Castro's Revolution Turns 50

Fidel Castro's first military strike against the former regime of Fulgencio Batista, was the 1953 assault on the dictatorship's largest military barracks in eastern , not far from where Raul Castro will address a rally of government loyalists Thursday evening in a celebration of 50 years of revolutionary rule under Castro, who came to power on Jan. 1, 1959.

"We went to the Moncada with the goal of achieving a new Cuba, of eradicating all the bad things that existed-the corruption, the swindling, the gangsters, the total control foreigners had over Cuba ," Ramon Pez Ferro, who as an 18 year-old, fought alongside the Castro brothers in that armed action, tells CBS News Producer Portia Siegelbaum.

"We thought we had to overthrow Batista's bloody dictatorship and transform things in Cuba. But we have gone far beyond what we were thinking at the time of the Moncada. And I believe it's been for the best," says Pez Ferro who today heads the International Relations Department of the Cuban Parliament.

"I think we have reason to be satisfied after 50 years," he says, adding that the Revolution's achievements give meaning to the deaths of 70 "excellent comrades" who were slaughtered by Batista soldiers.

"We could have done much more in this time, could have gone much further in terms of achievements, of economic and social development," he notes, "but the Revolution has come up against a tremendous number of obstacles, not the least being the attitude taken by the United States, a very powerful and nearby country."

The United States economic and trade embargo which is also nearing its 50 birthday has failed to depose the Castro government but scholars and analysts believe it has held back development and change on the island.

"To me the question is what would have happened if the U.S. would have accepted the revolution? What would Cuba be today? And, and could the U.S. at this point in fact be willing to normalize relations and what might be the consequences for both countries if that were to occur," asks Nelson Valdes, a Professor at the University of New Mexico, Cuba scholar and also a Cuban American.

In 1961, Valdes, then 15, was put on a plane to the United States by his stepfather. He one of more than 14,000 children whose parents thought separation was better than raising their offspring under a Communist government which reportedly was going to take away their children and send them to Moscow to be indoctrinated, among other groundless rumors.

It was 16 years before he would return to the island and much had changed in the interval. While Valdes casts a more critical eye than Pez Ferro, he warns foreigners visiting Cuba not to jump to assumptions about what they see.

People are mistaken when they look at old, deteriorated buildings in the capital, buildings that had been gorgeous in the '50s and assume that their residents are also down and outs, says Valdes.

"If you go and look at the people than you encounter a human and social capital that was not there before. And I think this is the main problem that we often find when people come to Cuba. Because usually run-down buildings elsewhere also have run-down people-people who don't have an education, don't have the cultural level you might say and what is odd in the Cuban case is that you can have physicists and doctors living in buildings in which there is no running water," he points out.

It would be hard to dispute the fact that the Cuban population today is a highly educated one thanks to the Revolution's establishment of free education running from primary school through the university, whether you're studying literature, civil engineering or medicine.

And while the Cuban Government has cracked down on dissident groups it sees linked to the United States and heavy-handedly discourages criticism of the socialist system and government, one thing I have learned in several decades of covering Cuba, is that the average Cuban complains all the time.

You can hear them at bus stops, in coffee shops, over the clink of dominos and certainly any doctor or physicist living in a building without running water is complaining.

"It is impossible to think that with so many Cubans going to class, reading books and learning and that they don't think, they don't think with their own heads. And they think that they have rights and those rights include the rights to education, to health, to have a house, to have a job and to be able to travel, to be able to use all those capacities they have developed," says Rafael Hernandez, a sociologist and editor of the sometimes polemical magazine Temas, funded among others by a Norwegian NGO.

And for Hernandez the 50th anniversary "is a celebration about the Cuban society, about how Cuba has reached throughout all these years independence, sovereignty, dignity-the sense of citizenship has been strengthened tremendously and a fierce sentiment, a fierce feeling of national pride. This is about all that."

Still he admits that one of Cuba's many problems today is a labor force that either works half-heartedly or doesn't either work at all. "A new, more disciplined, strict work ethic is needed."

At the year-end parliament session last week it was said that there are 186,000 Cubans of working age who neither have a job nor are enrolled in school. Most people here feel that number is conservative.

Turning this situation around is an uphill battle. As long as doctors, white collar workers, teachers and factory workers feel they are underpaid, there will be frustration and often, a turn to illegal or black market activities. They justify this by pointing out their salaries simply don't cover their basic needs, mostly a reference to food, clothing and utilities, since rents are low and a high 85 percent of the population owns their own homes, mortgage-free.

In his closing remarks to Parliament, President Raul Castro said austerity measures would have to be taken, including cutting freebies for workers.

A program giving free vacations to reward good workers, which cost the government some $60 million a year, will be nixed. Cubans also receive heavily subsidized rations of basic food items that last about 15 days. Transportation and, of course, free education and health care are also tremendous drains on the state budget.

But Cubans struggling to get by on government salaries did not welcome the announcement. A university professor and single mom tells me she is thinking about learning how to crochet so that she can supplement her income by making and selling sweaters and other items. She is close to tears as she speaks of the struggle to keep her three children fed and in shoes. If prices of necessary food items were to go up, she says, it would be the end of her. I'm not using her name because I don't have her permission to share her story.

But this woman, like many of my neighbors, is resentful that the Cuban pesos in which they are paid are not valid in all shops and restaurants. The dual currency existing in Cuba since 1993 is a sore point with all Cubans who need the cooking oil, bath soap and other items available only in convertible currency stores.

The government is reeling from a horrendous hurricane season in which three storms raged from one end of the island to another, wiping out nearly a third of the food crops and partially or totally destroying the homes of some 500,000 people. The official damage estimate is nearly $10 billion. On top of this, the price of Cuba's main export, nickel, has dropped over 40 percent

So the issue for the cash-strapped government is how to provide incentive to workers in all sectors of the economy. In a bid earlier in 2008 to raise agricultural production and replace imports, farmers were offered more land, easier access to farm implements and higher prices for their products, such as milk. The measures appeared to be working but then Hurricanes Ike, Gustav and Paloma set the process back by at least six months to a year.

Maggie Alarcon, a translator and daughter of Parliament President Ricardo Alarcon, lived for over a decade in the United States when her father was Ambassador to the United Nations. She says both societies have good aspects and can learn from each other. Asked what Cubans could learn from the U.S. she replies,

"I think a more conscientious sentiment of the work force. I think people here in Cuba need to appreciate a little bit more their job, the time spent on their job. I think one of the biggest errors in a socialist system with so many guarantees is that people tend to take education, health care, housing, utilities for granted and then they end up becoming complacent because everything is there and then the economy on the island in this country, this system tends to suffer because the government has to end up taking care of certain issues. In the United States people tend not to take their job for granted, people there work."

Will his latest belt-tightening measures reduce his apparent popularity? Hernandez thinks not but he also thinks Cubans are "not ready to wait forever."

"I think Raul is completely aware of that because he talks about that when he speaks, the need to go on, the need to take decisions, the need to introduce changes, not any kind of changes but changes that are clearly influencing and improving people's lives," says Hernandez. "It is not just about beans, it's not just about food, it's not just about transportation, it is not just even about housing, which is a key, critical question. It is also about people believing that they are participating and their views are taken into account."

The Cuban Revolution has outlived nine American presidencies and is about to outlive the tenth. There is some optimism among the population, if not the government, that the new Obama administration will be different, less hostile and more open to the island just 90 miles off its shores.

Valdes thinks Cuba would, in fact, be a more open society were relations between the two countries to normalize.

"U.S. policy has had unintended consequences," he says. "Usually it's tough as a way to change them. Actually the way to change the domestic situation in Cuba is to allow a much more normal relation. Then the surrounded fortress mentality would have to be replaced by something else."

President-elect Obama has said he will reverse the restrictions imposed by the Bush White House in 2004 limiting Cuban-American family visits to just one every three years and also limiting the amount of money they can send to relatives on the island. But he has said he will maintain, for the time being, the economic and trade embargo.

Maggie Alarcon, like many ordinary Cubans, says it's time to lift the embargo and to allow "all Americans", not just Cuban Americans, to visit Cuba freely. "Just lift the whole thing, have Cubans go up to the United States and have Cubans come down here."

But like the Cuban Government, Hernandez warns not to expect too much when the new President moves into the White House. "We have had Democratic presidents before, nothing happened, nothing substantial happened."

The poor relations between the United States and Cuba are an exception not the rule, he points out, adding, "We have more relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. We have more relations with Canada, with the European Union; we have more relations with Africa and Asia and other countries including Russia and China. Cuba is less isolated than ever."