Cuba Is Harvesting Bounty of Cash From Papal Visit

The zafra--Cuba’s annual winter sugar harvest--has for centuries been the lifeblood of this island’s economy. It was so important that Cuban President Fidel Castro used it to cancel Christmas as a national holiday in 1962. Survival, he said, outweighed celebration.

But last month, for the first time in 35 years, Castro reinstated Christmas as an official Cuban day off, despite the zafra. And the reason--this week’s historic visit by Pope John Paul II, which is bringing the Cuban state and its nascent private sector a different kind of zafra.

Even before the pope arrives today, millions of dollars will have been spent here by a horde of media and tourists that is expected to contribute as much as $25 million to a marginal economy strangled by a U.S. trade embargo and a huge foreign debt.

So much is being spent, in fact, that the bounty itself this week has become an issue here. And the story behind the windfall helps explain how things work--and sometimes don’t--in Cuba six years after the island lost the huge Soviet aid that kept the Havana government and its Communist system afloat.

Several officials in Havana have even used the word zafra half-jokingly to describe the rich harvest of hard currency pouring into Cuba since the first of the media arrived early this month.

But that clearly is not the official line. “We do not consider the visit of the pope as a business that will bring money into this country,” Jose Luis Rodriguez, Cuba’s minister of finance and prices, said this week when pressed on the subject at a news conference in the partly state-owned hotel where much of that money is being made. “It is a visit of another nature. And the expenses for this visit will be assumed by the state.”

True enough, Cuba’s omnipresent state has invested in extensive street repairs and face lifts for the plazas where the pope will speak. Castro stressed recently that his decision to give all workers time off to attend papal events “means millions of pesos in expenses, salaries and costs in a blockaded country that has very little but shows its character and nobility.”

While Rodriguez noted that the state’s financial investment in the visit is minimal, even a glance at prices that have been deliberately increased in the two weeks surrounding the pope’s visit at state-owned hotels and car-rental agencies and other services--as well as at the television networks and large news agencies that must pay them--indicates that Cuba does stand to earn a tidy profit.

More important, every outside dollar will count in this Communist nation where the government provides free health care, education and basic food rations for all its 11 million people--without foreign subsidies and with a sugar crop that now costs more to produce than it earns.

To prepare for the visit, the Cuban government, which owns at least a large share of every hotel, all car-rental agencies and large restaurants and bars, established a new price list, effective Jan. 12. A rental car and driver that cost $80 a day in early January is $130 a day this week; an $80-a-night hotel room now costs almost $200. And a $2 Cuban beer is going for $4 at the Havana Libre, the hotel that houses the government’s press center.

Almost everything has gotten more pricey this week. State television is charging each of the dozens of stations and networks from throughout the world $100,000 for a “clean feed” of images from the pope’s events--in some cases the only ones they will be permitted to receive. And satellite time for television broadcasting runs $725 for the first 10 minutes and $26.50 for each additional minute.

Independent camera positions at the pope’s major events also come at a cost. So does filming at government buildings for the flood of Cuba features the networks are turning out. For example, the government charged a CBS-TV crew $150-per-room to film in a public museum in Havana this week.

But, after 35 years of a punishing U.S. trade embargo and six years without its Soviet benefactor, Castro’s Cuba lacks enough of the high-tech infrastructure required by a media operation as giant as the one that has descended here. All three U.S. network anchors are broadcasting live from Havana, along with a cast of hundreds--including home-and-design personality Martha Stewart, who will report for CBS-TV’s “This Morning” on Cuban cuisine and culture. Network executives told Associated Press--which has 28 journalists accredited here for the pope’s visit--that the operation is their biggest since last year’s funeral for Princess Diana.

To support it, the networks had to bring their own gear--filling an entire barge that sailed into Havana from Miami earlier this month.

But the Cuban government is making money even off that: The state telecommunications company, Etecsa, is charging fees for all networks using satellite phones and ground stations--tens of thousands of dollars in tariffs equivalent to the business it estimates it will lose. Etecsa also is charging $150 to install a temporary line, $20 an hour for Internet access and up to $3.60 for each of the thousands of minutes of international telephone time being logged each day by the more than 3,000 journalists--half of them Americans--that the government says are covering this event. Those journalists also paid the standard accreditation fee of $60 each.

Asked for the bottom line for the government, Finance Minister Rodriguez said, “We have not made this calculation.” But Mario Paredes, executive director of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center in New York, said officials of the Roman Catholic Church on the island told Cuban officials weeks ago that the government can expect the visit to raise at least $25 million from tourism and other fees.

Though the government clearly is the biggest beneficiary, it is sharing the wealth with a growing private sector.

The tourism sector that is hosting the media, Rodriguez said at his news conference, is now the principal engine of the Cuban economy, helping cushion the blow of sharp losses in Cuba’s now outdated, inefficient sugar production.

But as for the burning question for most Cubans--about whether the visit of a pope who opposes all trade embargoes and sanctions worldwide will help lift Cuba from the U.S. ban--Rodriguez offered little hope, saying: “It would be a bit speculative. We are not thinking of getting any economic or political advantages out of this visit.”