Details of the plan were still being worked out last week, but officials said Cubans will probably be allowed to deposit dollars in special bank accounts and make withdrawals in the form of coupons that can be spent in government hard-currency stores. The idea is to try to drain dollars from the booming black market and to attract more money from the million-plus Cuban exiles in the United States–the same people who have been despised for years as gusanos (worms).
“We’re not dogmatic revolutionaries,” Castro explained in a radio broadcast. “We have serious problems, and we have to solve them to survive.” With the loss of economic support from the former Soviet Union, Cuba’s national income has declined by about three quarters. Food is scarce and health care, the pride of Cuban communism, has begun to suffer. Since last spring more than 50,000 Cubans have been diagnosed with optic neuritis, a gradual blindness attributable to malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.
It is precisely because Castro is a dogmatic revolutionary that the economic decline has been aggravated. Two years ago he personally intervened to block proposals by Cuban Communist Party reformers to allow free farmers’ markets. Now, with dollars in some form of official circulation, the implosion of the command-style socialist economy seems all but inevitable. Castro, 65, will have to look to his own survival.
