What Cuban Reforms?

Tourists pass by images of U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro in a banner that reads "Welcome to Cuba" at the entrance of a restaurant in downtown Havana, March 17, 2016. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Jan De Deken, Daily Beast: Cuba’s ‘Reforms’ Are a Myth

As Obama heads to Cuba, islanders reflect on their revolutionary past—and their uncertain future.

“Witness the real Cuba here!”

Writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez is exclaiming on his eighth-floor rooftop terrace, while pointing at the surrounding ruins of Central Havana—mansions that once exuded luxury and that now offer a full view of the heavens from their stripped frames. From this same terrace in the ’90s, Gutiérrez saw people push small boats into the Caribbean in the hopes of crossing over to Miami, only 370 kilometers away. “Desperate, often drunk, people stumbled into an ocean full of sharks to meet their death,” he says.

There is no such thing as el periodo especial in the Cuban press, that time when the Soviet-Union fell apart and Cuba lost its Communist Sugar Daddy. While novelists painted island idylls in baroque words and journalists acted as propaganda machinery of the Castros, Gutiérrez spat the despair and the struggle for survival of the pitch-black ’90s onto paper. “There was no drinking water, no food, no gas for cooking. The garbage was not picked up because there was no petrol. My apartment began to collapse like so many of the houses here.”

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WNU Editor: Too little .... and far too late .... is what all of my Cuban friends and Cuban watchers are telling me when they comment on the Cuban government's reforms. Speaking of tourists .... Cuba rolls out red carpet for historic Obama trip despite embargo (Reuters).