Category: Dossier Cuba 21 English

The sharp drop of more than 50% of the Cuba’s three main lines of income – medical exports, remittances and tourism – have hastened the collapse of the governance regime. The celebration of 26 of July is a day that begins to mark the countdown to the extinction of the Cuban regime, given the depth of the crisis in which it is mired and its manifest incapacity to get out of it.

The fall of the Cuban peso (CUP) against the dollar experienced in recent weeks denotes the government’s inability to reverse this situation that has already gotten out of control.  The big culprits of inflation are GAESA -linked to the Castro clan and their cronies- and Miguel Díaz Canel, the president imposed by Raúl Castro.

The nationalization of property by suppressing the freedom of enterprise and the market is the key element that in the end – in the absence of a foreign patron to finance its shortcomings – has led to the multi-systemic crisis that has pushed more than 80% of the Cuban population into extreme poverty.

It is increasingly common to hear Cubans say that Cuba is the same or worse than Haiti.  In Cuba, with a different history than Haiti, the implementation of a totalitarian system after 1959 generated the basis for the current deplorable state of affairs. As a result, Cuba, from one of the most progressive Latin American countries up to that date, in the year 2024 approaches Haiti: the most backward country in the Western Hemisphere.

In Havana, more than 7,600 m3 of garbage accumulates daily in public spaces near the homes and centers that generated it. TOn average, only 68% of the garbage is collected, while the rest remains in the streets creating sources of infection and even urban fires due to the production of methane gas.

The reason that more than 67% of the population (7,435,690 citizens) does not receive water in a stable manner today is the result of the abandonment of the maintenance of the water network for more than half a century while resources were invested in building more and more reservoirs for propaganda purposes. nvestments prioritize the provision of water to the tourist centers of GAESA’s oligarchic conglomerate and are not oriented to guarantee the right of accessing drinking water for the citizens.

Cuba’s energy challenges have no immediate solution. Cuba’s power generation infrastructure is obsolete, and in many cases, it is impractical to attempt its repair. It will take 6 to 8 years (some estimate ten) and a multi-million-dollar investment (approximately $10 billion) to rebuild the thermoelectric generation capacity. The only possible solution is to eliminate the state controlled (totalitarian) economy and move to a free market economy.

Today, the main challenge to change towards an open, democratic, and prosperous society based on the rule of law and a free market, is the need to reach a consensus among different social sectors and actors on a shared road map to transform the highly probable upcoming rebellions into a broad social movement aimed at displacing the power of the oligarchy.

Remittances to Cuba experienced a drop of 3.31% with respect to 2022 (2,040.25 million), totaling only 1,972.56 million dollars. The figure reached in 2023 represents a drop of 46.93% compared to 2019 and the social tension within the country has not diminished.

The Cuban oligarchy through its holding company GAESA not only arbitrarily appropriated no less than 69.8 billion dollars ($69,866,399,679) in a little more than a decade, belonging to the salaries of the doctors working in the international brigades, but by not reinvesting them in the public health system as the Cuban government had announced will be the case, it also robbed the nation of its right to enjoy comprehensive quality health security. That is what this research shows.

The Cuban oligarchy grouped in GAESA does not have as its priority to solve the national food problems, but to increase corporate profit from the needs of the population in this aspect. To achieve this objective, they do not need to increase production, but rather to profit by importing food products that are later sold in the retail networks controlled by them.

The development of a genuine private sector in Cuba requires significant changes in government policies. Without these basic economic freedoms and rights, MSMEs in Cuba cannot be the solution to the country’s economic crisis.