The island is going through an economic, political, social and migratory crisis as serious as or more than the one it suffered three decades ago under the government of Fidel Castro
The serious economic crisis that Cuba is suffering, the increase in migration and social discontent invite us to compare the current moment and the Special Period that the country went through in the 1990s. Experts from different fields consulted by Efe draw parallels and differences between the two periods . “I think they are comparable,” says Cuban sociologist Diosnara Ortega. “We live similar scenarios, although with particularities,” she adds. The Cuban historian Rafael Rojas is less likely to equate, but highlights that this crisis is “impressive” and that its “migratory potential” among young people is “extremely high.”
The area with the most similarities is economics. The Cuban GDP collapsed 36% between 1990 and 1993 and 13% between 2020 and 2021. In both periods, inflation, the fiscal deficit and the dollar exchange rate in the informal market shot up, points out Cuban Pavel Vidal, Professor of Economics in Colombia.
In these last two years the endless queues have been repeated as in the 90s, as a result of the shortage of food, fuel and medicine. In the Special Period, the famine and blackouts were much more serious; now runaway inflation and dollarization eat away at the purchasing power of Cubans.
To alleviate the situation, the Cuban government announced reforms on both occasions to liberalize the economy. But the opening to the private sector was then “a necessary evil that was reversed” and now it is “necessary and there is no turning back,” according to former Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray. Nearly 3,500 small private companies, prohibited in 1968, have been authorized. For Rojas, these slow and partial changes are due to the reforms of former President Raúl Castro, “something that did not exist in the 90s.” Vidal now perceives a greater geographical and sectoral diversification of the economy. Alzugaray points out that the Special Period “occurs after a stage in which Cuba was fine,” referring to the 1980s, while the current one hits a country “unbalanced” by the pandemic and the sanctions promoted by Donald Trump.
For Ortega, the current crisis “is much more serious than that of the 1990s.” “Then one could aspire to return to a recent past and today’s young people do not have that experience of a glorious past and despair spreads.” Cuban historian Ada Ferrer, professor in New York and Pulitzer for ‘Cuba: An American History’, sees here the “greatest difference.” «In the Special Period it was something new, it was the first deep crisis and the Government could ask for sacrifices. Now more than a third of the population knows nothing but the crisis », she argues.
Protests and migration
For Vidal “as in the 90s”, the economic crisis has led to “social protests” and “a wave of migration”, but of greater proportions. In the Maleconazo of 1994 and in 2021, anti-government protests were experienced due to economic malaise. The most recent ones spread throughout the country –thanks to the internet– and were suppressed and prosecuted with hundreds of sentences of up to 30 years in prison for those convicted of sedition.
The protests in Havana in the 1990s lost steam when the then president, Fidel Castro, approached and ended up giving a speech. Fidel offered a “political response” and gained “political capital,” says Ortega, while the current government “has only affected the police dimension.” The current president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, defined the demonstrations as an attempted “soft coup” orchestrated from Washington and affirmed that only violent acts have been judged.
Migrations are also dissimilar. The rafters’ crisis lasted five weeks and the current one “is by drip,” says Rojas. In 1994 more than 35,000 Cubans arrived in the US and from October to April 114,000 have arrived, almost 1% of the total population of the island.
In the 1990s, the island was dragged down by the fall of the Soviet bloc and now by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then he stopped receiving money from the USSR and now Venezuelan oil, remittances and income from tourism. Then and now the US has given a new twist to its sanctions against Cuba. In 1996 with the Helms-Burton law and now with the 243 measures that Trump approved, of which his successor, Joe Biden, has only reversed a few.
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