http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht.../13/wcuba13.xml

Cubans feel betrayed by tourist playground

Carlos swung his legs over the sea wall bordering one side of Havana's famous Malecon seafront promenade and looked on curiously as a 1957 Chevrolet with an open top slowed to allow its passengers to photograph the faded facade of a colonial building.

"They watch us and we watch them," he said with a resigned laugh as the tourists turned their cameras to capture the image of a young boy optimistically fishing in the oily waters.

"It's a little like being in a zoo," sighed Carlos, a 24-year-old literature student. "But that is the reality of life here. We are caged while the world looks on."

In the hushed tones that all Cubans adopt when they talk about their ailing leader Fidel Castro, who six months ago was forced to hand over the reins of power to his younger brother Raul after undergoing emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding, Carlos explained the continuing frustration of a nation still firmly under Communist rule.

[...]

"Fidel has starved us," he whispered. "Yes, there is a lack of food but it is more than that. We are starving for information, for opportunity, for freedom. We want to enjoy the same things as those people over there," he said as a fresh batch of tourists spilled out of the doors of a tour bus.

Cubans struggle to survive on an average wage of less than £10 a month to supplement the state rations which provide them with basics such as rice and beans and either one small bar of soap or tube of toothpaste a month.

Visiting foreigners can spend almost double that on a taxi ride to the airport or a meal in one of Old Havana's state-run restaurants.

"It sticks in the throat," says Oscar Espinosa, an independent economist and dissident who was jailed in 2003 for criticising the regime's economic strategy and is now confined to his home on conditional release.

"Such obvious inequality in a country where for decades the people have laboured in the mistaken belief that they are creating a classless society. The truth is we have created a paradise for tourists and those that live off them, but for the rest of us, daily life gets worse," he said

[...]