Cuba: Resistance to reforms being promoted by Raul Castro
By Gerardo Arreola
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
HAVANA – Resistance to Cuba’s reforms is noticeable from the diverse societal sectors, among them the unemployed, retirees, poor families and the bureaucracy, who are the losers from the changes, according to an academic analysis that is circulating here.
All reform has its winners and losers, and these last ones, naturally, offer resistance to change, say Omar Everleny Pérez and Pável Vidal in a broad evaluation of the plan promoted by President Raúl Castro.
Mayra Espina maintains that the process will have positive impacts on employment and focused attention on the vulnerable sectors, but will increase the range of poverty. It is an incomplete reform that should recuperate along the way a systemic focus and integrator of all development dimensions.
In the prologue of Views of the Cuban economy: the process of upgrading (Editorial Caminos), Pérez and Vidal note that the elimination of subsidies and the increase of prices can impact more needy families, while implementing the new system of selective support. New ways of assigning social costs to avoid a disproportionate increase of poverty during the adjustment are required.
In addition to the above, this book brings together essays by Ileana Diaz and Ricardo Torres; Dayma Echevarría and Teresa Lara; Luisa Íñiguez, Armando Nova, Camilo Piñeiro and Juan Triana, professors and researchers from diverse academic centers, most from the University of Havana.
Among the resistance to the reform, Pérez and Vidal have hinted at the coming opposition of the bureaucracy, which tries to defend its position at all costs. In the Cuban system this is conducive, given the large size of government and institutions with ample space for discretion, the absence of explicit rules and the lack of transparency in public decisions.
The authors believe that the reform tends to propose a new social pact by broadening the private sector, which requires greater transparency and accountability in the use of its taxes. Ambiguities and uncertainties indicate that the process, which is taking place without a profound critique of the soviet model that it owes so much to and without clearly specified guidelines of the socialism trying to be perfected.
They believe that one of their biggest dilemmas is the speed of change: the government wants gradual reforms, but the historical, octogenarian generation does not have enough time for that pace.
However, they think there are ways of accelerating without causing a collapse if one encourages small and medium sized enterprises and cooperatives.
They consider far-reaching institutional reform necessary and a greater openness to direct foreign investment, initially in small private enterprises, agriculture and future urban cooperatives.
Pérez and Vidal conclude that the government faces the challenge of forming consensus and managing the stress of redistribution in order to conserve the country’s stability without giving up on the changes, indispensable in order to better the Cuban people’s standard of living, something impossible to achieve with the actual model.
