(applause) - i typically handle these in a more extemporaneous manner than i'm going to do today but i want to make sure ionly speak for my 10 minutes
Pier 1 Imports Credit Card, so i'm going to be tied to my manuscript a little bit more than usual. americans can not freely roam cuba. they must attend educationaland cultural sessions
under the watchful eye of their guides. they are escorted fromstate-approved tourist sites that demonstrate the manycountless innovations and resourcefulness of the cuban people. as state-approved sites,these sites clearly have a rhetorical agenda for promoting cuba and portraying cubans in a positive light. i contend that in addition to overt rhetoricalmessages of industriousness,
there's a covert rhetoricalmessage of protest. protest rhetoric in a country that does not embrace freespeech an be a tricky endeavor. artistic expression,however, is one of the ways in which a rentor can createa statement of protest without overtly opposing the state. for example, lysistratais an excellent example of politically unpopular protest rhetoric from the classical period.
the arts can be interpreted in many ways after all, and an artist canclaim plausible deniability or lack of intent in amessage that is perceived to be a criticism or astatement of protest. i will focus on threestate-approved tourist sites that demonstrate theovert messages of industry as well as a covert message of protest. ariel gato miranda's artgallery in las terrazas; ediciones vigia in matanzas;
and fusterlandia in havana. the message of industry willbe self-evident, i believe. the rhetoric of protest ismuch more subtle and will be measured via post-introductorynarratives to the sites, reliance on discordantitems and other detritus to produce a remarkable product, and the apparent lack of any reasonablealternative for production. las terrazas is a planned eco-community
created in response todeforestation and consequent erosion in the hillsides in the area. the hills were terraced and reforested and a recreational link was constructed as well as a school. the town has a hospital, asenior center, a resort complex, complete with zip line and various shops. a 2014 travel article in the travel section ofthe u.k.'s independent
described las terrazas in this manner: "in 1968 president fidel castro forged the idea of a green revolution. he would reforest themountains that had been logged by spanish conquistadors,plant fruit trees in the areas destroyedby coffee plantations, and nurture land ripped up by hurricanes and he would improve thelives of cuban campesinos, in this part of the island,
mainly illiterate charcoal makers, who lived in poverty inthe remote rural ridges of the sierra del rosario mountains." so that's las terrazas. artist ariel gato miranda's art shop is one of these developments. he features recycled paper products that include realisticartistic greeting cards, small posters, writingtablets and the like
as well as some wood products. so, visual aid. then we bought this littlegreeting card at his shop. it's a lovely little greeting card made of recycled paper. the envelope is even more interesting because you can see the pulp in it. this is the kind ofproduct they are producing. the host explained in hisintroductory narrative
that everything isrecycled and/or repurposed. he detailed the paper-creation process which seemed incredibly tedious to me and he urged us to purchase the paper products as the men did. and the number of itemsfor sale was unvariable. we can also purchase these hummingbirds, five dollars a piece, or four for $15. fifteen cuban dollars are about equivalent
to u.s. dollars right now. keep in the mind that theaverage monthly salary of a cuban is about $20 to $30, so buying four hummingbirds for $15 sets somebody up pretty well for a month. elizabeth jacobsen and ibought four of these birds, i'll show you which i mean. during the exchange of buyingthem and getting the four, the host explained thatthe birds were constructed
from small bits of lumber from four different kinds of trees. they can be disassembled. they can be disassembled and reassembled in any combination you want. he wrapped each bird, this is interesting to me, he wrapped each bird indiscarded inventory lists that had been printedon dot-matrix printers.
remember those old edges in the trough? that was the paper used. here, i contend, that themessage of protest came in the form of a ratherfrantic explanation of repurposing the wood chips. like in any other form of supply, the artist relied on detritusto construct a product. the art of recycling becomesthe art of no alternatives. imagine what the art or artist could do
if he didn't have to spend this incredible amount oftime creating the raw product. don't worry if the wingsfall off or the tail, we'll just stick 'em back on. the next site underexamination is ediciones vigia, a small-batch publishingcompany that creates 200 copies of individual hand-writtenand hand-bound books. just an example of what they produce, this is a blank journal
that i brought back for pat greenwood. i'll pass this around so you can see that it's pretty rudimentary but there's a leaf attached to the cover and other very simplisticart pieces attached to it. this slide shows a repurposed drawer with the company logoof this lighted lamp, is the company logo. this decompage mural wasin the back of the shop
in a covered courtyard onthe way to the bathroom. decompage is constructed by small bits of paper adhered to, in this case, a wall. another example of art in the bookshop is this mural, which is also decompage but it has three-dimensional elements you might not be able to see. three-dimensional elements right there, the leaves and the lamp.
the young man is one of the calligraphers. again, the shop is decoratedvia the use of detritus. more perplexing in this shop, however, was this living statue. there are a lot of livingstatues in cuba, by the way, it's kind of a thing they do. this performer did not speak,but he welcomed photographs. he was dressed in asteampunk-style outfit. i don't know if you can see it,
but gears, one foot'sbigger than the other. there's this kind of tinman sleeve on his left arm. he was like the tin man and is covered in gears and cogs and has a clock prominentlydisplayed on his chest. rhetorically, this mascot is an interesting choice for a bookshop. again, handwritten books areincredibly time-consuming to produce, hence the clock makes sense.
but what about the gears? is it an expression of theartist's feeling dehumanized, like cogs in the machine of production? i contend that thismascot may be interpreted as a rhetorical message of protest. again, what other more productive ways could these workers bespending their time, perhaps writing their own novellas instead of copyingothers' novellas by hand?
finally, the last site is fusterlandia. this an idiosyncratic explosionof random mosaic images. the host narrative of this site offer a creation myth of the neighborhood that started when a neighbor had a hole in his wall and no supplies with which to repair the hole. the artist, fuster,offered to cover the hole with broken plates thathe had in his mosaic shop.
once other neighbors saw the patch job, they wanted in on the actionand fusterlandia was born. again this introduction narrative tells of yet another storyof the use of detritus to create a product and in this case the product covers decay and disrepair. visitors to fusterlandiaare greeting by this image of the ubiquitous che and fidel, clearly a political statement
set in an area with random other images like these mosaic giraffes. in many ways futurlandiais the best example of this mix of industryand waving the flag, literally they've got the flag, literally and figuratively,and the message of protest. the creation myth voices the problem of communal disrepair and lack of funds or standards of life with whichto make simple improvements.
i'll conclude with these images. on the right is a buildingthat has not been maintained, it's a pretty typical building. it has a guard dachshund on the roof. dogs on roofs were prettycommon and oncosens. the other two structures perhaps represent an image of hope in the cross, but also a reminder that eyes are everywherealways watching you.
with that, at his juncturei will turn it over to tony. - okay, you can kind of ignore that title because i want change itbecause i want to piggyback on tammy's talk about art and how there sort ofcan be this underlay, underlying sense of protest. i'm seeing the same thing in the economy only it's overt. we start with the basic premise.
cuba's economy's a mess. there's no getting around it. and while the embargo'sa big part of that, it's really their regime's commitment to a full-economy system that's failed. therefore cubans, the ordinary cubans, have to go through incredible lengths to survive, literally, to survive. famine was common in cuba, as you'll see
when we get to the special period and the government in orderto maintain its control, winks, ignores it. so everyone openly talksabout the black market, openly talks about howthey're evading the rules, and you get this culturethat i think is going to be a major obstacle to anyfuture economic development. so first of all let's do some demographics
'cause you'll see that whatever they have is creating some odd behavior. the interesting number there is first of all, the dominican republic, neighboring country, third-world country. cuba, which is the poorestcountry i've ever been in and yet look at how similarthey are to the united states. the really importantnumber is that number 10. cubans aren't having children
and the reason is becausethey can't afford it. abortions are free. i've read about one set of sisters in a new york times article that between them they'vehad seven abortions. they wanted children, butthey couldn't afford them. they and their husbands couldbarely survive as it was. we had a taxi driver whowas a physics professor at a university, had to quit.
and he said he really loved teaching, he'd much rather be ateacher than a cab driver but, as he said, we have a son, and so that explained it. he had to earn dollarsin order to survive. if you look at food, a basic necessity. first of all, cubans can buyfood in the united states. we can export food to cubans, always been exempted from the embargo.
they import 80 percent of their food, including 100 percentof the ubiquitous rice. you can't have a mealin cuba without rice. all that's important. and food is rationed. every cuban has a certainamount of food they can buy in the store, but it'snot enough to survive. therefore, just to live, youhave to go to the black market. now, one byproduct is you seevery few overweight cubans.
(audience chuckles) seriously. the only overweightcuban i remember seeing was our tour guide, who wasmaybe 10, 15 pounds overweight, but see she's in an industrywith access to dollars. she's going to have way above, as tammy said, the average income in cuba is about $30 a month. she's going to get thateasily being a tour guide,
and well above that. and yet, he's the paradox of cuba. we drove through the westernthird of the country. you see field afterfield, just sitting there. no crops. now there is a cow, or excuse me, horse, which is a pretty unproductiveanimal, on that land. but you see miles andmiles of empty fields. now in the countryside, peoplecan grow their own food.
now we were there in april, so you're not going to see much in crops. the crop you see to the rightof the picture is tobacco, but you can see how that is going to be the family's garden for their food. so you say, great! but they can't sell it to anyone. legally, you can't sell it. however, we saw, when wewere on benito's farm,
benito's tobacco farmis worth a whole hour, a pineapple guy. guy came by with his cartand he had pineapples, sold some to benito andwas going to go into town and sell 'em to the restaurants. overt, wide open, illegal, but that's what they had to do. now, the cuban regime will adapt in the face of crisis.
the major crisis came inthe late '80s, early 90s, when the soviet union collapsed and they stopped subsidizing cuba. and you can see, i thinkit was in '93 or '94, their economy shrank 15 percent. that's worse than whatgreece has gone through. this was when starvation was real, even though they can buyfood from the united states. they didn't have any money as a country
to buy the food. this is when thehelms-burton act got passed and going forward, one ofthe things clinton did, basically to be cynical,he was trying to get the cuban vote in floridafor his re-election. so helms-burton tightened up the embargo to kick cuba while they're down and the more important thing is, up until that time, theembargo starts with kennedy,
up until that time theembargo is an executive action controlled by the president. clinton gave away that right, so now congress controls the embargo. so if you think theembargo's gonna be relieved, done away with, you're thinkingcongress is going to act. ha, ha, ha. (laughter) so anyway, where you see in 2005 the spike
in their gdp, that's when fidel steps down and raul takes over. raul had been in charge of the military and what he had done duringthis intervening period is get the military out of the military and put them into business. many of the state-run businesses, restaurants, hotels, arereally owned by the military. so he came up with the cuentapropistas,
which are independent entrepreneurs. you're allowed to bea private entrepreneur in 201 industries. now i didn't want to list all 201, so the number 16 popped into my head and we did every 16 one. benny morã© was a dancer who died in '63, so it's like cuban dancing, you see what they are.
some are very trivial. now i want to point out number 96 and 144. this is not recreational. this is what we saw, fieldsbeing plowed by oxen. and it's not like they're amish. because that's what they have. so those are important industries. i'm sorry, we should have gone back. we have a part-time farmer.
there's a guy out with amachete cutting his tobacco on benito's farm. i'm going to go backwards again because i want you to see number 176. by pure chance my system got me to the one we're most interested in. that's us in a 1928 ford. the driver is an immunologist. ten years of medical training,
including two in europe, she had spent four yearspracticing in africa, one of the ways the cubangovernment earns foreign exchange is they export healthcare workers. she had come back to cuba, knew her grandfatherhad this car in a barn, took the engine out andput in a diesel engine, 'cause that's the kindof gas they can get, and she's no longer a doctor.
she's now a cab driver at night because she doesn't like the car to be exposed to the sun. okay, that's cuba. one last thing. this picture's taken by her sister. family's important in cuba. you can own your own home in cuba but you can't sell it.
you can trade it, but you can't sell it. if you happen to be married tosomeone who also has a house, you can't rent the second house unless it's to a family member. and so everybody's related. our tour guide is rentingan apartment in havana. she's open about it. she says, yes, we've agreedthat the woman's my aunt. if anyone asks, she's my aunt.
and it's the same thing. if you're a cuentapropistaand you hire a sixth worker, you pay a massive increase in taxes, unless it's a family member. so you go into a restaurant, they're all related supposedly. and everyone just winks at that. and it's that culture of tax evasion and ignoring the rules
that is necessary to live, but it's inefficient, it's wasteful. a physics professor andimmunologist being cab drivers to survive, that's pretty inefficient and it's not going to change. the embargo's going to stay in place and the cuban communist government is quite convinced thatthey're doing the right thing. so that's the pessimistic end of it.
so now, lynn is going to tell us more about the cuentapropistas. - i'm going to pick up where troy left off and go a little bit deeperinto private business and entrepreneurship in cuba. as many of you know, thecuban revolution was 1959, fidel castro and hisgovernment nationalized most of the foreign-owned sectors of cuba, sugar mills, oil refineries,utilities, transportation.
eventually, they went onto all privately owned land and homes, also moved to the state. by 1968, what castro calledhis revolutionary offensive, nationalized the remaining58,000 private businesses without reasonable compensation in cuba. over the years since thenthere's been small gains in private businessbut then the government has retrenched and taken things back. and it wasn't until the year2008 when raul came to power
that cuba started to see therebirth of private enterprise. and as tony says,small-scale urban businesses were allowed on a number of stipulations and they're called cuentapropistas. these are the seven categories of allowable small businesses. in 2011, the governmentauthorized private businesses and as tony said, 201designated activities categorized into seven groups.
in my talk i'm going to focus on group 1, production and sale of food and beverages. group 3, personal and technical services which includes repairof mechanical equipment and group 4, room rentals. some of the other reformsback in 2011 allow government to engage in commercialactivities with cuentapropistas. some types of i'm going to go tcps because i can't getcuentapropistas out of my mouth,
can hire unlimited employees,not just family members. restaurants seating from12 chairs to 20 chairs and later to 50 chairs. another reform was that people could rent out their entire home and public sector employees were allowed to also work in the private sector. by 2013, cuba had a workforce of 5.1 million people and over a million, or 20 percent,
were working in the private sector, including 430,000 legallyregistered self-employed, (brief video interruption) who either owned or leased private plots, and about 600,000 to amillion in those gray areas, those illegal activities. and as both tammy and tonysaid, the median income of government workers issomewhere between $20 and $30. while we were in cuba in april of 2016,
the government held theirseventh communist party congress and the government statedpublicly that private enterprise has a positive role toplay in cuba's future and they hope to moveto legalize thousands of small and medium-size businesses that have sprung up. and as of 2016, a third of the workers in cuba are now workingin the private sector. the first area i'd liketo look at is paladares,
they're the privately-owned restaurants. this is the story of cafelaurent, our first meal in cuba. paladares started in private homes. this was our first-day tour guide. this is the private home. the restaurant is up onthe top on that terrace and that is our groupat our first cuban meal. we felt welcomed and we had a lovely three-course lunch
and we knew it had been a private home because as some of us madeour way to the bathroom there was a lovely bathtubright in the bathroom where, that was open to the public. now these paladares, i'mgoing to give examples of what tony said. they have to go aroundthe system to survive. so i'll start by justtalking about the tax system and it's not only for paladares,
but it's for all small businesses. first, there's a monthly tax, a tax on net revenue basedon how much they bring in. so 15 percent or, if theybring in 10 to 20,000 pesos, up to 50 percent. so if you look at cuban pesos, convertible to convertible pesos, 24 cuban pesos equalsone convertible peso, so if they make 20,000 cuban pesos,
that's only $833 a month. so anything over $833 a month, they're paying almost 50 percent in tax. plus, they pay tax peremployee, as tony said. so if they have less than six employees, they pay one part of base salary. if they have more than, if they have 10 to 15. and then, if they havegreater than 15 employees,
they pay to the government three times the base salary of cuba for each employee. and then they also pay atax at the end of the year. so how do cubans get around this? well cuba is a cash society. there's no credit cards. there's no banking. there's no checks. so there's no records.
and so we have oneexample of this is benito, we asked him, how much of his revenuegoes to the government? and he says that 90 percentgoes to the government and 30 percent goes to me. so that's how it happens. another challenge forpaladares is advertising. how do tourists and others find this? well, to advertise in cuba you need
to get permission from the government, and we didn't see very much advertising, and you pay a monthly tax and there's a lot of bureaucracy. so how do the cubans get around this? they print up little business cards and they send people out on the streets and folks who bring guests to restaurants get a little bit of a tip
and the guests arrive in the restaurants. we experienced this model when my friend elizabethjacobsen and i wanted to ride in the special coco taxi. well we were greeted by a man who said, i will bring you to coco taxi. and he didn't, but we ended up taking a regular taxi back after giving him a nice tip just to get rid of him.
(audience laughter) and probably the biggestchallenge of paladares is lack of access to wholesaledistribution channels. paladares are supposedto pay retail prices for everything that they use. the government monopolizes, imports, and heavily taxes goodsimported by travelers, even if for personal use. it's impossible to find the types of wine,
beer, food that they're selling, much less they don't have access to quality, professional-levelcooking equipment. so when i asked how paladaresstock their kitchens and stock their wine lists,i was told that they have to know someone who knows someone. and that's how they run their restaurants. casas particulares, and i'mnot saying that right either, is a whole rental network.
we saw these when we were going through the countrysides. they're indicated with theblue anchor on the door and these are home rentals. and many of you probably saw, back about a year ago, thatairbnb somehow was able to make a relationshipwith cuba and go into cuba and offer cuban home rentals on their site.
so holly, who was one ofour mba students who works for a hotel chain, her research centered around the cuban hospitality industry. she booked a night at anairbnb in havana for just $50, just to have the opportunityto interview the owners. she found, they picked her up at the hotel we were staying at and she found it alovely private apartment with a balcony overlooking the ocean
and was able to talk with them. and the owners are subject to cuban tax and they also pay $10on that $50 to airbnb. the average host makesabout $250 per booking. airbnb is a very interesting case study. first, i wasn't sure how they made that relationship with cubabecause what we learned is that the cuban government requiresthe majority interest on all business activityfrom foreigners in cuba.
but what i do know is thatjust over a year later, 4,000 of the 20,000private rentals in cuba are now listed on airbnb,and over 13,000 americans have made reservations throughairbnb to stay in cuba. how can an internet company that runs on credit-card transactionswork in a country where there's very little internet and it's a totally cash-based society? what they found, as always,is that cubans find a way.
i read an article in forbes about a gentleman named manseca. he has access to aninternet connection at work and over the years, before airbnb, he built a portfolio of about 900 houses that pay him to findreservations for them. airbnb found him and eight others like him and now they go through them. airbnb goes through these agents
to book the rentals. the agent pays cash and the system works. additional challenges to the rental owners is again the distribution system. they don't have access tothings like water pumps to fix the water system. they don't have access to furniture to do the food for the breakfast. they also don't have accessto capital to fix things.
cubans distrust their banks,they don't use their banks, they are too bureaucratic and they don't do anyfinancing through the banks. and another challenge,again, is the internet. there's very little access to internet. as we were there, there'smore internet hot spots and we'd see large groupsof people sitting outside on steps using the internet, but it's very slow and very problematic.
my last example is nostalgicar. it's an entrepreneurial businessowned by a husband/wife, julio alvarez and nidialicia costa. they transformed a family passion of restoring cars into avery successful business. they specialize in 1950 chevrolets and they started in2012 with one '55 chevy. they now have over 22 cars and are contracted with over 15 drivers
and they have even started a side business where they refurbish carsthat employ 11 workers. mr. alvarez and his wife havebecome quite famous in cuba. they've been to washingtond.c. several times, been to the white house, and they're the model entrepreneurs,i believe, in cuba. but again, he spent alot of time talking to us about the challenges ofrunning this business. supply chain, again, is a big one.
where does he get tires,engines, spare parts? well, he orders them on the web. he has a partner in america. he uses that partner's credit card and then the partner somehowgets him the supplies and charges a 20 percentor more surcharge, just to get them there. he doesn't have access to a bank but he was pretty excitedwhen we were there
because he just was able to create a bank account for himself in miami. i was not quite sure how that happened but he got somebody toget him a bank account. you can find him on the web. the website is run througha business in canada and he wasn't too happy with that business because the prices were going up and it wasn't gettingupdated as much as he wanted.
and the last challenge he'sexperiencing is brain drain. he takes college-educated,graphic design on other students, he teaches them how to refurbish cars and some of them have been stolen away by american companies who wantthat talent at their site. so raul's cuba seems to be slowly creating a climate that supports small business with an overall goal of 40 percent of the workforce in the private sector.
however, there are still complaints of constant harassment by tax inspectors, shortages of supplies, limitedaccess to the internet, scarcity of quality food,shortage of plumbing and other supplies. there also seems to beweariness and distrust that the government could retrench again and take away many of the reforms. i was really impressed withthe innovative solutions
to roadblocks and bureaucracy that the cuban people come up with. some of them may be illegal but as tony said the cuban people seem to just take 'em in stride and their spirit andpride in their country was evident by everyone that we met. - so you'll hear sort of a continuation of the themes we'vealready talked about here
and how there's change going on and how that change istaking place in cuba. i'll start out here with a quote. this actually is a part of a slide from fabrica de arte, which is a warehouse converted into an art gallery with all different kinds of arts from rock 'n' roll on the ground floor to video expositions and alldifferent kinds of things.
this was one quote that caught my eye and it's part of a larger. the quote is farther in, in the middle. but talking about artand in my experience, as far as what iconcentrate my research on, revolves a lot around theterm transculturation, and i'll talk about that in a minute here. but a lot of that istaken in terms of culture in general but morespecifically to literature,
or at least that's my area of focus. so what i'm doing here is sort of a preliminary observation, so to speak. kind of scratching the surface on what maybe could be done or could be revealed with a deeper study. we were only there for about a week, a deeper study that wouldreveal some of these, what i call transculturalengagements that are occurring,
have been occurring throughout history and are occurring as well in cuba today. transculturation and identities, and what was interestingto me when i first had the opportunity toput on another cuba shirt. the author that's inspireda lot of my research and a lot of my work is cubano. so, fernando ortiz, and hewrote a seminal text called, contrapunteo cubanodel tacaco y el azucar,
which really looked at the processes of transculturation in cuba. he came up with the term. so here's the extended version but i think it's necessary to give you a context of where i'm coming from here. this is from his text. "i'm in the opinion thatword transculturation better expresses the differentphases of the process
of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the english wordacculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. in addition he carries the idea of consequent creation ofnew cultural phenomena,
which could be called neoculturation." so this process thatwe're talking about here is the creation of newcultural phenomenon, and where does that come from? so these processes canbe up-down or down-up. and what i'm looking at here mostly today are processes that i can see and we see examples of that already in terms of what's going on underground
and how that's influencing change. i think that's prevalentthroughout cuba today. a little more background here is tranculturacion narrativa, which is kind of where i'm coming from in terms of my own academic background and kind of extending thisterm, transcultural engagement, to different areas. so and this basicallylooks at artistic forms
and as you read thepoint you can kind of see where angel rama isgoing, he's from uruguay, where he's going with this interms of the colonial powers and indigenous cultures inall of latin america, really. so when we're talking about cuba, we're talking about african influences, we're talking about indigenous influences, we're talking about european influences and the transcultural engagements
which have produced whatwe have in cuba today. i'm going to take a look at these through the eyes of the billboards, which are very prominent. so we've mentioned alreadythere's almost no advertisement, which is kind of a nicething, right, in cuba? if you've ever been to any city, from america, any latinamerican city, of course, you'd see, to the eye, it'slike, where do i start?
there's advertisements all over. so you won't see any ofthat, or very little in cuba. what you will see areposters of propaganda. and this one you can't quite see it. my photography isn't that great. "el partido existe para elpueblo y por el pueblo." so, "the party exists for the people and by the people." so i'm going to take a lookat three different contexts,
so to speak, transculturizing engagements, and we've seen a littlebit of this already. las terrazas, the clinic there, and policlinco that wealso visited in havana. otro, so that's another billboard. sorry, if i can usespanish, "salud para todos," propaganda that you'llsee, "health for all." and las terrazas, we havehere part of a mural,
"mural de medican natural y tradicional," so this was in the clinic, very prominent, and when we asked andtalked a little bit to the practitioners there, and they said that all doctors, in partof their medical training, receive training in naturaltraditional medicine. so it's a part of theirtraining from the start and they said also there'sa pharmacy right next door, so 80 percent of the prescriptions
that they write are natural,traditional medicines that are prepared in thepharmacy right next door. so this process you cansee where it's been, through the years, sortof a transculturation in the medical process,in the field itself, in terms of treatmentsand medical services. we'll look at this a little more here. this is kind of out of place,but we'll make it back. this was also near there.
remesas, remittances,so we offer a service of paying out family remittancesthrough western union. miami, right, large cuban community. where do people get funds in cuba to do anything if they can't do anything? a lot of it comes from family in the u.s. if we have time we'll talk about that too. policlinico, this is in havana. more propaganda, thisis in the waiting room.
so this is raul, this one ofhis statements, so to speak. but he's talking abouthow to be successful, how to work together as a community, but the last one, we'll getback to this in a little bit, "la voluntad de la gente,""the will of the people," bringing that together. more above the waiting room and here is revolucion,it's a great definition, i won't read it right now,
but if you want, revolucion, revolution, by fidel, what revolution means. and maybe it's a goodtime stay tuned to this in terms of talking about the background, the context here, it'sall about the revolution. la revolucion. did i skip to... - [audience member] you went too forward. - oh, thank you. so next up here.
here is, also in the waiting room, so a visual poster withunderstanding diabetes, talks about that. really, and we saw thatfrom the demographics that tony had, in termsof longevity in cuba and the general healthinessof the population, a lot of that is in fact true and it's based on their medical system, while supplies are very scarce.
they don't have what they really need but they focus on medicine,their system is set up for a doctor to be incharge of a certain area around the clinic, makingvisits to the families, getting to know the families and then the families aredirected to this clinic if they need healthcare and then there's also specialized healthcare areas as well. the system itself, as tony mentioned too,
that cuba exports doctors. and this is an area where they have seen a lot of advancement and continue to see that. when we get intotranscultural engagements, so talking to the doctorsand nurses there as well. we weren't the first visitorsfrom the u.s. to be there. in fact, talking to otherpeople since we've come back there is a lot medicalprofessionals that go
to cuba to study thesystem, look at the system to see how it's working. and when we talk about thatshort term and long term, in terms of thesetranscultural engagements, so u.s. medical professionals learning from cuban and having those interactions is one level where wecan see that happening and bringing those back, exchanging, having an exchange ofideas and best practices
in terms of healthcare. so another billboardalongside the highway. "solo la voluntad humanpodra salvab al mundo," "only human will, or the will of humans will be able to save the world." so when we saw that earliertoo in raul's statement. so well, cuentapropistas, andwe talked about that already. i won't spend too much time on this but just in terms of,
there's a taxi, and youcan see the different ways in which this is working, not all above board, so to speak. how these entrepreneurs,how they're behaving to survive and make money. so we have on the one hand, so you can see here basicallygeared toward tourism, a restored convertible,this is on benito's farm. - [audience member]that's the pineapple guy.
- that's the pineapple guy. you can see his cart. it's a homemade cart,actually made with parts, scrap parts, put together. the horse. the horses, the animalsthere, they're not pets, they're not for recreation,they're for work and he's selling pineapples. so you have the one that hasa little bit of legitimacy
as being a taxista, andthen you have the other, i don't think being a pineappleseller is on the list. - [audience member] no. no, so, but you can see it's happening, so these processes are happening in spite of the governmentattempting to control them, they're happening, so this is something that's been happening all along in cuba. we want to go into the colonial past
and how the cultures tried, from european cultures, working to control, suppressthe indigenous cultures, but about how they wereunsuccessful in many ways. so as you can see, we don'thave time for that now, but the same processes continue to happen, continue to occur. so right here, you can't quite see it but it's a horse and a wagon.
you see, it's a four-lane highway. carts? where are the cars? it's amazing how little trafficthere really is in cuba. there just isn't, there aren'tcars, they don't have them. so there's infrastructureto a certain extent but there's really a lack of resources to make use of whatinfrastructure there is. also, one more point here,and i'll move on here quickly,
it reminded me if you're atsay, driving through duluth or superior, sunday at about noon, and there's a vikings-packers game, right? there's nobody. that's the way a lot of the highways were and a lot of times in cuba. so the pressures for reform are coming from below in a lot of senses. the third one, "la palabraensena el ejemplo guia."
so, "the word teaches and example guides," another quote from che,which are all over. this is the school in las terrazas. "vas bien fidel." "fidel, we know you're doing good." you can kind of see it's fairly well, it was actually a unicef site, in terms of others that we saw, it was fairly well maintained.
here we have, this wasnear our hotel in havana. this is the primaria, elementary school. you can kind of see thecondition that it's in and this is very typicalof most structures in cuba. a decrepit state. in spite of that, theireducation system is, they have a very high literacy rate. this contributes to theeducation of the people. a very well educated society.
being able to export doctorsis an example of that and i'll talk a little bit more. well, before we get to"socialismo o muerte" so in terms of the education,so i went to holly, that was mentioned earlier, she was looking at airbnband she rented one, so i went with her to do an interview, this was something that was great for me because i did a lot of translating
and i went with students and i could talk for a longtime about different contexts and translating all those,and what i learned there, but in there, so we weretalking, it was a young couple. she worked for a chinese company. she had, she could travelthroughout the world, she did travel. and her husband trained dolphins, he made the minimum wage,
but together they were lucky because her family had a house, his family had a house. and they were the lonedescendants, so to speak. so they actually had onethat they could rent. so they were renting this house, that's how they were able to do that. so they had a housethat they were renting. it was actually more like an apartment,
so an apartment that they were renting. in the time that theyhad started with airbnb, that was back in november of 2015 'til the time that we were there, it had been full every night. every night. and what they were doingwith what they'd earned is they were going to "buy" another house. in quotations, right,because you can't really,
and begin to expand that way. it also points to, when wetalk about equality in cuba, there is those who aremore well off than others. and that's problematic,problematic for the government, for the future of cuba. so i'm going to finish up here. another one, "la revovlucionseguna adelante," "the revolution will continue forward," even if it's in a car from the '50s.
i'll finish here with, "therevolution of the cuban people will again rise to the occasion." this was july 8th, 2016, by raul castro and you can see all thethings that he's done, or all his titles there. "the assembly of the people'spower, 8th legislature, 7th period of ordinary sessions, at the havana convention center." so what does that mean,
"the people will rise to the occasion"? we were with a taxi driver, and we mentioned this already, and he said that, cubans,we're magicians, somos magos. we're magicians, we cando, think incredible things with seemingly nothing. so, rising to the occasion. if we look at the billboards,what does that imply? if the government is bythe people, for the people,
is the government, is it going to change? if the word teaches and example guides, we have a lot of examples ofways to make things "work," so to speak. is that not what we'reseeing happening in cuba? a lot of the slogans, so to speak, the political slogansactually kind of speak to what the people aretrying to do on their own.
and i think that if we look at it in terms of transculturalcontext and engagements, those are things that are happening as a means of necessity in most cases but it's definitely happening, causing the government to respond to changes made by thepeople who have very little, that are trying to move forward. so it's going to be interesting
to see exactly what role the people play in this continued change. i think it's gonna just keep going. i think with the types oftourism that's happening, the people-to-people contextand the kind of interactions that i saw, i think there's going to be a lot more change in cuba. how it happens and how itmanifests itself politically is another question.
so this is one last one here. "as long as there's a man or a woman with arms in their hand, the country cannot be occupied." so there's a lot of that as well. that's the bay of pigs. and i think that's aboutit, that i have for now. questions?
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