Cuba’s ‘Special Period’: Past, Present and Future

What is feared when people talk about the Special Period are the prolonged blackouts, the collapse of public transport and the closure of industries. (Havana Leaks)

14ymedio biggerReinaldo Escobar, Havana, 14 June 2018 — The terminology of officialdom has its euphemisms and its unknowns, among the latter is whether it is politically correct to speak of the ‘Special Period‘ as a thing of the past, an question that became clear in the review published on Tuesday by the state-run newspaper Granma, that discussed Raúl Castro’s meeting with Cuban Communist Party (PCC) leaders. The article alludes to “the difficult moments experienced during the years of the special period,” with the verb in the simple past tense.

Although it is true that in none of the three PCC congresses held in the last 21 years, nor in any session of Parliament or the Council of Ministers, nor even in the ‘conceptualization’ of the country’s socialist model, has the official end of the so-called ‘Special Period’ been officially decreed. And we also know that, in practice, the terrible situation suffered in the first half of the 1990s is no longer suffered.

The reason for this limbo in definitions with regards to the finalization or the continuity of the Special Period occurs, in particular, because to decree its end it would not be enough to establish that its consequences have ceased or decreased, but it would be necessary to reverse the economic policies established at that time with the declared purpose of “saving the conquests of the Revolution.”

Either those policies — presented in provisional dress — are reversed, or the measures that were announced as temporary are considered permanent.

Reversing the policies would mean, among other things, reversing the opening to foreign capital, the permission to engage in self-employment, and the new business forms characterized by a greater degree of decentralization. It would be necessary to penalize the possession of foreign currency and to return to rigid five-year plans. But for this to happen, to return to the previous situation, the Soviet Union and Comecon would need to be resuscitated.

The problem becomes a political-ideological issue because the aspiration to return to the “promising past” is impossible; to do so it would have to be proclaimed that Cuban socialism does not intend to comply with the rules theorized by its creators and that the invisible laws of the market bring better results.

The reasons that forced Cuba’s leaders to decree the Special Period, or — and it’s one and the same — to partially accept compliance with the laws of the market, are not only the collapse of the socialist camp or the hardening of the American embargo. They respond in equal measure to the accumulation of errors resulting from voluntarism and the continued failure to take responsibility for the means of production that are described as social property, but which in reality have become the private property of the state.

When, from time to time, rumors about the specter of “a new Special Period” threaten to reappear, what is being talked about, what is feared, are the prolonged blackouts, the collapse of public transport, the closure of industries, the reappearance of polyneuritis, and the disappearance of products from the market. However, this set of damages is not the precise definition of that era, but rather the aftermath of a disaster that tried to attenuate itself through decrees of insufficient measures.

The ill-fated fruits of that policy, clinging to a refusal to make concessions on certain principles considered inviolable, are now in sight. Foreign investment has not reached fantastical heights, non-state forms of production are still tied to arbitrary guardianships that impede their full development, tourism is a mirage in which the number of visitors grows without proportionally raising profits, the Mariel Special Development Zone has not taken off, it has not been possible to eliminate the dual currency system, and salaries are further than ever from being enough to ensure the daily survival of the working family.

To all this, uncontrollable external factors are added, such as the frustration of the brief hopes that emerged with the thaw between Cuba and the United States, together with the difficult situation in Venezuela that has brought about a cut in aid flowing to Cuba from that country.

These are now, without a doubt, the least tragic moments of the late Special Period. The exhaustion of those provisional solutions, however, means that Cuba’s leaders must take responsibility and confess that the now deflated life preservers that kept the country afloat in the midst of the storm can not be the territory on which the future is built.

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