by Vladimir Rodina
BUCHAREST - With a bitter smile on his face, Stefan Duma looks at the official motorcade racing through downtown Bucharest and whispers: "communists!"
More than four-and-a-half years after Romanians toppled Nicolae Ceausescu and made a staggering start towards a market economy, many people like this 52-year-old taxi driver are convinced that their country is still in the hands of the old guard.
And for good reason.
Unlike other former Soviet-bloc countries, Romania opted for "continuity" by voting ex-communists to power just five months after the bloody revolution of December 1989.
"In the first free elections of May 1990, Romanians did not vote for communism, but rather against capitalism, fearing this would bring about unemployment and poverty. After all, this is what they had been told for 45 years," says sociologist Mircea Kivu.
But the idea of having the best of two worlds with former communists ruling by market-oriented liberal guidelines, has converted the early 1990 anti-capitalist frenzy into grim disillusionment.
With below minimum wages, and threatened by the prospect of joining a burgeoning army of unemployed, Romanian families are on a slippery slope. "Last time I bought my kids toys was back in 1991, but I guess they understand our situation," said an unemployed mother of six-year-old twins.
As poverty hit 55 percent of Romania's population by the end of 1993, the once spiraling rate of 16 births for 1,000 people fell sharply to 10 per 1,000 - the lowest in four years.
With the average monthly salary hovering around 120,000 Lei, or $70, and kindergarten fees and taxes for a pre-schooler reaching $60, larger families are becoming less attractive.
"Today, having children means increasing the risk of poverty," said Catalin Zamfir, director of the non-governmental Institute for the Quality of Life.
"Even a family with two children may find itself unable to live decently," he added.
According to a report recently released by the National Statistics Commission, the rate of children raised in poverty rose from 38 percent in 1989 to a staggering 73 percent in 1993.
With real wages shrinking by 40 percent in four years, more families are finding themselves forced to send their children to orphanages.
A 1991 statistics indicated 90,688 "orphans" in Romania, compared to 31,000 in Poland and 17,500 in Hungary.
The increasingly poorer performance of the economy , which is running 50 percent below projections, has also punctured the state's social safety net.
In 1990 funds earmarked for child benefits rose to 2.8 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP), while in 1993 that amount shrank to a meager 0.8 percent.
The Labor Ministry's erratic social safety net policy has proved equally helpless with the constant rise in unemployment.
A wage subsidy program for unemployed secondary school teachers and university graduates led nowhere, as few state or private companies accepted to take over some 200,000 youths with little, if any skill.
Retraining courses and job placement also got bogged down due to the lack of vacancies.
Attempts to improve medical assistance with international credits have failed too in the face of Romania's rural backwardness.
No telephone lines and the lack of storage facilities have but frozen a $150 million World Bank project to build 420 clinics and 50 maternity wards, in addition to setting up a family planning network and securing vital supplies of drugs and contraceptives.
The project signed in October 1991 has been left in the air as local administrations found it cumbersome to provide permanent food and shelter to the 50,000 medical personnel needed to operate it.
Concerned over their own well-being, 70 percent of the doctors are still commuting between large cities and distant hamlets.
"It is hard to believe, but whoever prepared that project designed a doctor's village home with refrigerator, color television and telephone," exclaimed a dismayed Health Ministry official.
"We could not afford that even 50 years from now," the official said.
Faced with the authorities' indecisive policy to move to a market economy, more and more Romanians are looking back at the old days in nostalgia.
"Things were much better under (Nicolae) Ceausescu: I had a decent salary, my family and I went on holidays every year, and we even saved a little money to buy a car," said Ilie Matei, an unemployed engineer.
If only 3 to 5 percent of Romanians openly regret the demise of the old communist regime, recent polls indicate that attempts to rehabilitate the old dictator's memory - inconceivable four years ago - are on the rise.
Several books dedicated to the "nation's greatest hero" have been published recently, while flowers and candles are regularly placed on his "presumed" tomb.
However, a recent attempt by a handful of hard-liners to set up a new communist party triggered a wave of protests, forcing the supreme court to deny them permission to do so.
"Sooner or later the real communists will be back in power," said a member of the Socialist Party of Labor (SPL), the self-declared successor of the old Communist Party headed by a former Ceausescu Prime Minister.
"If they cannot do it legally, they will have to resort to less orthodox means," the SPL member said.
Grim as this might seem, his warning is dismissed by the rightist opposition.
"We were smarter than our neighbors. Poland and Hungary have just elected communist governments, while we have had one for four years now," Senator Ion Coja said with an obvious grin.
Vladimir Rodina is a Romanian journalist from Bucharest reporting for United Press International and other Western news organizations.
