HAVANA, Cuba. – With another earthquake in the East and an alarming peak in violence closes the year 2024, a leap year if it comes to misfortunes. Cuba hit new depths during this cycle of 366 days suffered minute by minute, aggravated by the economic recession that seems to have no ceiling and the ideological entrenchment of a regime that has been exposed in its deep corruption, its inability to resolve the multisectoral crisis in which the country is sinking and its willingness, now undoubted, to repress with stick and prison any manifestation of popular discontent.
This year there was everything, but Cubans probably suffered from blackouts and inflation more than other problems that were equally terrible on a social scale, but less peremptory on an individual level. Citizen violence left a balance of more than 50 femicides reported by independent platforms in the absence of an official record of these crimes, while the figures of homicides with premeditation and cruelty, robberies with violence and assaults not only evidenced the rapid deterioration of material conditions and the moral degradation of society, they also demonstrated that the police forces are not enough to contain the push of crime.
The notable increase in homelessness and crime is rooted in the systemic failure that the Government refuses to accept. In the National Assembly people continue to talk about socialism while the elimination of what remains of the supply book is announced and more and more people in situations of misery – which the Government euphemistically describes as “vulnerable” – swarm in plain sight without there being an effective plan to help them.
Hungry elderly people, children working to help their parents, psychiatric patients eating from the garbage, women and men on the street who engage in prostitution in exchange for a loaf of bread or the minimum amount of money to buy it, are terrible postcards of a city, a society and a country that daily redefines the term “worse”, already insufficient to refer to what is happening here and which is not the fault of an embargo that has existed for more than 60 years without the degree of destruction having ever been appreciated, material misery, institutional apathy and political immorality that today make up the daily landscape.
The recent blow to MSMEs caused the fall of currencies and the rise in prices of essential products that, for a long time, have been accessible to a small number of consumers. From above, such draconian measures are taken against the private sector and with such a disastrous impact on the population, that at times it seems that the regime is seeking to boycott itself, tightening the rope to the extreme so that a new social outbreak with unpredictable consequences occurs. .
Accounting doesn’t suit anyone outside of the highest circles of power and the usual establishments. Everything that should improve – even if slowly – this year, remains in the same or worse conditions. The country is increasingly going to hell, crime is so superior to the capacity of the police forces – poorly paid, poorly equipped and easy to corrupt – that it would not be strange, in the near future, to see entire neighborhoods fall under the control of gangs.
The normalization of violence and the recognition by the authorities that they cannot do much to prevent it has been alarming. This reality does not appear in the state press, but in any police station the officers complain about the overwhelming increase in filed crimes that are not being investigated due to lack of resources, and the number of colleagues who are asking for leave to look for better paid jobs or Simply try to leave the country. How long could it take before crime realizes that the Government can’t beat it?
The only thing missing for Cuba, devastated by a war that never happened, is to fall into the hands of organized crime. This horrible year, which did not spare tragedies, exodus, hunger or repression, closes with a general feeling of fatigue and uncertainty in the future under a regime that, by 2025, has great expectations such as achieving one minute of electricity generation without fuel imported.
Every end of the year in this country there is less to celebrate, but 2024 was really bad, a leap year with a balcony overlooking the street and a red carpet for national blackouts, hyperinflation, hurricanes, earthquakes, Oropouche fever, outbreaks of dengue hemorrhagic fever, death in imprisonment of political prisoners, terrible economic decisions and, if that were not enough, discouraging omens for the coming year.
