Somos+, Jose Manuel Presol, 4 November 2015 — The Cuba of tomorrow will have to face this situation, which cannot be resolved, certainly, in a 24-hour effort. The deterioration caused by half a century of ineptitude and corruption cannot be solved in one day.
What we must make clear is what we are going to do.
Who? This writer, whom you are reading, he who is democratically elected by the People, the teachers, the members of the new National Police, the hospitality professionals, the current pimps and prostituted persons.
What? What we will not do is persecute the victims, and try, like in the terrible years of the sixties, to achieve their “social reinsertions” (by the way, which years haven’t been terrible in the last decades?). What we are going to do is persecute the causes.
We are going to put in the hands of all the victims something they do not have now: hope, faith in their future, a vision of what else they could do; and for this what we have to do is make work what does not work; to provide schools and centers of learning through the State (including, of course, decent salaries for educators) that are adequate to carry out their work; facilitate the resources so that the different policing organs can pursue real crime; make it possible for employees of hotels and the rest to do their jobs; make the stays of tourists who come to enjoy our country satisfactory, but without staining our people; making it possible for even the pumps to have alternatives ways of earning a living and, above all, making them and their prostitutes compatriots have a future.
And as we work to put all this in their power, by placing a person, an individual in the center of all the decisions. Remembering that the much talked about national sovereignty is not only an abstract concept, but it is formed by the freely expressed decision of every single citizen.
All this is, of course, related to a free and prosperous economy, for which there must be laws passed and methods facilitated for the entrepreneurial development of Cubans within Cuba, so that Cubans abroad will return and to support foreign investment. Without an economy that is far from being asleep, like the current one, flexible, dynamic, that satisfies the needs and generates work and wealth, all talk will be only words.
Resources, at first, will be scarce, or it’s quite probably almost nil, but what there is must be applied to generate jobs, improve expectations, motivate our young people, to say to everyone, in short, that there will be a new and better future, and it will be because they, yes, them, and not “papa state” will be the shapers of what they desire.
It will take work, but the day will come when a new generation of Cubans, without needed to abandon their island, will be able to look out from their homes at their children heading off to a school where they will begin to build their own future.
