Fidel: Happy Days Are Here Again

In Series Of Speeches, Castro Promises Cubans A Better Life

(CBS) 
A major breakdown at just one plant last year inflicted five and six hour daily blackouts, resulting in spoiled food and short tempers in this Caribbean island, where temperatures hover in high eighties year round. So one Cuban now opined, "So much trouble with the electricity and you're talking about electric rice pots!"

Castro insists there will be more than enough electricity to meet demands. Improved trade deals with Venezuela and China, increased nickel and cobalt production with both the Chinese and the Canadian company Sherritt International, and the recent discovery of oil deposits off the island's western coast, were cited by Castro as being behind the economic advances making the improvements possible.

Other opinions read by the Comandante included: "Fidel is crazy if he thinks he will solve the housing problem"; "What Fidel says we're going to get is fine but I'd prefer cooking oil and soap", a reference to items that disappeared from the shelves in the early 1990s and which for years have only been available at special stores in U.S. dollars; and "He talks about chocolate when what we need is food".

Weighing in on the side of the critics is Cuban-American scholar Marifeli Perez Stable who has written extensively on the Revolution.

"None of the good news is coming from within the Cuban economy -- no restructuring, a return to centralization, a peso revaluation that has nothing to do with reality - and, instead, is originating in Venezuela's oil and supposedly splendid accords with China," she says. "Sure, ECLA is projecting a 5 percent growth this year but that's pretty meaningless if the bodegas [grocery stores] are still rationed and what average Cubans can buy with pesos is either scarce or overpriced. When Cuban women can get a week's groceries and other necessities in peso stores without sweating it out, then five percent growth will be meaningful."

Castro says that's exactly what he's doing, making life easier for the average woman, which is one of the reasons he began making his announcements on International Women's Day.

Boosting the value of the peso and importing everything from more foodstuffs to the much mentioned pressure cookers will mean that people won't be so dependent on shops that only take the Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC), introduced in 1994.

From 1994 until nearly the end of 2004, three currencies circulated in Cuba. One was the U.S. dollar whose circulation Castro was reluctantly forced by the depths of the economic crisis to approve in 1993. The other was the CUC, more commonly called the chavito or play money. Those two could be used interchangeably and had a one-to-one value on the island, although the CUC has absolutely no value abroad.

The original Cuban peso remained the "official" currency with which the Cuban States pays workers and which were and continue to be used in the poorly stocked groceries and pharmacies, to pay rent, utility bills, for movie and theater tickets or sports events, among other things.