May 13, 2005
COMMENTARY

Cooking Fidel

On March 8, Fidel Castro received a standing ovation after announcing that rice cookers will now be included in the Cuban rationing system. It's hard to imagine a better illustration of this island dystopia's bizarre ways, more telling than any list of political prisoners or of human rights violations -- which, after all, are typical of any dictatorship, totalitarian or not.

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First consider the surrealistic aspect of announcing the distribution at subsidized prices of an appliance that, in order to function properly, needs two things: rice and electricity. Yet rice is rationed at less then three kilos per person each month, hardly enough, considering that it's a staple for two meals a day with often hardly anything else to cook. As for electricity, planned blackouts were recently six hours a day. It is almost like subsidizing the distribution of forks for foie gras and champagne glasses among the homeless.

Then there is the "forbidden fruit" aspect. For the last 46 years no rice cookers were ever sold in local currency in Cuba. The appliance -- together with pornography, VCRs and irons -- was specified on the customs' form as an item that visitors couldn't bring to Cuba.

Finally the price of a rice cooker is puzzling, to say the least. It's now fixed at 150 Cuban pesos, and is said to be subsidized. After the income increase that Castro gave his subjects starting May 1, that's about three-quarters of the minimum monthly salary. In European conditions -- say France -- it's the equivalent of buying one for €964. (Or else having a minimum monthly wage of €79, whichever scares you more.) The price may seem exorbitant, but it's nothing compared to the availability of rice cookers. Until the evening of March 7, the cookers were first available only for diplomats, then since 1993 only in foreign-currency stores and only for the equivalent of 10 (sic!) monthly minimum salaries.

So in light of all this, the Comandante's gesture becomes genuinely magnanimous even if there isn't much to cook. The Communist Party daily, Granma, urged readers to "look at the faces of the Cuban women: joyful and smiling, happy, grateful and perhaps, yes, in a little hurry to reach home and prepare the first lunch or dinner with the recently acquired rice cooker."

If the rice-cooker saga sounds strange and the fact that the head of state entertains the nation for two hours about how to boil black beans is unusual, consider other examples of Castro's erratic behavior.

Since the rice-cookers speech, he had 20 "special" addresses to the nation, so that Granma would run almost the same banner headline daily: "Tonight the extraordinary intervention of our Comandante." In one, he told everyone that the sugar-cane culture "belongs to slavery" -- although he himself made the entire population enslaved by his crazy dream of getting a harvest of 10 million tons back in 1970. All normal state activities were interrupted and the goal was...missed.

In another performance, he brought on stage the old pre-1959 Westinghouse and Frigidaire refrigerators and attacked them for being energy-guzzlers and inefficient due to a lack of rubber seals that were impossible to find. But now Catro promised that they'll be available in two months and a half -- hurray for El Comandante! For the same reason, thousands of electric bulbs are going to be "destroyed" and replaced with Chinese fluorescent ones, because they consume less energy.

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His decisions concerning monetary matters would fit better in a whimsical Sultanic reign than in a planned economy, although he himself declares that "in economic questions it is the sovereign people who decide." In March Castro revalued the Cuban peso, meaning that people who receive remittances from abroad now get 7% less. In April he revalued by 8% the Cuban convertible peso so if one comes with euros or some other foreign currency the merchandise sold for that Monopoly-like money -- which has no value outside Cuba -- is more expensive.

If this is all confusing, Castro explains his project for the two pesos: "Those are two brothers, they are born of the same mother called revolution. And the day when the miracle will take place and there will be full parity between the two, we would have reached the summit of our revolutionary road towards the most just and the most human society of the world, the most socialist that has ever existed in the world, the almost communist." (Should the roadmap to happiness be still confusing, it may help to remember the joke that used to make the rounds in Eastern Europe: "Communism is great at solving problems that other systems do not create for themselves.")

If one adds to these measures last year's rise of prices by an average of 15% and a 10% tax imposed on U.S. dollars when they're exchanged into Cuban convertible pesos, the many Cubans who live from what their relatives send them from America are now considerably worse off than before.

In what was probably an effort to counterbalance those measures, Castro raised the minimum salary to 225 pesos and the minimum pension to 150 pesos, or the equivalent of €5. Thus if a pensioner were to decide to suspend all vital functions for a month he or she can now buy a rice cooker.

The inimitable Granma commented: "The friendly hand of the revolution has knocked once again at the door of Cuban homes. As so many times in the past, it is as it is: unstoppable and infinite."

Theresa Bond is the pseudonym for a political analyst who specializes in closed societies.

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