Economic readjustments end egalitarianism and increase class differences in Cuba.
| Autor | Vazquez, Daniel |
Daily life in Cuba is filled with inconsistencies and extreme contrasts regarding living conditions and access to basic goods--now very different for the millions of citizens who depend on the meager state salary and those who, in contrast, receive money through remittances from the exterior, have private business licenses, or offer tourist services.
After the collapse of the European communist camp and the country's worst economic crisis in its history during the 1990s, the government no longer repeats, as it did for the past 30 years, the possibility of a prosperous future for everyone. Thus it is abruptly ending one of the essential components of the Cuban project: to promote an egalitarian society, which, in reality, had functioned as a nightmare for some, while others enjoyed more benefits.
In that egalitarian society that denounced capitalism and maintained rigidly programmed five-year economic plans through Soviet subsidies, money was demonized, people were sent to jail if they were in the possession of US dollars, profit for the individual was condemned as backward and bourgeois, and a model of proletarian austerity was advocated that ultimately caused poverty for many.
President Raul Castro has announced to the public that the government's productive apparatus is not efficient and that the economic accounting "does not balance." He has taken steps to insert the country into the world capitalist economy and now negotiates with the US, the former enemy and economic empire that former leader Fidel Castro either challenged or rejected. The governmental discourse has changed, but the self-employed still complain of low purchasing power, lack of raw materials, and excessive taxes.
Sluggishness in the outcome of the reforms
The government's economic reforms are driving the exploitation of land use, the opening of small private businesses, and licensing for various trades. Nevertheless, the government has ended up staying true to itself, remaining slow and with little to show for its efforts, perhaps the result of, as Luisa, a 75-year-old resident of Havana, calls it, "the collective mental numbness" that the Cuban people have been subjected to since 1960 when they were convicted for private initiative or the desire for material wealth.
"Now, the government wants us to build wealth and be economically independent, but I learned about capitalism in the Cuba of the 1950s, and when I tried to make some money in the 1990s selling roasted...
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