All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Uh, I had no idea about this, but for some reason, I'm just not surprised at all.
In Eric Margulies bookcase and his copy of a farewell to arms.
It's inscribed to Eric, the painter from his friend, Ernest Hemingway, Havana, 1952.
Eric Margulies, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Thank you, Scott.
I'll tell you how I'm doing.
I'm feeling very old today.
When you say me in Havana, even before Castro, I'm beginning to feel like Methuselah, but yes, I was there.
I remember pre-revolutionary Cuba and I vividly remember Ernest Hemingway.
It's a big burly man with a big bushy beard, gray beard.
And yeah, you say in here that your parents used to hang out with him and meet him for drinks at the bar down there.
That's right.
They used to go to the Florida Bar, which was a big hotspot in those days.
And there are most nights and the daiquiris were just coming into the world's knowledge then.
And the daiquiri was invented there and they would sit sipping daiquiris with Hemingway and with his girlfriend, Pilar, dark haired, busty woman, and talking.
And my father was a great raconteur and he was in the theater at the time.
So I remember him.
He was a very nice man.
Wow, that's really cool.
All right.
So I like that about your, well, your take on all kinds of different issues.
You always have a historical background to the story that so many other reporters and columnists lack.
And a lot of that, I don't know much about your dad, but you told us before about your mother and how after World War II, she went, I think, by herself, you said, right?
Unprecedented and toured all around the Middle East, making friends with people and writing about politics and all the various nations through the post-colonial era and all kinds of craziness, right?
You're right, Scott.
You have an excellent memory.
My father was also a very interesting character as a businessman and a Broadway producer in New York, owner of New York's best restaurant, the Café Chambord, a world traveler, a true man of the world.
To him, I owe my being introduced to the world and taken to all these places and becoming like him, a sophisticated.
Yes, you're very, very sophisticated.
So tell us about your, tell us about your recent trip to Cuba.
Well, I've been going to Cuba regularly over the last, oh, I'd say 10, 15 years.
And I haven't been there before.
Do you have to be a journalist to get away with that or anybody can go?
Well, I thought there was a problem.
Scott, it's murky.
The U.S. government, in its wisdom, says that thou shalt not go to Cuba.
But I think it is thou shall not spend any money in Cuba because you violate Treasury Department regulations.
So I think you can go there as an American if you don't spend any money.
That's one item.
Two, I was told in Cuba between 100 and up to 400,000 Americans a year are going to Cuba surreptitiously either via Jamaica, via the Bahamas, Mexico, or most conveniently via Canada.
And that's what?
To smuggle money into their family, that kind of thing?
There are Cuban-Americans, and they're allowed to go now.
President Obama eased things up a little bit so that there can be family visits and money can be sent.
But for the ordinary American like me, unless you're a journalist, it's a no-no to go to Cuba, and you can't be fined.
But you know, so many Americans are sneaking there because Cuba's a wonderful, beautiful island.
The Cubans are very nice people, and it's a really fun place to go.
And it's forbidden, so it makes it all the more fun and exotic.
Well, I saw this article.
It was pretty incredible.
The other day in the newspaper, it was about a guy who had a black market barbershop, and now they legalized it.
And so he is able to, I guess, pay through the nose, relatively speaking, for his license to cut hair.
And so now he's a legal and regulated barbershop.
He makes $25 a month profit.
And then so I was joking to the leftist in the audience about whether that $25 is really owed back to the people of Cuba and whether he's stealing that $25 from them or not.
But anyway, the point being that, well, like you say, as the headline of your article here, Cuba is starting to come alive.
That is, people are, to a greater degree now, allowed to own property and trade in it.
Is that correct?
That is correct, but still in a very limited, cumbersome, and convoluted way.
It is very close to what I saw in Moscow in 1989, 1990, where people were suddenly allowed to buy apartments, but ownership of title papers were murky.
And who owned it?
Was it the city?
Was it the state?
Was it the region?
I think it's still not clear in Russia, and it won't be clear for a long time in Cuba, too.
Foreigners are not allowed to own property there.
But things are starting to gel, but it's going to be quite a while before real private capitalist ownership is allowed.
But now they have begun to lighten up on cell phones and computers and these kinds of things a little bit, huh?
They have, indeed.
You know, Raúl Castro, after Fidel withdrew and Raúl came into power, he started making reforms, but they were very tepid.
Reforms.
People expected a lot.
It didn't happen.
He's easing up a little, and I know the old guard, the Communist Party, these old dinosaurs who run the place, are frightened that if you let up a little too much, the whole place is going to blow wide open.
They saw it happen in Eastern Europe, for example.
But certain reforms have been made, mostly allowing, kicking people off the government payroll, pension in Washington, D.C., and allowing them to go into small commerce, like opening up small restaurants, as you mentioned, your barber, doing stuff like that.
And trivial as it sounds, it has made an important effect, because you can see economic life coming back to Havana and Cuba, and it's made a marked improvement in the quality of services available, including restaurants.
Well, now, really, the United States has put the people of Cuba in between a rock and a hard place type of situation there.
As you say, this is the price that they pay for their independence from America, and it's really too bad, because, of course, if, for example, it was legal for Americans to invest there, it wouldn't just be a matter of free Americans going and investing in voluntary exchange.
It would be politically connected banks and corporations going in there and raping the whole place, like back in the day when our loyal puppets ran the thing, which caused all the communist revolution in the first place.
A rigged game, nothing free market about it.
So you can see why at least some people would have bought all this time the idea that they have to resort to this, because at least they get to keep the American gangsters and their gangsters out.
Well, you know, it's going to be very difficult to retain the old communist orthodoxy in Cuba.
The people who run it are now in their 70s and 80s, and they're not going to last much longer.
Raul is spring chicken, 81 years old.
It's pretty good shape, but we thought they'd bring in a lot of younger communist party people, more reform mind.
But in fact, the next level down below Fidel and Raul was purged, and they brought up a bunch of old fossils.
So they're very aware that all the things they've tried to create in Cuba about selflessness and socialist society and equality of everybody, et cetera, et cetera, is going to last about a week the minute money is allowed, big money is allowed into Cuba.
Not just the Americans, not just the Miami Cubans, but the Europeans are also eager to get in there, too, and Mexicans.
So it's going to be a gold rush.
Yeah.
Well, sooner or later, I guess it's coming.
But yeah, communism, it's a funny thing.
You know, my wife is from the USSR where everything is free and you get nothing, nothing.
And that's pretty much how they live in Cuba, have been living.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Eric Margulies after this.
It's anti-war radio on LRN.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, because that's how it's spelled.
A lot of times I say it wrong anyway, after all these years still.
Right.
That's fine.
Oh, well, good.
All right.
So we're talking about Cuba.
Eric just got back from there.
And I guess the question isn't you ask this, too.
You know, we're basically when is Fidel going to die and how far will his brother go after he dies?
Like maybe they got a personal thing where, you know, don't don't let people own too much, at least not yet.
And then once he's dead, maybe his brother can liberalize things a little bit more.
We're going to have to wait till he and all the other old fossils die off before the people of Cuba are allowed to.
And you know what?
Like in Mexico, Americans can't own property in Mexico either.
Right.
So you could have friendly, open relations with America and and allow the people of Cuba to sell their property to each other or to other foreigners, just not Americans and still have, you know, things to be pretty acceptable.
Right.
Yeah.
But what will happen is that Americans will then go into partnership or hire a local Cuban to buy the property.
So they're generally their ways around those kind of restrictions.
Still, it'll help.
The restrictions will help prevent a free for all way.
You know, Cuba is just barely keeping its head above water now.
Cuba was it was about to sink after the collapse of the Soviet Union because Cuba had become really a Soviet satellite state and sold sugar at inflated prices to the Soviets.
Soviets almost gave oil to Cuba, which some of which have been resold.
That kept Cuba going.
In fact, at one point, Scott, the Cubans had enough money to send an army of 400000 men, if you can imagine that, out of a population of 12 million.
And they had 100000 troops at one point in Africa.
I remember this because I was fighting in Angola, Cuban Foreign Legion in Angola.
I was with the anti-communist forces of General Savimbi in Angola fighting the Cubans.
So they were all they were in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, Congo, et cetera.
So they were all over the place.
But then when the Soviets collapsed, the Cubans almost went down with them and were only and were forced to start plowing with oxen and wooden plows and walking.
I mean, the country almost went back to the 18th century.
It had not been for Colonel Chavez in Venezuela, a great admirer of Fidel Castro.
Venezuela came and rescued Cuba just in the nick of time.
Well, and now you know what?
I wonder if, say, I was running things in D.C. and I just, you know, I don't know, vetoed or sunsetted or executive ordered out of existence the entire embargo and just completely opened up and got rid of all restrictions on trade between Americans and Cubans, between, you know, even America and Cuba, as far as that goes, you know, with states and things that they trade, mostly weapons, I guess.
If we just open up everything with them, would that itself not just be the biggest blow to communism there?
That just I mean, how could they withstand all this private capital coming?
They couldn't.
It would be a big tsunami that would sweep away the old order because they do have some crops for export and that kind of thing.
Right.
If America could be their customer in trade.
In fact, never mind one of the crazy thing I said about the government to government transfers.
But just if you let the people of America and Cuba trade with each other.
Well, Cuba export used to export a lot of sugar was the world's one spot that was the world's largest sugar producer.
But the sugar lobby in Florida, which is wired into the Republican Party, has virtually banned all exports of sugar, not just from Cuba, but from other West Indian countries.
Cuba may eventually produce hydroponic agriculture and things like that.
They have some high tech plants, but not enough.
But, you know, an ironic point, Scott, is that the United States, while huffing and puffing about the evils of communism in Cuba, we won't do business with them.
Quietly, the U.S. sells a couple hundred million dollars a year of agricultural produce to Cuba.
And it comes from Republican Midwestern states that seem to that have gotten around the ban officially through Washington with political pressure.
So it's even more shocking.
Well, that's directly against the whole theory of the embargo.
Right.
Is that to trade anything with them is to help Cuban society at all or trade or or make Cuban society more wealthy at all is to prop up the communist regime to the detriment of those poor Cuban people.
That's right.
That's how they sell it anyway.
Right.
It's been it's not it's labeled a humanitarian trade.
And, you know, like we have a humanitarian invasions these days.
That's the big, you know, carte blanche to do whatever you want.
But, you know, the really the the Cuban American community in Florida, which is enormously powerful politically because it dominates and to an extent to where the state goes electorally and particularly in this year is still rabid about Cuba.
I mean, these people are angry.
They've lost all their properties.
They were run out.
Some of their relatives were killed.
I can understand why they're angry and they don't want to have any any opening to Cuba, even though a younger generation in Florida is beginning to change their tune.
The hardline Cuban lobby there is has dominated, hijacked American policy towards Cuba, just as the the Israel lobby has more or less taken over American policy in the Middle East.
So it's we're frozen in time.
And that's all that changes.
It's very hard to see because no American congressman or senator going to stick his neck out to open up trade with Cuba and get a lot of flack from the Miami Cubans.
Yeah.
I like how Ron Paul went to that presidential debate in Florida and gave him a big lecture about how we ought to legalize Cuba.
And the place was just silent and he just kept going on anyway.
Well, here's why you ought to agree with me.
Great man.
Great man.
The only one with cojones, as they say in Spanish.
We had hoped a few foolish optimists like myself had hoped that President Obama, when he came into office, one of the first things he would do is not only close down that horror place of Guantanamo in Cuba, but normalize relations with Cuba.
But with his usual lack of resolve, he didn't.
All right.
Well, now, isn't Fidel Castro 90 something?
And when is he going to die anyway?
Well, Cuba has very advanced medicine and they seem to be keeping him going.
Colonel Chavez happens to be in Havana, I think, now having his cancer treated.
So, but Castro is very ill.
He has very little energy.
And ironically, he seems to be enjoying more being a journalist than a leader, because he writes in newspaper and observations every day and reminiscences.
But he's very old.
It's hard to see who's really running Cuba beyond the gerontology now at the helm.
Well, and now, do they have that whole Middle Eastern demographic thing where the vast majority of the population is under 30 now and that kind of deal or not?
Well, no, no, they don't, Scott, because Cuba has a very strange problem, and that is the population is actually shrinking.
Cubans are moving out of Cuba as fast as they can to escape the dire poverty in Cuba, hardships there.
I visited people who lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building where the elevator didn't work and there was no water.
They had to carry buckets of water upstairs because everything was broken.
That's how tough things are.
So people are moving out and people aren't having as many babies because it's just too hard bringing up children.
So the population has gone from 12 million to about 11.2 million and is shrinking and aging.
I guess I always thought when people are poor and worse off, that's when they have more kids in the hope that at least working together, we can have one good place to stay in and meals to eat, you know, that kind of thing.
That's not the case in Cuba.
By the way, I should mention another major Cuban export are physicians.
Cuba's trading for Venezuela, for example, for Venezuelan oil.
I think Cuba has 20,000 doctors, something in Venezuela, doctors to Jamaica, all over Central America.
Major export of health.
Well, so the problem isn't their life expectancy isn't shorter just from all the poverty.
I mean, beyond what the health care, free health care can make up for.
No, Scott, nobody's starving in Cuba.
The government has subsidized food and food distribution and things like that.
So everybody's poor except for some of the Communist Party bigwigs.
But they all have just enough.
They all have just enough.
They have enough.
They have good education, probably better than we do in the States.
They have.
Well, but that's cheating.
Come on.
Everything's better than here.
Well, and they have had good medical system, except it's deteriorating now because of lack of funds and money and they can't get foreign drugs in many cases.
You know what?
That always sounded to me like it must be a bunch of propaganda, though.
Why should socialism work real well when it comes to Cuban health care?
I mean, there must be isolated examples of it being good.
But is it really good for the majority of people?
I think it's been over exaggerated how good it is as part of the romanticism of the Castro revolution.
It certainly has been exaggerated.
But nevertheless, Cuba has a decent standard of living in spite of everything.
They're very poor.
But, you know, before Castro, I believe that Cuba's standard of living was almost as high as certain parts of the United States.
So it wasn't that Cuba came from nothing.
But the point is that the communist system is so ossified by regulation and bureaucracy and corruption and paying everybody off.
Just I know it took me days to get a press pass down there.
Go to A, go to B, go to C.
You don't have the form.
You don't have the paper.
People have done business down there or tear their hair out because they were immediately swarmed by government bureaucrats who all want to take a piece of the action of whatever they're doing.
And they make free enterprise really almost impossible.
Mm hmm.
Well, now you say in the article here, too, that people are less wary of the secret police and informers.
But relative to what?
Like, say, compare between America now or and East Germany in 1988.
Oh, I'm comparing it to my previous trips.
All right.
There's a little more outspokenness.
But, you know, you have to understand a lot of tourists, particularly Canadians, because they're the number one tourists who go to Cuba.
They come and say, oh, Cuba, what do you mean police state?
You don't see any policemen there.
And people are free to walk around, do whatever they want.
Well, that's not the case, because Cuba has followed China or did it on itself.
What they do, every building has a Communist Party building captain.
Every block has a block captain.
Every few blocks has a Communist Party cell.
And so on up in this pyramid structure.
And you're watched constantly by your neighbors, informers, some secret police.
If you do anything wrong or step out of line, you get a black mark in your book.
Everybody has a little, you know, like a report card.
And if you get a black mark for being anti-state element, you can lose your apartment.
You can lose your pensions.
Your parents get kicked out of their apartments.
You can't get medical treatment.
Your kids won't go to the right school.
Life for you could be made absolutely miserable.
So everybody polices themselves and everybody is watching.
It's a fear system that works remarkably well.
China has exactly the same thing.
Wow.
Yeah, that sounds horrible.
Well, how does that compare to, say, East Germany, which is, I guess, you know, the standard, the Stasi evil secret police that, you know, at least conservatives in America could relate to?
Um, East Germany had a lot of secret police and they had, I don't know, 25% of the population who were informers.
But I think Cuba is even a tighter police state than East Germany.
Of course, mind you, Castro claims that there have been over 1,100 attempts to assassinate him.
And there have been over the years, particularly in the past, the U.S. was constantly, or Cuban exiles were constantly trying to cause mayhem in Cuba.
So they're paranoid about security.
But it's and there has not been much of a lessening of force, free speech or political activity.
Well, now, do you think wealth can really change that if we were to open up trade and have, you know, I don't know, a Ron Paul in Cuba policy or something?
How long do you think it would take?
Because it's taken a long time in China, too.
We do a lot of trade with them.
People's standard of living standards of living are a lot higher.
But then again, they still live in that same kind of police state, too.
Doesn't seem to be receding very quickly.
I think if this financial tsunami from the U.S. were allowed to swap Cuba, I think a combination of the Miami Cubans coming over, they're itching to go back there, get their old property, which was confiscated, but also buy up all this beautiful beachfront property and downtown Havana, which is a glorious city.
It's just a museum.
It would be in very quick order.
I've always called the Cubans the aristocrats of the West Indies.
You know, Havana is a city that was founded in 1515, which is over 100 years before my native New York City.
So they're sophisticated.
They're well educated.
They're hard workers.
They're excellent soldiers, as I can attest to.
So I'm sure the Cubans will really they won't be like the East Europeans after communism fell and be sort of brain dead and not know what money is and not know what to do.
I think you'll see a quick renaissance in Cuba.
All right.
Well, listen, I got to thank you very much for your time.
It's a subject that you can tell I don't know enough about it to ask very good questions, but I always like to learn about it and even bring up the topic for people who, you know, just never had cause to think about it.
We still have this embargo left over against this little island nation right off our coast left over from decades and decades ago.
While we trade with the communist China and are in bed with them, we won't trade with the wicked communist Cubans.
Well, it may have made sense in the 1960s, Scott, when the Russians were their big time and there were missiles pointed at the US from Cuba.
But today there's no sense to it at all, except for sleazy Florida politics.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Eric Margulies dot com.
Everybody.
Cuba starts to come alive by Eric Scott.
Appreciate it.
