By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Dec 11 2013 (Columnist Service)

After three decades of supposedly planned socialism (1960-1990), when government plans were often only halfway fulfilled, lost in oblivion due to lack of oversight or of realism, or in the best of cases carried out any which way just to live up to the goals, Cubans got used to waiting (with or without hope) for the political leadership, financed with heavy Soviet subsidies, to come up with the next “plan”.

This reorganisation or new project came into our lives like a whirlwind, although it could later disappear with the speed and consistency of smoke.

The idealistic planning had, however, one result: people got used to receiving orders and orientations in which their individual decisions had little to no weight. If you had a telephone it was because the state let you have one; if you travelled, it was because the state allowed you to….ad nauseum.

The toughest years of the crisis and scarcities that followed the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its subsidies showed how unprepared the country was to make it on its own, because all that socialist planning had barely managed to provide the national economy with a structure capable of sustaining itself without foreign support.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

In the last six or seven years, the state-government-single party, led by General Raúl Castro after Fidel Castro withdrew from power, has tried to introduce order into the economic and social structure with more realistic planning, and endorsed it with the drafting of economic and social policy guidelines, approved as a pragmatic instrument at the 2011 Communist Party Congress.

Under cover of these guidelines, the leaders have introduced numerous and important changes in the economic and social life of the nation. But between the programme and the real, day-to-day individual lives of the people of this Caribbean island nation, there is a stressful distance caused by the uncertainty about how, when and in what order the planned “updates” will occur…

I will explain myself briefly: Cubans continue to see it as impossible, despite the planning, to create their own life projects because each time they must modify them, reformulate them, or forget about them depending on what comes down to them from the heights of political decision-making, and on the form and intensity with which the planners of the updates decide, with their lofty macroeconomic or macrosocial scrutiny, on these plans or variations that often arrive without Cubans having the chance to make their own updates and new plans.

Right now Cubans who one way or another have managed to save up some capital have very little certainty about the monetary future of the country, because the dual currencies will be unified, but there is no clear idea of how or when this will take place, how much the money will be worth, etc.

Those even more fortunate who, for example, hoped to buy a new or used car sold by the state now don’t know if they will ever see that dream come true, or how it might happen.

For some reasons that have been kept quiet, car sales are still controlled, restricted or denied by the state, even though the sale of a car in Cuba is one of the most lucrative business opportunities that any salesperson in the universe could dream of (new cars are, or were, taxed at a 100 percent rate – in other words, they cost double their market price).

But these lucky few are, as it is easy to deduct in an impoverished country, a tiny portion of the population.

Most Cubans live hand to mouth by juggling subsistence household economies that are constantly altered by inflation that has grown since the 1990s to the point that the wages earned by public employees, who account for around 80 percent of those working in Cuba, fall far short.

The cost of basic articles (food, hygiene products) and of electricity, transport and other services rises steadily, according to central planning, and ruins the plans with which hundreds of thousands of families, millions of people, barely managed to get by.

As another year is coming to a close, most Cubans know that not even the cryptic and poetic predictions that the Ifá priests (of santería, a popular religion of African roots) make every January will truly shed light on their immediate future, which each person has to plan in order to live their personal life – the only one that biology (or perhaps some god) has given them.

What will the next year be like for Cuba’s 11 million people? I don’t think even the oracle of Ifá knows for sure.
(END/COPYRIGHT/IPS)

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By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

The Cuban National Assembly, the parliament, has just passed a historic milestone: the visible turning point when one momentous and complex phase in the life of the country begins to come to a close, and a door opens on a future that, however hard to predict, will in many ways be different.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

General Raúl Castro, re-elected on Sunday Feb. 24 by the Assembly as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers for the legislative period 2013-2018, publicly reaffirmed that, independently of constitutional changes to limit terms for high positions, this will be the 82-year-old’s last mandate as head of state.

While Raúl made this declaration, former president Fidel Castro, in his 87th year — who held the reins of power in this nation for over 46 years — witnessed from his first-row seat in the parliament the statement that marked the beginning of the end of a historical period stamped by his personality and his style of government.

As it enters this period of potentially transcendent closures and openings, the country is already different to that governed by Fidel in 2006, when he became seriously ill and had to step down from power, first provisionally, then, in 2008, definitively.

Although the essential system has not changed, and there is still a one-party structure, the same electoral system and a socialist economy, it cannot be denied that the reforms introduced by Raúl as part of the “process of updating the Cuban economic model”, and transformed into a political programme as the “Lineamientos de la política económica y social” (Economic and social policy guidelines) approved in 2011 by the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, have gradually changed the reality of the country.

A series of economic and social measures, of greater or lesser scope, but in many cases convulsing the centralised, state-run political model, are beginning to change the face of the social and economic framework of this Caribbean island.

Among these changes is the elimination of prohibitions that limited the capability of self-realisation (access to mobile phones, the possibility of buying and selling houses and cars, etcetera), the various modifications that have been introduced (expansion and facilitation of self-employment, turning over unused state land to private farmers, creation of cooperatives, greater opportunities for marketing agricultural produce, availability of bank credits, a new tax law, among others), and even as transcendent a decision as approving a migration reform that, for the first time in half a century, allows free movement for the vast majority of Cuban citizens.

In parallel, the government of Raúl Castro has launched other campaigns, to strengthen the institutional environment of the country, to combat corruption at different levels of the economic apparatus, to change officials in charge of ministries and decision-making posts, and even an ostensible change in the style of government, moving away from grandstands, speeches and the constant and costly convening of mass mobilisations as part of the “battle of ideas”, to meetings behind closed doors where concrete goals are set, which to a greater or lesser extent have been making their influence felt in national life.

President Castro’s express purpose, ratified at his re-inauguration on Sunday, is to preserve the socialist system installed on the island in 1961. And for this he has tried to shore up the inefficient economy of the country and to find leaders among the upcoming generation who will be capable of sustaining it in the short to medium term, when Raúl and the other members of his generation can no longer fulfill their responsibilities, due to their age, and it seems, due to a forthcoming constitutional law.

However, in his latest public appearances the re-elected president has said that the most important “updating” motions are yet to come. Little is known about the nature of these changes, although there is much speculation.

Without doubt, the major challenges of any government in Cuba will be economic: the inevitable elimination of the dual currency that distorts the macro-economy, the micro-economy and family economy; the urgent need for wage increases to bring them in line with a living wage for the population; encouraging foreign investment capable of renewing the ageing infrastructure of the country; the controversial yet indispensable provision of access to the internet, without which it is impossible to think about individual, social and economic development in the digital age; and so on.

What kind of country will Raúl Castro hand over to his successors in five years’ time? Cuba continues to be the island with the finest tobacco in the world, and the most fiercely contested questions.

(END)

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