14ymedio, Ariel Hidalgo, 4 March 2023, Miami — That the Cuban Government has asked, for the first time, the management of the UN World Food Program, for help to subsidize milk for children under seven years of age is a clear example of the situation that the country is going through, since the Cuban leadership has generally been reluctant to accept food aid from abroad so as not to expose the unsustainability of its economic model.
It has also been announced that recently, with the last reserves of the Cuban State, 500 tons of powdered milk were purchased in the United States, the same country that supposedly maintains an “imperialist blockade” against Cuba. It is scandalous that in Cuba there is no milk even for small children in a country whose livestock farming, in another time, was only surpassed in Latin America by Argentina and Uruguay.
The Government has also declared that the population’s basic food basket will not be able to be maintained until the end of March. It had already been said before that in Cuba not only “is nothing being produced,” mainly due to lack of a labor force in agricultural work, but that there is no way to pay to import the food.
When the Revolution triumphed, the Cuban peso was on par with the US dollar. Today, the national currency is worth less than half of a tenth of one US cent, exactly 0.042, according to an official calculation reported on February 20.
So, what threatens the Cuban people, immediately, is a famine like there has never been before, not even at the time of the so-called Special Period, when Cuba lost subsidies from the former Soviet Union. We do not know what the population will live on for a full month, but we do know its consequences: more exodus, more deaths at sea, more crime than already exists, and more protests.
So, what threatens the Cuban people, immediately, is a famine like there has never been before, not even at the time of the so-called ’Special Period’
Some 99% of those interviewed in the opinion poll carried out in the fifteen provinces by the Cuba Siglo XXI Ideas Laboratory, agreed that the country’s main crisis is food, and among these, 92% considered that the most urgent thing now is economic freedom, in particular, the elimination of Acopio, a state monopoly on agricultural production. In other words, what we are talking about is not the supposed blockade of a foreign power, but rather the one that the same Government has maintained over its own people for more than 60 years.
Why is there no labor to make the land produce? Because there is no productive stimulus, because the agricultural worker is obliged to sell most of their products to the State at the price imposed by that same State.
This extreme situation was something to be expected for a long time, because it is a story repeated over and over in many countries:
Why did Yugoslavia, in the midst of a deep economic crisis, have to abandon that system of monopolistic centralism of the State and implement a system that granted workers participation in the profits and management of companies?
Why have there been attempts from the beginning to break away from the so-called socialist camp, such as Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (1981), frustrated by threats or military interventions by Russian troops?
Why did the communist regimes in Europe, including that of the Soviet Union itself, implode between 1989 and 1991 without the need for wars with other countries, without insurrections, without armed expeditions, or assassinations?
Why have the communist parties of China and Vietnam had to implement capitalist elements in order to sustain themselves?
Many of these countries will not have achieved true freedom, but at least they avoided, in the most critical moments, the horrors into which a country like Cambodia tragically ended. Is that the destiny of the Cuban people?
The large estates were never eliminated, but only nationalized, and the lands were never distributed among the dispossessed ’campesinos’, but only property titles to those who already had them as precarious workers and tenants.
The answers to all these questions are in the nature of that economic system, and the very origins of that model in Cuba serve as examples: the large estates were never eliminated, but only nationalized, and the lands were never distributed among the dispossessed campesinos, but only property titles to those who already had them as precarious workers and tenants.
Then the State, monopolizing 70% of the arable land, became the supreme landowner, which it administered, along with all the companies in the country, large, medium, small and micro-enterprises. This administration was carried about by a disproportionate bureaucracy, designated, not by capacity, but by reliability, which lacked true productive interests, and which, due to its magnitude, could not possibly be controlled by the small group of the leadership of the Party-State.
This was the genesis of that system in Cuba in the 60s, which by itself cannot be sustained without external allies capable of subsidizing it, such as the Soviet Union itself for a time and then the prosperous Venezuela that existed during first years of Chavismo before that country’s “21st century socialists” would lead it to ruin.
It is a model that carries, from its origins, the germ of its own destruction, something that the caudillo-in-chief realized at the last minute, when he had already retired from everything and was on the verge of death, judging by what he revealed, during a conversation with a group of students: The Revolution can be destroyed from within.
Every time the external ally lost its ability to subsidize and the internal situation became tense, the resort to mass exodus was the only option to alleviate tensions, but this resource only served to buy time until a new rich ally could be found.
What then is the current situation? The Government has promoted the largest exodus in its entire history, but that would-be helpful ally has just not appeared, which means that they are facing the most critical situation of all time.
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