Letter: A look at socialism’s devastating affect on Cuba’s economy

One of the first economic measures introduced by the Castro revolution after 1959 was the 50 percent% reduction in rent people paid for apartments and single-family homes. residences. This Urban Reform Law was hailed as a victory for the lower and middle classes; it and a measure that would stimulate the economy because renters would have more money to spend.

The result was very different. The law had a snowball effect on the economy.

Investors in apartments and commercial real estate refused to further invest. The real-estate industry was paralyzed. Cement plants, plumbing companies, wood manufacturing electronic factories and other related enterprises closed. Many went bankrupt. The economy entered a period of stagnation and which never recovered.

Other “revolutionary” or socialist laws, such as the “Agrarian Reform Law” which confiscated, without payment, privately owned land, had similar results. Also, The confiscation of large and small businesses also produced an economic paralysis and threw hundreds of thousands of workers to the unemployment lines.

All these government measures and actions of the government were accompanied by a demonization of capitalism, private enterprise and money-making. Business enterprises, as well as money, were considered evil.

“Money is the evil intermediary” said Fidel Castro, “between what man produces and what man consumes.” Two years later, after the beginning of the revolution the economy took entered into a major downward spiral. massive unemployment developed; inflation became out of control; all commercial and industrial production was paralyzed. The country rapidly followed this socialist phase with a Marxist-Leninist period, with rationing of most products, militarization of society, alliance with the Soviet Union, conflict with the United States and the migration of more than 2 million Cubans.

The economy never recovered. The middle and upper classes were destroyed, and workers joined the ranks of the unemployed, underemployed or of the state, working for miserable wages.

Jaime Suchlicki,

Cuban Studies Institute,

Coral Gables