Without a safe roof, electricity or running water, people find no other way to protest than to bang on pots and pans during a blackout.
By Reinaldo Escobar (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – When in the 1970s, and even in the 1980s, communist ideologues explained to us that the high cost of living in capitalist countries was due to what they called the anarchy of production, they concluded that this would not occur under socialism because the fundamental means of production were social property (under the tutelage of the State, which in turn was under the tutelage of the Party) and that the planned economy of socialism would make the cyclical crises that overwhelmed the capitalists impossible.
No inflation, no stagflation, nothing of the sort. Everything would flow smoothly, which would allow compliance with the Fundamental Law of Socialism, which stated that “the point is to produce to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of the population and not, as in capitalism, to produce only for the purpose of making a profit.”
Don’t tell me any stories. I learned it by heart and, so that others could learn it, I even gave courses on the Political Economy of Socialism, sponsored by the Cuban Journalists Association (UPEC).
The dispute between Trotsky and Stalin, ignoring each other’s desire for prominence, was based, among other theoretical questions, on the discussion of whether or not it was possible to implement socialism in a single country.
A century later, those who consider themselves Cuban Stalinists maintain that it is possible to build a socialist utopia without the support of the bloc of the same name, which has now disappeared, and also ignoring the fact that the system that governs the world is capitalism and that the country that leads it, the United States of America, the official enemy of the nation, has no interest in contributing to the fulfillment of Cuba’s five-year plans, which are no longer even formulated.
No one can deny that life has become expensive in Cuba. It has become unaffordable, just as the foreign debt of developing countries was declared unaffordable at the end of the 1980s when Fidel Castro proposed a consensual disobedience to force debtors to forgive their debts.
If social justice fundamentalists were consistent with their discourse, they should be advocating disobedience that would entail the immediate confiscation of all private businesses called “non-state forms of production,” which are indirect causes of the social differences existing in the country. They do not dare to do so because they already know the results of the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 and because, however fundamentalist they are or appear to be, they remain obedient.
The people, these poor people without a solid roof, without electricity or running water, find no other way to protest than to bang their kettles in the middle of a blackout lasting more than 12 hours or to block a street or a highway with their rickety buckets to protest the lack of water. These people do not believe in fundamentalists.
To the fundamentalists this perhaps sounds and smells like a counterrevolution and they may even suspect that behind it all there is financing from US imperialism because they do not see, or because they do not want to see, that this discontent coincides with that of the opposition.
Perhaps social justice is just a myth, a propaganda trick of the left to compete for power or to have a pretext to usurp it, but the high cost of living in Cuba is an undeniable fact after 65 years of a project disguised as social justice that should have made such high cost impossible.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
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