[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3646-3648]
[From the U.S. 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.

[[Page 3647]]

  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 protegee/associate Douglas 
     Butterworth, whose research project 4.5 decades ago was 
     surrounded by controversy and enigmas.
       Unquestionably, the Fidel and Raul 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 (Botin, 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 (Diaz-Briquets & Perez-Lopez, 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. (Nunez-Cedeno, 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 
     regime, but--as Butterworth deduced--a consequence of the 
     nouveau regime. 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. Additionally, their Cuban statistician, Alvaro 
     Insua, was imprisoned.
       Comfortably from abroad, academic and media enthusiasts of 
     the Castros' ``dynasty'' customarily replicate party-line 
     cliches 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 Ceausescu'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 
     emigres, which may reflect CoP patterns (Botin, 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,

[[Page 3648]]

     and moreover created new ones (Diaz-Briquets & Perez-Lopez, 
     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 Insuas were 
     abandoned in Cuba to their own lot. Alvaro 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 Alvaro and 
     Greta will write their own elucidating memoirs.

                          ____________________