Since the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016, Cuba no longer often makes the headlines. Should we conclude that the country, by losing its tutelary but controversial figure, has finally found a sort of appeasement, 65 years after its revolution?
This is far from being the case, if we are to believe the Quebec journalist and writer Hector Lemieux, who, for around twenty years, has lived between Havana and Quebec and has written reports on Cuba for French newspapers. , Belgian and Swiss.
Since 1959, writes Lemieux in Cuba in transparency (Summary, 2024, 144 pages), the country has often had a hard time, “but the current situation is catastrophic: food rationed to the extreme, triple-digit inflation, shortage of gasoline, medicines, massive exodus of living forces”. In 2021, unable to take it any longer, Cubans with “empty bellies” expressed their despair to the regime, now led by Miguel Díaz-Canel, who violently repressed the discontent.
For a long time, Cuba made the leftists dream, who considered it a socialist paradise and who dreamed of doing battle with Uncle Sam, and enraged the rightists, who saw it as just another red dictatorship. Today, writes Lemieux, “neither of the two situations corresponds to the truth” and “Cuba is a country in transition” whose evolution cannot be predicted.
As a good field journalist, Lemieux does not sign here an analytical essay, but a collection of short reports in which he “gives voice to the Cubans, these formidable storytellers”, condemned to fend for themselves by the national slump.
Quebecers who go to sunbathe on the island’s beaches may not know it, but Cuba is dying. “Everyone is leaving, except the old and the poor,” notes the journalist. In 2022, 500,000 people would have left for the United States, Spain or Latin American countries. Cuba has around 11 million inhabitants. At this rate, the country will become empty in the medium term.
Did the revolutionary spirit, which nourished the resilience of the islanders, die at the same time as Fidel? You should know, first, that in 2016, 80% of Cubans were born after the Revolution. The latter therefore did not experience the colonial contempt before 1959, but have experienced, since their birth, deprivations of freedom, of essential goods and, perhaps worse still, of hope.
For 30 years, Cuba “opted for an artificial state socialist economy, subsidized by the former USSR”, which allowed it to get by honorably. The fall of the Soviet big brother led to the collapse of the Cuban economy. Since then, the country has lived off tourism, the money brought in by its medical personnel sent abroad and that which Cubans in the diaspora send to their loved ones remaining on the island.
However, Cuba, especially since the pandemic which heavily affected the tourism industry, is no longer solvent. However, he must import “between 70% and 80% of his food needs”. The Cubans, therefore, get by, waiting to leave, for those who can.
Lemieux evokes the small miseries of everyday life. In 2014, there was a shortage of condoms; in 2018, it’s the turn of sanitary napkins to be in short supply; At all times, power cuts occur. To eat, workers steal everything they can from the companies where they work and resell it all on the black market. As public contestation of the situation generally leads to prison, we keep silent and operate surreptitiously.
Raúl Castro, at the head of the country from 2008 to 2021, liberalized the economy a little, but, due to lack of means, the Cubans cannot benefit from it. In 2014, for example, the scheme allowed the previously prohibited purchase of new cars. On the island, due to inflation and import taxes imposed by the government, a 2013 Peugeot 4008 sells for $325,000 and a used 2010 Volkswagen Jetta for $69,000, while the monthly salary is $27! We can guess the result: in six months, only 50 cars and 4 motorcycles will be sold.
In 2012-2013, the beginnings of a rapprochement between Obama’s United States and Fidel’s brother’s Cuba, through Canada and the Vatican, gave rise to a certain hope. This emergency exit was unfortunately double-closed by the coming to power of Donald Trump, who increased sanctions against Cuba, followed by Joe Biden.
“Washington,” writes Lemieux, “takes care to keep the island in poverty and increases pressure on the regime to encourage the people to rise up. » Meanwhile, the Cubans are suffering and the regime, to survive, is moving closer to China and Russia. There are history lessons that are lost.