Five years have passed since the tiny beast bit us. Five years since the COVID-19 pandemic spread to all continents and the world had to shut down a bit to withstand the onslaught of SARS-CoV-2.
During the height of the pandemic, when daily statistical reports fell like daggers on our heads, we were more afraid than ever, and yet for months we knew how to practice physical isolation as a paradoxical form of solidarity, we applauded the doctors, and we understood the logic of herd immunity.
We thought that after that experience we would be more understanding, more empathetic; that science would finally achieve the highest social reputation and have a privileged place in shaping policies; that collaboration between countries and between the public and private sectors would be an irrevocable norm; that we would better appreciate the dangers of the imprint we leave on our planet and act accordingly.
Nothing of the sort. We learned much less than we thought we would after so much pain.
The world today is even more dangerous than it was: more and more votes go to the far right and to fanaticism; the crazy economy generates more inequality; wars multiply: the dead under shrapnel increase, and nuclear danger looms; technologies evolve uncontrollably, and a minority of the ultra-rich dominate them.
That’s how the world is going. And that’s how it is also going for Cuba and Cubans, who have had to live through these last five years as the most terrible in several decades.
Official statistics speak of just over 8,500 deaths and 1.1 million COVID infections on the island: numbers that represent a low impact compared to other countries in the world.
Some were marked by chilling and inevitably inaccurate statistics, because in all of them — including Cuba — there were probably more deaths than recorded.
But over time, although not in the same way, almost all countries in the world were able to move forward and rebuild, despite the enormous disruption caused by the induced coma to the global economy.
The approach to confronting the pandemic — more or less restrictive in each case — or the degree of availability of vaccines and their application defined the way and speed with which the health emergency was overcome to reach what became known as the “new normal.”
In Cuba, despite the relatively low incidence of the disease and the low mortality rate — thanks to epidemiological control and the extraordinary achievement of five vaccines that protected Cubans of all ages — an additional blow would come: the great blunder that the Task of Reorganization turned out to be, with many victims and no one responsible who has even sincerely apologized.
In the Cuba of the last five years, the extreme extent to which the comprehensive policy of sanctions exercised by the United States can harm us has been exposed, combined with the structural deficiencies of a necrotic economic model and a string of bad decisions: broken dishes for which no one pays.
Failure to implement — or only half-heartedly implement — the necessary changes in the country’s economic policy.… Failure to do so out of irresponsibility, ignorance, or bad faith — who knows — has turned these five years into a prolonged ordeal that must end now, no matter what.
The traumatic legacy of the pandemic has multiplied. The scarce availability of foreign currency (neither fresh nor in the form of credit or aid) needed both to regenerate exportable production and services and to import consumer goods (even the most basic ones!); rising inflation; the shortage of all kinds of supplies; extremely low productivity and work incentives…and much more, have defined this kind of “locked domino” that could condemn the future of several generations of Cubans if action is not taken soon.
All of this has resulted in deep, widespread, and pervasive poverty; a population hemorrhage due to the massive and sustained emigration of recent years; and hopelessness and loneliness, especially for the elderly, who make up a quarter of the population and are bearing the highest costs of the crisis.
Five years should suffice to stop experimenting without results, to stop trying, with patches, to solve the “distortions” that are, in reality, vast, monumental, unbearable evils that afflict and defeat society and individuals.
This anniversary should mark the end of inaction; the forced withdrawal of those who only know how to put spokes in the wheels; the end of counter-reforms in the economy — Ruperto’s little steps.
We can’t wait any longer to move from Numantia’s resistance to creation, with all the risks that this entails, and even in a context — very predictable — even less favorable than that of five years ago.
“What we can offer now is, above all, an example. Not necessarily that of Numantia…yes… that of unpredictable imagination.” (Cintio Vitier, 1999)
How much longer must we wait for the economic “vaccines” that will unleash the economy and social initiative — all well-documented and explained by Cuban social scientists and economists, as patriotic, remarkable, and necessary as those who created the Abdala, Soberana, and Mambisa Cuban COVID vaccines?
Everything indicates that, postmarked from the White House, letters with very bad news for Cuba will continue to arrive in the coming days, weeks, and years.
Cuba’s “new normal,” which has yet to arrive after the COVID-19 storm, cannot depend on these Trumpian outbursts or the screwed-in-chairs of insensitive bureaucrats, reluctant to lose even an inch of their privileges.
