By Benjamin Noria
HAVANA TIMES – Reform means fixing or improving something that is wrong, unsatisfactory, or affected by corruption and malpractice. Reform is different from Revolution, which is a radical change. A reform seeks to improve the system in question, while continuing with it; meanwhile, radical groups try to promote total and extreme changes when they seek changes in a system, by overthrowing the government and the ruling elite in charge.
Perhaps many naive realists in Cuba can’t believe that the Government has known, for years now, what the solution is to fix economic matters on the island. The thing is, though, none of these solutions are in their best interests, since they would mean losing their privileges. They hold onto the discourse that the Revolution and socialism are the only path towards victory.
Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Cuban Government has been improvising measures to revive the economy and has copied economic models from other countries.
Economic transformations began after the IV Communist Party Congress, which took place in 1991, but they have been fruitless. The strategies we’ve heard them talk about the most to pick up the economy are, for example, the Party’s 100 Guidelines, the Che Guevara Operation that involved cutting down fruit trees to plant sugar cane in the 1980s, the Energy Revolution, the Battle of Ideas, and the 2021 Economic Reordering Reforms. All of these strategies are revolutionary, not reformist.
Many intellectuals know that Marxist theorists didn’t explicitly write down in textbooks what economic models the Communist and Socialist systems should have. In fact, these textbooks don’t even talk about the kind of government Communism should have and whether you can reach equality and democracy via this system.
For example, China and Vietnam have market economies and a Socialist State, they are also Cuba’s allies. Therefore, the Cuban Government could bring over economic advisors from these countries to give conferences at Havana University or the Ñico Lopez School of the Communist Party, about how to reform the Cuban economy. However, none of this has been done.
The Cuban Government continues to experiment on the Cuban population. People here are lab rats. The only thing they’ve tried to do is to create an illusion of progress, because it’s an elitist, conservative and backward system that has no tolerance for criticism and improving doctrines of the masters that came before them.
The Government has crushed every kind of threat to their power, they founded a single political party, have ordered the disappearance of opposition members within their government, etc. Furthermore, they made the working class worship the one-party State and they are monitored and kept under constant control from above.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
