This content was published on May 22, 2022 – 4:03 PM May 22, 2022 – 4:03 PM
John Palop
Havana, 22 May (EFE) .- The severe economic crisis that Cuba is suffering, the sharp increase in migration and social discontent have recently led many to draw comparisons between the present moment and the so-called special period that it went through . the country in the 1990s.
But is Cuba really experiencing a special period 2.0? Five experts consulted by Efe from different fields, from historians to economists to political scientists and sociologists, draw parallels between the two periods, but also clear differences.
“I think the two periods are comparable,” says Diosnara Ortega, Cuban sociologist and director of the School of Sociology at Silva Henríquez Catholic University in Chile. “We are experiencing similar scenarios, albeit with peculiarities,” he adds.
The Cuban historian Rafael Rojas, a professor at the Colegio de México, is less inclined to equate it, but emphasizes that this crisis is “impressive” and its “migration potential”, especially among young people, is “extremely high”.
THE ECONOMY
The area that evokes the most parallels is economics. Cuba’s gross domestic product (GDP) collapsed by 36% between 1990 and 1993 and by 13% between 2020 and 2021.
In both periods, inflation, the budget deficit and the dollar exchange rate on the informal market have skyrocketed, emphasizes Cuban Pavel Vidal, economics professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali (Colombia).
Macroeconomic figures aside, the last two years have seen the endless queues of the 1990s repeated due to the lack of basic commodities such as food, fuel and medicines.
In the Special Period, the famine and blackouts were much more severe; now rampant inflation and dollarization are eating away at Cubans’ purchasing power.
To remedy this situation, the Cuban government announced reforms to liberalize the economy on both occasions.
But as former Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray points out, opening up to the private sector was then “a necessary evil” – later reversed – whereas today it is seen as necessary and “no going back”.
Small private companies have been allowed since last September – banned in 1968 – and nearly 3,500 have already registered.
Rojas points out that these changes, although slow and partial, are due to the reforms of former President Raúl Castro, a context “that did not exist in the ’90s”. Vidal now perceives greater geographic and sectoral diversification of the economy.
Alzugaray points out that the special period comes “after a phase in which Cuba was doing well”, which refers to the 1980s, while the current one hits a country already affected by the pandemic and those promoted by the former US President Sanctions “Out of Balance”, Donald Trump (2017-2021).
This difference is fundamental for Ortega: “The current crisis is much more serious than that of the 1990s, because at that time one could aspire (back) to a more recent past. But today’s young people do not have this experience of a glorious past.” now “hopelessness” abounds.
Cuban historian Ada Ferrer, a professor at New York University and a Pulitzer Prize winner for her book Cuba: An American History, sees the “biggest difference” here.
“During the special period, it was something new, it was the first deep crisis and the government was able to claim victims,” while now “more than a third of the population,” referring to young people, “knows nothing but the crisis,” he argues .
PROTESTS AND MIGRATION
For Vidal, the economic crisis “like in the 90s” has led to “social protests” and “a wave of migration”, but the current ones are bigger.
Anti-government protests erupted on the Maleconazo in August 1994 and on July 11, 2021, with economic unrest as the main cause.
The most recent spread across the country – thanks to the internet – and were first repressed by the police and then prosecuted in dozens of cases and hundreds of sentences, some of up to 30 years in prison for those convicted of sedition.
The first, in which the police also intervened harshly, originated exclusively in Havana and weakened after the country’s then President, Fidel Castro, approached the protests and finally gave a speech.
Ortega highlights as a distinguishing feature that Fidel offered a “political response” to the protest, thereby gaining “political capital”, while the current government only influenced the “police dimension”.
The President of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, defined the demonstrations as an attempted “soft coup” orchestrated by Washington and reiterated that only acts of violence had been judged and that due process had been followed on all occasions.
The migrations of then and now also have different characteristics. The rafters’ crisis was concentrated in five weeks and the current one, as Rojas explains, is a “drop migration” that “has gotten worse with the pandemic”.
The 1994 brought more than 35,000 Cubans to the United States. From last October through April, 114,000 Cubans arrived in the U.S. — about 1% of the island’s total population — according to Customs and Border Protection, nearing the 1980 exodus of Mariel.
According to Rojas, this is “an expression of greater pessimism, weariness and hopelessness after three decades in which the government has been slow to apply economic reforms”.
SOCIAL FATIGUE AND LEADERSHIP
Several experts influence the psychological aspect. Alzugaray warns of the current “social anomie” and Ortega believes that if he now observes “a resistance to power” the situation previously led to resistance “to sustain it”.
“People in Cuba are not willing to wait, especially young people,” says Ortega about the current situation, speaking of “reduced trust” in the government and fewer social policies than in the 1990s.
It highlights that Fidel was able to change the frame of the speech and “lower popular expectations”, something that has not now been done, especially after the optimism generated by the so-called “thaw”, which was promoted by the former Presidents of Cuba and the United States, Raúl Castro and Barack Obama.
Also “very important”, Ortega continues, is the change in the political class, which is no longer the “historical” one, that of those who carried out the revolution, charged with legitimacy and charisma.
Alzugaray sums it up like this: “Fidel’s credibility was never in question, but that of the current government is.”
A final point is the aftermath of the international situation in Cuba, which was turbulent on both occasions. In the 1990s, the island was swept away by the collapse of the Soviet bloc; currently it was the pandemic and in recent months the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Then he stopped receiving economic support from the USSR. In recent years, Venezuelan oil shipments, remittances, and tourism revenue have declined significantly.
Then, as now, the United States twisted its sanctions against Cuba even further during difficult economic times for the island. In 1996 with the Helms-Burton Act and today with the 243 measures passed by Trump, few of which his successor, Joe Biden, has reversed. EFE
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