Category: Regina Coyula

The whole article conveys the desire to see one part of the whole. The author’s antipathy toward the dissidence would not worry me if it were not that, as a communicator, he contributes with his opinions to confusing an already badly informed populace.

The journalist says that, “To sit at the negotiations table with the government, one needs be a real political force.” He does not recognize any dissenting voice as having rights, and ascribes to them a lack of legitimacy for supposedly acting as scribes for Washington. But Ravsberg is not candid and must know that no dissenting voice has been able to make itself heard, even when it respects legally established procedures.

When Oswaldo Paya tried to move forward the Varela Project – respectfully, autonomously, following the law, visible thanks to Jimmy Carter mentioning it in the Great Hall at the University of Havana, live and to the press – the government’s response was to ignore the initiative submitted to Parliament and, with an open collection of signatures under its own sponsorship, to modify the Constitution to make socialism an eternal system. But also eternal was its friendship with the Soviet Union and, like that one, there are other eternities that come to an end.

Most of the dissidents are not old enough to dream, as Ravsberg suggests, of “an invasion by the Marines,” nor suicidal enough to support “a blockade that would bring their compatriots to their knees through hunger.” I don’t know a single person who sympathizes with terrorism, but it seems inconceivable to me that a journalist who pretends to be knowledgeable about Cuban issues doesn’t know that even the “enemy” press has been cited on the Roundtable TV program in talking about the scandal of the misuse of money to “buy democracy in Cuba,” those 20 million dollars the author mentions in passing to make the unaware reader believe that this hard cash comes to Cuba year after year.

“To lose touch with reality can prove catastrophic in politics,” Ravsberg warns us. No sir, it IS catastrophic. For journalism as well, but that often happens in countries like ours when you don’t ride the bus, when you have someone who does your shopping for you, and you live in a bubble of functionaries, artists, entrepreneurs and other characters who always know someone who knows someone…

On the other hand, offering the Cuban government solidarity and support for 40 years, or for 25, is to ignore the harvest of failures, the mismanagement and corruption that has nothing to do with a “blockade” or an imperialist threat, but rather one that has left a people exhausted and unbelieving and led to an emigration among young people higher than ever recorded.

Not all dissent is manifested by marching in the street or opening a blog; the visa lottery, crossing the Florida Straits and the immigration crisis in Central America are other forms of dissent, and the most popular, of course.

Reading Uncle Sam’s Cuban Nephews leaves me curious to know how the author believes the opposition to an authoritarian government should behave, when even civil society associations for protecting animals or the environment are suspect if they are not sponsored by the State, and promoting opposition candidates in the neighborhood Assemblies of Peoples Power unleashes an enormous operation by State Security.

Barack Obama will decide to meet with all, or with a part, or with no opponents to the government, but I am sure that he will come with a clearer idea of the Cuban dissidence than that held by Fernando Ravsberg.

The workers, who today serve the goals and wave the flags of the collective vanguard, will demand rights and organize strikes. This country that seems so quiescent today will become a Tower of Babel. That is why it is so important that the different visions of Cuba not ignore each other, and above all that the government does not ignore them all. Even common sense suggests that within the ranks of the apparently monolithic ruling party, there are opinions far removed from the party line and that it is thanks only to the mortar of so-called democratic centralism that they are not noticed.

Among citizens, anyone who wishes to engage in serious politics, if they want to attract interest and get votes, must be explicit and convincing with respect to preserving a system of healthcare, education and social security that covers everyone, although these activities do not have to be exclusively free. The inequalities that are currently shamelessly on display, are precisely in schools and health centers.

The lack of a sense of ownership and the feeling that “everything belongs to everyone, so nothing belongs to anyone,” has had disastrous results. Different forms of ownership have not been implemented except on an exceptional basis. Faced with limited private property (home, auto, cemetery vault, furniture, personal belongings, farmland), the rest has been overwhelmingly state-owned, not owned in common, however much they try to explain otherwise.

The economy needs to be renewed. It is urgent to modify the timid Investment Law so that the most motivated (Cubans, regardless of their geography) can participate. The state must become an efficient administrator and coordinator and must reform its bloated and unwieldy structure. Not making the necessary layoffs to pare the state structure is a political decision with an economic burden that also affects the lack of equality.

Fiscal policy (fair, based on production and productivity) should finance social policies and the strategic development of the country, but with full transparency about the uses of this money. It is disrespectful to taxpayers to force them to support an enormous and inefficient state apparatus. Planning must be realistic, and set aside volunteerism, historical anniversaries or “tasks handed down from above,” and should be a natural part of the autonomy of these businesses.

The market can no longer be subordinated to politics; in any event it must be subordinated to social interests. State intervention in the prices of agricultural products is viewed with suspicion and the critics didn’t take long to appear.

To articulate democratic participation and obedience to the law without exceptions are the greatest challenges, and we should not fear a real battle of ideas. If citizens feel their participation is truly voluntary and that they are honestly informed, their participation will be massive and spontaneous.

A good plan for the future should be based on José Martí’s idea of a republic for all and for the good of all. In a project like this there is room for all Cubans, on the island and abroad, ready to debate and to respect what is decided at the polls, and there is a great deal that will need to be voted on in the coming years.

As in any joint venture, no one will emerge the total winner. Negotiations will be open, as the development of a plan for the future must be open if it is to succeed after the secrecy of all these years. And citizens, through their votes, must have the last word.

We are not inventing anything. There is a wealth of experience in our history and in history in general about how to do things that come out better, versus worse. Personally, I have many doubts about how it should be, but I have none about how it should NOT be.

We have become accustomed to hearing military terms used to define the bilateral Cuba-United States relationship: cultural penetration, ideological battle, domination, hegemony. The national life throughout all these years revolved around the conflict with “the lurking enemy to the north.”

From the White House, nearly a dozen presidents eased and tightened the measures against its provocative neighbor. Conditions have changed with the passing of time and, with the disappearance of the socialist camp, other priorities left our country as an ember of the Cold War.

For the Government “governed” by a small group of octogenarians who come from the struggle against Batista in the Sierra Maestra, the situation has barely changed. They came to power very young, dynamited its structures, encouraged the bourgeoisie and with them the “lively classes” (the civil society of that time) to leave the country, and created their own way of doing things.

Because of this they never renounced the language of the barricade, nor have they stopped talking about the Cuban Revolution as a seminal and living event, when at least institutionally one can fix its end in 1976. Although the institutional character of the de facto Government of 1959 formally established a certain “informality” – with military uniforms giving way to civilian dress – the indisputable leadership of Fidel Castro sidestepped that inconvenience and he ruled as he saw fit.

Over the years, the anti-imperialist discourse has lost traction among the people, because as they have seen, the “empire” is not as fierce as it has been painted: half the family lives there, sends remittances, pays for our visits, or comes back loaded with gifts for everyone. Right now, the United States Government eases and eases and the Cuban Government interprets it as a well-deserved victory, not a quid pro quo, and still nobody understands what the crisis in farm products has to do with the “blockade.”

In the media and in academic texts (under State control), the consumer society and its values (or lack of them) have been anathematized; this has not kept cultural patterns from being a Frankenstein with the worst of each system. The taste for trash music, trash movies, trash literature and trash fashion is not only not avoided, but marks the canon of the popularly accepted. In a cruel paradox, culture has been what is most accessible to citizens in their spare time.

I don’t know how patriotism is measured. Flags haven’t been sold for many years, much less in Cuban pesos. The Cuban flag flies – though not always – on public buildings and in an ever declining number of neighborhoods and homes for the anniversary of the Revolution or the assault on the Moncada Barracks. It is also seen on the outfits made by the multinational company Adidas for our athletes, which many who are not athletes also wear, among them foreigners who assume solidarity, strolling through Havana with a beret, Che T-shirt and shoulder adorned with our national emblem.

In contrast with this quasi-institutional display, I see American flags in the old American cars that function as shared taxis, in the cartoonish bubble car taxis, in the pedicabs, and on caps, T-shirts, scarfs, and even in lycra versions that have flooded the streets with cellulite-filled stars and bars. La Yuma (the USA) and los Yumas (its inhabitants) are now the paradigm of a society that doesn’t substitute McDonald’s for roast pork and is considered anti-imperialist at heart. Weird, but true.

You don’t have to be an economist or a sociologist to see the exhaustion in individual perspectives, let alone the collective. If decades ago seeing one’s children emigrate was a tragedy, today it has become a hope. The State has no solution for the discrepancy between wages and prices, for the burden of transport and housing, and has now abandoned the role of father protector with which Fidel Castro felt so comfortable. Today, everyone must address the solution to their own needs, that for not being morally correct resolves the situation of two generations brought up under the idea of the State as the cradle-to-grave provider of everything.

The true and unconfessed fear of the champions of national identity is not a fear of the cultural influence that existed long before 17 December 2014, and which will not change the essence of Cubans, but of the free flow of information that lets any citizen peer into a looking glass that gives access to complete and contrasting information.

The agency buses, added a few years ago to ease the crisis, now pass up bus stops, already full, despite the desperate signals of their would-be passengers. How much do these buses cost their respective agencies to make only two daily trips which require a driver, gas and a mechanic. How much does it cost?

Private transport trucks supplement some of the shortcomings of public transport, but the solution is not to transport people in trucks, not to mention the price is several times higher, given that they offer a deficient service.

Private carriers should have the option of bank loans or other methods to acquire a bus 

The news report mentioned the lack of scruples of those who urinate in the buses, the graffiti “artists,” the rudeness of those who push to get on first, and even sadder, the lack of solidarity for older people or people with children. With summer vacation just ended, I have fresh images of parents who in the desire to give their children some distraction, traveled with their little ones to the beach or the zoo without other passengers offering them a seat. There are seats for the disabled, the pregnant and people with small children, clearly differentiated by their yellow color, but a great many people feel that if those seats are already occupied, too bad. Twice I have spoken up to demand a seat for women with babies, and failed.

The drivers, on more than a few occasions, are a part of the problem rather than the solution. As they are now required to pay out a sum of money before each trip, the informal fare collector has appeared who, on behalf of the driver, collects the fares and encourages the passengers to get on by the back door so as to stop as briefly as possible. The drivers are deaf to passenger complaints of excessive speed, sudden braking or the imposition of their own musical tastes; and I don’t even bother to ask them not to smoke. All this along with the previous paragraph gives an idea of how we travel and our values at the social level.

The idea of turning public transport into a cooperative has often been raised—a different way of trying to resolve some of the city’s oldest problems—but control remains in the hands of the Urban Bus Company.

Private carriers should have the option of bank loans or other methods to acquire a bus and let the trucks go back to carrying goods. These are not new ideas, they have proved their value in practice and have been aired in public forums, specialized meetings and in public opinions surveyed by the written press. There is no explanation for why, in the so-called updating of the country’s economic model, the “lack of haste*” hasn’t resulted in a viable alternative for easing the crisis in public transport.

This is perfectly captured in one of the most often heard phrases at the bus stops: Cleary the leaders don’t travel by bus!

*Translator’s note: From a phrase delivered in a speech by Raul Castro commenting that the update of the economic model would be accomplished “without pause, but without haste.”

Privileging the term social justice rather than the equality offers better perspectives

The full social equality, liberty and dignity that so many talk about, are relative concepts in our society; the so-called “circumstantial necessity” of inequality seems much more permanent; social equality rests in equality of opportunities, but not of possibilities. To privilege the term “social justice” before that of equality offers better perspectives.

If I understood the Palma coefficient correctly as an indicator of the degree of inequality comparing the richest 10% of society and the poorest 40%; in the study of the statistics a comparative analysis with similar strata of society before the economic crisis of the ‘90s and before the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 cannot be omitted.

Beyond production and productivity, a source of income that has nothing to do with work is remittances—money sent from family or friends abroad. Any citizen who receives just 100 CUC a month lives notably better than the immense majority of Cubans. Nor should we forget the point that remittances are received mostly by residents of the capital and by white people, and the terms of this paragraph are very important when speaking of inequality.

Let passion blind no one: mismanagement of the economy has been the responsibility of the socialist government, no matter how many attacks, “blockades” and “media campaigns against Cuba” have been generated from the exterior. It is not enough to have guaranteed health care, education and social security prior to our hitting bottom in the crisis of the ‘90s, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

The disappearance of Soviet subsidies exposed the vulnerability and the ineffectiveness of the domestic economy; not only had the national project that would bring welfare and justice not been achieved, but along the way, the social cost meant a loss of freedoms, moral and material impoverishment, and massive emigration. This is not the idea of a successful naitonal project.

Policy changes often create expectations that end up being disappointed

Monreal discusses the overlap between the political analysis of inequality and economic analysis. Like the academic adventure itself, policy changes often create expectations that end up being disappointed. I believe that this element, which refers directly to a criticism of the government, is intended to avoid leaving the analysis in the field of the economists.

To mention the Battle of Ideas* strikes a dissonant tone in a study of inequality, because that effort absorbed substantial economic resources for an exclusively political objective. These unknown and difficult to measure figures impede the calculation of a cost-benefit balance, but I have not the least doubt that those resources would have been much better employed had they been used for the construction and repair of houses, for one example.

It will be very hard for the socialist vision to see the workers happy to offer their skins for tanning – according to the Marxist allegory cited by Monreal – if in that way they can finish the month without “production failures” or “diversion of resources.”

This will happen with the coming of foreign businesses paying poverty-level wages, relative to their countries of origin, but yet much higher than current Cuban wages. This is what happened in Vietnam and China, now “revisionists” (a word now fallen into oblivion but so in vogue in the sixties and seventies of the last century) with respect to Marxist theory.

Without proof, I say this more as an observation and common sense, my impression is that Cubans are not entirely satisfied with the maxim “better the known evil”… and feel inclined to take risks and test their strengths in the vagaries of an open economy, and perhaps in this way, feel themselves to be less unequal.

*Translator’s note: Fidel Castro coined the term “Battle of Ideas” during the custody battle over the Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old lone survivor of a group of Cuban rafters, rescued off the coast of Florida in 2008.