Cuba did not arrive at Obama’s presidential visit with its head bowed and hands supplicating. It arrived, that’s correct, with clothes stained with the vicissitudes of 56 years of self-abandonment and of resisting the jostling of a neighbour… a neighbour that became an enemy because of the decisions of many former president elects before Obama came. It seems that this neighbour understood that force and anger only generates more force and anger.
The visit and its results have generated all kinds of impressions and positions. Back in his country many have criticised the American leader for daring to take this step. From this side of the Florida Straits some are more focused on highlighting the threats than the opportunities arising from this visit.
It would seem that the critics here and there would prefer another 56 years of embargo instead of trying the path to normalisation. These are the paradoxes of a reality that seems to change more quickly than some of its protagonists.
From my perspective the outcome of this visit for Cuba is very positive. Augustín Lage has listed the outcomes and I agree wholeheartedly. The President of the United States did not come here to demand submission, but to publicly reiterate, and in Cuba no less, that more than five decades of a belligerent politics has resulted in a complete and utter fracas. He came to publicly recognise, again in Cuba no less, the right for our people to decide their destiny for themselves.
Those that try to tarnish the success of this visit, its transcendentiality, its significance for Cuba, do us little favour and will do even less for the governments who finally managed to achieve in only three years what hadn’t been possible in over more than fifty years.
Of course, Obama also came to tell us about his idea of progress, like others, who are now friends, did before Barack. It’s utterly inevitable that nearly all the politicians from developed countries try to give us their own formulas, and also that nearly all of them wash their hands of their predecessor’s approach to Cuba.
Let’s not forget, for example, that the common position of the European Union is still in place. It is true, in the words of Obama, that there is an agenda supported by the values of American capitalism and it is down to us to know what part we can take advantage of and what we cannot. It will be our responsibility and no one else’s.
However, we need to look at our country to be able to have an idea of the real opportunities.
The Cuba that Obama has just visited is imbued with a transformative agenda which was elaborated a long time before these conversations started. This agenda was discussed with the whole country and it recognised, first, that the (state?) socialist sector will continue playing a decisive role, but that at the same time all other forms of property are needed in order to reach the goal of prosperity.
And this premise, is not a concession to any kind of pro-capitalist argument, it is the recognition of the self same history that we claim not to have forgotten today – of our own insufficiencies and inefficiencies.
Of the nearly five million working Cubans today, 70{bb302c39ef77509544c7d3ea992cb94710211e0fa5985a4a3940706d9b0380de}, that is to say nearly 3.5 million people, work in State entities: companies, subsidised companies, social and political organisations. At the end of 2015 the organisations in Cuba had the following structure:
Political and grassroots organisations are not included in this structure. Nor does it include not-for-profit institutions, joint ventures businesses, completely foreign-owned businesses, Cuban subsidiaries of foreign companies, the Chamber of Commerce or law firms.
Self-employed workers are excluded from this list. This half a million of Cuban men and women are still not officially included in any organisational form, among other reasons, because they are not considered micro, small, or medium businesses, something that at some moment, sooner rather than later, should change.
Within the financial organisations it is the sector related to Public Administration, Defense, Social Security that has the most companies with 691. The figure exceeds the number of businesses that exist within Public Health (497), Education (294) and Science and Technology (91).
According to some estimates, 25{bb302c39ef77509544c7d3ea992cb94710211e0fa5985a4a3940706d9b0380de} of the entire labour force of the country employed in the State sector works in Public Administration. That’s nearly a million people carrying out non-productive work that also does not have a direct impact on Health, Education, or Science.
It is for this reason that for a number of years the transformation program (the so called updating of the economic model) has considered the necessity of reducing the number of people employed in this part of the state sector and today over 500,000 people have been relocated to other businesses or to the self-employment sector, or, more lamentably, they have emigrated in the search for better jobs and better salaries.
In the light of low levels of employment growth in the state sector, the low level of investment, and the lack of dynamism in foreign investment, employment in a non-state sector has become a decisive factor so that a part of the population can stay in employment and offer the necessary services and products that are demanded.
But many of these products and services have little added value. It is a pending matter that the non state sector has yet to be converted into a sector that generates highly qualified positions and that produces goods and services of a higher added value. And not because Obama has recommended it, but because the country needs it.
It is clear that a price is paid in the distribution of revenue. It is also clear that competition and the market do not produce a natural equity, nor have they ever. Competition and the market produce efficiency and productivity, if the institutional arrangements are adequate. They can also contribute to social development, to equality, if the institutional arrangements are appropriate and if they demand a systematic improvement in goods and services and encourage innovation as a prerequisite without which it is impossible to remain in the market.
Today it is not only revenue that produces inequality, it is also a pricing policy that taxes all citizens, in the badly-named hard currency shops, and that privileges takings at all cost, before consumer growth, in particular in the most necessary good like milk, meat, chicken, oil, etc.
The same happen to us with salaries. For example, how is it possible to raise teachers’ salaries if we have almost a million workers receiving salaries for employment in bureaucratic positions, many of which are unnecessary.
But in addition to regulating the market we have to improve our social policies, make them appropriate to these new times in which we find ourselves so that they can be sufficiently effective.
It will depend on us, on all of the Cubans, on our ability to design our own development program, that the market, the competition, and the small and medium-sized businesses that may already be private or cooperatives, might produce the results that we need and that allow for the consolidation of the country’s economy.
Last Friday, while I walked on the grass around the area of Ciudad Deportiva waiting for the Rolling Stones’ concert I bumped into lots of old acquaintances. Some of them (no small number, actually) were the same who at the end of the 1960s branded many people, including me, as ‘ideological deviants’ for listening to this British group.
Neither they nor I have forgotten that past which is part of our history, but we were all there, enjoying the present and looking to the future.
