Cuba: Many questions, little time

By Elsa Claro

If you typed in an Internet browser the words “Cuba” and “changes,” you would get at least 4 million 980,000 results. If next you entered “Egypt” and “demonstrations,” you could get 1 million 60,000 links to information, even though at that moment there was a curfew in that major North African country and the Mubarak government was teetering on the brink.

Figures almost always have the impotence of untimely messages. People say that much of humanity was not designed for math. That’s not the issue. The issue is why recent events in the small Caribbean island deserved four times more media attention than the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs, at a time when exceptional circumstances are convulsing the Arab world.

Among the headlines you can read one that says: “In Cuba, small businesses are a key factor of economic reform.” High-brow essays claim that Cuba is on the way to capitalism. People with differing viewpoints engage in online debates about whether what has begun (or will begin) is meant to perfect socialism or whether it will end up destroying Cuba’s 52-year-old experience.

A flawed survey shows that within the country about 30 percent of the people say: “And why are we now going to reform everything for the best?” My interlocutors refer to the stage of Rectification of Errors and Negative Experiences that began in the 1980s. Looking for support, they do not leave out prior measures, also intended to cast off the ballast of a system that was suggested by great theorists, but without a method on how to do it well.

Life has its own rules and the skeptics are right when they recall failures of idealism that led to the elimination of monetary-mercantile relations, because we were heading for such a high stage of justice that everyone would be so good and honest that no economic controls would be needed.

That is why the controls were removed and the public accountants and bookkeeping staff were told to take courses to qualify in other subjects. Thousands of people retired with 100 percent of their wages, some of which were very high. And all the time, then, during and after, the government maintained free education, public health, culture and sports, based on an unsustainable social security, according to an assessment by University of Pittsburgh Prof. Carmelo Mesa.

In many ways we have lived for decades as if we were a First World country. So said one of my sources, who asked me not to give his name, referring to the benefits provided by the Cuban model that did not have enough material support. The more advanced citizen-protection systems implanted in rich nations under the name of “welfare society” were reduced or eliminated when the competition between the West and the Soviet Union ceased, my source said, expressing his conviction that the introduction of corrections was obligatory, particularly in a time of global crisis such as today.

There are issues as the elimination of the ration book. An overwhelming number of people do not want it to end, and they have said so at meetings where the economic measures to be implemented are discussed. They say how much the book relieves the people’s pockets and say they feel uncertain as to what will happen if the hoarders or administrative inefficiency prevent commodities from being available on a sustained basis. Less sophisticated skepticism but, again, skepticism.

It is odd that in the self-employed sector (more than 83,000 new licenses were issued between 2010 and January 2011) there is greater confidence that the efforts promoted by President Raul Castro and his team will succeed.

For example, among the farmers and agronomists consulted, I was told that, although 40 percent of Cuba’s arable land remains idle despite the release of land in usufruct launched in 2008, that non-state sector guarantees 70 percent of everything that is produced and brought to the marketplace.

Of course, it’s not a question of seeing a glass half-full or half-empty, but of seeing the coming realities and the attitudes, which are equally or more important. Note that the dairy-and-agricultural sector declined in the first half of 2010 by more than 7 percent, but the fact that it declined by 2 percent in the remaining six months tells us that no one is sitting on his laurels, much less on the failures or misfortunes.

The same applies to the official circles, as suggested by the increase in exports last year, the decline in purchases abroad, and other small but suggestive positive indicators.

Does that have to do with misgivings, fears and suspicions about what’s happening now? Well, if the seed contains the tree, before we see the tree we’ll see a sprout, a branch and then, in due course, the trunk and foliage.