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FREEDOMWAYS                 SECOND QUARTER 1980

U.S. government's blockade against Cuba as well as by the country's still underdeveloped agricultural production. Negative fallout from the rationing system is unavoidable since Cubans are addicted to meat-especially to pork. Add to this the fact that, as in most developing countries nowadays, efforts are afoot to change people's dietary habits in the interest of better health. The eating of fish, which oddly hasn't been traditional in Cuba, is being encouraged and wisely so since fish is both highly nutritious and plentiful.

Despite these factors, a diet of 2,000 calories-comfortable above the internationally recognized nutritional requirement level-is available to all Cubans among the rationed foodstuffs. Moreover, diverse supplements are easily accessible in the free lunch programs in schools, workplaces and restaurants.

Cuban administrators readily acknowledge the consumer sector's austerity. However, worthy of note is the economic policy, operative since 1970, of increasing the importation of a wide range of consumer goods (refrigerators, record players, electrical appliances, etc.) while gradually removing goods from the rationed category and placing them on the open market. This is the government's response, chosen over monetary reform, to the high solvency of the Cuban population occasioned by the revolution's elimination of unemployment and underemployment, entrance of women into the labor force and the advent of free health care and education. The process has led, in 1980, to the availability of more than 1200 products, only 45 of which are rationed. Today, 70% of an individual's expenditures in the marketplace goes for non-rationed products.

The material realities of life in today's Cuba, then, seemed to the members of our group not to be objectively intolerable but rather to "oppress" only those for whom any form of austerity violates their tastes for "the good life" as defined by the middle class values and standards of the United States.

Contrary to the picture of pervasive woe painted of Cuba in the major U.S. media, one is struck there by the upbeat spirit of the people, by their individuality (not ism), lack of passivity, friendliness and willingness to discuss their problems. Complaints are rife about the public transportation system (a casualty of the blockade's withholding of essential equipment and spare parts). In one instance, the editor of the largest youth-oriented newspaper speaks of the paper's need to improve its graphic style and tone down its sloganeering tendencies; in another, the director of a movie soon to be released here discourses on the severe strains being experienced in male/female relationships; in yet another, an official enumerates the mistakes made in the agricultural and industrial sectors, among them the initial wasting of resources, owing to Cubans' inexperience

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