After almost twenty years of flirtations and false starts with deep market reforms, Cuban authorities have announced a sweeping and comprehensive plan that will substantially reconfigure society. When Fidel Castro stepped down for health reasons in 2006, his brother Raúl Castro proposed a new way of running the Cuban economy, speaking of strict discipline between income and expenditure in the national accounts, responsibility in social spending, and an expansion of the private sector. Why the country has always treated these steps as sensitive may owe to several reasons, not necessarily mutually exclusive, ranging from genuine concern over the social costs of market-oriented measures—and the identity of the socialist project—to an equally genuine concern over the loss of social control and bureaucratic privilege. All of these concerns and interests are embodied by different actors of power, in constant dialogue with shifting international and domestic contexts.
What has just been announced points to an extremely abrupt turn— not partial, but a full 180 degrees—whose most direct tributary or condition is the strangulation policy imposed by Donald Trump since his first administration. And the conditioning may be more direct than we can openly state, to the extent that these measures end up supported by successive easings of that recently quite expanded coercive policy, which limits the Cuban state's ability to import fuel and receive foreign financing or investment. Cuba's connection to the world economy—not just to the United States—is currently severed almost entirely.
The impoverishment of material life is massive, extreme, and manageable only for the few with solid incomes from employment in or ownership of financially profitable enterprises, or who receive remittances of meaningful monetary value. We're talking about power outages lasting more than 48 continuous hours, runaway inflation, and issues as specific as they are critical, like an extraordinary cash-availability crisis, which has my uncle Chaguito eating plain white rice because the government hasn't paid him in two months; small private businesses don't accept digital payments.
Faced with this picture, I don't think the Cuban state had any way out other than to adopt a model close to so-called Asian socialism. Virtually no barrier remains to the expansion of the private sector, except in sectors such as education and health. There will be private banking, private data centers, and large private enterprises. The economic activities prohibited to the private sector will be narrowed, probably shifting from a scheme that specifically lists what one is allowed to do to one that specifically lists what one is not allowed to do. Businesspeople will be able to own and hold equity in more than one business. Foreign employers will be able to directly hire national labor, and economic actors will be able to import and export without having to route their operations through state enterprises.
I'm naming just a few of the many transformations rushed through first by the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party and then by Parliament. For now, there's no talk of changes in the strictly political realm—meaning matters relating to the exercise of democracy and elections more concretely—, perhaps with the idea of also emulating the Chinese and Vietnamese models, where the Communist Party—at least declaratively—retains "political" control of society. I don't rule out changes along these lines further down the road, and I should also stress that Cuba had been considering this before Trump. It had to be done.
The measures haven't sat well with a segment that closely guards the socialist identity of the revolutionary project I mentioned earlier. Less than a month ago, the Cuban president was saying Cuba couldn't move toward something resembling "Asian socialism" because of context—read: the curse of sitting 90 miles from the United States. And, overnight, almost everything that economists—once dismissed as "neoliberal"—have proposed for decades has become possible. I was critical of this kind of turn, especially when it was still possible to defend a different model and redirect the 1959 project—I could speak at length about this another time. But I now believe there is no other path than this one, and it was irresponsible to have postponed this step.
Those who criticize the move, sometimes out of the most sincere conviction, don't offer their own wager to improve people's quality of life. As a wager, it remains to be seen whether the Cuban state is capable of channeling whatever positive results this reform produces into a trickle-down effect, so that a professor like me, the doctors scattered throughout my family, my retired mother, and my uncle Chaguito can find socioeconomic peace—that is, dignity—from our regular incomes. Whether, on the back of potential economic growth, not only is the free provision of health and education preserved, but also its quality. Whether the thousands of vulnerable people in this country are offered a decent and precise way out of their situation. Here is where the final face of this transformation gets decided. For me, a change of regime is already underway, but history will say whether it leads toward a new kind of Caribbean socialist one or toward something else entirely.
Source for the cover image.
