Cuba can overcome internal problems without external intervention

2024-11-04 09:15:42 News & Society

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The Cuban government allowed the inhabitants of the island to open small and medium-sized private business with up to 100 employees. This happened in the wake of the massive protests which took place in July in Havana and a number of major cities due to the deterioration of living conditions, including in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.

?The State Council has approved a decree-law on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, which facilitates their coherent insertion in the legal system as an actor that affects the productive transformation of the country,? says a note on the website of the National Assembly of People?s Power of Cuba.

Meanwhile, President President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Cuba was taking firm steps to update its economic model.

Earlier, travellers were allowed arriving in the country to bring in food, medicine and other essentials without paying import duties.

According to official information, many government supporters who took to the streets during the days of the protests to prevent provocations were injured in clashes with protesters. The Cuban authorities blamed the United States for organizing the riots.

Analyzing the situation in the country, David Jessop, the director and founder of the Cuba Initiative, Non-Executive Director of the Caribbean Council and Cuba Briefing Editor, said the protests were largely spontaneous.

?The unrest, news of which was widely spread on social media within Cuba, was a response to growing concerns about food shortages, severe power outages, the growing incidence of COVID 19, and the deteriorating ability of Cuba?s health care system to cope with rising infection rates in some provinces, all of which to a significant extent have been exacerbated by the tightening of the US embargo. These then morphed in some locations to protests against the government,? the expert reminded.

In his opinion, the Government response was initially confrontational possibly because some in the Communist Party feared that a US soft war that the leadership says it has been facing was becoming among some a US inspired direct challenge to its power.

?Cuba?s President subsequently sought to lower the tension by recognising the legitimacy of many of the concerns expressed including by ?revolutionary people?. Since then he has moved to indicate to others in the leadership that it will be necessary to increase the space for debate in Cuban society, and to address issues with a wider group of participants,? David Jessop said.

From his point of view, this reflects in part the danger the early confrontations on the street posed to the Cuban military concept of a ?war of all the people? as this doctrine is felt to be the only way to repulse the US attempt at an invasion if it happens.

?Government has been undergoing generational change and implementing major economic reforms that decentralise and theoretically de-bureaucratise state decision making and encourage non-state economic development. There are divisions between conservatives and liberal reformers about the pace of and nature of such change. In my view the current tension s surrounding economic delivery and future growth and the concerns of many Cubans could be overcome if it were to liberalise and create a social market economy that emulated many of the reforms undertaken in Vietnam,? the expert said.

At the same time, according to him, only the Cuban people can decide on their own future.

?It is not up to The US, the EU Russia or anyone else to determine. The US Embargo has failed but has become a function of US domestic politics, making it harder to unravel and in the process harming the ability of the Cuban people to have a better life,? David Jessop added.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/67212-2021