Cuba: when dependence replaces development

Crises are often perceived as sudden events, as if a system collapsed overnight. Reality, however, tends to be different: collapses are not events, they are processes. Cuba did not wake up one day in crisis; it got there after decades of accumulated decisions, sustained dependence, and structural problems that were never resolved.

Before its political transformation, the island showed signs of economic development, but deeply unequal ones. Later, in an attempt to correct that inequality, it adopted a model that sought social justice but ended up creating another form of fragility: a highly centralized economy dependent on outside actors.

First it was the United States, then the Soviet Union, then Venezuela. The allies changed, but the pattern did not. Stability did not come from self-sufficiency, but from outside support. And whenever that support disappeared, the system began to totter again.

This pattern is not unique to Cuba. It reflects a broader behavior in humanity: the tendency to solve immediate problems without correcting their root causes. Structural solutions are replaced by temporary relief.

From a Semiversal approach, this raises an uncomfortable but necessary question. Are we building sustainable systems, or simply prolonging their fragility?

Cuba shows us that a society can stay standing for years, even decades, without being truly stable. But it also reminds us that when systems depend more on external factors than on their own soundness, collapse is not a possibility… it is an inevitability waiting to happen.