San José. January 1, 2021 differed 61 years from previous comparable dates since 1959 in Cuba.
Although the tireless propaganda of the Communist regime He repeated a series of self-aggrandizement to celebrate that yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the revolution’s triumph, on the first day of 2021 he put into practice an official economic package that buried the old state subsidies in multiple sectors and sparked a new survival fever for the 11.3 million inhabitants of the largest of the Antilles.
Bordered by the grave economic crisis in the 21st century and one of the sharpest since 1959, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) began implementing a serious unprecedented adjustment program on the island from its full power of armored state capitalism in a socialist economics.
With forecasts of inflation and devaluation skyrocketing, Cubans, right from the day of the birthday, are facing an increase in the cost of the food basket and in gas, water, electricity and telephony rates, with monetary unification around the dollar and a pay rise.
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“It’s for the neoliberalism pure in a system monopoly capitalism state. The worst consequences will be for the most vulnerable: the vast majority, ”said dissident Dagoberto Valdés, a religious, agricultural engineer, social scientist and director of Coexistence, a Cuban digital magazine.
“The same thing that this government has criticized in Latin American and Caribbean countries, in Cuba, these kinds of adjustments are widening the chasm, the abyss, between the few who enjoy the piñata of the state monopoly and the vast majority of the people. that will become poorer, ”Valdés, a former member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told EL UNIVERSAL. “It’s tightening a belt to an already impoverished economy,” he said.
On the other hand, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Cuba, Alejandro FernandezHe assured that “the strategy is not to dollarize the economy”.
The constant opening of state-owned enterprises in dollars in a country with salaries in Cuban currency is due to the intensification of the economic ‘blockade’ that Washington imposed on Havana in 1962, the shortage in the retail market, the lack of fuel and the collateral impact of the corona virus, he emphasized.
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The government has guaranteed it will prevent speculation on essential items and the dollar.
In a message for the 62nd birthday, the President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, stated that “we will win together” in 2021. The Cuban Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, highlighted popular “backlash” against the harassment of the United States and tweeted, “Yes, it can, yes, it can and always will.”
The damage sustained by US sanctions in more than 58 years amounted to $ 144,000 to $ 413 million, the Cuban State Department said.
Cuba sailed in one until the last night of 2020 monetary duality and the exchange rate it created in 1994, with pesos in two denominations – Cuban and convertible – and different prices against the dollar. The convertible was buried, and by 2021 only the Cuban was left amid a lack of priority goods that has deepened since 2018.
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The regime pays its employees in pesos, but it opened stores in dollars with products that, in popular jargon, “get lost” in local currency.
The PCC, the only political force in a country without it multipartidismo, the minimum wage went from 400 pesos (about $ 16) in 2019 to 2,100 (about $ 87), but the cost of living rose.
For the opposition journalist Yoani Sanchez, director of the digital newspaper 14ymedio.com operating illegally in Cuba, the rise in prices and tariffs and the end of subsidies would serve to christen 2021: “The year to say goodbye to the revolutionary mask.”