Marxism-Leninism and the New Tax Culture in Cuba

Yenisel Rodriguez Perez 

HAVANA TIMES — Today, as the outmoded bureaucracy opens the way to the most conventional forms of neo-liberalism, we’re seeing how the tiresome highly ideological speeches that date back decades are being tossed in the garbage.

The government is reappearing with longings for pragmatism, with political questions becoming concise and sensationalist: work, consume and pay taxes.

But even like this, the transition is bleeding to death from its own incongruities. The sharks forgot to hide their dorsal fins when masquerading as Mickey Mouse.

They insist on appealing to communist harangues, in the most orthodox style of the Marxism-Leninism, attempting to theoretically justify approved neoliberal policies.

Everything is like part of the same cake, with the tax culture as a virtue of the “Socialism of the 21st century.”

They use arguments that are easily refuted by the most mindless of the opposition, but resonate as great truths in the national media.

Only those who know the atmosphere of political oppression that reigns in the country will be able to understand how the Cuban government is able to sustain such arguments – affirming, for example, that the government’s willingness to provide social protection explains the socialist “essence” of the system. “The State will protect the worker,” they say.

Protect them from what? This is a question that would expose them at once.

Are they being protected from domestic neo-liberalism!

But this is a question that they assure doesn’t belong in their bogus television debates. In the solemn look of their journalists is discovered the fear of King Midas.

Now they say that the socialist politics in the country were strengthened in 2012. Nevertheless, the first non-state production and service cooperatives will have to wait for some time this year, 2013. If cooperative labor is the basis of any form of socialism, then what made us more socialist in 2012?

Perhaps in this same light, Marxism-Leninism is being reconsidered as a socialist contribution to the theory and practice of golf?

Who doubts that in this year the most renowned homegrown golfers will be able to collectivize (among family and friends) the clubs whose strokes will sink Cuban society into the deepest of holes?