By Osmel Ramirez Alvarez
HAVANA TIMES – The systemic crisis of the radical socialist model imposed in Cuba by the Communist Party, stubbornly clings to the belief that this is the only way forward. Despite the fact that the vast majority disagree and leave or want to leave the country in search of another path has reached disastrous limits. The leaders are blind to the dysfunctionality and the cruel cost paid by our people.
A desperate mother with no milk or sugar to give her children for breakfast; the rationed bread roll that has shrunk in size and is missing far too often. The electricity —needed not just for lighting but for cooking, since most of the country lacks gas service— is available for fewer hours each day. Recently, we’ve experienced blackouts lasting 12, 15, even 21 hours a day. The already scarce water supply worsens due to the inability to pump, leading to chaos. This is the Dantean picture of everyday life in Cuba.
There is no peace of mind in today’s Cuba where nothing works. If you go to work or school, there’s no safe transportation, nor is it affordable compared to salaries. There’s almost never any certainty you’ll get to your destination, even at exorbitant prices. Basic necessities are no longer guaranteed, not even in the previously regulated basic ration basket. Now, it’s all handled by private small and medium-sized private enterprises.
But these businesses sell at high prices, disconnected from salaries. It seems their offerings are more suited to the segment of the population receiving remittances, which is growing due to the unrestrained wave of emigration. Similar to the concept of state-run stores selling only in foreign currencies for those with dollars. However, those without remittances have no affordable place to buy from, and they become the main customers of the private sector. They buy little because they earn little, but they are many.
It is their employer, the State, that should guarantee a decent wage for people to buy in the existing market, or else provide goods priced in line with the wages they pay. But the state-party-government is bankrupt and can no longer guarantee anything, not even at the most minimal level.
They cling to populist strategies to shift the blame for their incompetence —called the “blockade”— onto the private sector. Even though they need this sector to make up for their economic failures, they stifle them with price caps, banned activities, exorbitant fines, and exaggerated fiscal policies. They pass the blame for the problems onto them, and there are always people who believe it. This works with a portion of the population.
Private businesses cannot sell cheaper because they buy goods abroad or from state companies in Cuba at informal market rates in dollars. The same government that doesn’t sell them dollars forces them into a market 13 times more expensive than the official rate, and then blames them for abusive prices and inflation. But what’s truly abusive is continuing to operate a failed system with so-called leaders who refuse to make the necessary and urgent changes.
However, though the material crisis is the most visible, Cuba’s biggest crisis is spiritual. We are a broken country, without hope, civically and politically bound. Families are separated by emigration as people search for a livelihood in capitalist countries that do work, and send remittances to those left behind, prisoners of a radical socialism that doesn’t work.
Children grow up without their parents, sometimes from before their first birthday, some without one parent, many without both. Marriages are held together via WhatsApp from a distance. Many don’t survive this, and families break apart. It’s a high price for economic survival, but there’s no other viable option.
Public healthcare has deteriorated to unimaginable levels, to the point where people fear hospitalization more than risking their health at home. There are no medicines, not even in hospitals. People, like zombies, suffer from chronic diseases and the seven endemic plagues: dengue, oropouche, chikungunya, COVID, staphylococcus, flu-induced pneumonia, and scabies (sarcoptes). People are forced to buy medications on the street at unaffordable prices, bought in the US and resold in Cuba. It’s unheard of, considering the low purchasing power of salaries and pensions, but practically the only option.
Much farmland is abandoned or semi-abandoned due to a lack of fuel or oxen (often slaughtered by criminals) to plow it, or due to a lack of labor because of emigration and widespread disenchantment. Likewise, because of the systematic theft that makes investments in labor and resources unviable. Workplaces and offices are semi-paralyzed by restrictions on electricity and fuel consumption, in addition to the never-ending blackouts.
It’s nearly a failed state. Only the government’s control prevents it from being classified as such. And, though barely surviving, most people find ways to stay alive, not yet collapsing publicly in noticeable numbers.
This is Cuba. This is how we suffer it from within, live and direct. And the reality is far worse than what can be described in words from a mere mortal. It would take Dostoevsky to faithfully depict such a raw and cruel reality.
Read more from the diary of Osmel Ramirez here.
