{"id":246631,"date":"2021-12-06T09:32:16","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T14:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=246631"},"modified":"2021-12-06T10:00:42","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T15:00:42","slug":"the-cuban-economy-and-the-cephalopods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/counterbalance\/the-cuban-economy-and-the-cephalopods\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cuban economy and the cephalopods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cephalopods are animals whose arms stick out of their heads, for example, octopuses. What\u2019s interesting, at least in the case of octopuses, is not only that, but also that they have a very complex nervous system distributed throughout the body, including their arms; they have three hearts and, since they do not have a shell or poisonous spines to protect them, they have developed a special ability to adapt to dangerous situations \u2014 their eyes are their main sensory organ \u2014 that does not take more than fractions of a second. In this way, they manage to confuse their enemies by camouflaging themselves with their inhabited environment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cuba is ending the year with important political events that made us think. It is also ending with an economic performance in some way expected \u2014 at least that is my case \u2014 because such an open economy, with a fragmented and relatively obsolete productive system, rearranging itself to an <\/span>adjustment program<\/span><\/a> that would necessarily have negative short-term effects are elements very difficult to handle given, in addition, the financial restrictions that the country suffers. But, above all, Cuba is ending the year with the highest inflation ever experienced before and with the conviction \u2014 hopefully permanent \u2014 that we cannot subject our internal decisions to the announcements of the U.S. administration of the moment. I have purposely made no mention of the <\/span>blockade<\/span><\/a>, because even without it, the <\/span>pandemic<\/span><\/a> would have deeply hit our economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the vaccines, 100% Cuban and consequently to the control of the pandemic, the possibility of opening the country again, of resuming projects, of thinking about giving greater speed and depth to the changes that have been happening, has been achieved.<\/span><\/p>\n

For our population, this has been the hardest of the years, trapped between the little access to freely convertible currency, without being able to bank the dollars they receive, suffering from the continuous devaluation of their salary \u2014 which very quickly lost its real purchasing power \u2014, trapped in rampant inflation, which has its most evident expression in the price of pork meat, which has far exceeded the market value in the Special Period, and in the existence of four reference currencies, the Cuban peso (CUP), the US dollar, the euro and freely convertible currency, what a way to achieve the <\/span>monetary unification<\/span><\/a>! Once again our population, all of it, has shown an extraordinary resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n

A good friend, who a long time ago was my student, affirms that in these two years so many new policies and regulations have been approved that sometimes there is no time to digest them or be updated on them and, above all, to know what their scope is. There are so many that it is likely that those abilities of the cephalopods will be needed to be able to adapt to an environment that has been changing at a speed never seen before \u2014 even when in particular I would like it to be greater \u2014 and with a depth not previously experienced, since that first transformation that turned the capitalist and underdeveloped Cuban economy into that other, socialist, but also underdeveloped.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just as a sample, some of those measurements are listed below:<\/span><\/p>\n