Haroldo Dilla

Cuba is a society lacking basic civil and political freedoms. But it is a living society, with an impressive mass of university and technical graduates, with an educational system that continues to be well recognized internationally.

If what is involved is the advance toward more balanced territorial development through the formation of production and service linkages, then the formation of strong, transparent and participative municipalities is not an alternative that can discounted.

Like any other political system, Cuba’s always had a band of ideological sycophants at its disposition. Unlike others, however, the Cuban system has always demanded absolute alignment from its brownnosers, even up to the most formal details, which has made them particularly boring.

To carry out the indispensably needed social adjustment and to improve the economy and their own opportunities for accumulation, the political elite is counting on two resources: political/police control as well as émigrés and their remittances.

The Cuban government has now begun the process of expelling hundreds of thousands of workers from the labor market and is organizing the country in agreement with the rules of the private marketplace.

A distinguished Cuban intellectual who resides in New York wrote to me disappointed by a well-known “verbal reformist” —a comrade of days gone by— who spent several minutes at a forum in Pittsburgh explaining that the only obstacle that his fellow Cubans face in traveling is obtaining a visa from the destination country.