Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Despite the demolition of the economy and the impossibility of living with a minimum of decorum in today’s Cuba, the regime has already figured out how to destroy the fighting spirit of its people and make them flee the country instead of fighting for change.
The power outages that plague the whole of its territory result from failed plans to renovate the electric grid, which have been proposed and then postponed dozens of times. The problem is budgetary. In the scale of priorities and criteria, the electrical grid has always been relegated to the list of budgetary objectives. Among other reasons, because the Cuban government is always looking for an ally country to give it oil free of charge to run its power plants.
The green transition plans have never materialized. The government is aware of the need for such a transition, which would imply decentralizing the national power grid by region. But, for political reasons so common to Latin America, centralism is the decision-making model that prevails and rejects decentralization, regionalization, or true federalism.
Along with the conviction that centralism is the only possible way to ensure the political regime’s sustainability, budgetary decisions run parallel, as they have to. These decisions are eminently political since they give the ruling class its raison d’être.
The regime dedicates much of the national budget to maintaining its Armed Forces and internal and external security institutions. A portion of the budget that could be dedicated to renovating the electrical grid goes directly to the apparatus of political control of society. With cynicism and resignation, the Cuban government’s logic is that it is preferable to control the population repressively than to attend to and resolve their demands regarding the quality of life, health care, or schooling.
It is logic that dates back long ago. It did not begin now but was imposed as a method of governance when the Soviet government’s subsidy to Cuba to simulate a prosperous economy disappeared.
From 1961 to 1989, the U.S. blockade was a useful propaganda tool for the Cuban revolution, although it did not hinder the Cuban economy due to the constant flow of Soviet support. There was free medicine and quality education for all. A middle class flourished and aspired to buy their LADA, the popular Soviet vehicle in Cuba. Cuba aspired to be the showcase for all of Latin America to see how Cubans lived under their successful socialism. It was a no-brainer. Eighty million dollars a day was a cost the Soviet Union was willing to pay to have the best socialist propaganda in the Americas. And Castro used it brilliantly to aggrandize his political figure and satisfy his masters in Moscow.
But everything changed when the Soviet Union disappeared practically overnight, and its subsidy to Cuba ended. At that moment, in 1990-91, when Fidel invented the concept of the Special Period, Cuba and Cubans’ return to planet Earth began. The need to create an economy based on its true productive potential and to leave behind the fantasy of Soviet funds always ready to solve any need was imposed.
Its military interventions in Africa and Latin America also came to an end. Cuba had led them but with funds and weapons provided by the Soviet Union. The last Cuban military feat overseas was the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The last remnant of Cuban guerrillas in Latin America is the ELN in Colombia. They are still militarily active but are now closely linked to drug trafficking, like the FARC, in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
That “Bolivarian” dream of Fidel Castro became an armed service apparatus of drug trafficking.
Today, the dream of socialist Cuba is ending in economic and social ruin, unethical and devoid of utopia, but with a repressive apparatus unique in Latin America capable of keeping the regime in power, even if they are the last inhabitants of the country. In the previous three years, more than one million Cubans have fled the country, desperate for the prevailing situation of hunger and lack of freedom.
The time is approaching when more Cubans will live outside the island than inside. That is what is left of the socialist revolution. Some dupes still believe in that fantasy. AMLO is one of them, not because he is incautious but because he considers it an option of refuge if things get complicated in Mexico or with the United States. Just as Carlos Salinas de Gortari did.
According to the international organization Prisoners Defenders, the number of political prisoners in Cuba is increasing month by month. It currently counts 1,113 political detainees. It affirms that the networks are spreading to imprison more and more citizens. Some say that “all Cubans are prisoners, although some a little more than others. Prisoners Defenders says that “In addition to the raids since 11J against human rights and political activists, independent artists, citizen demonstrators or independent journalists, now they are trying to silence with the terror of prison all the relatives of these victims”.
Continues Prisoners Defenders: “Arrests at peaceful protests and digital monitoring by the Cuban regime lead 13 citizens to political imprisonment this September.”
The Cuban state services’ spying system spends much of its time spying on citizens to detect who might question the regime. Instead of addressing citizen dissatisfaction, they simply want to repress it.
In this method lies the regime’s budgetary logic. Instead of attending to, maintaining, and modernizing the electric power supply network, they dedicate the budget as a priority to investigate and spy on citizens protesting the lack of electricity.
Citizen unrest, combined with police repression, makes Cubans choose to flee their country. Basically, this is what the regime wants: fewer mouths to feed and fewer people capable of protesting.
This mendacity of the regime is destroying the spirit and soul of the Cuban people. It is the perfect recipe for the prolongation of the dictatorship, which, in addition, is full of self-praise for its “resistance to imperialist aggression”.
The Cuban government has found a way not to give up power. Basically, it is to make Cubans feel that their only option in life is to flee. And Maduro, as a good disciple of Fidel, learned the lesson: to stay in power, you have to break the fighting spirit of a people, making them feel the futility of resistance.
@rpascoep
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