As the surging private sector is attacked by Cuba’s regime poverty will increase.
The Cuban economic czar, Marino Murillo, demonstrated once again how Castro’s “civilian”- military power, behaves like an ostrich sinking their heads in the sand, in this case, to evade and deny reality over and over again.
The Cuban vice president said that Raul’s economic “reforms” do not go well because lack of preparation by the bureaucracy in charge of the enforcement. He specified that there have been “more errors than virtues” and a “distancing” between the initial objectives and its practice.”
The official added that there were “flaws” in the content and in the upgrading of bureaucrats, thus announced that from now on everything will work wonders and that they will hold “new seminars to raise awareness of the new legal rules on the business structure” .
The trivial approach to hide the true causes of adverse realities is already secular in the upper echelons of Castro’s power.
For starters, even with new reforms, the active Stalinist centralism implanted by Che Guevara half a century ago cannot be mended. Even in a less centralized socialist economy, based on economic statistics and a certain autonomy of state enterprises, reforms won’t work. Simply put, socialism is not reformable. If there are any doubts about it, ask Mr. Gorbachev.
It is clear that this is not a bad application of the so-called “update” of Stalinism, but that the timid positive changes that have been made are always stopped or reversed. President Obama told the Cuban people on live TV that there is no future for Cuba if a large and prosperous private sector is not created. Obama gave them good advice, but they took it as a message from the enemy and reverted the little they had advanced.
Every day new obstacles are announced. Now self-employed entrepreneurs who hire new employees will have to increase their salaries as they hire more workers; nobody will be able to rent more than four rooms to tourists; it will be more difficult to apply for a self-employment license and every self-employed person is required to operate through an account at a state owned bank which is subject to confiscation at any time.
To make matters worse, the government, instead of facilitating foreign investment which the nation urgently needs, makes it more difficult. This is expressed in a report by IE Business School presented in Madrid. Spanish businessmen who swallowed the story of Raul Castro as a reformer now complain that investment in Cuba “stagnates for lack of reforms.”
In good creole you could say: “they looked for it and got it”. Nor did they lack good advice from the Cuban opposition about who they were dealing with.
Discontent and frustration grows among Cuban entrepreneurs, who are the only ones that can develop the economy and fight the poverty and despair of Cubans.
Roberto, a retiree, told independent journalist Iván García: “they dismantled all the private agros with forklifts, and now you walk through the state agromarkets and you will only find empty shelfs”
Carlos Márquez, a self-employed in Varadero Beach , told an independent journalist that the SuperMachi restaurant was for several years the most visited by domestic and foreign tourists. The business was going so well that the owners opened a second restaurant. So the regime took away their license and closed both restaurants. Their owners left for Cancun, Mexico, opened another SuperMachi over there, brought several of their employees from the Island, and they are achieving great success.
The lesson to be learned here is that with freedom there is prosperity, but without it there is misery.
The Castro elite insists on fighting wealth instead of poverty. Not even Kafka could imagine something like that.