[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 45 (Tuesday, March 17, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1583-S1584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CUBA'S CULTURE OF POVERTY CONUNDRUM
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I submit for inclusion in the
Congressional Record the following article regarding the early years of
the Castro regime, the policies of which created a culture of poverty
in Cuba, and converted a previously developing country into an
underdeveloped, closed society.
The author, Professor Roland Alum, is a Garden State constituent, a
long-time participant in civic activities, and has been a personal
friend for three decades. He is a respected anthropologist and author
whose writings have appeared in both major newspapers and academic
journals.
This article, which appeared in Panoramas, an electronic journal at
the University of Pittsburgh, touches upon sensitive topics apropos to
the current U.S.-Cuba relationship.
I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Panoramas, Feb. 14, 2015]
The Cuban Culture of Poverty Conundrum
(By Roland Armando Alum)
INTRODUCTION
I propose here to re-examine certain aspects of life in
``Socialist Cuba,'' principally the so-called culture of
poverty, as gauged relatively early in the Castro brothers
regime by two U.S. socio-cultural anthropologists, the
legendary Oscar Lewis and his proteegeee/associate Douglas
Butterworth, whose research project 4.5 decades ago was
surrounded by controversy and enigmas.
Unquestionably, the Fidel and Rauul Castro ``Revolutionary
Government'' enjoyed an extraordinary initial popularity in
1959. Yet, the enthusiasm vanished as the duo hijacked the
liberal-inspired anti-Batista rebellion that had been largely
advanced by the then expanding middle-classes. Instead of
delivering the promised ``pan con libertad'' (bread with
liberty), the Castro siblings converted Cuba into a socio-
spiritually and fiscally bankrupt, Marxist-Stalinist dystopia
in which both, bread and liberty are scarce (Botiin, 2010;
Horowitz, 2008; Moore, 2008).
Cuba was the last Ibero-American colony to attain
independence (1902); yet, by the 1950s, the island-nation was
a leader in the Americas in numerous quality-of-life
indicators. This record was reached notwithstanding
instability and governmental corruption during the republican
era (1902-58), including the 1952-58 bloody authoritarian
dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. However, under the (now
anachronistic octogenarian) Castros, Cuba became an
impoverished, Orwellian closed society beleaguered by
unproductivity, rampant corruption, humiliating rationing,
human rights abuses, and--understandably--unprecedented mass
emigration (Diiaz-Briquets & Peerez-Loopez, 2006; Horowitz,
2008).
CUBA'S CULTURE OF POVERTY CONUNDRUM
The Lewis and Butterworth project in 1969-70 is still,
oddly, among the little known accounts of the early effects
of the Castro family's regimentation. Supported by a Ford
Foundation's nearly $300,000 grant, the professors intended
to test Lewis's theory of the ``culture of poverty'' (or
rather, sub-culture of poverty). They had innocently
hypothesized that a culture of poverty (hereafter CoP) would
not exist in a Marxist-oriented society, as they presupposed
that the socially alienating conditions that engender it
could develop among the poor solely in capitalist economies.
Influenced by Marxism, Lewis in particular had cleverly
problematized the commonalities of the poor's elusive
quandary in well-known prior studies across different
societies, notably among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.
While poverty is defined in relative terms, the CoP was
conceptualized as an amorphous corpus of socially transmitted
self-defeating beliefs and interrelated values, such as:
abandonment, alcoholism, authoritarianism, deficient work
ethic, domestic abuse, fatalism, homophobia/machismo,
hopelessness, illegitimacy, instant, gratification/present-
time orientation, low social-civic consciousness, mother-
centered families, sexism/misogyny, suspicion of authorities
while holding expectations on government dependency, and so
forth.
This ``psychology of the . . . oppressed . . . poor'' is
considered a key obstacle to achieving vertical socio-
economic mobility even in fluid social-class, more open
societies, such as the U.S. Not all poor individuals develop
a CoP, but being poor is a sine qua non condition.
Ever since its early stages as a separate discipline in the
mid-1800s, anthropology's cornerstone has been the concept of
``culture.'' A century later, the notion drifted to everyday
language; to wit, statements such as ``a culture of
corruption'' became common in the media in reference to
mindsets in government and corporations. I prefer the
interpretation of culture by my own Pitt co-mentor, ``Jack''
Roberts (1964): ``a system for storing and retrieving
information,'' which fits with the Lewis-Butterworth
approach.
With initial high-level governmental welcome, one of the
Lewis-Butterworth investigations entailed comprehensive
interviews of former Havana slum-dwellers resettled in new
buildings. In the research project's fourth book, The People
of Buena Ventura, Butterworth (1980) admitted with
disenchantment that his research project found sufficient
social symptoms that met the CoP criteria, thus disproving
the initial hypothesis expecting an absence of the CoP under
socialism.
THE PROJECT'S SIGNIFICANCE
The Lewis-Butterworth ethnographic (descriptive,
qualitative) work has various additional implications. It
shed light for an evaluation of the Guevarist ``New Socialist
Man'' archetype. Similarly, it informed an understanding of
the dynamics that led to the spectacular 1980 Mariel boat
exodus, when over 120,000 Cubans (some 1.2% of Cuba's
population) ``voted with their feet.'' Ironically, the regime
and its insensitive fans abroad still refer to the raggedy
refugees with disdainful discourse as ``escoria'' (scum) and
with the Marxist slur ``lumpen proletariat.'' Significantly,
most Marielistas were born and/or enculturated under
socialism, i.e., they personified the presumed ``New Man.''
Many of them, moreover, had been military conscripts, and/or
had served time in the infamous gulag-type ``U.M.A.P.''
forced-labor camps created for political dissidents
(particularly intellectuals and artists), Beatles'
fans, gays, the unemployed, long-haired bohemians/hippies,
Trotskyites, would-be emigrants (considered ``traitors''),
and religious people (including Jehovah's Witnesses and
Afro-Cuban folk-cults' practitioners), etc. (Nuunnez-
Cedenno, et al., 1985). In fact, the Marielistas
encompassed also an over-representation of Afro-Cubans,
the demographic sector traditionally viewed as most
vulnerable, and thus, among the expected prime
beneficiaries of socialist redistribution.
Certainly, there were always poor Cubans--of all
phenotypes--and conceivably, some version of the CoP existed
pre-1959; but in my exchanges with Butterworth, he
reconfirmed another remarkable finding. While acknowledging
the social shortcomings of pre-revolutionary times, he could
not document (for ex., through the collection of oral life-
histories), a case for a pervasive, pre-revolutionary
Lewisian CoP.
This in situ scrutiny of daily life fairly early in the
Castros era corroborates previous and subsequent accounts by
many Cubanologists and the much vilified and ever-expanding
exile community. There exists a widespread CoP in Socialist
Cuba, though not necessarily as a survivor of the ancien
reegime, but--as Butterworth deduced--a consequence of the
nouveau reegime. The authorities must have suspected, or
ascertained through surveillance, about the prospective
conclusions, given that the anthropologists were suddenly
expelled from the country. They were accused of being U.S.
spies, most of their research material was confiscated, and
some ``informants'' (interviewees) were arrested and/or
harassed.
[[Page S1584]]
Additionally, their Cuban statistician, AAlvaro IInsua, was
imprisoned.
Comfortably from abroad, academic and media enthusiasts of
the Castros' ``dynasty'' customarily replicate party-line
clichees in their penchant to ``launder'' the dictatorship's
excesses and the centralized economy's dysfunctions by
blaming external factors. Topping the excuses is the ending
of the defunct COMECON's subsidies circa 1990. Some
apologists--notably a few anthropology colleagues--even
absurdly refer to the 1959-90 epoch as a ``utopia,'' while
the government labeled the current calamitous post-1990 years
the ``Special Period.''
Yet, the undertaking by Lewis & Butterworth, who were
initially eagerly simpatico to the Castros, provided
remarkable revelations that regime's defenders conveniently
still continue to overlook. It showed that life for average
Cubans toward the end of the regime's first decade--long
before the Special Period--was already beset with corruption,
consumer scarcities, and time-wasting food-lines. All this is
characteristic of what is branded ``economies of shortage,''
standard for Soviet-modeled societies (Eberstadt, 1988;
Ghodsee, 2011; Halperin, 1981; Verdery 1996).
Likewise, Butterworth portrayed how ordinary Cubans--``los
de a pie'' (those on foot)--were by then engaging in what
nowadays we call ``everyday forms of resistance,'' a social
weapon of subjugated people anywhere. As also depicted by
other observers and Cuban former participant-resisters (now
exiled, my own informants or ``cultural consultants''),
Butterworth reported how Cubans were already undermining the
hegemonic police-state through taboo actions, such as
absenteeism, black-marketeering, briberies, pilfering, and
even vandalism. Apparently, this project remains the only
conventional testing of the CoP in a totalitarian socialist
country, although numerous researchers have chronicled the
pitiable quality of life under such socio-political systems
(Eberstadt, 1988; Halperin, 1981).
Indeed, the Cuban reality of widespread misery--except for
the privileged top one-percent (now an elitist
gerontocracy)--as well as of indignities and hushed quotidian
defiance, evokes narratives about similar, though faraway
communist ``experiments'' that collapsed a quarter-century
ago. Among these comparable accounts are ethnologist
Verdery's (1996) descriptions of despot Ceaussescu's Romania
and Ghodsee's (2011) Bulgarian ethnographic vignettes.
EPILOGUE
A number of experts have been reporting about certain kinds
of behavioral traits among Cubans, both islanders and recent
eemigrees, which may reflect CoP patterns (Botiin, 2010;
Horowitz, 2008). This is not surprising, as the CoP worsened
with time as impoverishment augmented (Hirschfeld, 2008).
One can surmise that, despite its human and material toll,
the Castros regime not only failed to solve traditional
social problems, but exacerbated at least some of them, and
moreover created new ones (Diiaz-Briquets & Peerez-Loopez,
2006; Eberstadt, 1988). Much of this was already manifested
in the 1960s (Edwards, 1973; Halperin, 1981), as reflected in
the Lewis-Butterworth venture.
Lewis died, heart-broken, at age 56 in December 1970 upon
his repatriation. Butterworth also took ill--especially
emotionally--dying in 1986 (at 56 too). The IInsuas were
abandoned in Cuba to their own lot. AAlvaro languished in
jail for six years; in 1980 he was ``allowed'' to leave for
Costa Rica with wife Greta (who had also worked for the
project), and son Manolo. They reached the U.S. soon
thereafter, coinciding with the arrival of the Mariel
expatriates and Butterworth's book publication. After a brief
staying in northern New Jersey, where I assisted them, they
settled in Miami.
In assessing the legacy of the Lewis-Butterworth project on
Cuba's culture of poverty, there remain several intriguing
puzzles pending exploration. Hopefully, someday AAlvaro and
Greta will write their own elucidating memoirs.
____________________