The ’politics of the cadres’ is ’the Achilles heel’ of the Party, and food production is ’the stone in our shoe’
14ymedio, Madrid, 6 October 2024 — On Wednesday he was in Las Tunas, on Thursday in the Havana municipality of Diez de Octubre, on Friday in Santa Clara, and on Saturday back in Havana in the Plaza de la Revolución district. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has had a hectic schedule since returning from Mexico, where he attended Claudia Sheinbaum’s inauguration on Tuesday.
It is not unusual for the hand-picked president to make this type of tour of different corners of the Island, especially if something has happened in the place, such as after the passage of Hurricane Ian or the fire at the Supertanker Base in Matanzas. His speeches, both during these visits and at Party meetings, are usually marked by voluntarism and the usual reassignment of responsibilities: the United States blockade* is to blame.
However, his tone has changed slightly this week, in what seems to be a tour to calm the spirits of Cubans. “No one will give to us what we can do for ourselves,” he declared on Wednesday in Las Tunas, where he again called for “confronting the distortions that we have in the economy in the relations between the state and non-state sectors.” The “vices” that have appeared in “those necessary links,” he said, “require a clean-up and the establishment of responsibilities.”
There are 14,000 fiscal accounts in that province that have zero balance or little movement of funds.
There are 14,000 fiscal accounts in that province, he said as an example, that have zero balance or little movement of funds, which is a “window for tax evasion.” “2025 has to start with a more orderly scenario in that sense,” he stated, this time without mentioning any external enemy: “The moment is difficult, but it is not insurmountable; overcoming it depends on ourselves.”
The outlook he painted on Friday in Santa Clara was just as bleak, despite his usual stubborn tone: “We will get through this, and we will do so stronger, but we have to work hard.” In his hometown, Díaz-Canel had an “intense work agenda” that included meetings with provincial authorities and a pilgrimage to schools, recreational parks and state institutions. For the president, the “politics of the cadres” is “the Achilles heel” of the Party, and food production, especially of milk, “the stone in our shoe.”
This Saturday, in the Plaza de la Revolución, he was more forceful: “Things done badly are not contemplated, they must be faced with rigor.” This is the phrase chosen by the State newspaper Granma for its cover, although the photo that accompanies the headline is not the most fortunate, with the authorities contemplating an enormous hole in the middle of the street, apparently made by Aguas de La Habana (the Havana Water company), one of the state entities with the worst reputation among the residents in the capital.
One of the main missions in this Havana municipality – the most “central” of the capital, according to the official newspaper, with 141,000 inhabitants plus 30,000 in “floating population” and the oldest in Cuba, with almost 60,000 people over 60 years old – was the same as on Thursday in Diez de Octubre: to confront the proliferation of garbage dumps on the corners.
Díaz-Canel promised a “different moment in waste management”
As he proposed in Diez de Octubre, the hand-picked president “advocated for greater participation of the population in the sanitation work,” although he clarified that “this method will not be sustainable over time” and is only “the first response to the crisis situation that was generated in the capital with the issue of garbage collection.”
In this respect, Díaz-Canel promised a “different moment in waste management,” with “decisions that are being analyzed, including new foreign investment projects,” he said without providing details.
The leader also urged people to explain their problems “frankly.” “When we are insensitive, when we do not care about people, when there is apathy, when a complicated situation has been going on for a long time and no one comes to explain, to do something, people have to feel bad,” he said, without referring specifically to possible protests that, as on other occasions, may take place due to the unsustainable shortage of food, water, electricity and fuel.
And he acknowledged: “Many things have nothing to do with the blockade or with resources. They have to do with the way we organize ourselves, the way we take up the fight and say: we have to resolve this, we can deal with this.”
Translator’s note: There is, in fact, no US ‘blockade’ on Cuba, but this continues to be the term the Cuban government prefers to apply to the ongoing US embargo. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US ordered a Naval blockade (which it called a ‘quarantine’) on Cuba in 1962, between 22 October and 20 November of that year. The blockade was lifted when Russia agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from the Island. The embargo had been imposed earlier in February of the same year, and although modified from time to time, it is still in force.
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