Harsh Self-Assessment as Cuba Looks Within

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/world/americas/harsh-self-assessment-as-cuba-looks-within.html

By VICTORIA BURNETT
Published: July 23, 2013

So Alexi had little to argue with this month when President Raúl Castro unleashed his fiercest and lengthiest public lecture to date on the demise of Cuban culture and conduct. In a speech to the National Assembly, Mr. Castro said that Cubans’ behavior — from urinating in the street and raising pigs in cities to taking bribes — had led him to conclude that, despite five decades of universal education, the island had “regressed in culture and civility.”

Cubans build houses without permits, catch endangered fish, cut down trees, gamble, accept bribes and favors, hoard goods and sell them at inflated prices, and harass tourists, Mr. Castro said.

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But while Mr. Castro rebuked his countrymen for losing their “honesty, decency, sense of shame, decorum, honor and sensitivity to others’ problems,” many Cubans accused the government of clinging to an unworkable economic system while the country’s infrastructure and social services crumbled and, with them, the people’s sense of communal duty.

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Beyond that, he said, the “inverted social pyramid,” in which a doctor earns less than a manicurist, is becoming more pronounced as small-scale entrepreneurs, using the openings Mr. Castro has made to introduce some private enterprise, make money selling pizzas or mobile handsets.

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