On the road to the abyss

From La Joven Cuba

An old Arabic adage says: “The only thing that is built from top to bottom is a well.” It seems to be the problem with the economic Update of the Cuban Model: the continued belief that a group of government officials and experts at the highest levels are the ones to conceive, plan and implement the changes required. Meanwhile the rest of the people must join, abide and comply with them. Such dogma makes no sense.

The Update process began between 2008 and 2009. It eliminated absurd prohibitions and called for a national debate on what to do to harness the obsolete Cuban economic and social model while respecting the principles of national sovereignty and the socialist line. The majority of the people and experts welcomed the idea with reborn enthusiasm and displayed their creativity in millions of interventions and thousands of proposals offered.

Two documents emerged from this preparatory stage that, even with its limitations and dissatisfactions, could guide the reforms: the Guidelines (2011) and Conceptualization (2016). However, when the time came to do something — using the name Work of Reform – the circle of true decision makers who conceived and applied the plan, who included some of the persons who had caused the problem, demonstrated that they did not know how to solve it.

The variables causing the current Cuban crisis are three: the intensified blockade; the Covid-19 pandemic; and the erratic policy of internal reforms. Our ability to act on them is not the same. The first is beyond our will and radius of action — despite Biden’s campaign promises and the recent vote at the UN, favorable to Cuba but not binding.

The second will be resolved in a shorter period of time through herd immunity, made possible thanks to the government’s massive intervention and the achievement of the Cuban vaccine and the country’s scientific capacity.

Only the third can be overcome based on the will and capacity of Cubans on the island and a good part of its emigrants. It is on this that all of us — government and citizens — must act with objectivity, promptness and determination — three factors missing from the start.

Objectivity because the ideological myths coming from the old socialist model of the State, bureaucratic and militarized, have weighed heavily in its conception and implementation, greater than the real needs and possibilities of the Cuban economy.

Two examples are worth mentioning. If the socialist state enterprise is decreed as the protagonist of the Cuban economy, then even the promised MSMEs will be state-owned, and the independence and flexibility of this type of organization can never be achieved. Second, if non-state entrepreneurs are prevented from concentrating wealth, not through fiscal policy, but by limiting their administrative growth, how can they accumulate capital, promote employment and help develop the economy?

The speed of the process is a subversive word in the Update’s long march, the pace of which has tended to be slow and zigzagging. Thirteen years after it was started, lands for cultivation are less exploited than ever; agricultural and industrial production indicators have collapsed; less and less is being invested in industry, agriculture, social spending and science, and more is going to the construction of hotels that are never full, and the diversion of water, defying mitigation and the trade winds, to turn naturally dry lands fertile. Statistics from 2010 – 2020 tell us of a lost decade for the Cuban economy.

There has been a lack of determination due to the fear of change, more than the alarm before a descending whirlwind of crisis that can drag us inexorably to the bottom.

When Cuba experienced the extraordinary boom in professional services to Latin American countries (2004-2008): why wasn’t part of that huge fund invested in recapitalizing industry and agriculture in an efficient and sustainable way? During the three-year thaw with Obama (2014-2016): why was the monetary and exchange reunification not carried out to restore the Cuban peso to its throne?

Now the question is more one of survival than of Updating or reforming the economy. First, because of the ravages of Covid-19; but, in unison, due to the increase in the supply of goods and services that allow it to balance supply and demand and stop the inflationary spiral that sinks our currency: the Cuban peso, which puts those who do not have access to USD or euros, on the brink of hunger.

The task of reforming the economic update does not seem to be working. Peasants, cooperatives and well-known agricultural companies are on the verge of bankruptcy because they cannot afford the inflated prices of state services for electricity, water, seeds, etc., which have increased in some cases twenty-fold. The breakdown of the correspondence between the conception and the implementation of the Work of Reform requires an urgent national debate.

To this has been added the plastic re-dollarization and the measure of not accepting the physical US dollars anymore at a time when there are very few options on how to obtain them. These are measures that, beyond helping to alleviate the problems of Cuban banking, determined to give priority to the use of the enemy’s currency has transferred the problem to the ordinary consumer, who can only solve certain needs by buying with plastic USD or euros, at astronomical prices, and in the informal market.

Several prestigious Cuban economists, both in and outside the island, have referred to the urgency of adopting measures once and for all that have already been approved and have never been applied. Other intellectuals and businesspersons interviewed by the national press and many others say the same.

The roadmap for reform has been set and is known; the only thing missing is the political will to put it into practice. To continue waiting for the Greek calends to unleash the productive forces of the nation only leads us to the abyss.

Continuing on a wrong path must be surpassed by the search for a new course that allows us to envision the peaks of prosperity and development demanded by those of us who put country before selfish and conservative instincts of a small, but arrogant and powerful, group with all-encompassing powers.