Fernando Ravsberg

One of the greatest challenges the Cuban nation will likely face in the future involves the sphere of culture. The normalization of relations with the United Sates – a cultural force to be reckoned with – involves great benefits but also enormous risks.

Havana’s Ameijeiras Hospital looks like an enormous wholesale yard selling building materials. The employees of the company repairing the building offer to sell just about anything, from cement to wash basins – all new and top quality, claim the would-be vendors.

Watching the congresses held by different Cuban grassroots organizations made me recall an experience I had at Havana’s Lenin Vocational School. It had to do with leadership, natural born leaders and those leaders appointed on the basis of single lists that had been drawn up by “the powers that be.”

To openly acknowledge that these new relations between the United States and Cuba aim to “reach the objectives that those who supported the embargo had” (AKA regime change), is rather arrogant and continues to underestimate Cuba.

In these changing times in US-Cuba relations, Fernando Ravsberg notes the practical effects of the half century US embargo on the island as well as the way the Cuban government has used it for its purposes. Blaming the economic embargo for all of Cuba’s disasters was of course also a tactic used to conceal the failure of many utopian plans that undermined the nation’s economic foundations even more.

Political humor made its way into Cuba without a warning and without asking for permission, joking about things that up until now had been considered untouchable. The initial indignation was understandable.

The correct thing would be to start calling these “public companies,” for they in fact belong to all citizens. When we say they are “State” companies, it would seem the owner were a diffuse, ethereal entity represented by any bureaucrat with a position, a desk, a secretary and a State vehicle.