Why are we being surveyed?

Since last October 16, some 12,000 Cuban households have been surveyed to find out about the income and expenses of the Cuban family. The information was released by the Granma newspaper a week after the research carried out by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) began.

The surveys are an instrument to know, approximately, aspects of interest of the reality faced by Cuban families. In this case, the reported objective is to look at the economy at its base, at its essential core: the home and family. But I am struck by the moment in which this is being carried out. Is it the appropriate time, or not? It depends.

The Cuban family does not live, it survives the energy crisis (hours and hours of blackouts), a very difficult food situation, the high price of products gone through the roof, and the power of the Cuban peso devalued to nothing, inflation, and more, and more. In short, an economy that lives on the edge and that in the family sphere squeezes the pockets without moderately satisfying the nutritional requirements.

So why right now? Do the authorities need to test the situation at this very moment where we experience a wide and deepening crisis?

As a working instrument, I already wrote it paragraphs above, it can provide, depending on the quality of the method used, suitability of the interviewers, etc; a close view of the reality to be studied. But is it just a snapshot?

I don’t know… There is plenty of video on social networks and alternative media with images of the consequences of the socio-economic reality currently being suffered by the Cuban family. So… is it to reaffirm an economic model precisely in crisis? I think that stubbornness does not require surveys, it is both pollster and being polled.

Then…

The national reality is now worse due to Hurricane Ian — which collapsed houses and devastated crops, etc. and making the tenuous situation we are living under even more evident. It may, and I speculate, have shifted the balance of power and provide the most lucid within it data to argue in the direction of changes deep in the economic model that for years have been ignored.