Social Policies and Institutional Reform in Post-COVID Cuba: A Necessary Agenda [chapter]

Bert Hoffmann
2021 Social Policies and Institutional Reform in Post-COVID Cuba  
Introduction Contemporary Cuba faces severe difficulties on multiple fronts -the Covid pandemic; the persistence of unilateral US sanctions; the foundering of chavismo in Venezuela; the slow exit of the old fidelistas; and the pinched horizons of the island's youth generation. 2020 brought a crisis as grave as the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1990. That previous watershed was followed by a traumatic "Special Period" during which most outsiders and not a few islanders suspected that the
more » ... 959 Revolution might topple. Yet, in the post-Cold War era, Cuban communism has now remained in control for as long as its tenure under Soviet protection. A quarter century ago I reviewed ten books about the condition of Cuba after the Special Period for the London Review of Books, under the title "Cuba Down at Heel" (Whitehead, 1995). The best seller of the collection, by Andrés Oppenheimer (still lead analyst for the Miami Herald), was entitled Castro's Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba. My main comment on this was "One could equally argue that the readers of the Miami Herald should be preparing for Castro's final decade, rather than his final hour". In the event Fidel Castro stood down as president in 2008, and died in 2016. At the IX Plenum of April 2019 the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) set out its National Economic and Social Plan through 2030. My 1995 article ended as follows: "Virtually all the criticisms now to be heard of the Castro regime were already apparent by the time of my first visit in September 1968. To understand what has happened to the people of the island in the intervening years -and therefore what kind of a society Cuba can achieve in the next thirty -we need studies of health, of housing, of justice, more than we need further studies of the Gran Señor, the predicador and his courtiers". This chapter is about social policies in Cuba, and therefore focuses on such specific topics as health, education, housing, employment and inequality. Since
doi:10.3224/84742546.01 fatcat:5tnpim67sfcptjd7ad34glz3vq