Cuba is teetering in the worst of worlds, on the brink of an abyss and lacking an opposition structure to build an alternative.
The high risk of collapse comes from social tensions that seem to explode now, but that have been growing in the last five years due to a
terminal collapse of the economy, chronic shortages and inflationary pressure
.
The constant blackouts, an extremely graphic symbol, if you will, of the decline of the model, are the trigger of a popular fury that overwhelms a regime enveloped in confusion and impotence.
Thus, the communist
nomenklatura
, without weapons to process the crisis, operates with a notorious paralysis and distance from the disaster.
The official bureaucracy limits itself to repeating old
epic slogans and rejection of imperialism.
He does not notice that through the grid of those unsatisfied basic needs the symbolic value of the Castro revolution has long since slipped away.
The fate of this circumstance matters not only because of what may happen in the largest of the Antilles.
Also for what these liberated forces can provoke among the regional regimes that have looked in the Cuban mirror for decades and have used it to contain and punish their own communities.
The most significant example is provided by the transvestite Venezuelan ally in the face of ideological and economic poverty with
the styles of the civil-military dictatorships of the '70s.
Verification of limitations, not strengths.
The offensive of Nicolás Maduro's neo-Chavismo against the opposition resembles the Cuban calamity in one main aspect:
the erosion of the regime and popular rejection have been strengthened like never before and define the stage.
In Bauta, Cuba, the effects of blackouts.
AP Photo
In that sense, unusual developments in its history occur in Cuba.
Last Sunday there was a massive mobilization in Santiago de Cuba, the second city in the country, which spread to other locations
in demand for food and electricity.
They asked for food and to be enlightened.
But the government immediately blamed the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House.
The protest was a smaller echo of the one that shook the country in July 2021 and that was also a mobilization against the adjustment of the economy, an unforgiving orthodoxy that, as in Venezuela, added a dollarization that filtered
out the most impoverished sectors. .
The poor, the most affected
Power outages, which sometimes last up to 18 hours, are more than a nuisance in this context.
These masses with lower incomes, especially in the most precarious interior of the country, prepare their few foods with electric stoves.
They have no other alternatives.
The absence of fuel to move the plants has another connection with the Venezuelan crisis.
The Caribbean ally can no longer send the
100,000 barrels a day
that arrived in Havana practically as a gift during the Chavista boom.
The effect is not just the lack of light.
The damage leads to other difficulties.
The schools are empty because the children have no way to get to them because
without gasoline there is no transportation,
an essential means especially in the provinces where distances are important and people mostly lack cars and in any case would not be able to use them.
In Santiago de Cuba, the slogans of the march were initially basic, they demanded "current (electricity) and food." But the slogan of "homeland and life" from the previous national protest in 2021 reappeared. That repudiation of "homeland or death" ”, the classic of Castroism, was also accompanied by other defiant shouts:
“down with communism” and “down with Díaz Canel”
, (Miguel), the president and dolphin of the quasi-retired Raúl Castro.
A key difference with that July 2021 was the absence of the very harsh repression of that time.
Although there were police attacks on the protesters, the internet was cut off to prevent the spread of anger and the
rusty catchphrase of the Cold War against
the US was used, depriving moderation.
This caution in the face of protest is a political fact.
The regime has once again requested food aid from the United Nations, as it did last February.
A late realization.
It is interesting to observe how the thinkers in Cuba who were
intellectual pillars of the Castro process
describe this crisis .
The well-known Marxist philosopher and historian Alina López Hernández, who lives with difficulties on the island, maintains that "in Cuba currently the fundamental dilemma is not between ideologies, but between
an excluded citizenry and a repressive State."
“The (communist) Party in Cuba is today an ineffective and discredited organization,” he wrote on his
CubaxCuba blog.
The Constitution promoted by Fidel Castro defined the Cuban PC as "the superior leading force of society and the State."
Alina Hernández takes up that idea and affirms that today “the true superior force is
the counterintelligence apparatus and the State Security organs
that have become repressors of citizens.”
Her description would also serve to characterize Venezuelan decadence.
In Bauta, in the Cuban province of Artemisa, without electricity.
AFP Photo
But this defiant historian maintains something more and central to the Cuban crisis and these coincidences.
After repudiating the regime as “cowardly” for lying about US involvement.
In the protests, she maintains that the communist bureaucracy
“stopped looking at the citizens a long time ago.
That is why she has been surprised
by two major social outbreaks
for which she does not feel guilty and tries to justify them based on external factors... People are protesting because they are going hungry
. ”
Cuba had a development opportunity to emulate Asian communist models of opening, particularly the
Doi Moi
or
Multifaceted Reconversion of Vietnam
, which
in one generation turned that country into a free market regional power under the control of the CP
.
Dissidence between Raúl Castro and Hugo Chávez
That experiment seduced the youngest of the Castros, but it was sabotaged by the hawks of his own government who
did not want to lose their privileges.
He also conspired against Hugo Chávez who detested the alternative of a capitalist model even if it was Chinese style in the neighborhood.
Raúl Castro and Chávez never fully appreciated each other because of that discord.
After the death of the Venezuelan and the retirement of Fidel,
this modernizing possibility took flight in 2014
thanks to the combined management of the Democratic government of Barack Obama and Pope Francis, which aligned the Vatican with Washington's agenda.
The beginning of the thaw and the reopening of embassies between the
empire
and the island
changed the entire scenario.
Almost immediately it sparked an auspicious emergence of the middle class and an important flow of investments and, of course, political debate.
With growing tourism, large hotel projects appeared and an initiative to transform the island into the main container distributor in the Caribbean from a free zone in the port of Mariel.
As is known, the ineffable Donald Trump demolished all that weapons.
The Republican ended up associated with the Cuban hawks who celebrated the setback
.
When Joe Biden, Obama's former vice president, arrived in the White House in the 2020 elections, Cuban liberals were enthusiastic.
It was not be for lowerly.
The country came from a colossal economic disaster with an extraordinary drop in GDP that year of -10.9% and -10.8% in the per capita indicator, the worst collapse in almost two decades.
To improve the investment and business environment, which he assumed would arrive in a torrent when the thaw revived, Castro ordered the unification of the two currencies in force in the country.
It was the beginning of the current painful adjustment process
that triggered inflation and the price of the dollar.
Biden did not follow Obama's path and, instead, ignored the island's tragedy so as not to irritate anti-Castro voters in Florida.
Thus, the Cubans who came with that economic martyrdom on their backs
found themselves without what they had and not what they could have had.
The consequence was that first protest in July 2021 with the demand for freedom and democracy in the reasonable understanding that in this way the calamities could be better resolved.
Cuba never recovered
.
As Leonardo Padura has been repeating for years,
"in Cuba we have hit rock bottom; more than food or light, what we lack most is hope
. "
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