News SOS for Journalists Latin America Culture

Photos Photo of the Day Videos

My Memories of the Soviet Perestroika and Fears for Cuba

By Natasha Vazquez* (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – In recent days, I have seen many people mention the Soviet perestroika when referring to the economic measures announced by the Cuban regime, warning of a possible transition toward forms of capitalism controlled by the same elites that have governed the country for decades.

The comparison is inevitable, but I believe it is worth remembering what that process was actually like and, above all, what differences exist between it and what is happening in Cuba today.

I was very young when perestroika began in the late 1980s, but I was studying in Moscow and was able to experience part of that historic moment from the inside, witnessing firsthand the excitement that something which had previously seemed immovable was beginning to change.

With all its mistakes and contradictions, in its early years perestroika was not perceived as a project of plunder or as a simple withdrawal of the state from the economy. Instead, it began accompanied by the idea that the future could be better.

When Openness Meant Hope

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union had become stagnant. The economy was functioning increasingly poorly, bureaucracy had become an end in itself, corruption was a reality known to everyone, and society seemed trapped in suffocating immobility.

The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in 1985 generated genuine expectations of change, beginning with glasnost (openness) and the policy known as uskorenie (acceleration).

Perestroika became the central policy of the state in 1987, but it was not conceived as a project to dismantle Soviet socialism or to privatize the economy on a massive scale. Its stated goal was to reform a system that was showing clear signs of exhaustion—to modernize it and make it function by granting greater autonomy to state enterprises and allowing the creation of cooperatives and small private businesses.

At the same time, for the first time in decades, Soviet citizens began learning aspects of........

© Havana Times