Human Development in a Country without Freedom?

Human Development in a Country without Freedom? / Cubanet, Jose Hugo
Fernandez
Posted on June 27, 2015

Cubanet.org, Jose Hugo Fernandez, Havana, 23 June 2015 – Recently,
during a conference at the University of Puerto Rico, I was astonished
to hear how a teacher cited Cuba as such an example of Human Development
for the Caribbean region and the whole continent. No political
deliberation was evident in her statements. She simply appealed to
statistics and reports by international institutions, apparently
trusting completely in the reputation of the issuer, and without
reference to other more vital sources for comparison. The thing is that
it made me feel ashamed somehow of representing my country under
circumstances in which perhaps I should have felt proud.

The cynical compromise, well structured and promptly placed in orbit,
can become a historical fact. Machiavelli had it right, more than five
centuries ago, so how much better will our chiefs, his gifted students,
have learned it, even if they act much more savagely.

After shredding almost all basis for Human Development on our little
island, this regime has dedicated itself, with cold and careful
patience, to sugarcoating the pill for prestigious organizations like
the UN, UNESCO and UNICEF (and, through them, the international academic
sphere, particularly that of the European Union), in order to round off
the massacre, making the civilized world believe that its dictatorship –
ingrown and even wild in more than one respect – represents a
revolutionary project of humanistic and emancipating character.

It will fall to historians and sociologists or anthropologists and maybe
to the psychiatrists of the future to explain how, by what devices of
insane policy or under what kind of deception, they managed to win the
upper hand. But what is certain is that last year Cuba occupied 44th
place among the world's countries with the best Human Development
indices, and it is among the best in the Caribbean. One does not know
whether to laugh or to cry in the face of that piece of information, but
so it appears in the most serious records, those which inevitably serve
as reference as much for the naïve and dandruff-covered "experts" as for
the clever accomplices.

Although it is more, it should be pointed out that, as conceived by the
UN itself, the Human Development of each nation is measured, above all,
by the chance the bulk of its inhabitants live a life that meets their
expectations and that permits them to develop all their potential as
human beings.

And so we have a country where the only dream of the young is to flee,
even risking life, in search of material and spiritual growth. Or where
old people constitute a burden that no one can tackle and that,
therefore, moves no one, including the State. Or where citizens are
excluded, harassed, jailed for their political ideas. Or where work has
lost its function as the sustenance for family existence and the essence
of national progress… That country now ranks as a paradigm of Human
Development.

A couple of years ago, the vice minister of foreign relations for Cuba,
Abelardo Moreno, blatantly lied in testimony before the Universal
Periodic Review (EPU) of the United Nations Human Rights Council that
his government has recognized in its laws the indivisibility and
interdependence of all human, political, social and economic rights.

He also said, just like that, that the decrepit dictatorship that he was
representing had submitted to the EPU "without discrimination, without
double standards and without selectivity."

The strange thing, I insist, is not that he would say it but that there
and everywhere he was believed without it occurring to anyone to
undertake onsite and in depth verification which, as we know, is
fundamental for the most basic scientific conclusions.

In the end, it is not my purpose to bore my dear readers with more small
talk about the same thing. So it is that I merely set forth some other
parameters that are used as a guide for measuring the Human Development
of a country:

Respect for human rights. A solid economy based on cutting edge
technology to make it work. Civil society and autonomous and empowered
democratic institutions. Equality between people, regardless of any
prejudice. End of discrimination on the basis of sex, race, ethnic,
class or religious origin. Freedom of thought and of expression.
Elimination of fear of threats to personal security, arbitrary detention
and other violent acts for political reasons. Elimination of misery.
Freedom to develop and fully achieve the potential of each individual.
Elimination of injustice and violations of the law by the state.
Opportunities and guarantees of decent work without exploitation.

Those who take the trouble of weighing these parameters, they will tell
me now if Cuba practices only one of them to sustain its Human
Development trick. As for the rest, as Jesus Christ would say, he who
wants to understand does understand.

About the Author

Jose Hugo Fernandez is the author of, among other works, the novels The
Clan of the Suicides, The Crimes of Aurika, The Butterflies Don't
Flutter on Saturdays and The Parabola of Belen with the Pastors, as well
as two books of stories, The Island of the Black Blackbirds and I Who
Was the Streetcar of Desire, and the book of articles Silhouette Against
the Wall. He lives in Havana where he has worked as an independent
journalist since 1993.

Source: Human Development in a Country without Freedom? / Cubanet, Jose
Hugo Fernandez | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/human-development-in-a-country-without-freedom-cubanet-jose-hugo-fernandez/