She discovered that as Cubans have experienced, theEFF’s utopian dream is nightmarish. Those who can leave the country; those who can’t jostle each other to acquire tourist-generated CUCs by serving tourists as waiters, maids or taxi drivers. Cuba’s socialist agendahas stagnated economic growth and delivered its highly educated population to financial penury.

Haape urges Malema and anyone else who buys into the EFF’s economic claptrap to follow in her footsteps. Like nearby Venezuela, Cuba is a broken country. And a breathing example of what awaits South Africa if it allows the failed Castro/Chavez example to be repeated. – Alec Hogg

By Melanie Haape*

During US President Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba last month, a glimmer of hope shone: talk focused on the Castro era seeing an end, and being superceded by a younger, more market-driven leadership.

But hopes were dashed this week when the revolutionary vanguard announced that 84-year-old Raul Castro (Fidel’s younger brother) is holding onto his post of party secretary for a second term, and several of the other aged revolutionaries will keep their top posts too.

So if the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) Julius Malema is serious about his threat to “crush white monopoly capital”, there’s still time for him to see the results of capital flight up close – both monetary and human.

Mr Malema will get a nasty shock. As romantic and nostalgic as the island is, it’s also broken in every way.  And the slide has been long and slow. Cubans have learnt to queue for hours in the searing heat for bread, potatoes, or to get into their 50’s-style non-computerised banks; it’s very few South Africans that I know who will show such patient resignation if supplies of their own staple foods dry up.

Cuba is rife with shortages, smuggling, and bribery which is also fuelled by its confusing “dual” economy.

Wages and basic foods are paid in Cuban Pesos (average wage is about $20/month with cleaners at about $15 and doctors around $35) and the CUC – the “convertible Peso” equivalent to $1 is used to charge for hotel rooms, “tourist” restaurants – and everything else that the government can scrounge to foot its forex bill – or to pay for the massive bureaucracy needed to spy on citizens and on foreign companies who have joint venture deals to operate there.

Melanie Haape (nee Sergeant) in tourist mode – her visit to Cuba provided some poignant insights on what faces South Africa if the anti-capitalism political leaders are ever elected to employ their Castro/Chavez socialism.

It’s more than 50 years since Che Guevara, Fidel Castro & co. took to arms, and rapidly overthrew the Batista regime, quickly turfing out foreign oil companies and sugar barons. Yes, bad luck came in chunks – like the high sulphur content of Russian oil which damaged the refineries, the absence of spare parts for farm equipment which relegated thousands of tractors to the scrap-heap.

Nuts and bolts didn’t even fit because Russia’s metric system wasn’t compliant with the US’s Imperial system. Not to mention the mass exodus of its citizens.

Cuba has had spells of needing to import even sugar. While SA is not a single-product economy, it’s focus on building shopping malls instead of factories is not indicative of an economy striving to move past being a supplier of raw materials and into more self sufficiency.

Cuba boasts free education for all: SA does not. It was a world-beater in the medical field (boasting the highest average life-expectancy of all third world countries), and medicine is free for all, but today its doctors are emigrating to earn proper salaries while medicine shortages are commonplace.

Locals queue for hours on hard benches in dark halls at hospitals which have “tourism” entrances for sick foreigners. The latter boast clean rooms and VIP service – all payable of course in CUC along with the meds from “international” pharmacies.

Cuba’s government still spends heftily on fighting its many foes, and home Internet is forbidden. Scarce public Wi-Fi hotspots offer an hour online for 2CUC so that young teachers and lawyers are waitering to earn CUC tips rather than working for pitiful Peso salaries. Doctors drive taxis after-hours to earn CUC tips to supplement their pay cheques.

Housing may be cheap, along with water and electricity, but most homes are broken – along with their sewer systems, water pipes and electricity cables. Tap water has been undrinkable for two decades. Since the Raul Castro-led government has allowed citizens to house tourists for meals or overnights, some have managed to patch-up and paint – or they have done it on dollars sent from foreign relatives.

But even then bribes for building permission are commonplace and materials are hard to come by as all imports are handled by the State. Raul’s promised economic reforms have been slow in materialising and their benefits hardly show. Even the hype around Obama’s visit last month got less people on the street than the Rolling Stones concert a few days later.

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Cities like Trinidad, Santiago de Cuba or Cienfuegos are clean and their inner “old-cities” are painted, statues and buildings partly-renovated. But move a few streets out of the touristy, CUC-financed core, and the housing is shanty-style, decorated only by spaghetti cables overhead and filth underfoot.

Thanks to UNESCO’s generosity in many parts of this land, its legendary mix of architecture is being restored, but the sheer anomaly of seeing grand mansions long-ago converted into smelly, over-crowded, ghettos where the homeless live in fear of the building collapsing over their heads, can hardly be Mr Malema’s answer to housing South Africa’s  homeless – or indeed his panacea for a nation which has not concentrated enough on building a solid, educated middle-class.

Cuba’s legendary brain-drain is evident, and even Castro’s stricter rules on doctors’ emigration hasn’t halted the flow of educated 20-40-year-olds fleeing to Spain, Ecuador or the US. The Island now has a negative population growth rate thanks to falling birth rates and emigration.

Another factor which Mr Malema will note is that Cuba has never tried to scrub out its history. Whether that of its aboriginal Taino Inhabitants, Christopher Columbus or the Spanish conquistadors.

Even the oldest statues, monuments, churches and street-names are intact and mostly shining today. Che’s “renaissance” 15-years after the Russian melt-down 25 years ago now shines through with billboards and flags, statues and slogans dotted throughout the land reminding everyone of this revolutionary spirit.

But while school kids are still taken to work on farms as part of their curriculum and to remind them of that revolutionary spirit, many young farmhands are turning their backs to the fields in favour of the mighty CUC. Cowboys are itchy to find jobs at the massive hotels on the Cayo Coco and other islands.

These forex-earning factories which cater largely to visa-friendly nations like Canada or Spain, have become home to Castro’s new army: thousands of waiters, cleaners and bartenders are transported daily from their squalor to these glitzy “Fronts” in old-timer buses spewing the worst kinds of gases into the tropical Cuban air.

It’s now common for Cuban teenagers to listen to the same music played in the discos of Barcelona, while families have old-style CD-players to beam US and Spanish sit-coms – all available cheap on the black-market – to replace the boring state-beamed propagandist news.

In the first quarter of this year, Cuba attracted well-over 1-million tourists. Hotel, coffee and meal prices are comparable to or higher than those in Berlin while state-owned car-hire is way more expensive and almost as unreliable as the inland flights.

The state realised 15 years ago that tourism was its cash-cow, but how long it can pay workers less than $20 a month to serve this often overweight, luxury market and expect ill-paid farmers to produce coffee, sugar and tobacco is questionable.

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Photographing is banned in the tobacco factories and one has “Brave New World” flashbacks as propagandist news and readings are blared from loud speakers to rows of poorly-paid cigar-rollers 8-hours a day.

Just as the massive scar-faced nickel and cobalt-mining area in the lush rainforests of Moa are no-stop and no-photography areas for braver tourists wanting to travel inland. Cuba has its half-century of brain-washing propaganda and control firmly entrenched in its population: SA has not. Cuba is forced to allow its citizens to travel in dangerous buses, trucks and cars where SA has seat-belt and other regulations governing its road-users.

If Mr Malema wishes to look further and compare Cuba’s development with that of the former East Germany, he may also get some surprises. At the end of the Cold War, Russia’s rapid retreat from Cuba’s economy, along with the US’s heightened sanctions (eg forbidding relatives to send over cash) were dark-years indeed for the island’s inhabitants.

The former DDR, by comparison, received more than €400bn in renovations, modernization and other aid from the former West Germany.

Today, I live near Berlin, in the old DDR and have witnessed the regeneration of cities and towns in this area which hosted almost the same population number as Cuba’s.

The most modern telecoms networks, highways and sewerage systems took over from the broken post-WWII relics left behind. The ex-DDR has, nevertheless, still battled to compete with job-creation for youngsters and only after more than two decades sees some areas coming into their own.

And even the old DDR has not attempted to blot out its history. Streets, statues and buildings are restored.  Festivals and traditions which the communists introduced are still practiced today.

West Germany did not need to “chase” big money anywhere: the money and the keen kids followed the markets. Smart, high-tech factories built in the DDR to replace their dilapidated forbears were soon dismantled and auctioned to companies in the West which had educated labour forces to run them.

Big money, as SA has seen itself, finds its own way to “move”, and while the jury’s out on how long the Castros can hold onto Cuba’s status quo, the population has started voting with its feet – either through emigration or by serving tourists to earn “hard-currency” CUCs.

• Born in Zambia, Melanie Sergeant-Haape grew up in Botswana before studying at Wits and doing the Argus Cadet Course and joining The Star Finance (where she worked with Biznews’s founder).

After writing and editing at Business Day, the FM and several other leading publications in SA and overseas, she left for Germany where she has lived and worked for 20 years. Today she travels widely and remains an astute observer of environmental and international affairs. She is the sister of incomparable investigative journalist Barry and wrote this piece for Biznews during her visit to Cuba this month.