Perceptions can't mask Cuba's ills

It is the tendency of some foreigners to try to gauge events in any hard-to-understand country with the yardsticks they used at home or in other countries.

Thus, when a McDonald's opened in Moscow in 1990, many foreigners hailed it as evidence of success in Soviet efforts to build a capitalist economy on the ruins of communism.

See how Moscow is progressing, many argued. There's Coca-Cola and Mars bars and Pizza Hut and even direct telephone dial to the West.

Foreigners understood, in a fuzzy sort of way, that the empire was dying. That explained the cheap prices, the surplus of hookers, the hundreds of poor who lined up every day under the Kremlin walls to sell an old coat, a pair of boots, a bottle of brandy.

But the foreigners knew more about McDonald's. They saw it as a sign of progress, and believed it was time to invest in Russia, to send in young, aggressive scouts to look for business openings.

One Irish correspondent in Moscow was pressed by his newspaper to stop writing so many Moscow-is-collapsing stories. Why not be more upbeat, and write about how Irish beer was now on tap around the corner from the KGB.

His answer, in a message composed during a late-night drinking session: ``Because this country is dying, no matter how many McDonald's it has.''

Sometimes, I wonder if the same gap between outside perception and inside reality also exists in Cuba today.

Cuba's official 1998 portrait is one of stability, of slow but real progress after the economy all but collapsed between 1989 and 1994. And all the numbers, whether from Cuban or independent sources, unquestionably support that image.

Yet average Cubans on the island insist that life is bad these days, perhaps worse than ever. The gap in perceptions in Cuba indeed appears to be as huge as it once was in Moscow.

Tourism and mining are booming, and the Toronto-based Sherritt International is leading a pack of foreign investors pumping money into the energy sector, telecommunications, shipyards and other industries.

The Internet has reached Havana, the government's budget deficit is under control, there's direct dial to the United States from major hotels and there are even two fast-food chains, Burgi and Rapido.

So why do so many Cubans say that life is worse, that food is less available and of lower quality than five years ago, that public transportation is again awful after a brief upturn in 1996?

One Miami resident who flew to Cuba this week to visit relatives for the first time in one year said almost everyone she has seen complained that life has gotten tougher, not better, in the past year.

A poll carried out surreptitiously in January by academics in Mexico's University of Guadalajara showed 76 percent of Cubans believed that their lives were worse than in 1993, and 18 percent said they were better.

How to explain the gap?

Perhaps life is in fact improving, and Cubans are simply grousing too much. Perhaps life is indeed improving, but just too slowly for an increasingly exhausted and hopeless people.

And perhaps life is in fact not improving at all. Perhaps all those solid economic numbers and foreign investments are just more mirages, like Pizza Hut by the Kremlin.

In a country as opaque as Russia was then, and Cuba is now, your guess is as good as mine.