The Trump government’s aggression against Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president have made the possibility that the North American Administration decides to carry out similar and even larger actions in our country more concrete and real. There is not enough time to read all the analysis, including speculation, on the matter. Whether or not the threats issued by that Administration materialize, the truth is that this has increased the weight of uncertainty about the future, not only economic and political, but also physical, of Cuba.
But in the event that some outcome occurs, the truth is that Cuba must move forward and to do so it must manage to get out of the red numbers that the economy has exhibited in the last five years, which will now be much more difficult due to this increase in threats/actions of the North American government against our country.
Today, some of these analyzes suggest that, given this new “turn of the screw in North American policy” and the military threat, Cuba had to undertake a profound process of economic, social and political reforms; Other proposals go much further. But instead of looking north and outward, we should look inward.
There is a history of Cuba’s reforms/transformations, dating back more than thirty years. It is not possible to ignore the theoretical and political encounters and disagreements that these processes have logically caused.
The different stages of these processes that our country has experienced since 1990 to date have been carried out in conditions of obvious disadvantage due to the limitations that the blockade has caused and that force suboptimal decisions to be made, due to the difficulty of participating on equal terms—within the inequality that every underdeveloped country must face—in the global economy and finance.
The North American administrations themselves have wielded and recognized this instrument as their main weapon in their efforts against Cuba, even though some inside and outside are determined to reduce its impact.
The need for a deep and comprehensive reform of the economy, society and politics is something that has been raised, argued, demonstrated and discussed since as early as the late 1980s.
There are the works developed in the Faculty of Economics under the direction of Oneida Álvarez, all with diagnoses and proposals, both from the most essential, a new economic and social model for Cuba, to the macroeconomic, mesoeconomic and business spheres. The results of these works carried out by the four groups of experts were delivered where appropriate, but were not made public.
There are also the studies on scenarios carried out by the National Institute of Economic Research in the early nineties. There are also texts where well-argued proposals for reforms and transformations appear, even from different perspectives.
Then, the reform that began in the nineties, under very uncertain conditions, was a transformation effort that allowed survival and produced significant changes, but left others intact, including prejudices and cultures learned in previous decades and powerful bureaucracies, both in the purely administrative and political. These were capable of generating such resistance as to mediate and practically stop the reform.
By 2008, the situation in the country showed the need to continue that process of transformations frozen in time. This reforming/updating push promoted the appearance of three main documents: the Economic and Social Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution, the Conceptualization of the economic and social model and the National Plan for Economic and Social Development.
All three were the result of the collaboration of multiple institutions, academic, political and government, and intense popular participation. Then, and almost like a natural birth, a new Constitution of the Republic was approved that endorsed the changes proposed in the documents that preceded it.
But this new stage of the reform once again repeated sufferings from previous processes: learned prejudices that have not been released from the minds of people and the behavior of organizations; bureaucracies that won the fight against the reform proposal and vested interests, that were able to slow down and mediate essential transformations, generating resistance of all kinds, which have brought us to the situation that our country faces today. To this we must add the full weight of the pandemic and three administrations (Trump I, Biden, Trump II) that increased the pressures to the extremes they are in today.
We must also consider the failures of economic policies, among other reasons, due to lack of coherence and consistency and sequencing errors; due to the slowness in applying measures to respond to economic and social emergencies and due to the reluctance to recognize that our country has changed as much or more than the world around us has changed, something that has not only been pointed out from at least part of the academy, but also confirmed in the results of our economy and in the decline in the social situation. These facts were recognized in the PCC plenary session held last December and in the sessions of the National Assembly.
The reforms/transformations/changes that we Cubans must promote should not have as their primary reason to stop/deter the intentions of the Trump-Rubio administration. It would be a strategic error to think about them with that purpose, because it is not possible to speak with reason to an Administration whose political practice is unreason, among other of its “attributes.”
These changes that we need to make are driven by the situation we are in today and which, by far, has the characteristics of what is known as a critical juncture characterized by:
- The intersection and overlap of multiple crises that at the same time condition the increase in social unrest.
- The rupture of what was established for a long time as “normality” and the emergence of another whose grip is still not sufficiently clear.
- The emergence of new social subjects that require their own spaces for participation.
- The stagnation of the previous operating model, which no longer manages to capture new situations in all their magnitude and complexity and does not allow us to react at the necessary speed, thus undermining institutional legitimacy.
All of this confirms the need to build a new model, something that Conceptualization attempted at the time, but which has remained indebted to this new reality that the country faces.
Without a doubt, achieving the balance between what is “economically advisable” and what is “politically acceptable” is very difficult, especially in the conditions of our country today.
However, every bureaucratic trap that stands in the way of urgent change, every unjustified prejudice, every call to divide instead of multiply, every pretext to hinder/delay new ideas, every attempt to “perfect” what works poorly or has rarely worked, every call to “update” what has been archaic for years, contributes to moving us away from the necessary transformation.
It is undoubtedly good to learn from what we did, but it is better, although much more difficult, to unlearn from what we have done wrong. We Cubans will have to fix it, no one else.
