2024-01-06 22:17:08
“The rebels of this century continue their triumphal march through Cuba,” said Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the entry into Havana of a 33-year-old Fidel Castro. The island is going through its worst crisis since that moment when the commander-in-chief proclaimed, as part of the program of the victorious revolution: “No bread without freedom and no freedom without bread.” The present is a rosary of hardships: recession, the failure of the economic program, and daily tensions that speak of a society in the abyss, with unprecedented levels of daily violence. “The youth of today, who continue the work of the bearded”, maintained Granma despite the fact that during the last two years 425,000 citizens immigrated to the United States, which represents 4% of its inhabitants. This poignant statistic does not take into account the Cubans who left for Europe, Latin America and Russia.
The ghost of the social explosion of July 11, 2021 flutters. The wounds of that historic protest are open: 2,000 judicial imputations for contempt and sedition. The punitive exercise has not completely silenced a population that, since that episode, has redoubled its desire to leave.
The dictator Fulgencio Batista fell on the night of December 31, 1958, after two years of insurrectionary struggle. At the age of 92, Raúl Castro evoked that moment days ago when he led the official celebrations in Santiago de Cuba. The heir of his brother Fidel reaffirmed his trust in Miguel Díaz Canel. The current president emphasized the “undefeated” nature of the process started on the first day of 1959.
“Once again it’s time to rectify,” he said on Christmas Eve of the shortage. The current leadership claims to have learned from the Castros “the importance of timely correction in the face of any situation that could compromise the future of socialist construction.” The word “rectification” is part of the state language, as is “self-criticism”. Moments of contrite admission of failures that are repeated periodically.
rectification
Not surprisingly, Díaz-Canel recalled that in 1986, and in the midst of another complex circumstance, the former commander-in-chief launched the “process of rectification of errors and negative tendencies” that did not come to fruition because , the president said, the Soviet Union, Havana’s main ally throughout the Cold War, collapsed. “In 2000, Fidel himself urged us to change everything that needed to be changed, with a sense of the historical moment, and five years later, in 2005, from the University of Havana, he warned that the Revolution could destroy ourselves.”
The style of self-flagellation of the authorities in the face of the absence of results is known to a beleaguered society. The new call to repair what was done wrong coincides with exciting developments. The economy collapsed by nearly two points in 2023, according to Economy Minister Alejandro Gil Fernández’s calculations. Inflation, he reported to the National People’s Power Assembly (legislature), reached 30% per year, although consumer perception is that prices rose more than officially calculated. The devaluation of the Cuban peso eats away at pockets and expectations. The dollar officially costs 24 Cuban pesos, but in the informal market it is quoted above 200 pesos. Gil Fernández, like Díaz-Canel, trust, however, that “this time” the right course will be taken.
The island lives essentially on international tourism. During the past year, almost 2.5 million visitors landed in the largest of the Antilles, most of them Canadians and Russians, against the 3.5 million expected. Cuba has become a less attractive destination than other Caribbean places. This retraction affects overall economic performance. However, the reasons for the growing deterioration of living conditions, with scenes of unknown hunger and destitution, are related to the recognized failure of the so-called economic “ordering”. Under this name repeated until the press as a guarantee of prosperity, the monetary and exchange unification took place, preceded by a strong devaluation, a rise in prices and the reduction of subsidies.
Díaz-Canel and his team had to forget their praises for the program launched at the beginning of 2021, still under the effects of the pandemic. The setback, the president insisted, cannot be dissociated from the “asphyxiation designed and applied against a small country by the most powerful empire in history.” The measures prepared by the United States for more than half a century and accentuated years ago tend to indulgently explain almost all internal ups and downs. “I call the attention of those who prefer that we avoid the term blockade. Hopefully we can remove it from our everyday lives and erase its threats and its effects on Cuban society.”
For the portal La joven Cuba, the Government “seems to focus more on denouncing external aggressions than on the search for reforms that will get the country out of the crisis”. The need for profound changes “is at an existential point for the Communist Party, if it wants to continue to exist or aspire to remain in power, it must urgently transform itself. However, the Palace of the Revolution acts as if it does not know”.
The time of adjustment
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Another program of “macroeconomic stabilization” has been born from the disappointment of the failure to meet the goals set in the “ordering”, a concept that in Latin American countries is generally associated with “adjustment” and shock policies . The president denied that the measures had a neoliberal stamp. The paquetazo, as it is known, will make, according to Díaz-Canel, “a necessary leap” to make “more Revolution and more socialism”. Beyond the incorrigible optimism of the Government, the new rules imply an increase in fuel prices, public transport rates and electricity service and the final goodbye to the subsidy of food and other products that were included in the ration card
The end of the year showed long queues at gas stations. A meandering of cars used to waiting, this time urgent because of the ads that hit the pockets. To wait is a sacred verb in a Cuba that lives essentially on remittances sent by migrants, and crosses the straits with imagination, picaresque and resigned acceptance of the indelible codes of the black market. That which never seems to be subject to corrections.
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