Cuba and a return to the ‘Special Period’
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2023 (811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
While I was taking the pulse of Cubans during my May visit to the island, I touched a raw nerve when I broached the topic of Cuba’s punishing “Special Period in Time of Peace” in the early 1990s (and lasting for almost a decade). In the wake of the Soviet Union’s rapid disintegration, and the subsequent collapse of the Eastern Bloc of countries, Cuba’s gross domestic product had plummeted by some 35 per cent by 1995.
Cuba had effectively lost all of its main trading partners in a matter of months. It was almost the equivalent of the United States abruptly closing its border to all Canadian goods and services. Try to wrap your mind around that frightening thought.
The Cuban government understandably pressed the economic panic button. More important, it was an extraordinarily painful period for many Cubans, who quickly had their lives literally turned upside down. Each day was a God-awful struggle just to get to the next.
Cristobal Herrera / Associated Press files
Is Cuba returning to dark times not seen since Fidel Castro and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc?
The Fidel Castro government’s ability to feed its people was particularly compromised. There were shortages on the island of just about everything — compounded by the fact that Cuba imports most of its food-stuffs.
As for gasoline and diesel, that pretty much dried up after Havana’s lucrative barter arrangements with Moscow (sugar for crude oil) were subsequently terminated. Gas stations in Cuba were eventually closed and each one took on the eerie silence of a hospital morgue. And cooking oil, a precious commodity in most Cuban homes, was next to impossible to obtain.
The attendant fallout, and hence the birth of the “Special Period,” was almost too much to bear. The average Cuban lost approximately 25 pounds and tens of thousands developed an acute vitamin deficiency (causing temporary blindness in some). One Cuban recalled the painful memory of having to take a government-supplied multivitamin per day and a mixture of water and sugar before going to bed at night.
I remember my first visit to Cuba in 1995, when there was nary a vehicle on the road or a tractor in the fields. Cubans were hitchhiking along the highways, piling into small trucks on the road to Havana and making use of the government’s importation of some 700,000 bicycles from China.
Consequently, there were long and random power interruptions every day — including the hot months of the summer. It was no word of a lie to say that many Cubans were in a desperate state.
All of these thoughts came rushing back to me during my most recent trip to Cuba. Was Cuba once again going through another unbearable Special Period? Was today’s struggles and shortages a replay of the difficult circumstances of the 1990s?
For what it’s worth, I believe that the original Special Period was worse than what is happening in Cuba today. But I wouldn’t mistake that observation for downplaying the problems in the country or saying that things are all well and good on the island. They’re certainly not.
Many items are in short supply (particularly food), challenging to find and very expensive when you do locate them. (I’ve written about the fuel shortages and black market prices in a previous op-ed submission.) There are serious shortages of meat and especially pork, a Cuban staple, which is very expensive in dollar stores.
The same is true for medical supplies, rice and beans. I saw many Cubans lined up at government buildings, probably for hours, looking for monthly assistance and basic supplies of milk, coffee and bread (all extremely hard to get now). Simply put, life in Cuba is now very tough indeed.
Because of the petrol problem, the mostly old, creaky Cuban power grid (fuelled largely by diesel) is under enormous strain. Today, the electrical blackouts have returned with a vengeance to Cuba, lasting anywhere from four to eight hours per day (usually in the morning and at night). One litre of cooking oil, if you can find it, goes for roughly 1,000 Cuban pesos (instead of the 25 Cuban pesos at official rates) on the black market.
Still, I made sure to keep the Special Period conversation civil. One Cuban friend, Yordanis, insisted that what was going on in Cuba today was merely a continuation of the initial Special Period. Another acquaintance, Tolón, maintained that the circumstances now in Cuba are worse than the Special Period of the 1990s.
I made my counterpoints in reply. But in true Cuban fashion, we simply agreed to disagree and ended the discussion on friendly terms.
Of course, we all agreed that Cuba now finds itself in a very precarious situation. Once again, though, we had differences of opinion as to what the major causal factors are.
Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.