Cuba: If Nothing Happens, Something Will Have to Happen
In the long agony that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, those still in power in Cuba have found themselves forced to shed weight.
By Reinaldo Escobar (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – We all aspire to write that definitive text that pins down, like a cockroach under the entomologist’s needle, this terminal-stage of pseudosocialism kept alive through therapeutic abuse.
I warn you that this is not that text, though I may have intended it to be.
I have called what we endure “pseudosocialism,” not to avenge the Republic—which was also labeled “mediated”—but because since April 1961, when the hijacker of the Revolution proclaimed the socialist character of the process without the popular will, the essential principles that identify this system in the text books have scarcely been fulfilled.
Neither has the idea worked that each person should give to society according to their ability, nor that each should receive according to their work. Still less have the ever-growing needs of the population been met, an ambition inscribed as the fundamental law of socialism.
Not even in those years of Soviet subsidies were the five-year plans (does anyone remember them?) fully carried out, which were trumpeted with fanfare at the conclusion of Communist Party Congresses. It was all a mirage, a fraud, a scam.
I have said that the system is in terminal condition because, in the long agony that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and finally in the Soviet Union, those still ruling Cuba have found themselves forced to jettison ballast so as not to sink the country further.
Like in a boring striptease, they began by allowing self-employment, then found it coherent to invite foreign investors, finally gave in with some private businesses, and now are about to dollarize the market.
Only the most intimate garments remain.
I have also said that the system is subject to therapeutic abuse precisely because its terminal agony is being artificially prolonged.
If those still ruling Cuba were truly convinced of the theory, they would have given socialism another opportunity, at another time. And that would not have been a defeat or a surrender, but a timely retreat. Yet all signs indicate that the only purpose of continuing to milk this dead cow is to cling to power—no more, no less—for the enjoyment of the obscene privileges that such a position grants.
We Cubans often find ourselves subjected to the swings of the pendulum of hope. At times it seems that “this” has no repair, but no one dares put an end to it. And then, out of nowhere, rumors circulate that some ninety year old is at death’s door or that a fracture is emerging up above.
It seems as if we were waiting for the child to cry out that the king has no clothes, as though it were so difficult to realize that dialectical materialism, the philosophical basis of historical materialism, was unaware of quantum physics, and that artificial intelligence has no connection whatsoever to the class struggle.
If immortality does not play a cruel joke on us, if the performance of unbreakable unity is not yet another fiction, then something will have to happen—because this cannot be endured any longer.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.