In Cuba, We Have Lost the Ability to Dream
By Mariana Camejo (Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – “We have lost the ability to dream, and we don’t even know where we’re going.” Dreaming has to do with beliefs about the future, with hope, with what we believe we are going to achieve.
The phrases “We shall overcome,” “Building socialism,” “Yes we can,” have become mantras in official discourse, but truthfully, no one knows from what year we are supposed to overcome, how long it will take to build socialism, or at what moment we will be able to say we actually could.
People’s feelings about the country’s reality go one way, and the discourse in the government media goes another. Popular wisdom says there are two Cubas: the one on television and the one in real life.
Among the many problems stemming from the current crisis, there’s one I can’t stop thinking about: our ability to dream, to even imagine a future for the country—and ourselves in it. It’s not just a communications problem, nor is it essentially that, but it does have a lot to do with communication.
A few weeks ago, a seminar on Chinese-style modernization was held in Havana. From what I read, it praised the economic reforms China implemented and where they’ve taken the country. I want you to think with me about how this is relevant for us.
In 1978, an estimated 770 million Chinese people—around 80% of the population—lived on the edge of extreme poverty. The economic reforms that have brought China to where it is today began that year and were based on abandoning the centralized model and opening up to the market. China lifted more than 10 million people per year out of absolute poverty in rural areas until 2020.
Since 1953, when five-year plans began in the Asian giant, annual GDP growth has varied, but since the 1978 reforms, it has hovered around 8% or more. In this year, 2025, which marks the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the forecast is for 5% annual growth.
It’s worth highlighting that all this has been accompanied by tough anti-corruption measures. In 2024 alone, the courts resolved about 30,000 cases of bribery and embezzlement involving public officials.
By presenting these figures, I’m not suggesting we aim to match China’s indicators. It’s a country with a millennia-old society, a culture different from ours, and it doesn’t face the coercive unilateral US measures that we do. I’m certainly not saying their model is perfect—it isn’t—but there is a lot we can learn from that experience.
Compared to China, Cuba today has no development strategy to discuss with its citizens. The closest thing were the Party guidelines of 2011, or more recently, the Tarea Ordenamiento (Ordering Task reforms), although that was implemented without public consultation.
Of course, no development model will be free of criticism, but what it cannot be is absent from politics.
In terms of communication, whether institutional, journalistic, or from government authorities, there’s no trace of a strategy for developing the country. There are reports of isolated cases achieving goals, there are calls to replicate them, and there are many official appeals. But neither the successful experiences nor the calls to action are communicated as part of a larger strategy. And that’s a mistake rooted, from a communications standpoint, in political communication.
You can’t communicate what doesn’t exist
We have a macroeconomic stabilization plan that hasn’t been made public. The only thing I can clearly gather from it is that more dollarization is coming while wages remain frozen and the Cuban peso continues to devalue. There’s also talk about a government program to correct distortions, but again, the public doesn’t know its contents.
Every plan or program should have a timeline for implementation and deadlines for achieving objectives. Amid an unprecedented economic crisis, it’s existential to have a strategy that begins to carve a way out—toward development, with clear indicators, sectoral and investment priorities, and without ignoring the contributions of Cuban economists and other social scientists, many of whom are still within national institutions. Neither China nor any other country would dare envision its future without economic literacy among its authorities or by ignoring the academics trained in its own universities.
Let’s bear in mind that even multimillion-dollar investments, like the recent announcement from Russia, won’t be enough on their own to pull Cuba out of its crisis.
What strikes me is that at the level of political discourse, we look toward China, but the authorities seem incapable of drawing inspiration from that experience to take essential steps to put the country in a different position. Put another way: while China presents public five-year plans with proven results, Cuba holds a seminar praising those reforms but doesn’t take the step of structurally reforming its own economy.
And China is not the only valuable reference point for Cuba. There’s Vietnam, for instance. Economist Omar Everleny has written about the reforms that pulled Vietnam out of a deep economic crisis. By the late 1990s, they had shown results—even amid US sanctions, which should never be underestimated.
But we don’t have public plans or a strategy subject to popular oversight, so we don’t have journalistic or any other type of communication that builds a hopeful horizon for you or for me.
Communicating a national development strategy is urgent—but first, that strategy must be clearly defined. That’s a political task, not a communications one. Governance must be built on the efficiency that ensures a pathway to tangible improvements in people’s lives. A development strategy, therefore, must be publicly accessible and subject to popular oversight—and for that, we now have a Transparency Law approved in 2024.
Political and institutional communication cannot turn their backs on their responsibilities. But they can’t perform magic either.
We don’t need a communication strategy to entertain us, but one to tell us with real content and data how we’re going to emerge from this moment—not another long, tedious report of meetings that merely acknowledge the problems without outlining a roadmap for solutions.
Many would say it’s impossible to think about national development under the US embargo, but that’s not up to us, and it will persist as long as it remains effective in achieving its objectives: to foster a Cuba filled with despair and pain. Therefore, any plan to exit the crisis must take into account that the White House’s strategy is unlikely to change—at least until the Cuban economy becomes strong enough to overshadow the sanctions.
If we can’t visualize a horizon, if we don’t feel that horizon is attainable, if we don’t believe that a life without deprivation and with well-being is possible, how are we supposed to imagine a future in this country?
But we cannot dream based on the rhetorical redundancy of the same old slogans. Dreaming cannot be a luxury—it’s a plan with deadlines. Without a development strategy and without efficiency, no dream is possible. And no communication will save it.
First published in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.