Cuban Luxury

The New York Times has an odd title for its report on the slowly increasing disposable income in some incipiently quasi-post-Communist corners of Cuban society: “Slowly, Cuba Is Developing an Appetite for Spending.”

What a starving man lacks is not the appetite for food.

It is true that in any production-killing statist society, people may suppress ambitions and desires in psychological self-defense. But they hear about what they’re missing. If wealth and opportunity are allowed to begin to return, it is not “appetite” that revives only slowly and tentatively. It’s long-range planning of production, accumulating of capital, engagement in previously outlawed forms of trade. People must wonder whether the new hints of freedom will be expanded or capriciously reversed.

What counts as indulgence in the new Cuba? Watching a 3-D movie not on the big screen of a theatre, but on a 55-inch screen in an apartment. “This is novel — at least in Cuba,” says Manuel Alejandro, a Havana resident who recently saw his second 3-D movie on that 55-inch screen.

But those with disposable income to spend on a living-room movie theater, backyard swimming pool or car washes “are strictly a minority in Cuba, where the state pays its four million workers [in a country with an estimated 11 million people] an average salary of $19 a month.”

Most Cubans “live humbly.” For them, the slow development of economic freedom at the margins of the failed communist utopia is way too slow.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.