Pulling Rug From Under Small Entrepreneur, Cuban Capitalism Pretends Protectionism Isn’t Big Business Disguised As Big Government All Over Again

  The New York Times headline Cuba Hits Wall in 2-Year Push to Expand the Private Sector, as written By VICTORIA BURNETT from HAVANA, describes how nearly two years into the Cuban government’s economic overhaul by slashing public payrolls and bolstering private enterprise, reforms have slowed so much that many Cuban entrepreneurs and intellectuals question aging leadership’s ability or will to reshape one of the world’s last Communist systems by supposedly shifting nearly half of the island’s output into private hands.

  Those waiting for any good news received the opposite last week as a little-advertised government decision spread that steep customs duties would be charged on informal imports, from Miami and elsewhere, that have been the lifeblood of many young businesses. Emilio Morales, president of the Miami-based Havana Consulting Group, said, “This could have a huge impact” as state-owned shops in Cuba were losing business to street vendors. “It shows the state isn’t ready to compete with the private sector.”

  Nor should the Cuban government bother appearing to have held out this long trying to not completely betray why the revolution was fought for in the first place, if the country can only proceed as if owned by big business as the United States, Russia and China have by propping up huge business confederates while the small entrepreneur is left with nothing to stand on. Have New Yorkers ridden in owner operated taxi cabs in decades? (Ta da. 2017) It’s possible to even picture Mayor Bloomberg himself laughing about being realistic as to what capitalism has become. And really, he’s quite possibly the nicest guy you’d ever not meet. But do the underpaid Chinese really hope to run their own small shops as the small entrepreneurs of Cuba have tried to do? If in Cuba real grass-roots capitalism is driving state-run business out of business, then let it go. No, a country of citizens’ leverage and independence is what Americans don’t realize they’re no longer fighting for themselves, emulating the whining of some of exclusive corporate America that defines work as the ability to manipulate rather than share.

  So in late 2010 after the Cuban government began allowing people to open businesses, nearly a quarter of a million opted to work for themselves over the past 20 months by opening restaurants, snack bars and makeshift shops. Driving taxis and fixing cellphones. Along with those who took advantage of an earlier experiment with privatization in the 1990s, about 387,000 Cubans, out of a population of about 11 million, are now self-employed. Cubans are also buying and selling homes and cars among themselves for the first time in 50 years. A head start on Miami’s Cuban automotive entrepreneurs who’re still waiting to take over the island before any reliable mass transportation system can take root because an obviously lazy backward government is too comfortable behind their desks to raise a hand and pitch in themselves.

  But as the private sector has grown, so has the deluge of goods brought to Cuba each day in suitcases and duffel bags, principally from Panama, Ecuador, the United States and Spain because there’s no access to a wholesale market. Cubans turn to friends, relatives and so-called mules for everything from food to trinkets to iPhones. This, The Times refers to as “parallel trade” that has ballooned to more than $1 billion per year, Mr. Morales estimates, since the Obama administration began loosening restrictions on travel and remittances in 2009.

  Yunilka Barrios said, “Things seem to be tightening up.” She sells sunglasses, hairbands, nail polish and glittery bra straps from a grimy, narrow doorway, and she was alarmed by the prospect of a 100 percent tax on informal imports that the government indicated go into effect in September.

  Just as big government sanctioned business everywhere limits competition from small entrepreneurs, economists, businesspeople and diplomats believe President Raúl Castro is treading carefully because of resistance from midlevel functionaries reluctant to lose their perks, and conservative officials nervous about the social and political impact of economic enfranchisement.

  As the face of the revolution, the Cuban leader, Raúl Castro has sworn off the “shock therapies” that ruptured the Soviet Union. Saying in a December speech that the government would proceed “without hurry or improvisation, working to overcome the old dogmatic mind-set and correcting any mistakes in a timely fashion.” Instead of realizing perhaps that there’s probably no one to trust so just let it go before big capital corners the country and small business never has a chance though it theoretically has had a two-year head-start. Because the pace of change has been too slow for people like Yelena López de la Paz, who went bust because of competition, lack of experience and low margins. Her snack bar opened on her block last July, and made about $100 profit the first month, selling pizzas, juice from her mother’s homegrown mangos and chewing gum sent by her grandmother in Miami. Then three snack bars nearby opened and by the time she closed in November, Ms. de la Paz was taking home a dollar a day. She said in frustration, “I was investing a lot of money and time and earning nothing.” Just wait until a Wal-Martishist institution starts selling cars to an island that could probably just as efficiently do without that saturation of their economy as the United States allowed to happen when streetcar transit was on the verge before Detroit replaced an already efficient mass-transit system with the overly large vehicle, bus. But that’s okay too as other sources of fuel have been found to economically run over how many more of the world’s innocent?

  Experts say given Cuba’s lack of progress, the government’s pledge in April to move about 40 percent of the country’s output to the citizen sector in five years is less and less plausible. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuban-born professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, said, “At the rate they are going, there is no way they will reach that figure.”

  But with the National Assembly set to meet next Monday, Cubans are anticipating an expansion of the number of co-ops beyond the existing agricultural ones. Separately, the government is turning small, state businesses, including cafes and watch repair shops, over to employees in some provinces. It has lifted a $4 ceiling on the value of contracts between state entities and individuals and is subcontracting work, such as construction, to independent operators. “This is the first time since the 1970s or 1980s that the country has a plan, and this is the first time that there is discipline in implementing the strategy,” said Rafael Betancourt, an economist based in Havana.

  Some who see change slow, remain confident it will happen. “It may be a little frustrating for a spectator,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at theLexington Institute in Virginia, “but it’s not a five-alarm fire.”

  But caution is at odds with Cubans’ urgent needs as Orlando Márquez Hidalgo, editor of the Catholic magazine Palabra Nueva, said recently that if workers laid off by the public sector failed to find other jobs, their “discontent and frustration” would grow, as would “the number of those who dissent or wish to leave. Time is vital,” he said.

  Still the government claims to aim to trim state payrolls by 170,000 this year and add 240,000 private-sector jobs, which is a tough goal considering just 24,000 Cubans took out licenses for self-employment in the first five months of the year. A vice-president of the Council of State, Esteban Lazo Hernández, said in April that private-sector output would grow to between 40 percent and 45 percent of the gross national product in five years, from about 5 percent now.

  And, of course, not all entrepreneurs are struggling. Some restaurants and taxi services are making profits. Carlos Saladrigas, a Cuban-American businessman, said during a Havana visit in March that he knew of people “making a lot of money, even by American standards.”

  In interviews with the Times, a dozen Cuban entrepreneurs said they were making much more than they were in the public sector. However, supplies at state retail stores were expensive and unreliable and they often used the black market to cut their overhead.

  The unidentified owner of a snack bar, describing illegal activity, said hamburger rolls are bought out of the back door of a state-run bakery and meat patties come from a friend who filched ground beef from his employer. One man selling hardware said most came from “Roberto,” a Cuban euphemism for stolen goods. Surely the well-tuned Cuban police and military apparatus is prepared to enter the criminal enterprise system themselves and skim profits from the top and bottom as it has the last fifty years of Cuban government independence from the people.

  For Amarilis Albite Cabezas, a 23-year-old accounting student who runs a busy snack bar in her home in a Havana suburb, the restrictions stem from a continued distrust of individual wealth. That age-old distaste that was used to prevent small capitalism from getting an early foothold in the old Soviet Union. “They just haven’t gotten things organized,” said Ms. Albite, who gave up on a bank loan for a $700 refrigerator because she had to provide two guarantors, each of whom would have had to leave the full amount in escrow until her loan was repaid. She added, “They opened these businesses so that people could survive and so that they, too, would survive. But I don’t think anybody is getting rich. That would be, I don’t know, capitalism.” The farce of resentment of capitalism used to blame the poor for lack of opportunity and laziness. Strike up the violins.

  For the moment, Ms. Barrios is happy in her doorway, taking home $10 to $15 on a good day, after she pays $2 to the neighbor who shares the entrance. She has cut prices to compete and frets about rumors the government may crack down on stalls in passages and entranceways. Cuban elitism that has more in common with big elitist finance all over the world than either sets of leveraged manipulators would ever willingly, publicly admit. As Ms. Barrios fished for change in a pouch at her waist, she said, “I just want to keep this going.”

  Mail Online also documents a survey of Cuban progress while failing to have a contrived possible interview with Fidel Castro himself. Who unfortunately never woke up enough to share America’s partial fault for organized crime’s revenge for losing their elitist economic grip on the island.

  As elitism’s pretending to genuinely care for the masses continues.

  Boo!

7/17/2012

---------------------------------------------------------------

Pulling Rug From Under Small Entrepreneur, Cuban Capitalism Pretends Protectionism Isn’t Big Business Diguised As Big Government All Over Again

7/17/2012 : As elitism’s pretending to genuinely care for the masses continues.

Boo!

December 27, 2017 - January 18, 2018

What The?

  "Elitism’s pretending to genuinely care for the masses" is the most, theoretically, reactionary, leftish statement I've written.  What compelled that statement, was the essay's theme of stifled lower-caste entrepreneurialism. Not exactly just Cuba's problem of their own making. Political positions just seem to be, un-relinquishable, cornered ones breeding an undiluted reactionary-ism all over the world. Convoluted but true.

  Five-and-a-half years since Pulling Rug ... All Over Again, The Economist, September 30, 2017, headlined Clueless on Cuba economy. The communist regime can no longer rely on the generosity of its allies. It has no idea what to do. Still, the starting point's something? 

  It's possible that by trying to not be overwhelmed by other big business, the cracks are too huge for Cuba's political-economic elite not to fall through. Without framework to grasp, there's no big global story about reviving the Cuban Economy.  

  Presumably, the problem's about exact ownership. The gist that everything owned together is more equitable, is brilliant when working. Just as economic activity is preferable to planned privilege. But, still, yet again, questioning leadership's inability to adapt's a cliché. So common, The New York Times even frustratingly covered that aspect of international relations with the Crispin Sartwell political satire, History Totally Destroyed. 

  The Economist Cuba account, (The government “fights wealth, not poverty”, laments one entrepreneur.), includes ration books and poverty level salaries. By supposedly avoiding a ruthless economic transition, poverty's enforced, not faced. Unfulfilled socialism's regulating the economy at stifling proportions to maintain equal status. Unable to spread out everyone's "taste," to everyone's satisfaction, the government's sitting on their hands preventing economic-civil war AND facilitating stagnation. But, please don't give up and abandon the island to asphalted ecosystem destruction. Because phenomenal potential exists. Si?

  Cuba doesn't have systematic agriculture, importing 80% of their food. If ever there were fertile soil for a New Economic Policy? NEP-istas should have Farmers' Markets. There's debt that's unsolvable till pushed to accepting bailouts from the competition. Of course, similar to North Korea's playing the socialist card, anti-communism shrouds the deliberations between the countries and economies. Pandering to embellished public perspective got us this far. Yet getting out of the quagmires, is the test. 
  The Economist piece ends conjecturing about Raul Castro's possible successor, who, while addressing the Communist Party, stated their biggest fear is U.S. domination. The world and U.S. can do better than that. Come on Cuba. Circulate money among yourselves.  
  To repeat: Either economic system, capitalism and socialism, fulfills the other's purpose, or each are wrong in that other way. Capitalism working is socialism. Socialism working, is capitalism. Takes a bunch of geniuses to pretend the riddle's not just nonsense? No, it shouldn't. Just requires the whole world's maturing. Not just one prima donna, though that fantasy exists, unfortunately. 

  Taking another poke at it, here, in the darkened light. It's holding off on the temporary tonic of asphalting the entire island so commerce can fluctuate that's holding Cuba back? The convenient shortcut's ready for implementation. China's step. How could Cuba be faulted for petroleum dependence? We are only three, two, one, generations away from what, poisoning the atmosphere a little too long? Anticipating unknown variables is preferred to depending on them. Perfecting the car's not really needing ourselves anymore? Anyway, the American President, no doubt, already holds this carrot in readiness.

  Because the car's always meant economic growth? Especially since Cuba has no substantial fund for mass transportation. People are prone to over-inflating accomplishments. But look at Moscow's subways? That happened whole generations ago, when the yoke of an exploiting class was modified but reinstated as capitalism for some and duty for others. Free reality, Cuba. Make money before giving yourselves pay raises, just like America's Congress.

  Getting there quicker in cars made sense. As was getting around whatever impediment's in the way. Even in the way of worshipping autos today? The only alternative, taxing them to the moon so the mobile thrones are properly paid for, when over-taxation is never good? But because people have been stuck seeing their mobile thrones, for generations, as their taste of the good life, piece of the pie. 

  What do you mean dangerous traffic isn't normal? Especially since smart cars will organize our lives? History's echoes reverberate. There's more to making fools of ourselves than settling the predicaments of our daily lives. Case Closed, most unfortunately. 

  Cuba, breathe.

Next Readdressed Essay In Progress:

No Respite From Game of Molded Public Opinion

The film that doesn't dispute Lincoln rode a bicycle.

A Times Up! Event - September 28, 2012.  

The Battle of The Bike Ban in The Great Hall of Cooper Union

We Will See Progress, When?

My attention was drawn to a well-made short documentary using video evidence that New York City police have used the same adversarial-macho behavior as gangsters and hostile hotheads when exercising their much-criticized Stop-and-Frisk tactic of civilian control. Still I couldn't ignore The New York Times' positive titled headline, Cuba Dropping Its Much-Reviled Exit Visa Requirement, that reflects yesterday's essay's hope North Korea can positively restructure their economic culture.

Raúl and Fidel Castro

Reporter Damien Cave wrote - In a country of limits, it is the restriction that many Cubans hate the most: the exit visa that the government requires for travel abroad and can be onerous to get, trapping many Cubans looking to leave even for just a few days. But now that bureaucratic barrier is on its way out. The Cuban government announced Tuesday that it would terminate the exit visa requirement as of Jan. 13, letting many Cubans depart for vacations, or forever, with only a passport and a visa from the country where they plan to go.

Let's hope.

The Times continued - The new policy, promised by President Raúl Castro last year, and finally announced in the Communist Party newspaper, linked in my previous Cuban essay. The Times states this -  represents the latest significant step by the Cuban government to answer demands for change from Cubans, while also maintaining a significant measure of control. Cubans can be denied the right to leave for reasons of “defense and national security,” according to the new law, suggesting that dissidents will face the same restrictions as always.

In other words, the tactic is speculated to be calculated to turn everyone into happy campers. 

But -  Cuba's doctors, scientists, military officers and other professionals, who have also long faced tight restrictions on travel, may be ineligible as well because the new policy includes a major caveat allowing the government to limit departures to “preserve the human capital created by the Revolution in the face of the theft of talent applied by the powerful.”

So Cuba's doctors still won't profit on one of the best national investments Cuba ever made. Of course once a medical industrial complex is established to further properly siphon the doctor's wealth, then maybe. Like Korea, it seems the entrenched elite is waiting to be bribed. While the doctors must represent the façade of the country's opposition to anti-capitalist exploitation. 

According to The Times - the new law gives Cubans leeway to stay abroad longer, letting them remain outside the country for two years before losing their rights to property, citizenship and benefits like health care. Increased from the current policy's 11 months.

Under government private property restrictions, nder a court system by and for an entrenched elite, basically.

The Times cites that - Analysts say the government is encouraging more Cubans to travel so that they can go earn money elsewhere and return, injecting capital into the island’s moribund economy. 

HELLO!

Then - Whether that creates a temporary, or permanent, mass exodus, Cubans and experts say, will be determined by how many people have the means and passports to leave, and which countries welcome them. 

Or how welcoming Cuba is to be back in. Remember what Stalin did to his fighters for the Motherland? Destroyed the tainted by foreign influence. No doubt Cuba would paint the picture differently. But they have yet to show a real desire to grow beyond an arbitrary system of tyrants who no doubt smile as sweetly as Stalin himself could. 

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin

Of course The Times can quote Robert Pastor, professor of International Relations at American University. “The decision to lift the exit visa is a significant one for several reasons, although like most of the new reforms, it depends a great deal on how it is implemented. Nonetheless, by removing a state barrier to leave, this reform could lead to a large outflow, many of whom will eventually want to come to the United States, or it could begin to allow a circular flow of people that could enhance the economic opening of the island.”

Ka-ching!

Then The Times cites that economic progress has fallen well short of citizens gaining economic power. - Moreover, they are hardly tycoons who are independent of the government’s traditional power hubs of the military and the Communist Party.

One step forward, two back, yet. 

As The Times reports -  Especially in Havana, many Cubans have remained skeptical about President Castro’s commitment to change, noting frequently that celebrated new laws, allowing property sales and entrepreneurship, for example, were later larded with restrictions and taxes that so far have ensured only minority participation. 

The Times weaves apropos metaphors and quotes Havanans saying, "We'll see." While - There was no line of unusual proportions at the passport office in Havana, and many Cubans correctly noted that they still faced many hurdles to a legal departure. “It’s all very good,” said Laydis, 30, an Havana bank employee. “But which interesting country is going to give me a visa?”

Mars? So far the only remotely near locale that just requires billions of dollars (of influence) for anyone to visit.

As The Times points out further from the previous quotes' colleague, Maricel, 44, who is eligible for a Spanish passport because her grandparents were from Spain. “Sure, I can go but where am I going to get the money?” After all, the new law says nothing about reducing the fees for all the paperwork needed for a departure, which can cost hundreds of dollars.

Which is the crux of the dilemma. Bank employees apparently clueless that industriousness can solve anything. Work isn't just something delegated by fat cats behind desks. It's what freed the world's entrepreneurs to create a seemingly magic land inside personal computers. It's what everyone will have the potential to do for themselves once the great firewalls of control are torn down by, or for, the world's bureaucrats both private and government. 

So, as The Times reports - American officials said they were still studying the new policy to determine what the impact might be. Plus explaining - why America? 

And finally, The Times concludes - Other experts said that leaving Cuba, even without the exit visa requirement, could become more difficult than expected. Ted Henken, a Latin American Studies professor at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, said, “There’s an old saying among migration scholars who studied the Soviet bloc. ‘When the Soviets finally lowered the iron curtain, the West responded not with open arms but by quickly constructing a steel ring around their countries.’ It’s easy to condemn Cuba for its policies against the free flow of people, but when Cuba removes its own restrictions, will we redouble our own?”

So there. A world without borders is not what security is? What would John Lennon think? Possibly, let my people go?

Transition Who Can't Afford?

Something has been added to this essay's conclusion on CUBA.  8/7/14

Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

The previous essay, PATRIOTISM FOR EVERYONE? included an idea that was highlighted by two events yesterday. Israeli ground troops entering the Gaza Strip and a Malaysian Airlines Passenger Plane shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine. Reuters

3. Which is why international dispute is not about - who's wrong? 4. But whether ruthlessness is rendered impossible?  

The rocket that brought down the passenger plane was a "mistake." Trigger-happy is a mistake. The passenger plane was nowhere near landing in Ukraine at that height and speed. So without the proper instruments the Ukrainian rebels couldn't take a chance? When conflict escalates the innocent are victimized. Clearly the fog of patriotic militarism entered this century as pervasive as the last. What idiotic logic made all this patriotic militarism acceptable? Freedom Fries pictured above. The buck stops with "the decider." Soapbox View Everyone knows how to hide from responsibility. Chesters just push out their chests insisting their pride is their nations'. Despite what PEACE really means?

--------------------------------------------------------

So perpetual war and defense are necessary evils? This essay, A Damaging Distance, in The New York Times, Sunday July 13, 2014, by Ethan Bronner focuses on what the Middle East hasn't fixed. Who in their right minds thought limiting Palestinian financial progress would be a protection when anyone with a clue knows everyone's better off when there's full financial circulation? Again both side's elites are likely duff sitters. 

Again!

4. To Mideast Diplomacy Rendering Ruthlessness Impossible.

"Vengeance is mine sayith the Lord" - not mortals.

Despite war's exploitation, no one wins and maybe, just maybe, we lose our souls?

______________________

Change is constant. Transition a longer  haul. They're not the same difference if change is sudden and transition, evolution. The point? Most of the world has been relatively poor virtually all of human existence. Change has taken place, but not an actual transition. That "the poor will always be with" us is almost a dandy excuse for our destiny. Why lazy insufficient prosperity is the working poor's burden while improved circulation on their behalf is considered weak by those for whom opportunity overflows, and those that resent more hasn't rained on them - yet. Resourcefulness sure is part of the equation, and not entirely out of line to expect of people. Within reason. 

Visiting home, ten years back, my wife and I swam laps in my favorite swimming pool. A nine year old African-American boy, there with his little brother, was from another nearby small town. Like paradise, not crowded, only us four and the older man in lane 6.

The kid asked to look at my goggles then popped out both lenses before I got him to give the goggles back. Sure you can re-insert the lenses as he gigglingly pointed out. But done enough the seal is never the same. He was amused playing with me and when his little brother came over and asked to do the same thing, his older brother told him he'd already done it. But before that. Alone, hanging on to the deep end's gutter. He asked if I could give him money. Reminding me of my precious summer youth collecting cold drink bottles with my friend Patrick who'd told me about the bright idea. I made the kid cry. There were adults collecting everywhere and you were in trouble disturbing their territory. Don't tell me balance didn't drop out of the bottom of our economy. 

With education for the taking most everywhere on this planet? Plus all the money thrown far and wide for the denied to at least grab on to something? Yet money isn't circulating completely throughout while we have this nice basic reality used as an instrument economists can't solve. Inflation. Well, it's a fact of life the poor will never adjust to it and remain destroyed by it. Unable to tag along on the continuously replenishing financial treadmill the elite surf. The Poor rendered useless as perpetual debt. The president of the World Bank and functionaries even state that economies need some inflation so the salaried can keep up better. Considering all things equal, that's fine and dandy the relentless pursuit of inflation propelling those with the power to compete. Which does not solve the problem of economies not fully circulating. Maybe Russians fighting in Ukraine taking care of business at home would have kept Malaysian Airline Flight 17 aloft?

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It is sad. Rumors of revolution gossiped about Brazil if the hosts lost the World Cup before losing to Germany. Because money hadn't instead been spent on the poor who'll rise up in anger unless massaged by a championship. Perhaps contributing to tolerance of football field violence when a referee allowed Brazilians latitude attacking Columbians leading to unintended retribution that knocked a Brazilian star out of the tournament. Paraphrasing Sam Borden's Blame for a Crushing Injury Is Spread Across the Field The New York Times, July5, 2014. Digitally titled: For Bellicose Brazil, Payback Carries Heavy Price: Loss of Neymar. 

The first title worthily sums up the article's insight. While the second gauges momentum as the core of any sports story. One star makes a difference. Not easily replaced. Regardless. It's sad cultural identity is reduced to feudal rivalry.

Any learned person can point to dissatisfied people falling into further disarray. But considered logically, successful revolution against modern militaries is preposterous. As anyone can guess, throughout history, the poor have seldom relieved their stress through revolution. Possibly that great time of equality in the Soviet Union? Unfortunately elitist and when weighed with the sins of persecuting individuals - equality was not ironed out. 

Statistics show Brazilians are discontent. Wikipedia notes the 2013 Confederations Cup Riots followed that tournament Brazil won. Initiated mainly by the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement), a local entity that advocates for free public transportation. The demonstrations were initially organized to protest against increases in bus, train, and metro ticket prices in some Brazilian cities, but grew to include other issues such as the high corruption in the government and police brutality used against some demonstrators. By mid-June, 2013, the movement had grown to become Brazil's largest since the 1992 protests against former President Fernando Collor de Mello.

It's of course ridiculous for affairs of state to be tampered with through sport and vice-versa. Yet on the other hand, political leadership is the art of forming mass opinion translated from ambivalent drivel to avoid blame? Football and politics aren't just games. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

June 27 

Soapbox View conjectured - Crimea, the next Monaco? 

July 2nd, 

The Moscow Times, Flow of Crimea Tourists Drops 35%. 

July 4th, 

The Moscow Times Crimea and Sochi See Futures as Gambling Centers. 

-------------------------------------------------

For objectiveness sake, history sinned.

Now. Relish this. It's not every day news is this close to making sense.

The National Capitol Building in Havana, Cuba, home to the Cuban Academy of Sciences. - Nigel Pacquette / Wikicommons

Russia Ratifies $35 Billion Debt Write-Off For Cuba  

The Moscow Times, July 9, 2014

Huh. 90% of 35.2 billion forgiven. So it's a deal to get 3.2 billion out of Cuba. When if 35.2 billion were put into Cuba to circulate properly this debt theoretically would have never happened. I think Cuba should take this last 3.2 to U.S. Federal Court and dispute that there's any debt at all. Everyone's thumbs were on the scales. Cuba would be a better ally if that 3.2 went into itself. The whole world should be paying Cuba not to industrialize to maintain a vacation paradise. But that's the great equalizer, for funding nations, terrorizing the land. I say try for Paradise Cuba. If you asphalt the entire island it will sink under the big flood. 

Señors Castro?