What will happen in Cuba after Castro? Will its unique blend of strong public service provision, tiny private sector and crumbling infrastructure be reversed in a western-backed post-Soviet-style 'transition'?
The years of US economic blockade have certainly taken their toll. To the visitor the decaying colonial facades of central Havana may appear charming, but for the residents the ration books, collapsing buildings, pot-holed roads and failing water supply are not.
more »What will happen in Cuba after Castro? Will its unique blend of strong public service provision, tiny private sector and crumbling infrastructure be reversed in a western-backed post-Soviet-style 'transition'?
The years of US economic blockade have certainly taken their toll. To the visitor the decaying colonial facades of central Havana may appear charming, but for the residents the ration books, collapsing buildings, pot-holed roads and failing water supply are not.
Yet despite the blockade, good medical care is freely available, Cuba's infant mortality is lower than that of the United States, there is 98% literacy, and Cuban-trained doctors tend to the sick across Latin America.
One of Cuba's charms, perhaps under-rated by its inhabitants, is the absence of the huge disparities in wealth so evident in other Caribbean and Latin American countries.
Perhaps a post-Fidel lifting of the blockade will allow the island to improve living standards without losing its egalitarian, public service ethos. Or perhaps the United States will consider any alternative to its own version of the 'free' market in its own backyard another manifestation of the 'axis of evil'. Time will tell.
Technical note
The pictures shown here were taken in 2000. They were shot on Kodachrome slide film at time when I had yet to come to grips with my newly acquired film scanner. Kodachrome is not a film that scans easily and it is only recently that I have had the skill, time and patience to pull the slides out the filing cabinet. Kodachrome was long regarded as the crème de la crème of colour films; the Cuba trip was the last time I ever used it.
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