CARICOM in ‘changing’ Cuba
A COMMUNIQUÉ was expected to be issued yesterday on the Third Caribbean Community-Cuba Ministerial Meeting that concluded in Havana on Friday. It is expected to offer an explanation on future CARICOM-Cuba cooperation and initiatives in economic and political coordination with Latin America in the context of new economic and political alliances and arrangements in response to international developments.
The two-day meeting occurred in the significantly changing Cuban environment to that of 1972, when four CARICOM countries had played a vital role in helping to bring the then Fidel Castro-led revolutionary government out of the diplomatic cold in a display of courageous defiance of the United States of America.
That was 38 years ago when Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago chose to break Washington’s crude isolationist policy against that small Caribbean nation with their unprecedented joint establishment of diplomatic relations with Havana.
The legendary Fidel Castro and the administration he led for some half-a-century before serious illness compelled him to hand over government leadership to younger brother, Raoul Castro four years ago has never failed to show his deep appreciation for that pacesetting diplomatic initiative by the quartet of CARICOM states.
CARICOM ministers who participated in the Havana meeting were expected to learn at first-hand why Cuba — the only country to suffer from the longest and most punitive embargo enforced by the USA– is now in the process of implementing serious adjustments to its economic model from total state control, based on socialist transformation, to embrace a widening experiment in private sector operations.
The announcement earlier in the week by President Raoul Castro that some half-a-million state workers are to be facilitated in new employment, mostly in a gradually expanding private sector — including tourism and construction industries — had followed a controversial interview by elder brother Fidel with an American journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, published in ‘The Atlantic’ magazine.
The ‘misinterpretation’
Castro lost no time in telling the media, at the launch of his latest book, that he was “misinterpreted on the economy” by Goldberg when he quoted him as saying that “the economic model no longer works for us.”
But the Cuban leader refrained from any criticisms of Goldberg, remarking that he would “await with interest” the journalist’s promised “extensive article” to be published in ‘The Atlantic’.
Those in the US Congress and mainstream media, known for their anxieties to ridicule Cuba’s economic model and governance system, can be expected to join in political jeering.
Of course, they would have no interest in considering, for instance, that after 50 years of admirable struggle to survive the onslaught of successive administrations in Washington, with its suffocating blockade as a core feature, Cuba does not have to apologise for tough, pragmatic decisions on adjustments to its economic model.
Not in this closing first decade of the 21st Century, long after the disappearance of that once powerful superpower –The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) — and then to witness, by 2007, America’s own humiliation with the collapse of its traditionally flaunted economic model of capitalism.
The ‘Wall Street crash’ was a development that spawned the prevailing global economic and financial crisis still seriously impacting today on economies the world over.
Workforce
Initially, as explained in Havana, the alternative employment programme will affect half-a-million of a five million-strong Cuban workforce, with another half-a-million to follow over a phased period, with state assistance in various private sector businesses.
This, according to reports out of Havana, is not an overnight development. The adjustments are linked to reassessments of policies and programmes over the past two years. The adjustments are being made all the more necessary by the global crisis that affects so many poor and developing nations.
Incidentally, as readers would know, NONE of the then economically affected nations have had to contend with a 50-year long spiteful blockade by ‘Uncle Sam’, now agonising over the revealed painful weaknesses of its own economic model.
Yet for all its domestic challenges, the Cuban government continues to reach out by offering assistance, though not as extensive as previously, to countries in the Caribbean and other regions in various areas, including health, agriculture and construction.
The United Nations has long recognised the remarkable achievements of Cuba in health and education. And just last week, while President Raoul Castro was speaking about re-deployment of sections of the labour force, Inter-Press Service (IPS) was reporting on Cuba’s success in making available in the world the vaccine, VA-MENGOCO-BC, the only such medication against meningitis-B, included since 1991 in Cuba’s national infant immunisation programme and used successfully in South and Central America.
As we await the outcome of last week’s Third Cuba-CARICOM Ministerial Meeting, it is of relevance to recall here what Professor Norman Girvan noted when he accepted in 2009 an Honorary Doctor of Economic Sciences degree from the University of Havana.
In recalling the debt of gratitude owed the people of that Caribbean island state by so many in the poor and developing world, Girvan, a former Secretary-General of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), observed:
“The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration on the ability of a small Caribbean country to chart its own course of social justice, economic transformation and national independence by relying on the mobilisation of the entire population; on the will and energy of its people; and for its numerous actions of intensive international solidarity…The debt is unpayable.”