A year ago I titled the introductory “Editorial and issue contents” in this journal “Increased aggression and hard times, and moving forward and this issue’s contents”. The title still holds, with two adjustments. The aggression, above all from the US economic Blockade, while it has not significantly increased over a year ago, continues. As is widely known, and notwithstanding a few small mitigations, it remains unrelaxed. As of when this editorial is being written in late summer, Biden continues to break his election campaign promise to roll back the major Trump escalation of the Blockade to its level under Obama. The Blockade always was, and still is, both illegal and immoral, particularly so because it deliberately targets an entire country’s civilian population. And while that aggression has not increased over the year, some of its effects have, since some of the measures escalating the Blockade require a number of years to implement to their full harmful potential. A guest editorial plus a dossier of four academic articles on the Blockade today constitute the majority of this issue.
And the economically (very) hard times in Cuba continue. After a 10.9 percent contraction in GDP in 2020, Cuba “returned to growth” in 2021, at 1.3 percent (Anuario Estadístico de Cuba, Año 2021, chapter 5, table 5.1). This minimal recuperation from the previous year’s large drop has of course generated no economic satisfaction, beyond the obvious awareness that “still worse would be still worse”. The Cuban government has continued with the major reforms proposed to the country’s project of building a socialist economy, one part of its long project of building a socialist society. The initial documents of the Tarea Ordemamiento (Reordering Task) in January 2021, with the associated ongoing stream of legislation concretising and implementing it, is the latest major development in this process to be added to the fundamental guideline documents and new Constitution from the last decade.
But the hard times continue. In the editorial last year I wrote of four social and economic problems central to the existing hard times that “are at least among the most, if not the most, discussed by people throughout Cuba today: COVID, food, the economic reforms and the New Families Code.” The first of these issues, COVID, continues to be a social problem in Cuba as in the rest of the world, notwithstanding the Island’s superior performance in relation to COVID to much of rest of the world, including many rich countries such as the United States. And while this first problem continues, it is looked at differently today than it was a year ago. As in most of the rest of the world, COVID has become a problem built into everyday life in Cuba for at least the short term, as opposed to a crisis. The second of these problems, however, continues unabated. The queues for food and other necessities remain, and similar concerns and problems with the supply of gasoline and electricity have joined the list of top-discussed problems in Cuba today.
The last year saw major developments regarding the fourth issue, legally redefining families and the roles of people in them. The Constitution in force before 2019 was “progressive” on these concerns in a number of ways, but nevertheless completely inadequate for the deep social changes on these issues that have swept the world over the last 20 years. Article 36 read:
Marriage is the voluntarily established union between a man and a woman, who are legally fit to marry, in order to live together. It is based on full equality of rights and duties for the partners, who must see to the support of the home and the integral education of their children through a joint effort compatible with the social activities of both.
Progressive forces in Cuba pushed for the 2019 Constitution to change this, in particular in relation to the issues of same-sex marriages and guaranteed equal social rights for non-sexually-heterodox people. The government backed their proposals, and incorporated these types of modifications into its original drafts of the new Constitution which it submitted to the population for social discussion. A significant part of the population, however, opposed these changes. These people were able to present their views, both in the organised social discussions, and also though a number of non-governmental institutions in Cuba which are capable of socially presenting and promoting their ideas, in particular various churches. Given this social division, the government chose to withdraw what it had intended to incorporate into the Constitution, and then to have a broad social discussion on the issues. The results of this would then be incorporated into a new Families Code, where it would have the same effect on generating enabling laws.
On September 15, 2021, the government published a draft of the new Families Code (Código de las Familias, where putting familias in the plural is both conscious and important, and it is very frequently not translated into the plural in English), and opened the public consultation period on it on February 15, 2022. The results of the public consultations were presented in a series of revisions throughout the spring, culminating in version 25 on June 5, where almost 50 percent of the originally proposed articles had been modified as a result of the public consultations. On September 25, 2022, Cubans voted on the proposal. As of the writing of this article just a few days after the vote and with 95 percent of the votes counted, the voter participation was 74 percent, with 67 percent of those voting in favor and 33 percent against.
It would take an article to cover all the details of the changes. I reproduce here five short paragraphs from People’s Dispatch that make a very compact presentation of the majority of its many dimensions, going far beyond the extremely important “same-sex marriage” issue that too many international news reports reduce it to. Together, all these changes make it at least among, if not the, most progressive Families Code in the world.
The new code enacts sweeping advances in the rights of women, LGBTQ people, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities.
The new code guarantees the right of all people to form a family without discrimination, legalizing same sex marriage and allowing same sex couples to adopt children. Under the new code, parental rights will be shared among extended and non-traditional family structures that could include grandparents, stepparents, and surrogate mothers. The code also adds novelties such as prenuptial agreements and assisted reproduction.
The Code promotes equal distribution of domestic responsibilities amongst men and women and extends labor rights to those who care full-time for children, the elderly, or people with disabilities. The code establishes the right to a family life free from violence, one that values love, affection, solidarity and responsibility. It codifies domestic violence penalties, and promotes comprehensive policies to address gender-based violence.
The Code also outlaws child marriage and corporal punishment, stating that parents will have “responsibility” instead of “custody” of children, and will be required to be “respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents.” It also asserts that parents should grant maturing offspring more say over their lives.
The new code also expands the rights of the elderly and people with disabilities. It recognizes the role of grandfathers and grandmothers in the transmission of values, culture, traditions and care. (peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/26/cubans-just-ratified-the-worlds-most-progressive-family-code/)
I have devoted a lot of space in this introduction to the issue of the new Families Code. This is not only because it has been one of the most discussed issues in Cuba over the last year and as such “one thing that Cuba is about today”, but also especially to underline the following. While Cuba’s economic problems are high on the list of life-problems for all Cubans, Cuba today is not reduced to its economic struggles, as is too often implied by the coverage of Cuba by the international press. One sees another example of this among the topics discussed in the first article in this issue, the government’s continued development over the last several years of the Modelo de Gestión del Gobierno orientado a la innovación (MGGI).
And of course the third problem indicated, the concern with the whole process of economic reforms, continues to be among Cubans’ central daily concerns, with inflation joining the group of the currently most discussed problems in the country.
Looking at Cuba’s ability to respond to its economic hard times and to get better results in the short term from its reforms takes one right back to the issue of the Blockade. To raise its economic productivity, which is necessary for raising its standard of living, Cuba, like any country, except large countries with continental economies, needs to specialise in particular steps in production chains. Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands in Europe can have their high standards of living only because they concentrate on particular steps in international production chains, which they can do only if they can buy the inputs they need for those steps and sell the outputs. This they can do since they are part of the larger European Union economy, and beyond that, they can buy inputs and sell outputs freely in the world capitalist market at prevailing prices. To carry out their national economic production they import and export on a huge scale compared to their economy. Right before COVID, they exported and imported about 82 and 77 percent of their GDP, respectively. Cuba’s reforms call for expanding trade, not because “Cuba cannot produce what it consumes because of its weak economy”, but rather, like any country, as a key to expanding its production and efficiency. Of its total imports of 11.5 billion pesos of goods in 2018, 7.6 billion pesos were intermediate goods, while only 2.3 billion pesos were consumer goods (additionally Cuba imported 1.6 billion pesos in capital goods) (Anuario Estadístico de Cuba, Año 2019, chapter 8, table 8.8).
To acquire the necessary hard currency to buy these intermediate goods for production, Cuba needs to export something. In 2018 one quarter of its export earnings came from tourism. While COVID is the main source of the reduction in tourism earnings, the Trump-increased-Blockade cut into that even before COVID. Further, the Trump measures are the key to why Cuba’s tourism has recovered less than that of other Caribbean destinations since COVID began to abate.
Less commented on, although it is economically an even more important export for Cuba, is a category of products that Cuba makes at low cost and high quality, hence products that are highly competitive on the world market when they are not persecuted by the Blockade. These in fact would have sharply increased in demand since the onset of COVID absent the Blockade – medical services and biotechnological products. These earned twice as much foreign exchange in Cuba as tourism right before COVID hit the world. As such a large part of Cuba’s exports, even a modest percentage increase in their earnings could have constituted a major offset to the losses in the tourism sector. This would have made today’s economic situation in Cuba night-and-day different from what it is, given the necessity for productive imports for Cuba’s economy just outlined. Understanding this, the US government has ratcheted up its efforts to disrupt and prevent the sale of exactly these products by Cuba to the world to truly extraordinary levels.
Another major pair of jointly produced products among Cuba’s major foreign currency earners, for which there is a solid world demand, are nickel and cobalt. Again, the US blocks Cuba’s sale of these to whatever extent it possibly can. It forbids any products to enter the US from anywhere in the world if they have even traces of these metals from Cuba as part of their total inputs, and this includes entering the US as just a step in a production chain for a product to be finished and sold elsewhere in the world. With the scramble to roll out electric cars (and other uses of batteries), the price of cobalt has doubled and redoubled in recent years. Michael Erisman’s piece in this issue’s dossier recounts the cancellation in 2018 for this reason of a major multimillion-dollar contract by Cuba (through Sherritt) with Panasonic in Japan for products it sold to Tesla, resulting in a huge loss to the Cuban economy.
One can never be sure what the future will bring, but all indications to present are that Cuba will survive the current increased aggression from the US without submitting to the US’s dictates, as it has for the last 60 years. As is the case for all blockades, the blockaded country will continually work to find trading possibilities around or through the blockade with those countries and companies not dominated by US foreign policy. Venezuela remains important in this regard, though its economic problems over the last years have seriously hurt its ability to trade with Cuba. Russia had recently become increasingly important in this regard, but its current war with the Ukraine has seriously hurt that possibility, and the increase that was planned. China of course is the country in the world most economically able to ignore US dictates, and trade with China is important for Cuba, but not exploding. Very important in this regard is the greatly reduced and continually declining hegemony of the US in the world capitalist market over the last 30 years and more, and in particular the opposing increased weight in the world economy of what was formerly referred to as the Third World. The floating electricity generators from Turkey currently being used by Cuba are a very visible example of what a difference this makes to Cuba’s production and consumption. Trade remains small with these countries relative to with the Developed World, but still the growth of trade with Vietnam, Iran, India, and once again Brazil if Lula wins the upcoming elections, is emblematic of the new world that is (slowly) emerging. But for all those changes, the US’s power in the world capitalist markets to hamstring Cuba’s effort to execute its economic reforms to increase its growth and productivity remains massive. In my view, unless China and other countries with more independence from US domination dramatically increase their trade with Cuba, the Island’s goal of a minimum 4 to 5 percent annual growth in order to be able to carry out desired improvements in social well-being is not possible. Very unfortunately for Cuba, the key to Cuba’s short-term full success with its short-term goals for growth and economic reform lies in Washington. Absent the relaxation of the Blockade to its Obama level, I see the most likely short-term economic future for Cuba as at least several more years of economic hard times. There is the real possibility despite this, however, that with good domestic policies and a moderately performing world economy, Cuba could effect a continued reduction of those hardships year by year, of the magnitude that it achieved in 2021.
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While the short-term problems in Cuba always almost completely dominate the international media, the International Journal of Cuban Studies’ mandate of presenting “all things Cuban” not only takes us to history, the arts, culture, religion, to any dimension present or past of Cuban reality, but also to long-term processes of change as well as the more discussed short-term ones. The opening article in this issue, “Local development in Cuba from a higher education perspective” by Jorge Núñez Jover of the University of Havana and Aurora Fernández González, who is an adviser to the Minister of Higher Education of the Republic of Cuba, is precisely such a long-term social restructuring effort. The necessity to begin a long process of decentralisation of Cuba’s economic structure (which was more centralised even than that of the USSR) was one central driver of its Rectification Process already in the late 1980s. And as the article argues, while from the Special Period on the issue of local development has had continually growing conceptual importance and concrete implementation in Cuba’s evolving new procedures for trying to develop socialism, both the pace of efforts for local development and even “the place of local development issues in the country’s economic and social development models has changed drastically, especially in the last three years. … [L]ocal development is no longer considered a relatively peripheral issue, … [but to] the contrary, it is now seen as a key element of the socio-economic transformation underway”. Here the whole multi-faceted issue of local development is looked at in particular from a higher education perspective. But, like so many things in Cuba, this huge change “no es fácil”. “Finally, the paper reviews some of the obstacles that hinder the advancement of local development. Displacing the traditional centralist and top-down model is a difficult task.”
Returning to an issue that is very much short-term, as well as medium- and long-term, the second academic article in this issue, “Comportamiento del cumplimiento tributario de los trabajadores por cuenta propia en Cuba”, looks at the problem of the sustained growth in the level of tax debt of the sector of self-employed workers who pay taxes under the general regime. It does so through a careful case study of cuentapropistas with tax responsibilities to the Municipal Office of Tax Administration of Santiago de Cuba. Through surveys, it considers the question of what factors have the greatest influence concerning their compliance with the tax procedures. From this, it ends by making specific suggestions on how to strengthen strategic alliances with territorial organisations that intervene in compliance management to improve the results in this important and problematic area. The article is a collaboration of four authors, one from Cuba, two from Columbia and one from Ecuador: Maira Vázquez Díaz from the Universidad de Oriente, Cuba; Yahilina Silveira-Pérez from the Universidad de Sucre, Colombia; José Ramón Sanabria-Navarro from Universidad de Córdoba, Colombia; and Oscar Parada Gutiérrez from the Universidad Laica Vicente Rocafuerte de Guayaquil, Ecuador.
A guest editorial plus a dossier “The Blockade Today and its Recent History” of four academic articles address many different aspects of the issue that not only is so central to Cuba’s economic performance, but beyond that and from that, so central to Cuba’s efforts to develop a historically new way to try to build socialism. It is of course possible to overfocus on the role of the Blockade and to use the Blockade as an excuse for weak to outright bad domestic economic policies. With the major escalation of the Blockade under Trump that continues under Biden, however, it is now more difficult than ever to overfocus on the Blockade for understanding Cuba’s economic problems (again, still possible). This author maintains that, from the time the initial step of the necessary broad social discussion was completed and the first guidelines for the significantly different way forward were adopted in 2011, inadequate domestic economic policy was codeterminant with (and very much in interaction with) the Blockade to explain Cuba’s weak economic performance. That performance was significantly better before COVID hit than it is now, but still not what it could have been absent the Blockade and with better domestic economic policy. My argument is not that what the domestic policy planned to do was wrong or even inappropriate. To the contrary, the fundamental and historically harmful problem with the domestic economic policy was the lethargy in carrying out what it indicated it intended to do. This author considers that lethargy in moving forward a huge problem both in itself, but also one that was then greatly amplified because of how the world happened to subsequently unfold. There is no economic reason why what is now being done ten years later could not have been done step by step over the five years following 2011, and that loss of five years is already a big economic loss in itself. But then two huge and interacting things occurred external to Cuba: Trump won the US elections in 2016, and COVID exploded on the world in 2020. If the reform process in 2016 had been at the point where it is now, Cuba could have made much greater gains from the short window of opportunity at the end of the Obama years. More important, it would have been much more ready to confront the Trump escalation, which not only undid the significant though inadequate Obama openings (especially as first steps in an indicated process), but went way beyond that in intensifying the Blockade. Cuba would also have been in a much stronger position to confront the effects that COVID had on its economy both directly and through COVID’s effects on the world economy. One standard economic example will suffice just to underline the point. Major monetary changes such as those that are part of the Tarea Ordemamiento should be undertaken with large financial reserves, particularly for a country with such limited access to outside credit other than at exorbitant interest rates. Cuba was in a much better condition (if not “great”) in that regard in 2016 than when it, out of necessity, launched the process from a position of much greater weakness in January 2021. The very likely result of having inadequate reserves for such a transition is inflation.
Contrary to what I held in 2016 for the different situation then, today I argue strongly that to objectively understand Cuba’s economic problems one must treat the Blockade as the primary factor, with inadequate domestic policy as secondary though still extremely important to the results. And that claim needs to be understood exactly as follows, in line with what I have argued above. No matter what domestic economic policies Cuba undertakes, it is not possible to achieve more than mediocre growth of a percent or two (and with a lot of luck three), as long as the US Blockade exists at its current level, and absent some major expansion of trade with Cuba by the few counties around the world that have a lot of economic autonomy from US foreign policy.
The dossier is opened by the article “The global geopolitical confrontations in the post-Cold War era and the role of Cuba” by Carlos Oliva Campos from Department of History, University of Havana, and Gary Prevost from the Department of Political Science, College of St Benedict and St John’s University in the US. Given that the Blockade has been in existence for over 30 years since the end of the Cold War, it is essential to stop thinking about why it was imposed and why the US maintained it for the first 30 years, and start thinking about it in terms of today. Domestic politics in the US certainly play an obvious and important role. But this article presents a broader and deeper frame for understanding why the US so tenaciously maintains the Blockade in the face of almost universal international condemnation for doing so, and with essentially no gains for either the people of the US nor even US companies. It outlines the US’s new, quite different, global confrontations today.
The next article in the dossier again approaches the Blockade in terms of two of today’s favourite weapons of aggression by the US against countries it disapproves of. As has been widely noted and discussed in international political discussions by many mainstream organisations as well as progressive critics, over the last five years or so the US has elevated economic sanctions of differing degrees of severity to arguably its central (far from only) weapon for inflicting major damage on countries it designates as its enemy. The former option of direct military intervention took a body-blow in Vietnam, and then more recently was further seriously bruised by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the time being seems to have been removed from the table. “Economic and media war against socialist societies: the case of US-Cuban relations” by Mark Ginsburg from the University of Maryland establishes this frame, and considers a second component of “the Blockade” beyond its economic aspect, the US-led media war against Cuba. The paper is not about this background framing, but rather only briefly establishes this frame and then uses it to carry out a rich and detailed discussion of these two aspects of the US blockade of Cuba over its 60-year history. The final quarter of the paper prior to the conclusion focuses on the very recent events of July 11, 2021, and the equally interesting and less investigated non-events of November 15, 2021.
The third article in the dossier, “There and back again: United States policy toward Cuba in the 21st century” by Ernesto Domínguez López and Raúl Rodríguez Rodríguez, both from the Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies, University of Havana, looks at the changes and continuities of the Blockade since the beginning of this century. There were some important openings for a brief time at the very end of the Obama administration, but even then, like the rest of the 22 years considered, the element of continuity has been predominant, including in the subsequent important escalation under Trump. Like the previous article, this one has a very rich concrete and detailed discussion of the Blockade in the two decades it investigates. The article approaches the US Cuba policy as public policy. In that frame it examines what are the key variables that drive the US Cuba policy, and studies their expressions. From this it identifies the central axis of US Cuba policy. All of this serves to help “explain the framework that the US’s Cuba policy creates to thwart the development of Cuba”.
The final article closing the dossier, “Cuban cobalt: a gateway to strategic minerals politics?” by H. Michael Erisman from Indiana State University, takes a different approach to investigating the Blockade today. Looking specifically at the potential for cobalt sales from Cuba to the US, it goes beyond carefully documenting the losses the US Blockade imposes on Cuba. It also examines the losses the US Blockade imposes on the US, from the perspective of its need for cobalt for its participation in the world production of many of today and tomorrow’s new products which are part of the goods that will differentiate “developed countries” from “underdeveloped countries” in the immediate future. (Such differentiation will depend even more on social organisation than access to particular goods, but the discussion here is on goods, which can indeed contribute to well-being, including to possibilities for human-centred social organisation.) Interestingly, he documents that the US government strongly recognises the importance of cobalt, listing it on its list of 35 strategic minerals that the US needs of which it is self-sufficient in only three, and ranking it third in terms of “supply chain risk”. Erisman makes the case that not only would the US benefit from buying Cuban cobalt, but that it should be able to get the best and most secure deal possible for it from Cuba. Finally, he goes on to consider the potential it could have for Havana’s bargaining power with respect to any negotiations with Washington concerning the Blockade in particular, and more generally with respect to the overall normalisation of relations.
The guest editorial by Helen Yaffe of the University of Glasgow again very richly, in its shorter format, documents an overview of the history of the embargo, its international repudiation, and its human and financial cost for Cuba. But the main point of the editorial is to advocate for something that people, who along with the large majority of humanity as indicated by the yearly UN votes find the Blockade immoral and illegal, can do to try to make it unenforceable. The editorial closes describing the incipient “1 cent 4 Cuba” campaign, and how one can contribute as an individual to this international collective effort.