The year 2023 will be the seventh that I write this column in OnCuba, always every fortnight, punctually, except for some fortuitous event that prevented me by force majeure. Almost always the first article of each year has been focused on making a synthetic balance of what happened in the recently finished year and looking at the year that is beginning.
I always try to scrutinize the reasons that would allow us to move forward and those others that stand against possible advances. There are almost always numbers and data, and discrepant points appear with some of the predictions of the authorities that manage, or at least manage, the national economy, and also with some of their concepts.
Today’s article will be something different.
The Minister of Economy gave a detailed presentation what is planned for 2023 and the expectations of global growth, as well as the behavior of the main variables for the coming year.
Although I am convinced that the economy is very important and is often decisive, I believe that contradictory aspects of the reform/updating process, which began many years ago, weigh on it and constantly generate new claims.
triumphalism vs. reality
The authorities proclaim the need for disagreement and criticism; but such approaches are often ignored. Dissenters and critics are disqualified. They are ignored and the tree of complacency continues to be cultivated, of the “symptomed” reports and the triumphalist reports, although there are exceptions.
This year, as in previous years, according to certain reports, all the provinces have had successful performances but, incredibly, the country is not advancing at the pace that is needed and the queues remain firm. The same is true of our ministries. It seems that they are the provinces and the ministries of another country and not those of the one in which we live and that it is going through a crisis that it cannot overcome.
Today we have an expert bureaucracy in building methodologies, which does not even understand them well; but that it is capable of subordinating “strategic emergencies” to those and that it evaluates its success —that of these methodologies— by the number of meetings and reports carried out “on time and in proper form”, and by the number of projects associated with them.
It has been declared for a long time that the state company is the “engine” of the process of transformations/reforms, but the approval of the company law is delayed for another year; an organizational structure is created above them —the Higher Business Management Organizations (OSDE)— which produces the opposite effect to the so repeated and never achieved autonomy.
Once again: we know what and how to do, but prejudices are stronger than emergencies.
march and counter march
In that first version of the Conceptualization of the Cuban Economic and Social Model of Socialist Development in 2017 it was possible to define that the fundamental means of production are those that guarantee the strategic. Then, in 2021, in the update of the Conceptualization…, was placed in the hands of the State! identifying what they are.
Today we have so many “fundamental means of production” that they exceed the real capacity of the State and the Government to manage them efficiently. Everyone, absolutely everyone, knows that so many cannot be fundamental.
It is recognized that the “Science and technological innovation” section should be one of the pillars of development, but more is still invested in “state commerce” than in science and technological innovation.
We know that one of the causes of inflation is excessive fiscal spending and its misallocation. But we insist on maintaining an oversized state apparatus and a tax system that reinforces its rent-seeking nature and is inconsistent with the need to “unleash the productive forces.”
We identified that national food production is a strategic urgency. But we still haven’t solved the fundamental problem of agriculture, which is The earth’s problem: State agricultural companies remain poorly disposing of the people’s lands, in the hands of the worst land administrator that Cuba has ever had in its entire history and who kept 50% of those lands uncultivated for decades, 3 million out of 6 million hectares. Today it still maintains more than 800,000 hectares in these conditions.
The same state companies still do not understand that their main mission is to make it easier for peasants to produce instead of using them as raw material to make their operation poorly profitable.
Private property and foreign investment
Our Constitution says that private property is necessary in the effort to build the future. But we cut off their spaces in the present and constantly grow mistrust from both sides.
We declare that foreign investment is strategic for development. But we haven’t just blown up procedures that we know today slow down approval processes and drive away investors, already scared by the Helms-Burton Act and at the expense of its application.
You know what to do and you also know how to do it.
The debt that suffocates us
Debt strangles us and takes away opportunities every day. We have everything it takes to renegotiate it and there have been proposals as to what and how to do it. But not enough signals are given about the decision to resolve it.
We repeat over and over again the “will” to build better relations with emigration. But the policies towards her continue to be hijacked by old prejudices and do not achieve the necessary proactivity to add the immense mass of Cuban emigrants to a country project in which all contribute as one.
Here, too, has long been known what to do and how to do it.
dependent municipalities
We identify local management as decisive for development. But the municipalities and provinces continue to be kidnapped by the sectoral approach.
In foreign investment, for example, even small investments have to be submitted to the corresponding ministries for approval in a long process, to later wait for the decision of a commission coordinated by Mincex. Nor do they, the municipalities, decide on the use of the land, the same that is often uncultivated while the municipality must “import” its food from others.
Forgotten “conquests”
We know that health and education are the pillars of our social construction. We saw during the pandemic how important it is to have a strong primary care system.
However, it is preferred to invest much more in hotels, knowing that the recovery of the investment may take more than one and a half times the time planned, and that with the number of rooms we had in 2018 we can serve almost three times the number of tourists who arrived in Cuba in 2022.
Without a well educated and healthy workforce we will never achieve development.
Without a solid, modern education and health system, appropriate to our times and with high-quality services, we will not have the essential labor force to achieve the vision of the country that we have approved for more than five years.
The Revolution, back in its beginnings, invested more than ten years in building those two columns that supported the equality achieved and promoted social mobility.
“Trabas” that enjoy good health
The “identification of obstacles” has become fashionable. There is no speech or intervention in which the phrase is not used and is almost always accompanied by another that invites to “end the bureaucracy.” There are plenty of expert “trap hunters”.
It happens, however, that after the “hunt”, the obstacles continue to enjoy good health, feeding and feeding on the same bureaucracy that is being asked to eliminate.
There is a company in Cuba that has demonstrated high resilience, a capacity for adaptation typical of the human species, capable of producing even in the worst conditions and not only producing but even exceeding its goals: the factory of obstacles.
It is the only factory in Cuba that has no energy or resource restrictions of any kind. He works 24 hours a day and has his supplies guaranteed; among them, prejudices, customs acquired in other times, personal interests disguised as concerns for the future of socialism, habits and cultures that have not been unlearned, and fear, great fear of the risk that any change produces.
It is always rare that those who have the power in their hands to eliminate them, or at least reduce them so much that their existence does not impede the dynamic of changes that Cuba needs, are the ones who constantly repeat and demand that they be eliminated.
Efforts and knowledge
It would be untrue if it did not also recognize that it has been done —and a lot— despite fatal accidents and their aftermath of pain and death; of tragic cyclonic “gifts” of an altered nature that destroyed a good part of Pinar del Río; of the permanent mutation of Trump in Biden, and of all our ties.
It has been done, joining efforts and knowledge, putting science and those who produce together with the decision-makers, in a collective effort rarely seen. It has been done, it is true; but frequently at the wrong time, in the wrong order, without the necessary coherence; sometimes, even, “because there was no other choice.”
Whether 2023 is better than the three previous years will depend on us, on understanding that continuity is also a rupture; that the effects of the blockade will be less if all of us, the Government and the people, do our homework better; If, knowing that obstacles are objectives, we do not use them to make obstacles grow, which is the best way to cultivate inertia.
It will depend on adding, rather than subtracting, finding the least common multiple, letting go and regulating better, promoting rather than prohibiting, generating hope with facts and not with repeated slogans. It will depend on how much we stop being to be again.
Yes, this time, like others, we really need wings to reach the nation that we owe ourselves.
