[Marxism] NYT: In Cuba, a Politically Incorrect Love of the Frigidaire

[Walter Lippmann]

Here's some cutesie-pie reading in the Sunday newspaper of record.

This reprehensible source of news distortion is more properly
designated "The New York Slimes" - by me - because it cannot seem to
resist finding ANY excuse to trash the Cuban Revolution. In this
case, for example, while sneering at Cuba's program to save energy
and to replace wasteful appliances with newer and modern ones, it
omits such simple facts as the country-wide replacement of
incandescent bulbs by compact fluorescents. In this case while
mentioning that Cubans are required to pay $200.00 for their
brand-new Chinese refrigerators [ask yourself, where would YOU get a
new refrigerator for $200.00?], it leaves out one key detail. You get
to pay for the new one over ten years. AT ZERO [0%] FINANCE CHARGE.
Yes, it's true that some Cubans can't, don't or won't pay for the new
machines, and in Cuba, unlike here in the center of World Freedom, no
one will come and take the new frigs away.

You'd have to wonder how this New York Slimes reporter - they don't
have a bureau in Cuba and only bother to go to the island once in
awhile - managed to select this particular individual who complains
so loudly on cue about a new refrigerator. Oh, also, though this is
supposed to be yet another proof of the invasive presence of Big
Brother Kommie Kastro intervening brusquely into THE LIVES OF OTHERS,
the reporter, he omits a few notable facts.

Had Washington not imposed a blockade on Cuba almost half-a-century
ago, these ancient machines might long ago have been replaced by more
modern and efficient ones. Same is true of the ancient U.S.
automobiles which Cubans keep functioning out of a mixture of
necessity and affection. See the lovely documentary movie YANK TANKS
for an automotive sense of this phenomenon.

By the way, the pseudonymous source says she got her Frigidaire 24
years ago. Even by my mathematical skills, that would have been 1983
or so. In other words, she got it used because major household
appliances from the U.S. haven't been imported into Cuba since the
earliest days of the Cuban Revolution. We're not told the model
number of manufacturing date, so there's no way to know how old the
Frigidaire actually was, or what its rated electricity usage was.
These would have been interesting facts to know. They would have made
the story more meaningful, indicating that there was some rational
calculation in the Cuban government's decision to do this, not just
some nutty inspiration by an old bearded crackpot.

But it would have taken something away from the Big Bad Commie story,
wouldn't it? Maybe it WAS wasting electricity? Many Cubans with
ancient refrigerators have special latches which are used to keep the
old doors firmly shut. After a certain number of decades, the rubber
gaskets which insure insulation finally give out, and the latches
maintain the pressure which keeps the cold functioning. Recently my
own Amana refrigerator has begun having problems. I bought it NEW in
the mid-1980s.

My next door neighbors in Havana had - I don't know if it's been
changed out yet - an ancient frig from the 1940s, which they had to
defrost literally every two or three days. Cubans love to complain,
and foreigners expect all Cubans to complain, and Cubans like to
provide foreigners with what they expect: complaints. Somehow I think
this complaining is part of the Cuban national culture. I have felt
this way about the New York Times for about as long as I've been
reading it, ever since the early sixties. It never ceases to give
reasons to be disliked.

Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California

============================================================================
GRANMA STORY ABOUT PARISIAN REFRIGERATOR ART EXHIBIT:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/70240
============================================================================

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 2, 2007
The World
In Cuba, a Politically Incorrect Love of the Frigidaire By SIMON ROMERO

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/weekinreview/02romero.html 


HAVANA

ANYONE who thinks the cold war ended years ago clearly has not spent
time in Cuban kitchens.

Before he disappeared from public life, an ailing Fidel Castro
enlisted the prowess of Chinese industry last year to get rid of some
of the most resilient totems of American imperialism: Frigidaire,
Kelvinator and Westinghouse refrigerators from the 1950s. The
government acquired more than 300,000 new Chinese replacements as the
centerpiece of a project to improve energy efficiency in a
cash-starved country and eliminate what Mr. Castro called “dragons
which devour our electricity.”

But the vanquishing of these refrigerators (along with some Soviet
models imported in the 1970s) has caused some wistfulness and angst
here. In their decades of isolation from the American economy and
from global prosperity, Cubans have been taught to take pride in the
way they have kept grandiose old mechanical marvels running — ancient
Cadillacs and Russian-built Ladas included.

“They took away my señor and replaced him with a little guy,” said a
47-year-old cook who lives in the Reparto Zamora district in western
Havana. Welcoming a visitor to her kitchen, she pointed to the slim,
white Chinese-made Haier that had taken the place of the bulky, pink
Frigidaire that had been in her family for 24 years.

She called herself Moraima Hernández, but indicated with a wink that
she was concealing her real name — the only way she felt able to
speak without fear of retaliation. Well, up to a point. She declined
to say why she felt Mr. Castro was casting a shadow over items as
banal as household appliances.

Instead, she simply opened the Haier to reveal its meager contents:
bottles of tap water, a few eggs, mustard, half an avocado and some
“textured picadillo,” soy protein mixed with a bit of ground beef.

Her old refrigerator was so big, she said nostalgically, that two
legs of pork could fit inside.

Continuing her tale, she said that it took eight men to carry the
Frigidaire from her second-story apartment down to the street and
that they had to remove part of her balcony to make way. The Haier,
by contrast, was carried up with ease.

The Chinese model makes less noise than the Frigidaire. And like many
other refrigerators in Cuba, it already has an affectionate, if
mocking. nickname: “Llovizna,” or “Drippy,” because of the moisture
that accumulates on its shelves.

Cubans do not have to switch to Chinese refrigerators, but there are
strong incentives to comply. When the exchange program is offered to
a town or neighborhood, it is presented as the apple of Fidel’s eye,
and as an opportunity to show one’s patriotism while lowering one’s
electricity bill.

But unlike education and health care in Cuba, refrigerators are not
free.

A concern for Cubans is the cost of the new Chinese models: about
$200, a small fortune in a country where the average monthly wage is
about $15.

Ten-year payment plans have been made available.

But officials have already acknowledged problems in collecting
installments. Granma, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, reported
that provincial officials had promised “actions intended to elevate
payment discipline in the beneficiary population.”

Of course, debt and interest remain elastic concepts in Cuba, which
is not a member of the International Monetary Fund or any other
multilateral lending organization. Today, its top trading partners
are Venezuela, which provides Cuba with cheap oil, and China, which
buys raw materials like nickel from Cuba while selling it items like
refrigerators.

The island’s economic isolation, compounded by a United States
embargo in place since the early 1960s, has made a necessity of
preserving technology from before the revolution. Inspired by the
ingenuity it took to keep American refrigerators working so long, a
group of Cuban artists last year transformed 52 of them into art.
They put on a show called “Instruction Manual” that was a big hit in
Cuba and is making the rounds in Europe this year.

In the show, the artists Alejandro and Esteban Leyva pinned medals on
an old G.E. refrigerator, painted it olive drab and named it “General
Eléctrico.” Another artist, Alexis Leyva, installed oars on his
refrigerator, drawing on the politically loaded symbol of the
homemade boats Cubans use to leave the island illegally. Others were
made into cars, skyscrapers a Trojan horse and a jail cell.

Ernesto García Peña, a painter, turned his into an eroticized female
image. “In this heat,” he explained, “the refrigerator is almost
worshiped for its role as an absolute necessity of modern life. We
treat it with very special affection.”

Still, necessity most often trumps sentimentality in Cuba. Many
thousands of old refrigerators are simply being taken to junkyards,
where technicians recycle everything they can.

According to the government, the refrigerators weigh an average of
122 pounds, including 93 pounds of retrievable steel, 18 of plastic,
3 of aluminum and 2 of copper.

The steel goes to plants like Antillana de Acero in Havana, where it
is transformed into construction material. The copper goes to the
Empresa Conrado Benítez to produce telephone and electric cables. The
aluminum is used to make kitchen utensils and parts for other
appliances.

“Where do the old refrigerators go?” Granma asked in the headline of
one of its many articles on Cuba’s energy-efficiency drive. “From
them,” the newspaper said, “everything is reclaimed.”