My weekly greeting. Comment for Harold on his work on the Social Contract.
The theme is very interesting: The State’s promises of a better future created expectation in Cuban society and most took on the challenge, ready to do their part (which is nothing more than their share in the contract).
The State has failed though it has talked of a subsidized state, something absolutely debatable. Society has responded in a more or less conscious way with successive violations of which I can only offer some examples: Insufficient salaries, embezzlement and “diversion of resources,” insufficient delivery of food rations and high prices in the free markets and in hard currency, the black market, inadequate and poorly functioning transport, poor quality education, bribery and the buying of grades and degrees.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that on the one hand they have decided to put it aside in view of the fact that the State has not fulfilled its obligations under the pact.
The apathy of those who should be running this race is a result of the years of putting the cart before the horse, that being the cart of politics and the horse of the economy. In our country they have tried to subordinate economic laws to political interests.
They didn’t pay much attention during the era of Soviet subsidies, but the country’s leadership should have learned the lesson of the Special Period, but the Venezuelan oil subsidies appeared and they stumbled again over the same well-known stones.
No Cuban needs an outside instigator to be aware of the economic failure and social crisis; the more damage that a youth that “doesn’t take on the struggle” does to Cuba, the more damage is done by the drain of young people who believe that only by emigration can they have any hope of personal success, and I say this although I see nothing terrible in conceiving the world as a global village. One of the things we tried to inculcate more than patriotism was jingoism, with the natural rejection of the brace.
The cycle of historical processes is uneven. Socialism lasted 70 years in the USSR, and managed to convert a feudal society into an industrialized one; in Cuba where the economy has taken the fall, socialism is maintained by firm control of power by the same leadership that made the revolution against Batista.
There are young people who will make another revolution of which you speak, whose always restless nature will lead them to find their own paths and not those marked in advance as if they were in an arranged marriage since childhood. And it won’t take 70 years. Then they will introduce new forms of social compact.
April 7 2011