Capitol Words a project of the Sunlight Foundation

Rep. Albio Sires

Mr. Speaker, I submit the following regarding the culture of poverty in Cuba under the Castro regime.

The Fidel-&-Raul Castro regime marks 53 years this Jan. 1. The brothers unquestionably enjoyed extraordinary popularity in 1959, but the enthusiasm soon vanished as they turned Cuba into a financially and spiritually bankrupt Marxist anti- utopia. As a result, nearly two million Cubans of all social backgrounds have fled, many of them settling in Hudson County. By the 1950s, Cuba was a regional leader in numerous social indicators, notwithstanding instability and corruption during the republican era (1902-1958). But since 1959 the island- nation has become a backward, closed society beleaguered by unproductivity and rationing. Sociologist Tomas Masaryk noted that ``dictators `look good' until the last minutes''; in Cuba's case, it seems particularly fine to certain U.S. intellectuals. Comfortably from abroad, apologists contend that most of the socioeconomic problems that traditionally afflicted the prior five and a half decades were eliminated after 1959. Yet, fact-finding by international social-scientists challenges this fantasy. An early, little-known account uncovering some effects of the Castros' regimentation came from research in Cuba in 1969-'70 by U.S. cultural-anthropologists Oscar Lewis and Douglas Butterworth. They intended to test Lewis' theory that a culture of poverty would not exist in a Marxist-oriented society. They had naively presupposed that the socially alienating conditions that engender such phenomena could develop among the poor solely under capitalism. The Lewis-Butterworth early on-the-ground scrutiny validates many accounts by respected experts and the much vilified exiles. There exists a culture of poverty in Cuba, although it is not necessarily a survivor of the old times, but seemingly a by-product of the Castros' totalitarian socialism. There were always poor Cubans, and some version of the culture of poverty might have existed before; but in my communications with Butterworth, he reconfirmed another discovery. The researchers could not document a case for a pervasive pre-1959 culture of poverty. The authorities must have suspected the prospective conclusions because the scholars were abruptly expelled and their Cuban statistician imprisoned. Upon the 53rd anniversary, the old Lewis-Butterworth analysis invites renewed reflection. Apologists customarily replicate propagandistic cliches by blaming failures on external factors, such as the ending, two decades ago, of the multibillion-dollar subsidies from the defunct Soviet Bloc. The anthropologists' undertaking, however, revealed that life for average Cubans in the Castros' first decade was already beset with corruption and time-wasting food lines. Likewise, Butterworth described how ordinary people were engaging in what sociobehavioral scientists now call ``everyday forms of resistance.'' Cubans were already undermining the police-state through black-marketeering, pilfering and vandalism, as we hear that they continue to do decades later. After more than half a century of oppression and poor quality of life, one hopes for a transition to an open society with equal opportunities for every Cuban.