The American economic system is largely built on a relationship known as “buy now and pay later.” Retail merchants engage in ingenious advertising to persuade prospective customers to enjoy their merchandise today, while promising that the payment be painless because it is postponed.
In many other countries, such a system would be too risky to depend on. In America, it works because the seller, first, extends credit only to those who have a steady income and a record of paying their bills, and, second, the law enforces the buy-sell contracts. Businessmen don’t spend much time advertising their wares or extending credit among those who lack visible means of paying for their purchases in the near future.
It is a puzzlement, therefore, to watch otherwise keen American businessmen panting at the prospect of trading with Fidel Castro. In the last few weeks, there has been a steady stream of leading businessmen traveling to Havana to fawn over Fidel.
Castro has been playing the game like a clever con man. He entertains the businessmen at rum-and-lobster luncheons, he passes out good Havana cigars, and he sends the Americans home with truckloads of gifts.
But when you wipe away all the razzmatazz of meeting with a head of state, the plain fact is that Castro isn’t a good prospective customer because he doesn’t have the money to pay for what he wants to buy.
Castro’s Communism has ruined the economy of Cuba, once one of the most productive in Latin America. Soon after he came into power, he de-emphasized sugar in favor of industrialization. After that failed, he disrupted the economy again by a massive effort to reemphasize sugar. Sugar is Cuba’s main source of hard currency, but today the market price of sugar is below Cuba’s cost of production.
Like all Communists countries, Cuba is always starting a new five-year economic plan when the previous one flops. The Cuban economy is in desperate financial straits, and Castro is kept in power only by Soviet subsidies, estimated to run to at least $3 million per day.
Practically all consumer goods are in short supply. In this once coffee-drinking nation, Cubans are now rationed to one ounce per week.
The fault is not in the Cuban people. The several hundred thousand who have emigrated to the United States have proved that Cubans are hardworking, skilled producers, and good citizens. The fault is in Communist control.
It is also a puzzlement to watch the American politicians, the same ones who are always talking about “human rights.” A good antidote for their enthusiasm about Castro is a recent interview with Garland Grant, a Milwaukee man who hijacked a Northwest Airlines plane in 1971 and has been living in Cuba ever since. Grant isn’t the sort of person we relish getting our information from. A member of the Black Panthers, he committed an outrageously criminal act endangering the lives of 59 people on that Boeing 727 jet.
Grant’s comments on Cuba do, however, ring with the sincerity of six years’ first-hand experience. His main goal is to get back to the United States because Cuba is so horrible and “everybody is too scared to say anything.” It doesn’t bother him that this would mean spending most of the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. “Just open my cell door,” he said, “and I will walk in. … I’m all for the United States now. I’d even wear a Nixon button.”
Grant now sweeps floors in a Havana hotel for $100 a month. He Says he is “living like a dog,” and blacks are treated worse “than in the worst parts of Mississippi.” Grant spent two and a half years in jail, not for hijacking, but for picketing the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. He lost an eye from a beating by a prison guard.
