The island is going through an economic, political, social and migration crisis equal to or more serious than the one it went through under Fidel Castro’s government three decades ago.
The severe economic crisis that Cuba is going through, the increase in migration and social discontent invite us to compare the present moment with the special period the country went through in the 1990s. Experts from different areas consulted by Efe draw parallels and differences between the two periods. “I think they are similar,” says Cuban sociologist Diosnara Ortega. “We are living similar scenarios, albeit with specifics,” he adds. Cuban historian Rafael Rojas will be less inclined to equate, but emphasizes that this crisis is “impressive” and that the “migration potential” among young people is “extremely high”.
The area with the most similarities is economics. Cuba’s GDP collapsed by 36% between 1990 and 1993 and by 13% between 2020 and 2021. In both periods, inflation, the budget deficit and the dollar exchange rate in the informal market soared, notes Cuban Pavel Vidal, professor of economics in Colombia.
In the past two years, the endless queues have repeated as in the 90s, due to the shortage of food, fuel and medicine. In the Special Period, the famine and power outages were much more severe; now runaway inflation and dollarization are eating away at Cubans’ purchasing power.
To alleviate the situation, the Cuban government announced reforms on both occasions to liberalize the economy. But opening up to the private sector was then “a necessary evil that was reversed” and now it is “necessary and there is no turning back,” said former Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray. Nearly 3,500 small private companies have been authorized, which were banned in 1968. For Rojas, these slow and partial changes are the result of former President Raúl Castro’s reforms, “something that did not exist in the 1990s”. Vidal now sees greater geographic and sectoral diversification of the economy. Alzugaray points out that the special period “comes after a phase where Cuba was okay,” referring to the 1980s, while the current one hits a country “unbalanced” by the pandemic and sanctions propagated by Donald Trump.
For Ortega, the current crisis is “much more serious than that of the 1990s”. “Then one might aspire to return to a recent past and the young people of today do not have that experience of a glorious past and despair is spreading.” Cuban historian Ada Ferrer, New York professor and Pulitzer for “Cuba: An American History,” sees the “biggest difference” here. «In the Special Period it was something new, it was the first deep crisis and the government was allowed to ask for sacrifices. Now more than a third of the population knows nothing but the crisis,” he said.
Protests and migration
For Vidal, the economic crisis “like in the 90s” has led to “social protests” and “a wave of migration”, but of greater proportions. In the Maleconazo of 1994 and 2021 there were protests against the government because of the economic slump. The most recent – thanks to the Internet – spread across the country and were suppressed and prosecuted with hundreds of sentences of up to 30 years in prison for sedition convicts.
Protests in Havana in the 1990s lost steam as then-president, Fidel Castro, approached and delivered a speech. Fidel offered a “political response” and was given “political capital,” Ortega said, while the current administration “has only influenced the police dimension”. Cuba’s current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, defined the demonstrations as an attempted “soft coup” orchestrated from Washington and affirmed that only acts of violence have been assessed.
Migrations are also different. The trusses crisis has lasted five weeks and the current one is ‘by drip’, says Rojas. More than 35,000 Cubans arrived in the US in 1994 and 114,000 arrived from October to April, nearly 1% of the island’s total population.
In the 1990s, the island was swept 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 put a new spin on its sanctions against Cuba. In 1996 with the Helms-Burton Act and now with the 243 measures Trump approved, only a few of which his successor, Joe Biden, has reversed.
Source: La Verdad
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