In Cuba it does not clear. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. After months of blackouts due to the terrible state of the National Electric System (SEN), in recent days a new fuel supply crisis has semi-paralyzed public and private transport in Cuba, causing kilometric queues at gas stations and delirious scenes, such as the of hundreds of drivers and taxi drivers sleeping in their vehicles for several days waiting for a tanker truck that nobody knows when it will arrive. They are the so-called “ghost queues”, which people do at their own risk around the dilapidated service centers that dispense gasoline and diesel, but only just in case, without any assurance that the miracle of being able to refuel will finally take place. To kill time and boredom, some even played dominoes under a tree.
“We are worse than ever. You no longer know where to look,” says Manuel, owner of a Russian Lada that has been driving through the streets of Havana for more than 40 years. It’s Glory Saturday, and Manuel is talking in line with other car owners. Among them they comment that they have experienced other similar crises before and that in the end the situation has normalized. “This cannot continue like this, without a fuel supply you cannot stay for long, because if not everything collapses,” says the most optimistic interlocutor. He thinks that, as on other occasions, the authorities will end up “resolving an oil ship somewhere” and that this new crisis will also pass.
Several jump on him. “No, mate. The situation today is different. This is already cyclical. When it is not gasoline, it is the blackout, and then the chicken will be lacking and a boat of chicken will have to be obtained, and again the diesel will be lacking…”, argues a young man who says he is doing the paperwork at the Spanish embassy to acquire nationality and leave the country. In the last year, about 320,000 Cubans – 3% of the population – entered the US illegally through the Mexican border, according to data from the US immigration services.
In a ghost queue you can hear any opinion, even the most extreme and exaggerated. But the truth is that the current moment is especially difficult for everyone. Public transport has been working very poorly for years. In Havana, a city of more than two million inhabitants, in December 2021 there were only 878 buses (less than half the number in the early 1990s), and 440 of them were not working due to lack of tires, batteries, etc. oil filters, material to catch punctures, and for various breakages. Today the situation is even more serious, admit the authorities, who have recognized that it is the worst public transport crisis in the last 10 years.
The problem is compounded by the current fuel shortage. In the capital, the bus stops are overcrowded and it takes people hours to cover a journey between the center and the most remote neighbourhoods. Route and private taxis, which were an alternative, also stop and charge more and more for the journeys to a population that is already exhausted by inflation – the salary of a professional in Cuba is between 4,000 and 5,000 pesos, while that a liter of vegetable oil costs 700 and a kilo of powdered milk, 2,000-.
Beyond the current fuel deficit, various economists assure that the Cuban crisis is general and structural, of a model. And that the Government must introduce real far-reaching reforms and liberalize the economy, not continue putting patches that at this point no longer work. “The issue is life or death, of the highest priority,” says Omar Everleny, who recalls that three decades have just passed since the Solchaga report, made in 1993 by the former Minister of Economy of Felipe González Carlos Solchaga on the economic changes that should be introduced on the island to make the system sustainable. “It is striking that the report seems freshly written. Part of his appreciations are valid today. I wonder if new diagnoses are needed or what is needed is to implement some of those recommendations”, considers Everleny.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
This economist observes that it is true that two years ago the law was finally approved that has allowed the creation of more than 7,000 small and medium-sized private companies, one of Solchaga’s demands, and although these are beginning to become the most dynamic factor in the economy, various obstacles still hamper its operation -such as high taxes, excessive bureaucracy that slows down and complicates any management or the absence of an official exchange market that allows new entrepreneurs to acquire the foreign currency they need to import and close the cycle of their business-
In that report, recalls Everleny, Solchaga warned of the importance of rhythm and the conception of a comprehensive reform. “The comprehensiveness of the reform is, in our opinion, an essential ingredient of success. But it is not the only requirement. Measures also need to be taken with the utmost urgency. Let them be done before the economic decline leads to irreversible degradation and chaos that compromises the nation’s self-confidence and erodes the leadership of its leaders. In the current economic situation, passivity or commitment to partial reforms is, in all likelihood, equivalent to trusting that it is the outside world that will impose the philosophy, pace and intensity of the reforms,” the former Spanish minister stated in the document.
In Everleny’s opinion, although some of his suggestions have been put into practice in recent years, far-reaching reforms have been put off “for too long.” Still, he assures him, “the so-called state socialist enterprise continues to be thought of, without understanding that the State must concentrate only on the strategic activities of the country; that it is better to think of public companies; that the unprofitable state companies stop working, and pass them on to other forms of ownership; that the state monopoly of foreign trade should not be maintained. In addition, development cannot be conceived without paying debts from the past, which causes reluctance to invest on the part of external capital, even though an advertising effort is made. The list is huge.”
In his opinion, and that of many other Cuban economists, “the road is nothing more than the same route through the countries that have advanced in the last thirty or forty years; that is, a greater role for market relations, without giving up the project that has been tried to be built. Vietnam managed to move towards development and the starting point was lower than the Cuban one. Cuba can try, even if we are not Asian”.
Like Manuel, Everleny these days has also had to queue for miles to fill up her car with gasoline. He wants to think that, although there is less and less time left, if the necessary changes are introduced, it is still possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Others, like the historian Alina Bárbara López, say no, that this is a “systemic crisis” and that the time for a possible Vietnamese-style reform has passed. “Cuba is in the final moment of a model of political, social and economic conception that I do not think can be reformed under these conditions,” she said in a recent interview with Efe. In the phantom queues experienced this Holy Week, people were in such a hurry to solve a few liters of fuel that these deep dilemmas were not even raised.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
#gasoline #ghost #lines #light #tunnel #Cuba