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CUBA: START THE DEBATE
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
SEPTEMBER 2009 (IPS) - Cuba's official newspaper and organ of the Communist Party recently published a story that stunned the populace: in a country where the lack of food has become endemic and causes the people dire economic hardship, tonnes of agricultural products were left to rot outside the city of Havana because there were neither the containers nor the vehicles nor the organisational capacity to transport them, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.
In this article, Padura writes that there is an urgent need to debate the current situation in Cuba, but only if the debate is real and if the critical analysis is used as more than a political thermometer or collective catharsis. It must be channelled into the effort to implement structural and conceptual changes that will make it possible not only to grow more plantains and vegetables but also, and most important, to make sure that they make it out of the fields and to the people at prices they can afford.
Since the early 1990s when their protector the Soviet Union disappeared, Cubans have lived under constant and debilitating economic pressure, with chronic shortages that have made mere survival a daily struggle. Dreaming of a better life and having a right to express this dream and to identify the problems impeding it can be considered as a reward for their prolonged resistance. So let the debate begin - a real debate.
(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.
//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND,
THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM// (END/2009)
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