42 Chapter 2
social benefits such as workers’ lunches, closing down noneconomic
projects launched during the Battle of Ideas; broadening opportunities
for self-employment, and a wide release of prisoners who had com-
mitted offenses against the security of the state as a gesture of good-
will toward the Catholic Church and other international actors.
Raúl has fostered this discussion because discontent, indolence,
apathy, and various forms of corruption have been developing with
force lately. For example, from January 2009 until May 2010 the
country saw the death of 26 patients in the Havana Psychiatric Hospi-
tal,^26 the dismissal in March 2009 of top-level government cadres such
as Secretary of State Felipe Perez Roque and Vice President Carlos
Lage, the dismissal of General Acevedo, Director of the Institute of
Civil Aeronautics of Cuba, in March 2010, and a strong media cam-
paign against the government at the beginning of 2010 because of the
death of the prisoner Orlando Zapata in a hunger strike and Guill-
ermo Fariñas’s hunger strike asking for the release of imprisoned dis-
sidents.
Now, bearing in mind the various proposals that have been
expressed in different forums in Cuba, I shall proceed to formulate
some possible features that the Cuban model of socialism might adopt
and to identify the scenarios favorable to the above-mentioned model
and the policy alternatives that, if adopted by the government, would
contribute to the crystallization of the best-case scenario: a new model
of socialism for the twenty-first century. I do this as a contribution to
a debate that is being conducted in my country and abroad, but I want
to stress that these suggestions are made humbly and do not preclude
other analyses and proposals (Hernández, 2010a, 2010b; Alzugaray,
2009b; Alonso, 2007; Martínez, 1993, 2001; Lopez-Segrera, 1995b,
1997, 1998; Guanche, 2009a, 2009b; Tablada, 2007; Campos, 2007;
Chaguaceda, 2009; Segura, 2008, 2010).
- No such thing had ever happened before in the Cuban health care system.