Cuba Goes Old-School on the Millennium Goals, What’s Next?

Cuba Goes Old-School on the Millennium Goals, What's Next?
October 10, 2013
Graham Sowa

HAVANA TIMES – I swear everything is slower in the Caribbean. However,
my Cubana Airlines wall calendar affirms that time continues its steady
countdown to the 2015 due-date of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Cuba will be one of the few countries not asking for extensions on the
majority of the United Nation's homework assignments to the world.

When implementation of the MDGs began in 1990 Cuba was already nearing
the finish line.

The first decades of the Revolution saw Cuba move from the best of the
worst in Latin America to being on par with Canada and European
countries in terms of aggregate health, education, and social development.

The 1980's came with plenty of foreign aid and solidarity from the
Soviet Union, but then all of that went when the decade came to a close.

The Special Period began in earnest right when Cuba should have been
showing everyone else how it had already pulled off most of the MDGs.

The MDGs, unlike many foreign development programs, are more insulated
from the politics of economics than most of the developing world is used to.

The inclusiveness of the MDGs to solutions originating from various
rationalities and ideologies allows for the same thing that is always in
vogue for the free-market types: a marketplace of ideas where solutions
are judged by their outputs more than their methods.

Countries are allowed to serve as models to one another in their common
pursuit, by different methods, of the same development goals.

Of course, in 1990, the last place most people were looking to advice on
the Millennium Development Goals were the ex-Soviet member states and
increasingly out-on-a-limb Cuba.

Now, with less than two years left, everyone should probably take
another look around the United Nations General Assembly meeting room and
assess where they are, and how they got there.

Globally, the economic goal of increased income (I should say increased
income for the poor, because the rich seem to have interpreted that this
applies to them as well) was met 5 years early.

However goals such as maternal and child mortality, sanitation, and
education will remain on the to-do list well past the 2015 due-date.

Cuba has done much better at achieving goals in those last three
categories of the MDGs than increasing income and real purchasing power
of the Cuban worker, which decreased, and remains stagnate.

On the contrary, the countries that have increased incomes for the rich
and poor alike have not translated that income growth into adequate
social, health, and education development to meet the MDGs. Those goals
will not be met on a global level.

In a world in which people were not so committed to ideology perhaps
there would be an easy way to merge the successes of increased income in
some countries with increased social, health and education development
in others.

However, in Cuba's case, the model is further complicated by being
largely analogue.

Most other developing countries rely on digital technology that is
orders of magnitude more powerful than what Cuba has at its disposal.
These countries are not looking for solutions that make their investment
in international information-technology look like poor foresight.

The adolescents of Nigeria are likely to touch a tactile screen to turn
the pages of "Things Fall Apart".

Meanwhile, in Cuba, "La Edad de Oro" will continue to be published in
the dead-tree version.

If Cuba wants to make its path to development navigable to other
countries it will need to hurry up and digitize.

The next set of development goals is probably not going to leave much
room for analogue solutions, no matter how good they are.

Source: "Cuba Goes Old-School on the Millennium Goals, What's Next? -
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