SourceAn unfair discussion on Cuba and the foreign debt
I usually have strong discussions via WhatsApp with three of my best friends from college based in the United States, Uruguay, and Spain, respectively. All of them have a highly critical, denouncing, visceral, but often unfair position IMHO, on the political regime prevailing in Cuba since 1959. I always find interesting the emotion with which not only they, but most of my former fellow students who have emigrated, speak out against the “regime” or the “dictatorship” that, ultimately, enabled us a path free of cost to form us as competent professionals. Thanks to that dynamic, alien to many young people in the world who wish to enjoy the same opportunity to graduate as computer engineers, doctors, or industrial designers—to name a few of the careers chosen by my high school classmates—, many friends are receiving handsome dividends wherever they live abroad. The last topics on which our political discussion, which sometimes turns rough, has revolved were the foreign debt and poverty in Cuba. Here I will refer to the former, but the argument I am proposing can be extrapolated to the latter as well.
The friend based in Uruguay—of whom I am very proud because he became an outstanding engineer coming from a social context that is not very prone to deliver professionals—triggered the controversy by sharing a video of the Argentinean congressman and former minister Ricardo López Murphy, where the first thing you hear him say is that the U.S. sanctions regime against Cuba is an “embargo” and not a “blockade”. This twisted narrative pretends to imply that the issue boils down to a choice between one term or the other, with “embargo” representing a set of loose, uncoordinated and even innocent sanctions that Cuba overestimates. On the contrary, whichever category is chosen to designate the aggressive U.S. approach to Cuba, we are talking about—and this is what counts—a comprehensive sanctions regime that hits all the vital points of the island's finances and trade relations. The country is a stinker in the international system—especially after the infamous, Trump-blessed redesignation of it as a state sponsor of terrorism—, while daring to send even an empty ship is an act of extraordinary audacity and spirit of solidarity—or suicide.
A diferencia de lo que dijo el diputado @SantiagoCafiero, en Cuba no hay bloqueo alguno. A Cuba nadie le vende porque se trata de un régimen estafador. Las cosas como son. Basta de decir tonterías. pic.twitter.com/u1RN56OkFR
March 21, 2024— Ricardo López Murphy (@rlopezmurphy)
Those who follow me here know that I am not soft when it comes to pointing out the serious problems that emerge from the wide internal mismanagement, the rampant corruption—increasingly tangible even in the highest levels of the country's leadership—and the severe cutbacks in the exercise of individual and collective rights of all kinds. But Washington's policy is a heavy shadow that serves as a somehow reasonable and plausible argument for many Cuban politicians to evade their responsibility in the national crisis, or as an objective and definitive explanation for certain key negative developments. It vitiates the debate as to where the bad government ends and where the effects that obey exclusively to OFAC's sanctioning arm begin. Returning to López Murphy's video excerpt, the most important point he addressed was the bulky foreign debt that the Island has—it could be in the order of 20 billion dollars—, which makes a few countries and actors want to lend or sell. For the Argentinean, it all boils down to the country having a history of being a swindler or “bad payer”.
I responded to my friends that a serious fact-checking service could give the label “misleading” to López Murphy's statement, because while it has a true basis—Cuba came to take a stand against foreign debt paying in Fidel Castro's rule, and is currently in default—, it maliciously hides all the rich context behind that dynamic. For example, after restructuring its debt with the Paris Club itself in 2015 under the administration of Raúl Castro, Havana was paying for almost four years the amounts agreed to this and other creditors. In 2019 the non-payments began again and it finally defaulted the following year, but that bitter decision had an objective and verifiable explanation accepted by the creditors in 2021. In 2019 the first Trump administration had begun a ferocious onslaught against the Cuban economy, sanctioning the state-owned fuel importing company, and closing practically all the avenues that Obama had enabled to boost U.S. travel to Cuba—which allowed setting record figures in the decisive tourism sector.
Then, that 2021 was the toughest year of the Covid-19 pandemic, so much so that the devastating effects of the pandemic, together with the economy's precipitous fall, led to the most forceful and massive protests against the revolutionary government after 1959. Cuba did not enjoy any relief from U.S. sanctions as even Venezuela did, because the Biden administration gambled that Covid-19 could provide the victory that years of harsh economic and political warfare had failed to deliver. Vetoed from IMF membership, it did not receive the billion-dollar assistance from the global lender that nations free of sanctions and with more robust and resilient economies, such as Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, or Costa Rica, did receive during the pandemic. Since then, the outlook has only gotten bleaker. So when my friends abroad see statements like López Murphy's they only notice that they serve to feed the failed regime narrative they associate with the Cuban Revolution. They are not interested in contextualizing, inquiring into how foreign debt is a hot problem for many countries with fewer or no financial barriers, let alone pointing out the hypocrisy of a so-called “economist” speaking from a country indebted to the marrow of its bones to the IMF itself. And that's unfair.
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