Cuba, its crisis and its reasons

By Luis Sexto

At least among Cubans, the common definition of “being in crisis” is the equivalent of “being on fire,” about to go from flesh to ashes. Other, less ardent cultures, define it less catastrophically. The word’s Greek root is criterion, and criterion is a synonym of judgment, and judgment is therefore evaluation.

Thus, “being in crisis” is being submitted to a judgment, to an examination, a crucial spot where the possible choice is either improving or the opposite.

Well, then, this erudite reference is applicable because we could admit that Cuba “is in crisis” but in the constructive sense of that expression, which is so recurrent and often so alarmist.

Judged impartially, the Cuban situation raises questions that provoke doubts. Will it emerge from the critical circle giving a thumbs-up sign like the winners do? Or will the judgment pull Cuba down, as if sentencing to death the order it has maintained for 50 years between periods of diverse signs?

At times, revolutionary Cuba has displayed a sort of bullet-proof health; other times, the fever has appeared as a symptom of a struggle against internal antibodies that need not be silenced or reduced, and as a symptom of combat against external aggressions that troublemakers reduce to incidents of scant influence.

Take, for instance, the blockade, which some call “the embargo” as if it were bilateral, whereas its reach affects third countries via the Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws, which (and many seem to have forgotten this) forbid trade and investments with Cuba, under the threat of losing any investments once “Castroism” has packed its bags.

Add to this economic war the campaign by the big media that justifies and exacerbates the meddling of the United States and powerful European countries into matters that concern only Cuba and Cubans.

About the impact of foreign actions, I have already written on these pages. Let us turn, then, to domestic matters. Because, aside from the hindering effect of external actions, inside and outside the island, what will have a positive effect on the Cuban crisis is the solution of its domestic misalignments and economic dissonances, even before economic problems become political.

The solution will require a resolution in the tackling of a process that’s being called “actualization,” a term that certain opinions brand as insufficient, in the semantic sense of the word.

With this, I must admit that the national unity around the socialist program – basically independence and social justice – is becoming a diverse unity without uniformity, because with regard to the act of “actualizing,” certain opinions circulating through the local network or daily conversation wonder if the purpose of the “actualization” is to revive the remnants of the so-called real socialism, which failed in the former Soviet Union and the former socialist countries of Europe.

 

As is evident, the government of President Raúl Castro, aside from being the first to publicly recognize the urgent need for structural and conceptual changes in Cuba, is explicitly using caution as a tactic. It does so because it doesn’t seem wise to suddenly correct or modify or turn around a reality gripped by contradictions of an organizational nature and by ethical misalignments in the social consciousness.

According to the intentions that may be gleaned from meaningless gestures and words that have not renounced to the commitment of change, “to actualize” may not mean to apply makeup to an aging economic organization but, instead, to cast aside whatever has failed to function or never functioned with efficiency and effectiveness, and then find an appropriate substitute.

One would have to suffer from political insufficiency not to realize the need for caution in the process of reorganization, as its enemies could be operating in the bureaucratic maze with enough space to say “No” to any “Yes,” an action difficult to annul.

The process also demands us to step lightly when confronted by extremist revolutionaries who are obsessed, as if by a conditioned reflex, with the ghost of private property, forecasting darkness where others seek to cast light. But, if all this implies subjectivity, the country’s concrete problems are no less drastic. Cuba is affected by the world crisis because it is a small, underdeveloped archipelago that needs foreign trade to satisfy its basic needs for supplies. And its social policy is out of proportion to his possibilities of performance.

In recent weeks, the debates during the Tenth Catholic Social Week turned to the various challenges facing Cuba, among them the ageing of the population. That demographic characteristic forecasts that, within 10 or 15 years, Cuba will have the oldest population in Latin America, with negative implications in the spheres of labor and social security. How many Cubans will work and how many will have to be supported because they’re old or invalid?

If among the strategic principles that might aid “actualization” – or reform, to be more clear – labor becomes the principle that generates and regulates all wealth, one could imagine how far, in a logical plan, could go the boundaries of a reordering that takes into account its insertion into a labor force that is qualified but aged, with scant relief.

The most optimistic assessments attribute the low birth rate to the fact that Cuban women have the opportunities of a developed country in an underdeveloped economy. The Revolution gave the women access to different options, sometimes contrary to their traditional tasks of housekeeping and childbearing.

Today, women account for 66 percent of all technicians and professionals, and 38 percent of the managerial force. In other words, women have a path to personal fulfillment, to existential justification that perhaps inhibits them from taking on motherhood as their sole mission.

Of course, we should point out that the existing prejudices do not guarantee women the unhindered exercise of their professional abilities.

Despite the veracity of the data, the demographic problem also responds to a mechanism of abstention in the face of a somewhat adverse, unstable reality with unclear guarantees of success.

Therefore, the decline in births, in the number of children per family, and even the frequent incidence of divorce may be associated to the shortage of housing, to the disproportion between labor and remuneration, and to the vulnerability of the Cuban economy in a burdened world that thrashes and exudes hostility, even though in Cuba maternity still has prioritized, free care and laws that support it.

The domestic problem mentioned above are not the only ones. But it wouldn’t be convenient to lengthen this article. And we could end by repeating the question made at the start: is Cuba in crisis?

It is. It is beset by many disadvantages. But one advantage sustains its certainty to break the circle: it is alive. In other words, the spirit that brought the Revolution of 1959 remains alive. And to be alive implies that an incalculable number of Cubans are able to readjust their ideals and socialist goals to the demands of the hour, an hour that moves swiftly in a clock whose hands shorten time.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist who won the 2009 José Martí Award, is a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.