Politics Should Be Subordinate to Law, Not the Opposite
By Benjamín Noria
HAVANA TIMES – Immanuel Kant wrote in his book Theory and Praxis that for a republic to exist, politics must be subordinate to law, not law to politics.
This explains why there is no rule of law in Cuba but rather an autocracy or despotism. When law is subordinated to politics, things happen like the harassment by State Security of Alina Barbara Lopez, a historian living in Matanzas. This courageous woman has spoken openly everywhere about the abuses, arbitrariness, and human rights violations of the Cuban government.
What Lopez is doing is the same as what intellectuals like Voltaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, and Engels did in their time, fighting against absolutist systems —including Fidel Castro himself, who struggled to overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Without the challenges posed by these figures against authoritarian traditions, there would have been no abolition of slavery or women’s right to vote.
In his definition of revolution presented at Jose Marti Plaza on May 1, 2000, Fidel Castro said that revolution is “changing everything that must be changed.” However, as we have seen over 66 years, the same economic situation persists, and the rulers cling to maintaining the same totalitarian state. Fanaticism has blinded the Cuban government for decades, leading it to neglect the needs of the people and the natural rights of human beings.
Cuba does not belong to Cubans; it belongs to the Castro dynasty. Sovereignty does not reside with the people as the Communist Party claims. The government believes that it is the state’s role to direct economic life, sponsoring state interventionism as the guarantor of social justice. The absence of free elections over defined periods prevents a process in which voters directly choose candidates for public office and replace a president who has completed their term or governed with irregularities, incompetence, or ineptitude.
The government is not obliged to be accountable to the people for its poor management, as, in dictatorships, such administrative accountability does not exist legally.
This is the problem with the Cuban government. Until it is willing to change its framework, abandon conservatism, allow a free market economy, encourage creative freedom, and promote private initiative, no change will be possible. It must stop playing the victim of the US embargo and take action. Human actions are what count.
Now we can only wait for the nation’s fate, which is highly uncertain. What is certain, however, is that there will be no reforms akin to Glasnost or Perestroika to dismantle what the Castro regime has done to this country. The misery, poor quality of life, and economic darkness left by the regime cannot even be compared to the plagues that, according to the Bible, God sent to the Pharaoh of Egypt for arbitrarily holding the people of Israel captive.
Simple sell a large part of Cuba to China and bank roll the Cuban government to avoid total collapse!
seems like the amount of money it would take to finally resolve the electrical grid problems is equal to what the Cuban government spent building new hotels recently absolutely revealing ‘mental midget economics’ can succeed in destroying a country as massive sub-human conditions demoralize millions of average family citizens: everyone is figuritively and literally in the dark!