Tuesday morning roundup: guess the theme

Can Cuba's lack of oil serve as the opposite of the resource curse?

Professor Mesa-Lago said one impetus for reform may be Cuba’s dimming hopes of tapping offshore oil deposits. Repsol, the Spanish oil giant, decided in May to leave Cuba after its second well came up dry. Other companies are exploring different sites, but the dry well dented Cuba’s prospects of reducing its dependence on Venezuela, which provides billions of dollars’ worth of oil each year in exchange for a range of Cuban services.

Russia has no such advantage, but even outside the major cities, there's potential for change in spite of reprisals:

Antontsev, who has a radio show, said his listeners don’t respond when he has programs about laws cracking down on protest, but the phones light up when he talks about bad roads.

“They don’t see the direct link between elections and the condition of the roads,” he said. “People will become dangerous when they see the reason for their misfortune.”
Alexander Kruglikov, a longtime Communist, said the authorities are making a big mistake in suppressing dissent. “I have to say that the Soviet Union fell apart because there was no real opposition in the country,” he said with a wry smile. “No one was listening to individual voices.”

This column on Belarus's distinguished political prisoners comes a few days after friends and I were talking about the Soviet-era nostalgia sweeping Eastern Europe. I think I've had this conversation with more than one set of friends, one of whom said that people were buying old, crappy products because they reminded them of the old days. I heard about this a bit in Hungary--not so much "at least the trains ran on time;" more, "at least our pensions were guaranteed." Financial security is nothing to sneeze at, but it (obviously) needn't come at the expense of personal and political freedom, no matter what the Asian Tiger theorists will tell you. Anyway, in one of these conversations, I said, "if people want to go back to living under that system, they still have Belarus." We can only hope that won't be the case for long.