Behind Cuba’s Centralized Economy

By Repatriado*

HAVANA TIMES — If at any time, leaders of the Communist Party/Government honestly believed that a centralized and planned economy was going to be more efficient than the market economy, they couldn’t honorably uphold this position after the disastrous Special Period which it led us to and which we still haven’t left behind.

If the Party/Government has ever upheld this economic Stalinism out of ideological convictions, they couldn’t honorably uphold this position once their Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts adopted a market economy while still holding onto Communist ideology.

Given the fact that centralism and the State’s planned economy have been proved to be incompetent, as well as the fact that Orthodox Communism can be superimposed on a market economy, why is the Cuban Communist Party/Government stubbornly insisting on having a centrally planned economy?

Maybe the answer lies outside both the economy and ideology. Let’s take a look:

Every Cuba lives in and off of the underground economy or “black market”, be it by actively taking products and services away from the sole owner of everything, the State, or passively, consuming these goods or services which are either inexistent or available for out-of-reach prices at state-run establishments, which are the only ones legally authorized to sell these.

Cubans don’t adopt this illegal lifestyle because they want to or because of criminal genes, they do this because they have no other choice: you either buy things on the black market or you don’t have clothes, food, you can’t fix up your house and you can’t run your car (if you have one).

The black market has become a distribution agent, possibly the largest supplier of goods and services in the country, overtaking the goods and services the State officially offers.

So, if nearly everything that is being sold illegally comes from the State, the logical conclusion we can draw from this is that there are goods and services to be distributed, not many but definitely enough, but there isn’t a functional economy to distribute it reasonably.

Why?

Because only a decentralized economy and a framework of autonomous companies can ensure this distribution and this is something that the State Council’s economists know, something I know and something every other government in the world knows (except for the Cuban and North Korean governments).

Why don’t they do this then?

It might well be that the Party/Government isn’t interested in the economy or ideology as anything else but as tools of social control, using the people’s obligation to resolve their day-to-day needs on the illegal market as an almost perfect way to control them socially.

If you become a pain-in-the neck politically speaking, they don’t arrest you for doing this, but they can prosecute you for a long list of accumulated “illegal activities” that its police can easily draw up without needing to invent anything. That doesn’t mean to say that they don’t invent common crimes for their political opponents when they want to, but it isn’t commonplace. Why are they going to make things up when just living in Cuba and not having pigmentary retinal dystrophy or scurvy clearly involves doing something illegal?

Therefore, you might think that Cuba’s leaders have consciously chosen to keep the Cuban people surviving outside the law, constantly violating the law so as to be able to coerce them via the blackmail of knowing they are guilty, knowing that any half-thriving financial stability is based on their active or passive participation in the illegal economy and therefore is fragile and you can be “blown up” at any moment when they decide to target you.

Thus, the answer to why they stubbornly insist on having a centrally planned economy seems to lie outside economic practice or ideological theory, it seems to lie in their need to control society and manipulate its citizens.

If social control is essentially the main foundation of the Cuban economic model, then it would be wrong to expect serious and profound reforms to take place, which are meant to improve society’s quality of life, because this isn’t a priority on the current Party/Government’s agenda, it rather seems that all they really want is for all of us Cubans to be criminals.