My Depression in Cuba Comes from Distractions
By Jorge Fernandez Era (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – I fall into depression every time Diaz Canel goes abroad. Believe me, it’s not fear that he won’t come back.
Months given over to depressions.
Mine has to do with thinking about those who replace him at the head of the country. One would like all of them traveling at the same time.
They do, but instead of an airplane, they use caravans of vehicles crisscrossing the island from one end to the other, confirming how great everything is going.
How boring the Plaza of the Revolution gets with Valdes Mesa, Morales Ojeda, Lazo, and Marrero making their rounds. It’s terrible to imagine that suddenly Cuba could be run by the CVPs (Security and Protection Corps) of the Palace of the Revolution.
Marrero has been very active these days, even though his obesity doesn’t come from ever having worked in the Security and Protection Corps. A report in Granma: “Change, don’t get distracted by what brings no results,” cites a phrase from him on one of his outings. Was he referring to socialism?
I don’t think “change” has anything to do with our tropical experiment. In any case, I found the photo accompanying the article significant. It shows the prime minister chatting with four Cubans playing dominoes in a Community Food Kitchen. Could it be that he was criticizing them for being distracted when there are more important things to do?
Like planting so there can actually be community food. Who better than him, who already has the problem solved.
Maybe he gave them the president’s example, he who never hides the fat.
“The idea that to transform ‘one must do things differently,’ and that in each municipality the government structure should resemble its locality, was defended in Guantánamo” by Marrero, the Prime Minister.
He’s been playing the same “Guantanamera” for years. He hides behind a desk to deny that he and his ministers are the ones abstaining from doing anything different.
“The work system that functions well in one municipality does not necessarily work the same way in another,” he reasoned.
Good thing he reasons. The result of all they are (un)doing is that what works badly somewhere works equally badly everywhere else. The “actions aimed at transforming existing problems in the territory” almost always mean that the problems do transform, yes, but by getting worse each day.
The journalist says, “Reality is felt on the ground.”
And if that reality is handled like a domino table…
“The fate of each product must be strictly controlled, as well as the prices agreed in the contracting committee, because the purpose is for the people to acquire it without intermediaries,” notes Marrero, the former Minister of Tourism.
Because of excessive control and the back-and-forth, products arrive battered to their recipients. Contracting committee, my foot… Any day now even the Committees will meddle in that.
No wonder they call those unproductive, desert-like places “Poles,” which were once agricultural enterprises and today they try to revive at all costs. About the results of one of them, Marrero said that the fact that “these yields are achieved demonstrates that we can produce, and that the state enterprise can act as channel and facilitator.”
Honest man. With that “we can produce” he admits that practically nothing is being produced.
Electricity, yes. Days earlier, in a meeting with the director of the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, the prime minister “highlighted the results obtained there compared to last year.” Unflinching, he heard the director say: “We managed to fulfill the accumulated generation plan with more than 190.3 GWh, as well as meet efficiency indicators.” Luckily, the people of Matanzas, sunk in long hours of blackouts, didn’t get to hear him.
Even if they had. The “efficiency indicators” of the News, the Roundtable program, and the “facilitating channels” are higher every day.
“Generation of electricity must be maintained with the greatest availability, reliability, and efficiency possible, until the plant’s capital repair,” the director specified. Marrero added that “the actions carried out by the CTE workers are a living example of how to face difficulties in an institution burdened with objective problems, such as technological obsolescence, limitations in capital repair and maintenance.”
The ones with limitations are us who suffer it. We continue with and maintain an obsolete government that can’t be saved even with a capital-intensive repair.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.