Word: havana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Avenue Galiano, a shopping street in downtown Havana, where she was gazing longingly into a store selling plastic shoes for 20 pesos (15 cents). They are rationed, and it is not her year to buy new ones. Ana was eager to talk, but not in public, where the government's ever present watchers could see. Come to my home, she said, and you will see how terrible life is here...
Home is a rundown walk-up in Old Havana, where filth clings to peeling plaster and the reek of garbage sticks in the throat. Makeshift walls, festooned with frayed electric wires, subdivide the old apartments into tiny windowless warrens. When we arrive early one morning, she is locked behind massive doors. A woman with the face of a Madonna stares impassively over the half door to her dark flat. Down the hall another head pokes out: the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution has taken note of our arrival...
...government, desperate to limit the daily 12- hour blackouts of summer, spent some of its precious cash on cheap, dirty oil to fire the electric plants. But nights are still dark and silent; only the light from the tourist hotels casts a faint glow over the ocean-front Malecon. Havana is a ghost of itself, its once vibrant life leached out by hard times...
Circumstance, not a change of heart, is the driving force behind Cuba's grudging transformation. If the collapse of the Soviet empire had not cut Havana's imports from $8 billion to $1.7 billion today, change would not be coming at all. Beginning in July, Castro announced steps to open up the economy. He legalized the use of the dollar, granted more autonomy to farmers, and allowed people in more than 135 small-time occupations, from shoe repair to haircutting, to work for themselves. "For 30 years we did not do anything like this," Fidel told a group...
...system needs only modest tinkering. A grizzled mine worker warns against any changes that bring back inequality. Reporters are invited into the country, but top officials decline interviews: they no longer seem to know what the party line is. "There is a new incoherence," says a Western diplomat in Havana. "It's not pluralism, but different people have different ideas about where the country should...