In all the arguments surging about Fidel Castro, I have noticed the lack of simple, even tourist-level observation, of what his country has been like in recent years. This can tell you more than disquisitions on land reform or geopolitics. A friend who went there this year reports that the level of goods available to citizens is even more limited than he remembers from visiting communist Romania in the 1970s. He entered one local-currency government food shop in Havana. Three staff sat at the counter, but there was literally no food to buy. There was a Havana-wide shortage of eggs at the time, and when a box of eggs appeared at one end of the town, mobile phones brought crowds rushing with the news.
As always in communist countries, people with capitalist money are relatively well treated.
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