“Economic War” in Cuba: Against Whom?

By Haroldo Dilla (El Mostrador)

HAVANA TIMES – The “economic war” against “imperialism” announced by the Cuban president points more to a social massacre than to an epic struggle. Cubans will suffer more, continue emigrating, and be imprisoned when they publicly express their reasonable discontent. The country will continue to impoverish.

As a subject born out of war, the Cuban political class likes to invoke it. They revel in its proclaimed epicness and yearn for its authoritarian chains of command. Now they are once again calling for combat to announce an austerity program against –quoting President Díaz-Canel– “a scenario of a maximum suffocation policy, designed and applied to a small country by the most powerful empire in history.” They have named the indefinite program an “economic war,” and it is inferred from some isolated statements that it must contain reductions in public spending, tax increases, price controls, and the elimination of the few subsidies remaining from the “Soviet” era.

Blaming United States hostility towards Cuba for all the ills afflicting the island has become a manic exercise of the Cuban political elite. This is what the Cuban president is now doing, invoking what some call the US blockade policy and others the embargo, which certainly implies limitations on the Cuban economy – harmful to the population and politically counterproductive, therefore unjust – but which fall short of explaining the absolute economic collapse of the Caribbean island.

This collapse is the result of misguided policies of state control over everything that moves – the condition of a regime that, against all odds, maintains its totalitarian vocation – with the consequent closure of emerging private economic opportunities, the survival of a public sector plagued by inefficient and technologically outdated companies, and the flourishing of corruption that, in this context, operates as an original accumulation for an officialdom (and their families) turning into a bourgeoisie.

It is even noteworthy that this “warlike” proclamation comes just when the Biden administration has announced some relaxations of the embargo concerning the island’s emerging private sector, has eased immigration procedures, and has finally alluded to certain collaborations by Cuba in the fight against terrorism. Despite its repeated preaching against the US blockade, the Cuban political class cannot live without blaming it for every evil occurring on the island. That is why they did everything possible to frustrate Carter, Clinton, and Obama when they tried to move towards normalizing relations. As Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz reproached the men of her time, the Cuban government encourages the sin it condemns.

Therefore, this “war” is not fundamentally against the embargo but against the Cuban society itself. A repressed society, without autonomous organizations, subjected to a regime of dreadful privations.

To get an idea of this, let’s say that the average monthly Cuban salary (about $11 dollars at the real exchange rate) is enough to buy a kilogram of chicken meat, another kilogram of powdered milk, a liter of cooking oil, and the rest to pay for basic services. If it were a highly specialized doctor (less than $20 dollars at the real exchange rate), they could add some additional vegetables and, with luck, a couple of kilos of pork. Social services – health, education, pensions – are in a calamitous state. Public transportation does not work. And Cubans have learned to endure prolonged nighttime blackouts in the middle of the rigors of summer.

This “war” is set on this stage that replays, under worse conditions, the crisis of the 1990s, when the Cuban economy, after the end of Soviet subsidies, suffered steep declines of more than 50%. But then there was a robust social services system, a stock of stored supplies, and the political resource of Fidel Castro. None of this exists now, as in the 30 years since then, the economy only experienced a brief and slight respite due to the subsidies from Chávez’s oil decade in Venezuela.

Popular protests have increased – sporadic, spontaneous, without organizational bases – and have been met with greater repression. Some critical intellectual figures, such as historian Alina Barbara Lopez, have been physically mistreated, prosecuted, and sometimes forced to take the path of exile. More than a thousand people remain in prisons for their participation in various peaceful protests.

The result has been a severe impact on national survival. For several decades, the Cuban population has not grown due to low birth rates and the emigration of its younger, more educated population.

These people use all possible means, from legal migration resources to frequently deadly attempts, boarding boats to Florida or crossing hostile territories to the Mexican/US border. Usually, this meant a loss of about 50,000 young people annually, but in the last two years, the number has risen to nearly half a million, against a total population barely exceeding 11 million. Only the oldest and least capable population remains on the island, those who have nowhere to go.

The “economic war” against “imperialism” announced by the Cuban president points more to a social massacre than to an epic struggle. Cubans will suffer more, continue emigrating, and be imprisoned when they publicly express their reasonable discontent. The country will continue to impoverish.

It is foreseeable that all this will worsen if Trump returns to power and the far-right gains more ground in Latin America. In the end, only their dubious anti-Western allies (Russia, China, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela) and the dwindling handfuls of nostalgic leftists who insist, against all evidence, on finding some sign of the path to social redemption in this debacle, will remain on their side.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.