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Mistakes in the 21st Century and Cuba’s Current Debacle

HAVANA TIMES — This article is a bit Machiavellian: I am not writing “from below,” as I always try to do, but rather from what I imagine to be their perspective. Assuming they are rational people capable of recognizing mistakes. But we know that many elites, blinded by their power and their desire to accumulate ever more money and influence, fall into what the ancient Greeks called hubris: irrational excess. And in the framework of Greek tragedy, every hubris has its nemesis: the response of fate, which in today’s popular culture is often called by the Hindu term “karma.”

Only in Cuba, that karma is falling upon an entire people, not just those who brought it about.

I will begin at the start of the current century and proceed in chronological order.

This is exclusively my personal opinion, and I claim no “expert” credentials; I am simply relying on my ability to interpret events as an ordinary Cuban who has read the history and the news as they unfolded.

1. Tourism as the Main Engine of the Economy

At first reluctantly, and later with increasing enthusiasm, the Cuban government chose tourism, beginning with the post-Soviet crisis of the 1990s, as a stable source of income, both in hard currency and foreign investment. The idea was not bad at all for a country like Cuba. I remember a Spanish economist arguing that tourism was a type of service people in developed countries preferred to purchase for their vacations, even when cutting back on other consumer goods. In other words, it was a goose that laid golden eggs, not subject to market fluctuations like commodities.

Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, we were surprised by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. International travel sales declined, but the worst came twenty years later: COVID.

Result: The pandemic caused Cuba’s tourism market to collapse, and we have not recovered. All because the risks of what economists call “black swans”—unpredictable, high-impact negative events—were not taken into account.

2. “Resizing” the........

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