The most complex times are about to arrive. Thus, using a farsighted tone, marino Murillo, Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, defined the coming changes that the Cuban government will make to update its economic model, a much-needed action that has become essential for the future of the country.
Most complex means that what we have done so far is barely to train but is about time, in the post Mayan era, to face the real world. The national economy will apply itself into life or death processes, strategies to be drawn along the way, trickeries to deal and desecrate rocky political consciousness and, in addition, they must demonstrate their efficiency not to remove or weaken punctual but meaningful and precious assurances that Cuban society has today. Or at least not to remove or weaken them more than immobility has done in the last decade.
If we list what’s ahead, we understand that the 2011 or 2012 were, indeed, years of gestation. Ahead it is, for example, the implementation of the tax law. Looming is the creation of a wholesale market. Ahead, but we don’t know yet how much long, is the monetary unification. Looming in the state side is the greater autonomy for enterprises, which have to prove their profitability and power management skills.
They are not, or should not be enemies, state and private sectors. The educational backwardness of a long and methodical teaching acts on us and makes us not understand, at first instance, the prosperity of one as the prosperity of one another. But this out of phase stance is explained in a dilemma they go through, as a caravan, the dangers, the precariousness, the depths and rewards of contemporary Cuba.
Changes must be accelerated because there is not enough time and there is risk of pondering too much a process as instinctive as survival. But the changes should not accelerate too much because there is a risk of improvising a process as final as survival. Slow implementations for the circumstances and fast for thought. In two years you don’t change the mentality of fifty. Less, much less, practices that were branded, at government level, as the reverse of justice.
This mechanism, however, eventually yields political benefits. Cubans live the particular nation, not the historical nation, and understand the economic model update, still understand and lend a hand, as legitimate spaces of freedom, not even individual, but public. The self-employed and the gap we open with them will not make us a rich country, but a viable one, potentially dialogic, a country where cafes have a personal deed and there will be literary journals that don’t belong to monolithic institutions, all alike.
If, for example, we find oil, and exports of medical services, tourist arrivals will not support our economy, or, failing that, if we find nothing but we could achieve balance between the parties, the State would have to prove its ability to learn and move on par or do as it moves alongside: a guiding mechanism that guarantees even pathways to be legally challenged.
We must recall a principle that is not Greek, neither Marxist, nor Christian, nor Marti, and that is all that at once because it is the principle of principles. The true strength of any system is this: a power kind. So naturally kind that, if for a moment it is not, then it would cease to be. Another purpose is deception, embezzlement of what is possible.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
