By Haroldo Dilla (El Mostrador)
HAVANA TIMES – The “economic war” against “imperialism” announced by the Cuban president points more to a social massacre than to an epic struggle. Cubans will suffer more, continue emigrating, and be imprisoned when they publicly express their reasonable discontent. The country will continue to impoverish.
As a subject born out of war, the Cuban political class likes to invoke it. They revel in its proclaimed epicness and yearn for its authoritarian chains of command. Now they are once again calling for combat to announce an austerity program against –quoting President Díaz-Canel– “a scenario of a maximum suffocation policy, designed and applied to a small country by the most powerful empire in history.” They have named the indefinite program an “economic war,” and it is inferred from some isolated statements that it must contain reductions in public spending, tax increases, price controls, and the elimination of the few subsidies remaining from the “Soviet” era.
Blaming United States hostility towards Cuba for all the ills afflicting the island has become a manic exercise of the Cuban political elite. This is what the Cuban president is now doing, invoking what some call the US blockade policy and others the embargo, which certainly implies limitations on the Cuban economy – harmful to the population and politically counterproductive, therefore unjust – but which fall short of explaining the absolute economic collapse of the Caribbean island.
This collapse is the result of misguided policies of state control over everything that moves – the condition of a regime that, against all odds, maintains its totalitarian vocation – with the consequent closure of emerging private economic opportunities, the survival of a public sector plagued by inefficient and technologically outdated companies, and the flourishing of corruption that, in this context