Among the reforms initiated under Raul’s presidency, Cubans may now stay in tourist hotels and buy electrical goods such as mobile phones, computers and electric scooters; the cap on bonus payments tied to productivity has been lifted; and a new payments system that ties incomes to productivity is being generalised across state enterprises. Cubans can now hold multiple jobs and students may work part time to supplement their allowances and gain work experience. Excessive subsidies are being gradually withdrawn.

The biggest changes so far have been in agriculture. Raul has declared increasing food production the government’s top priority and a matter of national security. While Cuba spends billions of dollars on food imports, half the farmland has been lying idle, much of it overrun with the farmer’s nightmare, a woody tropical weed known as the marabu bush. The government is now promoting a large-scale “return to the land”.

Land belonging to the state will not be privatised. Rather, individuals, cooperatives and state farms are being encouraged to grow crops or raise livestock on idle state land. Raul reported to the National Assembly in December that 54% or almost a million hectares of this land had been granted in usufruct, i.e., leased rent-free on a long-term basis. These land grants have benefited around 100,000 people. A social movement among producers has sprung up to pass on knowledge to new farmers. Urban agriculture too is being expanded by creating or consolidating “green belts” around the cities.

Farmers can now buy seed and supplies directly from a new chain of state stores, instead of everything being centrally allocated by the state, while the state has doubled, tripled or quadrupled what is pays to producers to stimulate production and thus lower prices in the free markets. Guaranteeing a stable supply of cheap, locally-produced food to replace expensive imports is a precondition for the elimination of the ration card.    

In a bold administrative decentralisation, responsibility for deciding what crops and livestock are to be farmed where has been devolved from the head office of the agriculture ministry in Havana and the provincial capitals to Cuba’s 169 municipalities, bypassing a notorious chain of administrative bottlenecks. In November, a report in Granma newspaper estimated there was an excess of 89,000 administrative personnel, some 26% of the total, in the state farm sector alone. This “engenders bureaucracy, raises costs, hampers productivity, creates disorder and prevents the worker from improving his income.” A rationalisation and reorganisation of the administrative workforce in the state farm sector has begun.

Regarding the changes under Raul’s presidency, we should note the following. First, these changes are broadly consistent with the diagnosis made by Fidel in his November 17, 2005 speech at Havana University and the line of march he proposed to achieve “true and irreversible socialism”, while not being limited to the ideas expressed by Fidel then or since.

Secondly, while most of these changes flow from government decrees, some – such as the trend towards more public criticism and debate and the gains won against homophobia in recent years – result from encouragement or support “from above” meeting with a groundswell of activism “from below” to overcome administrative opposition and inertia and backward attitudes. 

Thirdly, the pace of change is constrained by the need to strive for consensus on the most far-reaching changes and the fact that the Cuban leadership has had to devote much of its energies to crisis management, with the devastating 2008 hurricanes – which caused economic losses equivalent to a fifth of Cuba’s GDP, and from which the country is still recovering – and the global economic turmoil of the past year, which has hit the Cuban economy hard. 

This makes further changes all the more urgent, yet it has also delayed their timely implementation. The 6th Communist Party Congress, originally scheduled for late 2009, has been postponed at least a year. On the plus side, this leaves more time for debate in the lead-up to this historic Congress. Already, millions of Cubans have participated in two rounds of organised debates in neighbourhoods, workplaces and Communist Party base committees. In late 2007, more than five million people, almost half the population, participated in a first round of grassroots debates and produced some 3 million concrete proposals, all of which were recorded and analysed by the Party leadership. A second round of debates began in September.

Intersecting with these organised debates is an informal debate that carries over into the new institutional spaces that have been opening up in the island’s mass media. Granma and Juventud Rebelde, the two national daily papers, have opened up their pages to critical comments from readers on everything from local grievances to the subtleties of paternalism. The revamped Spanish-language web page of Juventud Rebelde now allows the discussion to continue in cyberspace, with readers posting comments and debating each other and columnists such as Luis Sexto and Jose Alejandro Rodriguez, another popular and fearless critic.

La Calle del Medio (The Middle of the Street) is a new monthly, 16-page colour magazine “of opinion and debate”. It carries critical commentaries on many controversial and formerly taboo topics such as students cheating in exams, and long and thoughtful letters from readers. In these commentaries the capacity for critical thinking of the average Cuban citizen – the fruit of the revolution’s efforts over several generations to forge a new human being capable of contributing to the building of a socialist society – shines through and illuminates the difficult path ahead.