{"id":245919,"date":"2021-11-18T11:17:21","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T16:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=245919"},"modified":"2021-11-18T11:22:27","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T16:22:27","slug":"the-cuban-economy-and-its-many-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/economy\/the-cuban-economy-and-its-many-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cuban economy and its many wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last 60 years, on this small island we have had to face many and very varied wars in an area so difficult to grasp from a single perspective, that of the economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I write these lines motivated by a <\/span>National Television Newscast report<\/span><\/a>. Three speeches during the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party are its content. All three were aimed at explaining\/arguing\/defending the so-called \u201cnon-state forms of management\u201d and their legitimacy under socialism. It is not the first time \u2014 and I imagine it will not be the last \u2014 that the highest leadership of the government and the Party has defended these new forms of management.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is true that sometimes the political discourse that defends them goes far ahead of the regulatory instruments that allow their consolidation and, even more so, of the ideological prejudices that insist on identifying it a priori as a necessary evil and sometimes as a strategic error. It is also true that so many times these prejudices, many of which have been with us almost from the beginning, have allowed us to consolidate positions that have delayed the process of change that began in the 1990s and even put it in reverse on more than one occasion. The damage caused by these prejudices is very difficult to calculate, but the weakness of our economy today, our vulnerability to the measures of the U.S. administration, and the tremendous effort made to get out of this pandemic can serve as a proxy to estimate that damage, at least in good part of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, these interventions also reflect that other war that every day \u2014 for much more than 20 years now \u2014 is being waged in our country against the resistance and those who resist. It is probably the most difficult of all wars, because it is even our own war, the one that must be waged every day against ourselves, against what we learned one day, against what we thought should be for all time, against what at one time was based on \u201cprinciples,\u201d which later changed radically, even against values \u200b\u200bwithin which we grew and assimilated as <\/span>the values<\/span><\/i> \u200b\u200bof a socialism, assumed as socialism, and defined, at times even against the basic principles of Marxism.<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of economics, our wars have been many in these 60 years, since those first wars fought against the initial U.S. government measures and that led us to institute a card for the purchase of lard, a prelude to what would later become our everlasting ration book.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the war against the blockade in its initial version \u2014 which was very cushioned by the \u201cfraternal and supportive help of the Soviet Union (USSR)\u201d \u2014, then against the blockade increased by the \u201cTorricellis,\u201d later expanded to what seemed impossible by the Helms-Burton Act and later brought to almost unimaginable expressions by Mr. Trump, an inheritance Mr. Biden received with approval. The blockade has undoubtedly shaped part of our way of being, of thinking about solutions, of assuming the present and imagining the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another war of longer duration has been the one that our country has waged against underdevelopment and dependency. Underdeveloped before and now, we still do not stop being a dwarf with a huge head and thorax and small and weak legs and arms, understanding by head and thorax that bureaucracy that resists and by legs our productive apparatus that is not capable of sustaining us. Dependent on Spain, dependent on the United States, dependent on the USSR and quasi-dependent on Venezuela in recent times. Underdevelopment and dependency go hand in hand and have also conditioned our way of behaving, our business culture, the approach and the adoption of solutions to our problems, characterized by seeking \u201coutside\u201d what can be obtained \u201cinside,\u201d preferring what comes from \u201coutside and outsiders\u201d before those from \u201cinside,\u201d to the extent that we managed to have a legal body for <\/span>foreign investment<\/span><\/a> long before we had it for \u201cnational actors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Foreign Direct Investment and organization<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n