Cuba and Venezuela: the story of two calamities and the same abyss

Cuba teeters over the edge of the abyss and has no opposition structure to build an alternative. The high risk of collapse comes from social tensions that seem to be exploding now, but which have been growing over the last five years for a period terminal collapse of the economy, chronic shortages and inflationary pressures. The continuous blackouts, an extremely graphic symbol of the model’s decline, are the trigger of a popular fury that overwhelms a regime shrouded in confusion and impotence.

THE nomenklatura The communist, without weapons to face the crisis, operates with a notorious paralysis and absence in the face of disaster. The official bureaucracy simply repeats old things epic slogans and rejection of imperialism. He does not realize that, in the network of those unsatisfied fundamental needs, the symbolic value of the Castro revolution has long since vanished.

The fate of this circumstance does not only matter for what happens in the largest of the Antilles. Also for what these liberated forces can cause among the regional regimes that for decades have looked at themselves in the Cuban mirror and used it to contain and punish their own communities.

The most significant example is provided by the Venezuelan transvestite ally in the face of ideological poverty the styles of the civic-military dictatorships of the 1970s. Test limits, not strengths. Nicolás Maduro’s neo-Chavista offensive against the opposition resembles the Cuban calamity in one main respect: Regime erosion and popular rejection have strengthened like never before and set the stage.

In this sense, unusual developments occur in Cuba in its history. Last Sunday there was a massive mobilization in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second city, which spread to other locations demand for food and electricity. They asked for food and lighting. But the government quickly blamed the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House.

The protest was a minor echo of the one that shook the country in July 2021 and which was also a mobilization against the adjustment of the economy, a ruthless orthodoxy which, as in Venezuela, addeddollarization which filtered down to the poorest sectors.

The poor, the most affected

Power outages, which sometimes last up to 18 hours, are more than a nuisance in this context. These masses with lower incomes, especially in the most precarious areas of the interior of the country, prepare their few foods with electric stoves. They have no other alternatives.

The lack of fuel to move the plants has another connection with the Venezuelan crisis. The Caribbean ally can no longer send the 100 thousand barrels a day arrived in Havana practically as a gift during the Chavista boom.

The effect is not just the lack of light. Damage leads to other difficulties. Schools are empty because children have no way to get there Without petrol there is no transport, an essential means of transport especially in the provinces where distances are important and most people do not have a car and in any case could not use it.

In Santiago de Cuba, the slogans of the march were basic, demanding “electricity (electricity) and food”, but the “homeland and life” slogan from the previous national protest in 2021 reappeared. That repudiation of “homeland or death”. , the classic of Castroism, was also accompanied by other cries of defiance: “Down with communism” and “Down with Díaz Canel”Miguel, president and protégé of the almost retired Raúl Castro.

A fundamental difference compared to July 2021 was the absence of the very harsh repression of the time. Although there have been police attacks on protesters, the internet has been shut down to prevent the spread of anger and violence rusty crutch from the Cold War which we underline by blaming everything on the United States, but without moderation. This caution in the face of protest is a political fact. The regime once again asked the United Nations for food aid, as it did last February. A late realization.

It’s interesting to see what Cuban thinkers were like intellectual pillars of the Castro process. The well-known Marxist philosopher and historian Alina López Hernández, who lives with difficulty on the island, maintains that “in Cuba currently the fundamental dilemma is not between ideologies, but between an excluded citizenry and a repressive state”.

“The (Communist) Party in Cuba today is an ineffective and discredited organization,” he wrote on his blog. CubaxCuba. The Constitution promoted by Fidel Castro defined the Cuban PC as “the superior ruling force of society and the State”. Alina Hernández takes up that idea and states that today “the true superior force is the counter-espionage apparatus and the state security bodies “transformed into repressive citizens”. The description of him would also serve to characterize the decline of the Venezuelan regime.

But this provocative historian argues for something more central to the Cuban crisis. After repudiating the regime as “cowardly” for lying about US involvement. in the protests, he claims that the communist bureaucracy “He stopped looking at citizens a long time ago. That’s why they surprised him two great social explosions so they don’t feel guilty and try to justify it based on external factors… People are protesting because they are dying of hunger”.

Cuba had a development opportunity to emulate Asian communist models of openness, especially the Doi Moi OR The multifaceted reconversion of Vietnamwhich isIn one generation he transformed that country into a free-market regional power under PC control..

Dissidents between Raúl Castro and Hugo Chávez

That experiment seduced the youngest Castro, but it was sabotaged by hawks in his own government who They didn’t want to lose their privileges. Furthermore, once again Venezuela conspired against Hugo Chávez who hated the alternative of the capitalist model, even if in the neighborhood it was of the Chinese type. Raúl Castro and Chávez never fully liked each other because of this disagreement.

After the death of the Venezuelan and the withdrawal of Fidel, This modernization possibility took flight in 2014 hand in hand with the joint management of the democratic government of Barack Obama and Pope Francis which aligned the Vatican with Washington’s agenda.

The birth of the thaw and the reopening of the embassies among the empire and the island, It changed the entire scenario. Almost immediately it triggered a propitious emergence of the middle class and a major flow of investment and, of course, political debate. With the growth of tourism have appeared large hotel projects and an initiative to transform the island into the Caribbean’s main container distributor from a free zone in the port of Mariel.

As is known, the ineffable Donald Trump demolished all those weapons. The Republican ended up joining the Cuban hawks who celebrated the setback. When Joe Biden, Obama’s former vice president, arrived in the White House for the 2020 elections, Cuban liberals were thrilled. It wasn’t for the inferior. The country emerged from a colossal economic disaster with an extraordinary decline in GDP that year of -10.9% and -10.8% in the per capita indicator, the worst collapse in almost two decades.

To improve the investment and business environment, which he predicted would come apace as the thaw resumed, Castro ordered the unification of the country’s two currencies. It was the beginning of the current painful adjustment process which triggered inflation and the price of the dollar.

Biden did not follow Obama’s path and instead ignored the island’s tragedy so as not to anger Florida’s anti-Castro voters. Thus, the Cubans who came with that economic martyrdom on their shoulders, They found themselves without what they had and not what they could have had.

The consequence was that first protest in July 2021 with the request for freedom and democracy in the reasonable awareness that in this way the disasters could be resolved better. Cuba never recovered. As Leonardo Padura has been repeating for years “In Cuba we have reached rock bottom, more than food and light what we miss most is hope”.

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