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CUBA: START THE DEBATE

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HAVANA, Sep 23 2009 (IPS) - Cuba’s official newspaper and organ of the Communist Party recently published a story that stunned the populace: in a country where the lack of food has become endemic and causes the people dire economic hardship, it happened that tonnes of agricultural products were left to rot outside the city of Havana because there were neither the containers nor the vehicles nor the organisational capacity to transport them.

This time the disaster (in Cuba, with its central economic planning, organisational disasters also seem endemic) was due to the failure of certain mechanisms after a change of the entities responsible for the collection and redistribution of products.

Meanwhile, forecasts of the island’s economic growth in 2009 have been drastically revised downward (from an initial festive 6 percent per year to 2.5 and now 1.7 percent), partly because of a drop in the prices of the island’s exports (nickel and tobacco) and services (tourism), the fallout from the previous year’s hurricanes, the effects of the world economic crisis, and the trade complications caused by the US embargo. To resist collapse, the authorities are demanding increased productivity and savings, which they are trying to achieve through significant cuts in social benefits and so-called “freebies”. There is even movement towards elimination of the ration system which, curiously, has become the opposite of what it was supposed to be: a mechanism to foster equality in poverty. Today the state finds it almost impossible to pay for these few, meagre offerings –enough to feed a person for about twelve days of the month- with an agricultural sector so weak that Havana must import 70 percent of the food consumed in the country, though the land is fertile and the climate tropical.

The Cuban economy and society are crying out for the “conceptual” and “structural” changes that were announced over the last three years but have been introduced in tiny steps and for the most part in the form of cuts rather than moves to strengthen or diversify the economy.

Now the leadership of the country has called on the people, for the second time in three years, to hold a discussion on the problems, shortages, inefficiency, and disfunction in Cuban society, politics, and the economy from the perspective of each citizen. And it is insisting, again, that the debate be held without fear of voicing dissent -a real novelty in a country that in its official statements always vaunted its unanimity and is known for its top-down formulation of domestic policy.

Two years ago, after a speech given by current president Raul Castro, a similar discussion was held and more than one million comments from the population were received on a wide range of national issues. The number of suggestions and complaints is sure to balloon given the illusion that the government might be listening and with the accumulation of so many unmet needs, an economy in crisis and hamstrung by its own defects, no hope that Barack Obama will make any real changes in the decades-old embargo, and after the people saw the defenestration of a part of the state leadership (vice president Carlos Lage and foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque were the best known) and can feel in their bones the slowness of change and the loss of certain benefits.

The list of problems the government must address is formidable: the need to bring real salaries in line with the cost of living, the chronic and growing shortage of housing, the economy’s rock- bottom efficiency and productivity, the overabundance of idle arable land, the high price of food in both the state and non-state markets, the irrationality of the dual-currency system in which people are paid in Cuban pesos -an average of 400 per month- yet have to purchase much of their food with the far more valuable so-called “convertible peso” (CUC), which equals 24 national pesos. One litre of soybean oil costs the average Cuban an eighth of his monthly salary. A bag of cement costs 6.60 CUC and a gallon of paint more than 20. In addition, there are problems of marginalisation and violence, deterioration of the health care system (particularly with primary care), the requirement of authorisation for anyone wishing to travel outside the country, the flight of young people with talent (scientists, artists, athletes), the physical decay of cities like Havana, and many other challenges that require both immediate attention and long future commitments.

There is an urgent need to debate the current situation in Cuba, but only if the debate is real and if the critical analysis is used as more than a political thermometer or collective catharsis. It must be channelled into the effort to implement structural and conceptual changes that will make it possible not only to grow more plantains and vegetables but also, and most important, to make sure that they make it out of the fields and to the people at prices they can afford -among other needed solutions.

Since the early 1990s when their protector the Soviet Union disappeared, Cubans have lived under constant and debilitating economic pressure, with chronic shortages that have made mere survival a daily struggle. Dreaming of a better life and having a right to express this dream and to identify the problems impeding it can be considered a reward for their prolonged resistance. So let the debate begin – a real debate. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

 
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