HAVANA.- Cubans, increasingly hit by the crisis, are preparing to welcome a new dark year, after the great economic package announced this week by the Cuban regimewhich the dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel himself recognizes will “increase” certain problems that the island faces today.
By closing the National Assembly of People’s Power (ANPP), which resulted in the accumulation of bad economic news that reaffirms the regime’s inability to stop the crisis. Díaz-Canel admitted that the measures, which include the increase in the costs of basic services and the cuts in state subsidies, do not solve all the challenges “by themselves” but, on the contrary, “All of them taken together can increase certain problems”.
Among the economic measures announced, which will have a great impact on the lives of Cubans, are a 25% increase in electricity rates and increases in the prices of liquefied gas and water for unmetered consumers, and the intervention of the informal market of currencies, where the dollar It was trading on Friday at 273 Cuban pesos (CUP)a cost 1,037.50% higher than the official one, which since 2005 has been anchored at 24 CUP.
In addition, the package includes the elimination of fuel subsidies and the food supply card, the freezing of staff and adjustments in the number of public workers, and the extension of tariff exemptions on imports of food and toiletries.
Despite these suffocating measures, Díaz-Canel said “we are going to overcome the challenges with work, talent and creativity; that is, with creative resistance,” said Díaz-Canel, who carries the weight of the economic decline that the island is going through on the shoulders of Cubans, while building luxury hotels in a country devoid of tourists.
The usual “enemy”
The Cuban dictator dedicated his speech to railing against the sanctions imposed by the United States government, which he blames for the “deep structural distortions and deformations that mark the economic performance” of Cuba.
In his opinion, the effects of the crisis are reflected in “the depression of several essential services, including electricity, health, education, water supply, communal services, public transportation, food production and medicines, all of which require the importation of equipment, parts, fuels or raw materials, for which the scarce financial resources we can count on are not enough.”
The dictator, however, failed to mention how he manages to import everything necessary to build and inaugurate luxury hotels, Nor did he explain how the US is the sixth largest exporter to Cuba, according to official figures from the state National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), under these circumstances.
Maintaining the speech of his main allies, Russia and Venezuela, he described the Cuban economy as a “war economy” which, according to him, operates in a scenario of “a policy of maximum suffocation designed and applied against a small country by the most powerful empire in history,” in reference to the United States.
Elimination of subsidies
The designated Cuban ruler said that They bet on the gradual elimination of subsidies to “move forward” in economic recovery in the new year.
“The gradual elimination of some subsidies and changes in fiscal policy, among others, are aimed at correcting unsustainable deviations and distortions in the current conditions of the economy. “They are adjustments that will allow a necessary and better use of the meager financial resources available,” she emphasized, without specifying what he was referring to.
With low wages and food shortages, Cubans are preparing for greater challenges.
FOUNTAIN: With information from AFP / Diario de Cuba / Diario Las Américas Editorial Team
