Some things never change. The late Poison Ivy was a great fan of Cuba, the last communist holdout in the western hemisphere. It seems our new communications minister inherited the veneration our revolutionaries hold for that benighted country.
According to the deal, we'll get to share with Cuba expertise in software design and hardware manufacturing. One would have thought that manufacturing hardware is something best left to the hyper-efficient markets of Asia, where you can pick up the latest and greatest for a song. But no, we want to emulate that bastion of advanced technology, Cuba.
For comparison, our Internet penetration is on a par with that of Cuba, where private citizens are prohibited from buying computers or accessing the Internet without special authorisation. That hardly seems like something to aspire to. Its sole mobile operator claims 330 000 customers, or about 3% of the population. Using that as a benchmark would set South Africa back two decades.
Why is it that private South African citizens, on their own initiative and at their own cost, fly to hi-tech conferences in the USA, Europe and Asia, but their government thinks in stultifying command-and-control terms, and seeks to learn from the most repressive, undemocratic and underdeveloped regimes in the world?
Cuba's own citizens are fleeing the country in their thousands, risking their lives on the high seas in homemade rafts, only to face the threat of arrest and deportation if caught.
According to Ra'ul Castro himself, one in four workers in the country's state-run economy is superfluous.
The average income of a Cuban worker, reported by one visitor to be about 245 pesos a month, cannot buy a hot dog a day. It is just enough for an onion or a pack of cigarettes, but you can't have both on the same day. (Real data is hard to come by, but figures reported by the World Bank, and converted to convertible Cuban pesos, roughly square with this report.)
Cuban infant mortality rates, often lauded by fellow travellers of the communist regime, are a farce. More than a third of all pregnancies are aborted, and doctors who have defected report that the age of infants who die is routinely misreported. Even so, it has plummeted from 13th on the world ranking of infant mortality to 44th. The real figure is anyone's guess, but UNICEF ranks Cuba 158th in the world for under-five mortality.
Cuba's own citizens are fleeing the country in their thousands.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
The communist regime has imprisoned Dr Darsi Ferrer without charge - and denied him urgently needed medical attention. His official crime? He had two bags of cement at home. His real crime? Documenting conditions in the hospitals the regime does not show off to foreign diplomats and filmmakers. A US television station, ABC, cowed under threats of having its Havana bureau closed if they showed these smuggled images. Perhaps the Cuban regime is aware that photos and films of fly-covered patients, emaciated mange-ridden bodies, gangrenous wounds and faeces-smeared floors aren't consistent with its propaganda. Ferrer remains in jail, a year after his arrest, where hunger strikes by (and suspicious deaths of) political prisoners are commonplace.
Children in Cuba's vaunted education system are required to participate in quasi-military drills, reminiscent of the Hitler Youth and the old South Africa's "kadette". They must also show that their parents are properly "integrated", which implies membership of the communist party and other revolutionary or union organisations. Needless to say, there is only one union, levying mandatory dues, and it doesn't exist to defend workers' rights against capitalist employers, since there are no capitalist employers. Whenever state events in support of the dictator take place, children are required to prove attendance, or risk their place in school. Does "free education" still sound so good under these conditions?
At a free "concert for the homeland", only a few people turned up to hear a "popular" singer, who got rich by kowtowing to the regime. Instead of singing, however, he merely read a letter in support of the country's one-party communist state. Thrilling entertainment that must have been.
Reports the Associated Press from Havana: "State-controlled media said the concert would prove Cuba's artists and intellectuals support the government. But the approximately 1 400 Cubans who turned out to watch were nothing compared to the thousands who routinely jam the plaza for free concerts."
While calling for a normalisation of relations between the US and Cuba, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - hardly a fire-breathing right-winger - wryly observed that it seems the Cuban leadership wants no such thing, since it would rob them of their oft-used excuse for the lack of development in the country.
A group of women known as the Ladies in White, marching to protest the imprisonment of their husbands and sons, and armed only with flowers, were recently assaulted by the regime's brownshirts and forced into buses to be taken home. Many were beaten. One reports she was called a "filthy negro".
We might indeed learn a lot about liberty and prosperity from this awful island, but it would be a surprise if Cuba could teach us much about technology. Perhaps General Disappointment would serve his country better if he made a break with the past - in which our telecoms policy, despite a longstanding association with Cuba, was none too successful.
There are probably better examples in the world to which South Africa could aspire.
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