American intellectuals love Cuba’s minimal economy. Being rich, they confuse poverty with chic.
I recently heard National Public Radio wax eloquent about Cuba’s new transportation system for the 21st century: hitchhiking!
Cuba’s transportation is now so decrepit it can move only about 15 percent of the traffic it moved 20 years ago. So travelers gather along the highways, waiting hours or even days, to hitch rides on government trucks or with the few lucky private citizens who can still afford gasoline.
Gas costs $3.40 a gallon, and most of the cars are leftover pre-1970 gas-guzzlers. Wages average $10 per month. That guarantees most of the traffic will be government vehicles.
The generous, farsighted Cuban government now has assigned 2200 transport inspectors to stand at key roadside locations, where they flag down vehicles and make them carry passengers for a few cents each. As the Greens point out, this minimizes CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, there’s still the crime potential.
In my college years, I hitchhiked thousands of miles with a big Michigan State sticker on my suitcase. Male drivers readily picked me up. This was the 1950s, before drugs were widespread.
Only one woman ever picked me up-and she had two hefty teenage sons along.
The young Cuban female hitchhiker interviewed by NPR said she didn’t worry much because “most people are nice.”
I’m sure that’s true. Unfortunately, even a minority of rapists and robbers can be a serious drawback to society. Does Castro indemnify raped hitchhikers who were paired with rapist drivers by government officials? Cuba, of course, is far too progressive for liability lawsuits.
More good news: Cuba is shedding its reputation as a good place for cheap sex vacations. They haven’t gotten the girls better jobs, but they’ve arrested enough of them often enough to drive them off the streets.
“Progressives” loudly praise the Cuban food system too. Fidel hasn’t been able to afford fertilizer or pesticides for his farmers since the Soviet subsidies collapsed, so Cuba is now the most advanced country trying to feed itself from all-organic farming. Yields are so poor that the government rations a family of four to about one chicken a month.
Nor does Castro allow farmers to sell their food directly to consumers. They might make too much money.
That leaves most Cubans trying to grow their own food on vacant lots in Havana. Cuban consumers are thus freed from dependence on big agribusiness corporations like General Foods and Monsanto. The Greens like that.
Space for urban gardens isn’t the problem it would be in a U.S. city, of course. There aren’t many businesses vying for locations in Cuban cities.
Come to think of it, turning the compost pile and weeding the garden are probably more entertaining than listening to Fidel bloviate on the state-owned TV station.
Americans, of course, don’t need to worry about the risks of hitchhiking and dangerous bacteria in their compost piles. Cuba is poor and we are affluent, and that’s likely to be true in the future. Until and unless we foolishly sign the Kyoto treaty and have to stop using fossil fuels.
That would be foolish because CO2 doesn’t explain the Modern Warming. Virtually all the warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much CO2 was emitted. In the meantime, the ice cores, seabed sediments and pollen fossils tell us that Earth has had a moderate, natural, irregular 1500-year climate cycle for at least the last million years.
Greenpeace says that to stabilize CO2 we’d have to cut fossil fuel use by 60-80 percent. Then we’d have to hitchhike like the Cubans.
Would we have to listen to Castro-style speeches too?
