Rafaela Cruz, a Cuban journalist and economist, asserts that Cuba’s current economic crisis is a result of its socialist system that concentrates “political power in an elite, keeping the civilian population atomized and economically dependent on the State.”
“We are living through the result of six decades of a system – socialism, statism – that has caused more havoc wherever it has been implemented than the hordes of Attila the Hun. There is not a single historical example of a successful socialist economy in relation to its capitalist counterparts.”
“The people must be deprived of any hope for real, sustainable and growing improvement within socialism, by demonstrating to them in historical and economic terms that, as a parasitic system, it will always take more than it can give; but we must also eliminate all desire —through ignorance or short-termism— for improvement within this system, and stop rejoicing when the economic situation improves slightly —out of humanity, they say— when the only way out of this eternal crisis is to reach a situation so bad that the parasite’s own survival is impossible. And yes, for that we must suffer. Has any people ever achieved freedom and prosperity without paying a toll in suffering?
“The path to [Cuban] prosperity, to the dignity that only being free can bring, does not lie in improving socialism, but in killing it; and to do that we will probably have to suffer more hunger, more blackouts, more of all those deprivations that we have been suffering for decades — sometimes more, sometimes less — and that we will only completely overcome when socialism disappears . We have to reach our darkest moment if we ever want to see the light.”
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Cruz, Crisis and socialism in Cuba: the road to the end, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 22, 2025) Here are references to other blog posts about Cruz. . And here is a list of articles by Cruz in Diario de Cuba.