Standing in the center of the small auditorium, Marlene Vázquez, director of the Center for Martian Studies, spoke with a broken voice and tears on the verge of welling up. In a few sentences, she referred to the situation in her country, Cuba, which carries long years of economic blockade and a crisis that the pandemic deepened. She referred to “a crisis of values,” to “damaged spirituality,” to “desperate portions” of the population making “ethical concessions that they otherwise would not.”
There are Cubans, he continued, who think that the United States “is a sugar giant, with one arm of Lincoln and the other of Wendell Phillips, who are going to make us all abundant and rich. It is a painful truth, but it is so.”
The scene occurred last Thursday at a forum dedicated to the island in the context of the ninth Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Social Sciences. In the presentations of the speakers, who spoke of a wide variety of topics, the costs of the blockade, the shortcomings of this time, the resistance and the role of Cuba as a regional reference had paraded.
The attendance was poor, perhaps because the table was held in the Humanities Coordination, which is not one of the most easily accessible venues. Most of the attendees were Cuban researchers from different disciplines, attached to centers affiliated with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso).
Mariela Castro spoke about sexual education and a young researcher asked what to do if young women do not have access to contraceptives (“and not everything is the blockade”). Another voice referred, with concern, to the “rise of religious neoconservatism”.
Enrique Gómez, from the Center for Psychological and Sociological Research, made a good summary of several interventions when speaking of the “efforts and contradictions” of the Cuban process.
To talk about Cuba, he said, “we have to do it honestly: Cuba is a benchmark for our region, and not because it is a perfect process, because we can learn from it. You can learn from the trajectory full of aggressions, from his ability to resist and also from his mistakes”.
Gómez also spoke of the need to recognize “the daily sacrifices and efforts made by Cuban families in this context of adversity.”
In the list of “efforts”, understood as ongoing or possible changes, he referred to the need to “strengthen state companies, which are not socialist because they are so”; of the need to promote municipal autonomy and abandon the “logic of centralization”, of the “diversification of current economic actors”.
The researcher also referred to the need to incorporate youth into the “revolutionary process”, through a program for children and youth that is currently under debate and that, here the novelty, is intended to be built with the participation of young people to break “the logic that has prevailed in sectoral and vertical policies”.
Likewise, Gómez said that in Cuba there are “insufficient participation mechanisms,” in addition to a bureaucracy that “kidnaps the spaces for participation and privileges, which is disastrous for socialist development.”
Cuban researcher laments crisis of values on the island due to blockade and pandemic