NYT: Battered by Storms, Cuba Uses Ideological Zeal to Lift Spirits and Direct Anger

----- Original Message -----
From: Walter Lippmann
To: CubaNews@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 6:46 PM
Subject: NYT: Battered by Storms, Cuba Uses Ideological Zeal to Lift Spirits and Direct Anger


Revolutionary zeal and consciousness are key to Cuban recovery efforts,
but practical measures including direct material assistance from friends
around the world, and the practical activities of a revolutionary team
of leaders is decisive to the reconstruction program. Here in the United
States, religious prayer and private charity are at the forefront, while
in Cuba the society as a whole - in other words, the government - takes
fundamental responsibility for the well-being of everyone. This article
tries to suggest that Cuba's government is holding up some assistance,
that is, making Cuban suffer as a political maneuver while they press
Washington for an end to the blockade. That twists reality completely
around because it is WASHINGTON which is causing Cubans to suffer by
not permitting people in the United States who want to help with the
reconstruction process from doing so, completely voluntarily.

Cubans know the state cannot do everything. They also know that Cuba is
not alone, and each individual is not left to their own devices, as we
see in the United States of America. Cuba helps people everywhere and
today that assistance is being returned in turn by those Cuba has been
helping. Cuba is, of course, accepting help from non-governmental and
religious groups from the United States, but won't accept anything from
the government which budgets tens of millions of dollars to orchestrate
destabilization and subversion within the island. As e.e. cummings put
it so eloquently in his very famous poem "i sing of olaf glad and big":

"there is some shit I will not eat".


Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 28, 2008
Battered by Storms, Cuba Uses Ideological Zeal
to Lift Spirits and Direct Anger
By MARC LACEY

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/world/americas/28cuba.html

LOS PALACIOS, Cuba - There is a familiarity to the huge hurricane relief
effort under way here as work crews hammer away at homes whose roofs were
blown away, restring fallen electrical lines and dole out rations to those
who lost everything. But then there is the quintessentially Cuban dimension:
the newly painted placards and billboards going up amid the destruction.

"The revolution is more powerful than Mother Nature," trumpets one roadside
banner, a quotation from Fidel Castro that has appeared in the weeks since
two successive storms battered Cuba.

"The people of Los Palacios will recover with our own force," reads a
hand-drawn sign in front of the Communist Party headquarters in this
hardscrabble agricultural town in western Cuba that suffered two direct
hits.

One might think that ideology could wait at least until all the lights were
back on. But in Cuba, acknowledged for its expertise in hurricane
preparedness and response, the political ramifications that storms present
are tallied along with the physical damages.

The physical effects of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike have been profound,
totaling at least $5 billion, the government says. The storms partly or
completely destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and crops in fields from
the fertile Pinar del Río Province in the west to Guantánamo in the east, a
grave concern in a country that was struggling to feed itself before the
hurricanes hit.

Besides clearing fields of rice, beans, plantains and sweet potatoes, the
storms destroyed more than a million eggs and killed half a million
chickens.

Assessing the political fallout is trickier. Local Communist Party officials
are walking block by block gauging discontent among the population. The
country's leaders, meanwhile, have told the people again and again that
blame for any lasting pain they endure should be directed not their way but
at Washington, their regular foil.

"The empire is making our suffering worse," said Luis Guzmán, 56, who has
followed the regular commentaries that Mr. Castro has been producing from
his sick bed since handing over power to his brother, Raúl, in February.
"It's your blockade that prevents us from developing."

Mr. Guzmán, a retiree, is one of many Cubans who were hard hit by the two
storms, Gustav in late August and Ike early this month. His home was not
just damaged but blown away altogether, scattered over the vast fields of
this agricultural region. Some small scraps of wood were left behind; he
turned them into a makeshift lean-to under a tree.

Mr. Guzmán does not receive Granma, the state-run newspaper that faithfully
prints Fidel Castro's writings (though no longer always on the front page).
Instead, he listens to his battered radio, which tells him what the former
leader is thinking.

The hurricane has clearly been on Mr. Castro's mind. In his day, he would
appear on television from the country's hurricane command center and give
running commentary on the incoming storm's wind speed and potential for
destruction. After the winds had quieted, he would rush to lead the cleanup.

Recently, Mr. Castro has issued a storm of commentaries about the storms,
overshadowing in some ways the more contained remarks his brother made
during a trip to affected regions on Sept. 17, which some have pointed out
was more than two weeks after the first hurricane hit.

"I didn't see any sullen faces, and when I saw one, I went up to them and
talked to them, and it was because they were at the hospital sick or had
some problem," Raúl Castro said.

Cuba has pointedly turned down several offers of emergency aid from the
United States, and no one has been more vocal than Fidel Castro in
explaining why to the population. The assessment team that Washington
initially proposed was a euphemism for spies, he said. The relative pittance
- $100,000 in the first offer and now more than $5 million - came with
strings attached, he insisted. Dignity trumps a politically motivated
handout, he declared.

The Cubans have been holding out for a lifting - even a temporary one - of
the United States embargo to allow them to buy building materials and relief
supplies on the American market. It is not just a pie in the sky idea. After
Hurricane Michelle in 2001 the Cubans began buying agricultural products
from the United States, a loosening of the trade ban that continues to this
day.

As Emilio Triana Ordaz, the Communist Party secretary in Los Palacios, put
it, paraphrasing Fidel Castro: "The United States didn't cause the
hurricane. We know that. But they've been causing damage to our country for
50 years and it's holding us back."

Mr. Ordaz, who also directs the local civil defense committee, boasted about
the efficiency of the pre-storm evacuations, which included gathering people
in havens along with their electrical appliances. Seven people were killed
countrywide in the two storms, a death toll that even Cuba's critics
acknowledge would have been much higher in a country that did not keep
detailed lists of every resident on every block.

"When something awful like this happens, your spirit is on the floor," said
Mr. Ordaz, explaining the banners that remind everyone that even if the
landscape is damaged the political institutions are not. "You're sad. We
want to lift spirits and motivate people to get up and struggle. It's not
the end of the world."

Raúl Castro's fledgling government was under great pressure to institute
changes before the hurricanes hit and that pressure has only grown. In fact,
Mr. Castro sped up his long-planned overhaul of Cuba's agricultural system,
saying he would dole out unused land to those who want to give farming a
try. In the days since the hurricane, thousands of applications have been
accepted and land giveaways have begun.

"The country is going through difficult times and this is a way to help,"
said one of those future farmers, Rolando Pérez Estupiñán, as local
Communist Party officials looked on and nodded with encouragement at his
revolutionary fervor. He said nothing about his opportunity to make a profit
on any extra food he produces after paying off the state for seeds and other
farming materials, which is part of the plan.

"These storms have been catastrophic," said Jürgen Roth of German Agro
Action, an international aid group working to increase Cuba's food
production, which has fallen by a third over the past decade. "The state has
food reserves, but it is in the coming months when people will begin to feel
this. You can't feed 11 million people with cabbage."

The government has acknowledged the losses but put the best face on them.
"There have been very serious effects, but I can say no Cuban is going to
die of hunger or be abandoned to their fate," said Alcides López, the vice
minister of agriculture.

While some Cubans are grousing about the delay in receiving aid or the small
temporary dwellings where they are now forced to live, it is uncertain to
what degree Cubans blame Raúl Castro.

Some Cuba experts based in the United States are predicting a spike in the
number of Cubans trying to flee to the United States as conditions worsen,
especially since October is typically when the fiercest storms slam into
Cuba. Brian Latell, a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency who
tracks developments in Cuba, went further in a just-published essay:
"Popular anger, perhaps even new forms of lawlessness, are likely to grow."

But Mr. Ordaz shook his head vigorously when he heard that. He said his
walks through the neighborhoods of Los Palacios, where most of the homes
suffered some damage, had given him no cause for concern.

"We know things are tougher there in the U.S. right now," he said, referring
to the financial crisis in the heart of capitalism on Wall Street.

As for an exodus, he said: "People aren't leaving. We know every time
someone goes, and"-making a zero with his fingers - "this many have gone."

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WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
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