By Benjamín Noria
HAVANA TIMES – Well, first I must explain the term in the title of this post so that the idea that is going to be developed is understood. For example, I’m going to explain it with an analogy.
De-Stalinization was a process that consisted of eliminating the personality cult of Stalin, and the work of the Stalinist period (1924-1953). It began in 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, but was not made official until 1956 after a secret report by Nikita Khrushchev, who was at the time the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was released at the conclusion of the XX Soviet Communist Party Congress (in 1956).
Now, in this same way in Cuba, De-Castroization will be necessary to eliminate the personality cult of Fidel and Raul, the authoritarian government, and the archaic state centralized economy that they have left behind.
I am sure that the government does not know how to solve Cuba’s current economic crisis, since in textbooks there is no solution to the economic problems of dictatorships and totalitarian governments.
Firstly, what must be done in Cuba to get out of the economic crisis is to carry out a De-Castroization process.
Mikhail Gorbachev realized this when he carried out Glasnost and Perestroika from 1985 to 1991. They were reforms that promoted freedom of expression and the press, and the market economy.
This is the only way discovered by thinkers that has allowed modern human beings to achieve economic, political, and social development.
Socialism was supposed to be liberating, in which spontaneous associations of workers would emerge to organize factory committees, which would be able to decide for themselves what was best for their own benefit. A democratic system without class antagonism had to emerge, perhaps with defects, but with a rich potential for liberation.
No system is perfect; however, capitalism is the one that has been able to satisfy the material, physical and spiritual needs of human beings with much more precision, and it is also the one that finds solutions the fastest when problems such as water scarcity arise, or for food, and the vaccines it produces when a virus emerges. It owes everything to freedom: freedom of creation, civil and political liberties, free market economy.
When human beings are in a state of freedom, they are capable of creating a diversity of objects and goods that result in their own benefit and also of use to others during the exchange for a certain price.
In Cuba there is an interventionist State that directs the entire life of society and monitors every step of the citizens. The State is the one who says which films can be seen and which cannot, which subjects can be taught and which not.
This formula does not work. It is confirmed through 64 years of failure and misery of the Cuban revolution. A change is necessary.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
