In the first few years of the Revolution, the economic system that until then had sustained the Cuban nation, and the complex entrepreneurial grid that had evolved over the centuries, were destroyed. First came the confiscations of 1959 and 1960, when all properties belonging to the Batistianos were "recovered" in favor of the state. Next on the list were all enterprises having any hint of ideological coloration. In that category were, essentially, the media and the private schools, so that the civil society that preceded the revolutionary era could not articulate its own defense. Later, in October 1960, the great segment of industrial and commercial property, national and foreign, was confiscated, by decree, in just 24 hours. Suddenly the Cuban state, which had practically no management experience, was called to administer 50% of the GNP. And a few years later, in 1968, after a revolutionary offensive, the entire entrepreneurial matrix remaining in the country - some 50,000 minute enterprises, nearly all family-owned - also passed into state hands, since Fidel Castro - against the tepid opposition of Carlos Rafael Rodríguez - was convinced that it was the role of government to mend umbrellas, repair shoes and maintain refrigerators, so as to prevent, at all costs, any Cuban from escaping government control and managing his own affairs. To own property was a path to power, and Fidel Castro was determined that nobody on the island would have power except himself. Cuba thus became a more communist state than the USSR.

These confiscations prompted the mass exodus of the entrepreneurial class and of many professionals who saw their lives shrinking. The country was palpably drained of what today is known as human capital, and with each emigrant who fled, the strong work ethic that had characterized Cuban society was weakened and replaced by the passive attitude of those who expected the state, since it had taken charge of their lives, to resolve all their problems. To them, it was no longer possible to dream about improving personal or family conditions through their own initiative. The Party decided where they could work, how much they could earn, and how they were to spend the money.

And that was but a fraction of the limitations imposed on society. The Party, besides rationing food to control how much and what the Cubans were to eat, also established the ethical and inter-personal rules that would govern public life. It was the communists who decided which ideas were just and which were despicable; which books should be read and which should be burned; which music conformed to patriotism and which denoted a pro-Yankee and servile attitude (like those rocking Beatles, created by the perverse imperialism). Nothing escaped the Party's implacable eye: which clothes and which hairstyles showed nationalist roots, and which, on the contrary, exhibited personalities rotted by cosmopolitanism. In fact, the Party knew and decided which persons were acceptable to visit and which should be avoided, in order to escape being tinged with guilt by associating or maintaining ties with politically undesirable persons. People found that they had to avoid running into old acquaintances who might be perceived as being opposed to the government, and even certain relatives became inconvenient, for the only relationship acceptable to the revolutionaries was a relationship with an impeccable comrade.

A revolutionary was expected to repudiate his parents, his children or his siblings if they fell into disgrace or opted to go to exile. Abandoning Cuba was considered a sordid form of treason to the fatherland. Such attitudes could not even be attributed to the political immaturity of the early days, for as recent as July 1999, when several basketball players decided to defect in Puerto Rico after an international tournament, the father of one of them - Ruperto Herrera, president of that sport's federation in Cuba - declared them traitors to the nation where they were born and proclaimed the immense shame he felt by the defection of his son, whose only aim was to continue playing basketball in a country where citizens were treated as human beings and not as objects owned by the political power.

Worse yet, it was the Party's prerogative to establish which students could receive a higher education and which were doomed to become common laborers or low-level employees for life. College education had ceased to be a right, within the reach of any talented high- school graduate, and had become a privilege based on the political credo. Castro's slogan was constantly repeated: "The university is for the revolutionaries." When it was discovered that Antonio Guedes, one of the leaders of the University Student Federation at the Clinical Hospital, was an observant Catholic, he was expelled from the university. To be a believer in the 1980s was incompatible with an academic education. This is merely one example among thousands of similar stories. Ana María Sabournín's case was even more disturbing. She was expelled from the university after a tumultuous student meeting, in which people (shouting at the top of their lungs) informed her that her husband was a homosexual. It was known that a homosexual could not be a university student - those who were found to have such inclinations were publicly expelled in dishonor - but her rejection was even more brutal. The rule now applied to the spouse of a homosexual as well. The regime's homophobia, which in the 1960s had crushed thousands of Cubans regardless of their intellectual hierarchy (Lezama Lima, José Mario, Virgilio Piñera. Reynaldo Arenas, Ana María Simo) was still alive in the 1970s and 1980s. There was no let up. The university was only for heterosexual revolutionaries, who had better be careful in choosing their spouses. And the same held true in every segment of the state. Leadership positions went to the "good revolutionaries" - even if they lacked intellectual merit or a suitable preparation for the job. Che Guevara, who had no relevant experience, became the head of the National Bank; a basketball coach, José Llanusa, became the minister of education. The only required merit was to be a revolutionary, loyal to Castro; the big crime, the unredeemable flaw, was not be one.

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