Cuba: When a Single Phrase Says it All

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – After rumors on social networks that a major crisis was looming due to fuel shortages, those mainly responsible for the national disaster decided, through their Round Table program, to send two of their heavyweights: The Ministers of Economy and Energy, to “explain” to the people what will happen in the immediate future, which in summary is nothing other than the deepening of hunger, blackouts and other calamities that Cubans suffer from within the walls.

Gil, the dull Minister of Economy, asserted that although the situation is difficult, socialism and the Revolution are the only way out, from which some interpretations can be deduced, none of them favorable.

The phrase confirms the regime’s usual intransigence to address the changes that Cuba really needs and thus get out of the systemic crisis that it has suffered for decades, namely, a transition towards democracy, the rule of law and full market freedom. But no, for them it’s about socialism or you die.

A phrase that contains a veiled totalitarianism that recalls, precisely, that fatal slogan of “socialism or death” raised in 1989 or that “homeland or death” of the early 60s, assuming Fidel Castro and his political regime as the incarnation of Cuba and its nationality.

Hence, those who with free thought dissented or dissent from his dictatorship, received, and still receive, from his followers’ insults including the humiliating epithet of sell-outs, worms and lackeys of imperialism.

Totalitarian and fascist phrases in the style of Mussolini who, further back, in the 1930s, uttered in a speech “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”, very similar to those that the Cuban leader also expounded to Cuban intellectuals. decades later: “Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing.”

The phrase precisely leads us to have no way out because if socialism and this aberrant social order that they call revolution is the only alternative that the people can count on to get out of this hell, we will be condemned forever and ever in an infinite loop. of suffering and empty promises. Said in good Cuban: we are in big trouble.

In short, the phrase is of refined cynicism, a mockery of Cubans’ intelligence, since if the facts show us day after day the failure of the system, no one with a living neuron could believe such absurdity.

Read more from the diary of Pedro Pablo Morejon here.