[van-discuss] Re: [van-announce] Help a youth go to Cuba

[Marcel Hatch]

OK Gordie,

I read your link on definitions of homeless. It's a very good study 
and I learned a lot from it. I see what you're saying. One of the 
study's measures for homelessness is overcrowding within a single 
dwelling resulting in lack of privacy. This is a big problem in Cuba. 
Cuban's are constantly frustrated because of this. It results from a 
lack of building supplies. Mexican's contracts for cement were 
cancelled because of pressure from the U.S. Lumber contracts between 
Cuba and other Latin American countries have been nixed by the the 
U.S. One solution Cuba hit on work within blockade-imposed scarcity 
was to build hotels where couples could escape for some privacy for a 
couple of hours (for you know what). It's a problem that will only 
end by the ending of the blockade and in the long term the ending of 
capitalism. In the case of Cuba, the biggest,  baddest capitalists 
still effect life on the island.

In the future I will say no one in Cuba lives on the streets or goes 
without shelter.

My point in general Gordie is that a real workers' government can 
move quickly and decisively within its means to prevent conditions of 
barbarism at the bottom which is a common feature of most all 
capitalist countries. This is why I support Cuba. Like those 35,000 
homes that were wreck by hurricanes this fall that are being rebuilt 
for free, and workers who lost jobs as a result of the hurricanes 
that are being paid 100% of their salary until factories and farms 
are fixed.

This is a superior approach to anything ever proposed by conventional 
party in Canada -- but certainly not beyond the imagination of 
working and poor people here.

Thanks and in sol,

Marcel

At 04:09 -0500 11/6/02, Geordie Birch wrote:
>said Marcel Hatch (on 2002-11-05),
>
>> Their is a housing shortage in Cuba but no one lives on the streets
>> or sleeps at night without shelter. This is because families all stay
>> together in one house and those without family share housing with
>> friends. It's tight and it's uncomfortable but it is how Cubans
>> survive and they do it with dignity and with pride to ensure no one
>> suffers. This example is not unlike how Canadians and people in the
>> U.S. did things during the Great Depression. I know, this is how my
>> grandparents lived.
>
>Are you aware that many people in Canada and the US live this way now?
>Unlike in Cuba, we call them "homeless."  I have lived like this and will
>again.
>
>I guess you and I differ on the definition of homeless.  I already posted
>the following link (and as such am in gross violation of netiquette) but
>am afraid that it was overlooked in the flood:
>
>http://www.campus.ncl.ac.uk/cardo/virtualconf/papers/Definitions.htm
><-- `This paper explores the diverse definitions of homelessness in 10
>developing countries and how those definitions have developed. Definition
>is important because "... most researchers agree on one fact: who we
>define as homeless determines how we count them."'
>
>Homelessness is more than simply rooflessness, and to say that
>homelessness does not exist in Cuba erodes the dignity of the many Cubans
>living in substandard housing.
>
>Geordie.