The American media may be salivating about Obama's "historic" trip to Cuba - since no previous American president has seen fit to so legitimize that nation's despotic communist regime - but it will take a lot more propaganda to convince Cuba's long-time victims of communism that Obama's visit is anything to get excited about:
The Obama policy has specifically targeted Cuba's small but growing private sector with measures such as allowing sales of farm and construction equipment for non-state enterprises.
Private-sector workers already enjoy advantages over those at the bottom of the income ladder, who must survive on meager state salaries and rations.
These low-paid workers feel left behind as prices rise, and see Obama's visit as far removed from their difficult lives.
"He'll come, take a ride in a vintage car and smoke a cigar - then he's gone," said Alberto Hernandez, a Afro-Cuban street sweeper, whose salary of 240 Cuban pesos a month, about $10, makes it hard to afford basics like toothpaste, he said.
Like many in Cuba, Hernandez remembers the most prosperous era to be the 1980s, when the Soviet Union still funded the Communist-led island. In contrast, even fervent supporters of Obama in the city see the ongoing U.S. embargo as a leading cause of poverty.
What's funny about this story is that Reuters is basically regurgitating propaganda as filtered through people who haven't been allowed to hear truth for more than half a century. Not many Cubans who are alive today remember a time when Cuba wasn't under Castro's control, so their entire frame of reference is is a communist one. Good times were when the money was flowing from Moscow. Bad times are when it stopped. The problem all along has been those ugly Americans with their mean, nasty embargo. It's never been corruption on the part of the Castro regime. It's never been the inescapable poverty of the communist system. It's always been whoever refuses to support that system, because if only meanies like America wouldn't do that, then communism would work swimmingly every time.
As for this business about a burgeoning "private sector" that does so much better than those on the government payroll, I'd say it remains to be see just how private this sector is and how well it's really doing - but anyone could have told you that the emergence of a real private sector free of government control would be the answer to Cuba's decades-long misery. If that's the result of the U.S. ending the embargo, it might be the one good thing that comes of it. But given Obama's disdain for the private sector in his own country you can hardly give him credit for being some sort of capitalist hero - and the Cuban people don't appear fooled by any such notion either.
The only thing that's really going to put Cuba on the right track is getting rid of the Castros for good - and Obama clearly has no interest in doing anything to make that happen. It would be ironic if whatever free-market capitalism he has unleashed on Cuba now does the job for him. Then again, much to the surprise of Democrats, free-market capitalism is how most problems are solved.
