Cuba Takes Some New Steps Backwards

The domino game is blocked

Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES — Peter was a friend of mine from high school and his grandfather once told me in Puerto Padre: “These people hate habaneros (Havana residents)”.

He was referring to all those rebels who governed the country and are still leading the most miserable revolution you can imagine in their old age.

I am going to have to think that this old rascal was right, just like in everything else, if I don’t, it’ll be impossible to understand at this point why they have shut the doors to the possibility of entrepreneurship, imagination, creativity, inventions that benefit the country, all of our society. From now on, people who were in a tight spot won’t be able to improve their situation because of the simple fact that they screw over whoever is beginning to take off.

You can already hear “abducted” voices warning that it will be bad for whoever wanted to set up a business, but those who already have their own businesses still won’t have any problems. That’s not true at all, as of tonight, whoever has a business and isn’t the son of a general, will wake up with nightmares and in a cold sweat several times a night, they won’t live in peace, especially because when a growth and development dynamic of this kind is abruptly cut like this, enthusiasm dies out, people’s willpower dies, optimism dies, the growth chain, motivation, and incentives for the entrepreneur, all die.

They must be suspicious about just how quickly Cubans jump at the opportunity to work with real benefits and maybe they have all the reason to be so from their point of view. They work day and night and end up setting up a business, like all of those people in Cuba used to do when you could and just like the diaspora community has since 1959. They must think that in no time at all, they are going to have them at their level and they will shortly be the motor pushing the economy forward, and this string of incompetent generals want nothing less than finding their shoes being worn by their victims of yesteryear, with all of the outstanding accounts there are.

Otherwise, it’s impossible to explain why a government is stopping an emerging middle class who is beginning to give solutions which are still tentative, but real, genuine and homegrown.

Not only will History not absolve them, but it has prepared a chapter for them in a book that is hermetically closed because of the stench and fetidness that its pages give off.