As we dole out intellectually dead budgets, Cuba shows how commitment for the downtrodden can make a country great!

With another forgettable budget being presented in India, let me show how real commitment for the downtrodden can alter a country’s economic landscape! When the capitalist West won the Cold War against Soviet Union and Eastern European nations, it became an underlined conclusion among political pundits and in fact a common perception that capitalism was the real path for success – rather than socialism, which was made to appear as a sure shot road to economic doom! However, this self-ratified superiority of capitalism and the entire Western chest-thumping exercise that existed during those times and even the succeeding decades are all but gone. United States is grinding it out through an extended recession streak and Europe is literally struggling to keep the eurozone in one piece, with the entire eurozone on the verge of collapsing like a broken jigsaw puzzle. The recession in Europe and North America, which started in 2008, is like a never-ending nightmare with no sight of revival whatsoever! Reports of frequent protests all across Europe with people ransacking and vandalizing public property tell volumes about the distorted economic model of the entire region. One such set of protests – the Occupy Wall Street movement – epitomized the public outrage against the capitalistic style of governance in the United States. What worked for Barack Obama during these times of instability, were perhaps his pseudo-socialistic doctrines, which marked the beginning of a new economic era in a country that was once considered an unrelenting proponent of and for capitalism. In similar lines, the current chaos in developed economies too is speeding a transition towards a new economic pattern... a pattern that is gradually reinstating the very essence of socialism once more!

Spearheading this latent movement forever has been Cuba, which has shown incredible resilience against the American tirade and in many spheres is much better placed than most capitalist countries across the globe. The US trade embargo against Cuba – which the Cubans prefer to call an “economic blockade” – with its entire wherewithal could not destabilize their economy. An example typifying how the United States has continuously bullied Cuba was when America stalled the passage of a Swedish medical equipment consignment on the ground that the filters attached with the instruments were patented under US law. In similar fashion, America has regularly curtailed transactions of Cuba with various countries and corporations – whether it was to do with importing diagnostic instruments from Japan, chemicals from Italy, or X-Ray machines from France. But in spite of such attempts to distort and damage the Cuban economy, the country discovered many avenues to bypass the truant American meddling, by entering into joint ventures with foreign corporations and infusing investment in their home turf. The tie-ups Cuba managed included corporations from Germany, France, Brazil, Canada and even UK. The total project outlay from foreign collaboration in Cuba has surpassed $5 billion and is ever increasing now, involving around 60 different countries in 40 different sectors with the total number of such projects exceeding 240! That’s an incredible feat considering that Cuba has been economically isolated by the United States for decades now, with very few political and economic patronages worth mentioning. They did it on their own and did it with a socialistic approach! They escaped the clutches of recession, which shaped the misery of most Western nations, with their committed socialistic bent; and their economy is now advancing at an astronomical rate of 9.6 per cent per annum.

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