for criticism. Another display lambastes Batista for failing to diversify the economy. Another still, which provides a year-by-year report of sugar output, accuses Batista of neglecting this all-important industry. The numbers show a downward trend, interrupted with some up-ticks, in the 1950s, and then a giant leap forward, as Castro mobilized the country to produce more sugar in one of his regime’s grand economic plans.

The moral and economic rot under Batista led to humiliation and human tragedy, the museum tells us. “Many women who were denied jobs saw themselves forced to become prostitutes in order to survive,” said one display. Said another: “According to a census in 1953, there were 200,000 shacks and misery huts.” Said a third, also referring to the 1953 census: “40,939 people died due to lack of medical attendance and unsanitary living conditions.”

The history the museum imparts is part truth, part fiction and all hypocrisy. Batista was indeed an unsavory character. He did oversee a corrupt administration in Cuba. He did undermine the halting democracy that the United States helped create after liberating Cuba from oppressive Spanish occupation at the turn of the century.

But Cuba and its U.S.-style constitution was also an economic powerhouse with potent social institutions and impressive accomplishments. A 1958 United Nations report ranked Cuba’s vibrant free press eighth in the world, and first in Latin America. Despite its much smaller population, Cuba had 160 radio stations compared to the

U. K.’s 62 and France’s 50. It had 23 television stations compared to Mexico’s 12 and Venezuela’s 10. The tiny country supported 58 newspapers, fourth in Latin America behind populous Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Cuba once installed telephones at a rapid rate. No more. It once ranked first in Latin America, fifth in the world, in television sets per capita, and also ranked high in radios, automobiles, and many other consumer goods. No more. With the population increased and the housing stock degraded, more people suffer inadequate housing today than ever before, and sanitary conditions have become a scandal through much of the country.

The information-hungry populace in the Batista era was well-educated, as it remains. Student registration at primary schools in 1955 was 1,032 students per 10,000 inhabitants, higher than the figures for 1990 of 842. The registration rate for higher education was an impressive 38 per 10,000, about the same as it was 10 years later (34 per 10,000) and 15 years later (41 per 10,000). The country, in fact, had a long history of high literacy levels: At the turn of the 20th century, only 28% of those 10 and over couldn’t read or write, not that different from the current figure, 100 years later, of 16%.

But unlike today, Cuba’s economy under Batista was powerful, both domestically and in exports, and it was becoming increasingly diversified. Under Castro, its economy is in tatters, nowhere more so than in the sugar industry that Castro once promoted so heavily. Last summer, Castro announced a shut down of half of the country’s sugar mills. “We had to act or face ruin,” he explained. As he told NBC News just this week. “It cost us more to produce sugar than what we could sell it for.”

But if Batista bested Castro in virtually every broad socio-economic indicator, he paled in comparison when it came to controlling either the electoral process or the populace. Castro executed thousands of political opponents after he came to power, imprisoned tens of thousands and caused hundreds of thousands to flee to exile. Where Batista won a disputed election, a Castro election leaves no room for dispute: Castro allows no opponents, no opposing viewpoints to appear in the press, and, because that might not be enough, his political machine ensures a good turnout by keeping tabs on who votes and who doesn’t: In last Sunday’s national election, Castro managed a 90%-plus “yes” vote, not quite as impressive as Saddam Hussein’s 100% but, among dictators, respectable enough.

Those who revile Batista often point to a decadent economy that relied on mafia-run casinos, prostitution and other demeaning jobs servicing tourists. Tourism was important under Batista – Havana was an east-coast alternative to Las Vegas, complete with the sex and gaming, and the same mafia owners – but never as important as tourism has become today. Cuba’s once diversified economy is gone and Castro is now putting all of his hopes in attracting tourists.

To do this, Castro’s Cuba now permits prostitution, it winks at sex tourism – tourist guide books even include sections on the country’s once-taboo gay and bisexual scenes – and, as under Batista, the country unabashedly invests heavily in tourism. Earlier this week, Castro inaugurated a US$100-million resort on the island’s northeastern coast, broadcast nationwide, to underscore the importance the government places on the new five-hotel complex of 944 rooms able to house 1,500 tourists.

Tourism is now Cuba’s No. 1 source of foreign income, with 1.6 million visitors generating about US$2-billion last year. More tourists come from Canada than from other important sources of foreign exchange, chiefly Germany, Britain, Italy, France, and Switzerland. Castro, like Batista, is eyeing one other important tourist market.

“Our friends from the north are not in this list,” Castro said with a grin, referring to Americans that can’t travel to Cuba due to U.S. government regulations.

Some day soon, perhaps, Castro’s dream may be realized, and Cuba’s economy may once again benefit from U.S. tourism. If it does, Cuba under Castro will have recovered one of the benefits that the country once enjoyed. Forty-four years into the Revolution, Castro will have achieved all the failings, real and perceived, that Cuba had under Batista, and it will have retained few of the virtues.

Click here to read “Responses to Fidel Batista!”

National Post
January 20, 2003

Re: Cuba’s Cruel Joke, Lawrence Solomon, National Post, Jan. 11.

I am truly impressed that a Canadian newspaper has finally captured the very essence of the survival of the Cuban people. As a Cuban-American living in the United States, we have been amazed how long it has taken the Canadian people to admit/realize that the policy of “engagement” with Cuba has only enriched the very repressive regime there and has done nothing for the Cuban people.

We have our pressures here from both Republicans and Democrats who want to follow the lead of “the world” that trades with this brutal dictatorship, particularly that of Canada. Add our press who is still mystified and enamoured with this “revolutionary.” Please let your neighbors down south know: Your policy of engagement with Cuba has not worked. It has only prolonged the misery of the poor people in Cuba!

Elena Merino, Atlanta, Ga.

I have to thank you for letting people know the real side of my country. Some of my friends didn’t believe me totally until they read it. I’m a landed immigrant from Cuba, where I experienced for 27 years what you so truthfully describe.

Cuba is such a wonderful country and the people are so warm and friendly. It is just very unfortunate for my countrymen to live under such a demeaning and hypocritical government. The more people in the world that know the true colours of what is happening in Cuba, the more chances are that such a big lie as communism won’t be spread. There are too many people in Canada who support Castro under the false idea that he’s a hero. Thanks for trying to open up their eyes with your article.

Name withheld, Kamloops, B.C.

Mr. Solomon decries the economic problems in Cuba without referring to that very immoral economic embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States. And why was that embargo imposed? Because after 60 years of exploitation by corporate America, Fidel Castro nationalized the sugar industry, without compensation – a move applauded by many people, including me.

The United States, to its everlasting shame, missed a great opportunity to do something noble and support a genuine revolution of the people, not the usual military junta coup. Alas, it was so convenient to push Castro against the wall and nudge him towards the Soviet Union to justify the embargo.

Only people like Mr. Solomon remember the Batista years as prosperous. Such prosperity as existed was fueled by American tourists who flocked to Cuba for the brothels and casinos run by American interests. The mass of the people were illiterate, dirt poor and toiled in the sugar industry for pitiable wages and working conditions and could not afford to purchase consumer goods, medicines and dairy products as asserted by Mr. Solomon. The only ones who could were in Batista’s orbit, mostly of Spanish ancestry. They are now mostly living in South Florida, having been dislodged from their privileged position. The black Cubans are staying home. With the help of the United States, Cuba today would be a shining beacon for all the Latin American countries. Alas, it was not to be.

Ron Renaud, White Rock, B.C.

Thank you for a dispassionate exposition of Cuba’s current economic reality. Mr. Solomon highlights the ration card system, which most commentators do not do, thereby giving their readers the impression that, 1) Cuba’s privations are merely endemic and generic symptoms of Third World poverty, and 2) that these are merely exacerbated by the U.S. embargo. By noting that the libreta was instituted in 1962, in the very early years of the revolution, before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and before the U.S. embargo could arguably be held accountable for the levels of indigence that have become common in Cuba, Mr. Solomon alerts the careful reader to the structural nature of the problem and its uniquely Cuban (political) genesis.

The onus for the pauperization of the Cuban economy is on the government and the Communist Party, for turning a pre-1959 free-market system (with the imperfections inherent in the market and the defects particular to developing economies) into one of the most rigidly centralized and collectivized in the old Soviet Bloc, with virtually the entire economy under state control. This has culminated in the virtual dissolution of the sugar industry for unproductivity and non-competitiveness on the world market.

In this light, the rationing system must be understood as a fundamental element of social control that goes well beyond its avowed purpose. This purpose was not to overcome a momentary emergency in supply or distribution, but to institute (the appearance of) egalitarianism as a matter of ideology.

I would quibble with only one characterization: Mr. Solomon says that Cuba was once the most prosperous country in the Caribbean. Cuba was, rather, one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, which, in 1959, included the then-wealthy and resource-rich Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Venezuela. It was, by some reckonings, on the threshold of attaining the status of a developed economy, and was much closer to the developed world in its social structure, constitutional welfare provisions and income distribution, than to countries such as Mexico, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, traditionally characteristic of underdeveloped economies. It was also a more prosperous country in terms of living standard – as measured by per capita income, literacy, various health indices, caloric intake, per capita ownership of cars, radios and TV sets, total number of TV and radio networks, total number of newspapers and magazines, etc. – than the USSR itself and Eastern Europe. This can be contrasted with today’s prohibitions on access to the Internet for the general Cuban population, and on the bleak prospects for acquiring a computer on a per capita income that is among the lowest in the world.

Ricardo Fernández, Miami, Fla.

Congratulations on your excellent article describing the Cuban situation. I have never read anything written in the United States that is so accurate and so informative in regards to Cuba. Mr. Solomon’s article should be sent to everyone who has an interest in Cuban affairs, and it should also be sent to millions of uninformed people in Latin America who believe Castro’s propaganda.

Dr. Joaquin de Posada, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Everything Mr. Solomon explains in his article I know already, and yet his discourse brought tears to my eyes. These are my people whose lives he describes, and he has made so realistically painful their everyday acrobatics for survival.

If only more folks in this country and around the world could understand exactly what was so apparent to Mr. Solomon, we wouldn’t have wealthy American and European businessmen wining and dining Castro as if he were a Third World genius who delivered his people from hell. What Castro has accomplished is precisely the opposite: Castro has delivered the Cuban people into hell.

Ileana Fuentes, guest columnist for El Nuevo Herald, and Cubaencuentro.com, Miami, Fla.

We have just returned from our fifth trip to Cuba, and I concur with all of Mr. Solomon’s findings. On each trip, we are saddened to find the Cuban quality of life more diminished.

We noted the frequent shortages of toilet paper throughout our four-star hotel and unexplained electrical outages which sometimes lasted for hours. The waitstaff at the hotel restaurants seemed under duress most of the time and sometimes had a surly attitude. I watched the waitstaff pack up desserts in shopping bags once the buffet lunch was closing and saw a weary chambermaid leave for the day with a garbage bag full of toilet paper and supplies over her shoulder. Native Cubans who swam near our hotel on a Sunday were quickly approached by guards and promptly escorted off the beach.

We had lunch in Havana on calle Obispo, probably only doors down from where Mr. Solomon had eaten. I had seen the homeless dogs in the streets and saved some chicken for them. When I hit the street mid lunch to give it to a passing dog, a toothless woman stepped forward with her young baby to claim that it was her dog and promptly left with the scraps and bones.

Anna Butt, Toronto

Read Lawrence Solomon’s article, “Cuba’s Cruel Joke”