Cuba enters shifting (economic) sands

What Lucía Caridad Torres wants is for them to take care of her, to help her build her tobacco house and to allow her to live like a peasant.

When Hurricane Ian hit Cuban lands on September 27, 2022, she lost her tobacco curing house in the Las Barrigonas neighborhood, in the province of Pinar del Río.

Since then, she has not been able to harvest any more.

No agrarian authority has been willing to offer the help he needs.

“No one knows what those of us who live off the land go through,” says this 62-year-old woman.

To harvest this year, he not only lacks the wood to build the house, but also access to fertilizers and fuel.

“With oil, we plant.

With what we plant, we raise pigs and we will have food produced by ourselves.”

But there is nothing to indicate that the peasantry and, therefore, food production in Cuba, will improve, not even the package of measures that the Government announced in December, and which contemplates an increase in the price of fuel of more than 500 %, an increase in the price of electricity of 25%, an increase in the price of the liquefied gas cylinder, and which, according to the authorities, has the objective of achieving macroeconomic stabilization in the midst of a crisis that many compare with the so-called Period Special from the early nineties.

If what is seen is an increase in the price of living, is there a political will aimed at opening and diversifying the island's economy?

Cuban economist Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva believes that the new measures are not only inconsistent, but are concentrated in the sphere of circulation, when they should focus on production.

“In the short term, it is affecting the population, which already has a great deterioration in its purchasing power.

"I don't see any measure that encourages production in the medium and long term."

Last year, the Minister of Economy, Alejandro Gil, warned that the “economy is in a complex situation” and recognized the lack of milk for children, and the little bread or coffee that reaches Cuban homes through delivery. monthly rationed, which has become impossible to subsidize by the State.

In 2023, 2.2 million eggs were produced daily, when in 2020 there were 5 million, and about 9,000 tons of coffee were reported, when domestic consumption demands about 24,000.

Pork production was reduced by almost 90% and decreases were recorded in the percentages of rice, beans and a sugar harvest that does not exceed 350,000 tons, which does not cover half of the country's demand.

These figures translate into hunger.

When on July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in historic protests that left more than a thousand political prisoners, people asked for “Freedom” and shouted “We are hungry.”

Three years later, Cuba has an inflation of 30% at the end of the year, an economy that has contracted 2% despite having projected a growth of 3% and a depreciation of the Cuban currency of more than 50% against the dollar and to the euro in the informal market.

“There is no political will aimed at adopting the transformations that the national economy needs,” says Cuban economist Mauricio de Miranda.

“Extractive institutions are reinforced and not those inclusive ones that should unleash the productive forces, restricted today by state control measures.”

The Government has continued to invest in tourism, a sector hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2023, Cuba received 1.8 million tourists, well below the 4.2 million visitors who arrived in 2019.

The outlook does not invite optimism.

These are years of errors, rectification processes, measures that do not seem to give results, an increase in the economic sanctions of the Donald Trump Administration towards the island, a decrease in oil aid from Venezuela and Mexico, and an emigration of almost half a million people in two years.

In December, the Government of Cuba recognized the failure of the Ordering Task implemented in 2021, a measure that promised to get the country out of stagnation, with the end of monetary duality and a reform of prices, salaries and pensions.

However, the measure not only accelerated inflation, but did not resolve the partial dollarization of the economy.

State monopoly

In recent years, the Government has taken other measures such as the opening of foreign currency stores, foreign investment in some mixed capital companies, and has implemented the banking of financial operations.

But none of these measures have involved decentralization or the elimination of the state monopoly of industries and markets.

They have not even allowed the complete development of the so-called MSMEs, small and medium-sized businesses that were approved in 2021 and that meant an opening to the private sector on the island after decades of prohibition.

“I think MSMEs demonstrated in a short period of time that there is enormous potential,” says Everleny.

“Then we have to start looking at the fact that one of the greatest potentials this country has is the private sector.”

De Miranda says that for Cuba to actually get out of the crisis, the problem of monetary and exchange duality must be resolved, industrial and agricultural production boosted, markets liberalized and the centralized economy system dismantled.

“The country needs bold economic measures that will not be adopted under the current authoritarian and totalitarian political system.

That is the reason why the necessary measures have not been adopted to get out of the crisis.”

Ingrid Febles, 54, left her job at the Cuban Telecommunications Company, Etecsa, in the city of Camagüey.

She is waiting for her final departure from the country.

“I don't think we can get out of this crisis,” she says.

“The people do not see the solution to their problems.”

Leonardo Villarreal, 41, believes that every measure taken has affected the Cuban family and that the country is worse than when he was 20 years old.

“We are worse than during the Special Period, of course.”

Like the Special Period, after the fall of the USSR and Cuba's loss of its main trading partner, today Cubans suffer from long hours of blackouts, limited transportation and lack of food or medicine.

But if the Cubans had something then it was the hope of getting out of the crisis, and that they seem to have lost.

"What's happening today?

Without having completely emerged from that Special Period, the country entered into a new crisis, but different because people have no hope,” says Everleny.

“The State works as if time were infinite, and there is no time.

The population is aging, more than 25% of the population is over 60 years old.

And the Government has already lost credibility.”

Follow all the information on

Economy

and

Business

on

Facebook

and

X

, or in our

weekly newsletter

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_