CUBA: THE INVISIBLE FUTURE

By Leonardo Padura and - - Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Nov 3 2009 (IPS) - If a person’s past is the accumulation of the life experiences that made him who he is, the future embodies the dreams and the expectations of what this person wants to be and what he needs to have a better life, materially and spiritually. This ability to direct one’s gaze forward and try to extract from the present the qualities of the future is one of the intrinsic components of the human condition and the source of people’s and societies’ ability to endure.

For the men of my generation who grew up and lived in Cuba over the past five decades, the idea of a better future was one of the motors that carried us forward in our ever more distant youth. The desire for personal advancement, animated by the winds of a revolution that transformed life in the country in the 1960s, led us to imagine the future as a tangible period in which the most driven, capable, and intelligent (or the best at exploiting their efforts and skills) would not only enjoy the spiritual satisfactions made possible by a more just and educated society, but also material compensation that would be difficult if not impossible to come by: a decent salary, a comfortable house, maybe even a car issued by the Cuban state (the only source of this and other goods for the last fifty years) as a reward for one’s social labour and personal achievements.

The economic and structural crisis that upended Cuban society in the 1990s as a direct consequence of the disappearance of its protector the Soviet Union, almost the only trade partner and source of finance for the island, created a rupture in Cubans’ image of their future: from one day to the next the hopes than animated us disappeared and were replaced by a struggle to survive in which we managed to make it through one day with no idea how we would make it through the next. Individuals’ abilities and intelligence often lost their connection to collective aspirations, and since that time only the most skilful and daring have been able to forge for themselves a better present -though even they have rarely been able to hold on to strategy for the future. The impossibility of knowing where the island is headed has almost always prevented realisation of their dreams.

Cuba has changed in recent years. It has changed to the point that the need for structural and conceptual changes has been accepted. It has changed so much that many of the benefits of the past, once identified with the qualities of the socialist model, are now considered paternalistic excesses, unsustainable perks and subsidies. On this note, more changes have been announced, like the possible elimination of the ration card, now seen as an unaffordable subsidy for a state in serious financial straits, the elimination of the dual currency system (the Cuban peso and the “convertible” peso), which complicates the operation of shops and the daily life of the people, in particular those who have no access to the convertible peso, used largely in the tourism sector. And there are yet other transformations about which little information is available and which the government has asked for more time to implement -time taken away from the future of every Cuban.

Among the recent changes put in motion, one of the most revealing was the elimination in various governments ministries of workers restaurants, which were also subsidised by the state and the site of a permanent “diversion of resources”, a euphemism for stealing. In these places, a meal now costs a worker 15 pesos, or 360 pesos per month (24 work days), at a time when the average monthly salary was just lowered to 400 pesos. Is it possible to plan a future with a margin like that?

Even the Cuban government has recognised that it is impossible to live on the salaries it pays. And on the basis of even less evidence it has also acknowledged the numerous shortcomings of an economic model that does not guarantee productivity (Cuba imports more that 70 percent of the food the country consumes) and many of the symptoms of social disintegration visible on the island, from the resurgence of prostitution, corruption, increased manifestations of marginalisation, to the drive to emigrate that consumes many young people.

And yet there is little talk, almost none, of the impossibility of forging models or aspirations for the future beyond those that would be guaranteed by the state (health care, education, which are so essential and yet arouse other expectations in individuals and societies for whom they are guaranteed). For example, the dream of having something as necessary as a home -and there are many Cubans who live in deplorable conditions or warehoused in tiny spaces- is an unattainable utopia in a country where a bag of cement costs more than a third of the average salary. After graduating from university, what can a person aspire to?

Cubans today, even if they have more room to express their dissatisfaction with the present, are incapable of imagining a future that is different, or how or when it might come about. The costly paternalism that the state has created and is now trying to eliminate is also tied to this process of imagining a possible future, which is tied to the decisions and actions the government takes, in yet another expression of its paternalism. How and when will things change? How will we be affected, and how much will this alter our future? No one knows the answers to these questions. Meanwhile the years go by, and what might have been a future is stranded in the past, inaccessible and irrecoverable. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.