After 62 years, Cuba is today a poorer and a more unequal and repressive society.
The 8th Congress of the PCC is going to be held in a country in which that party and its government no longer command, but obey a tiny mafia group that controls the main economic resources, monopolizes the use of force and decides the national and international direction of the country. The Congress is landscape, scenery. The mafia caste controls these institutions, not the other way around.
That power elite is present in all state institutions but is not subordinated or controlled by them. It is located outside of any effective control of the Party, the People’s Power Assembly, the Council of State or the General Controller’s Office. Faced with this reality, it is not the time to ask or continue to wait for reforms of state and party institutions that have been stripped of all real decision-making power. Political and military power is exercised in a totalitarian way by that caste that has also accumulated immense economic power through their personal control over GAESA.
It is necessary to take the reins of that oligopoly, -which today has unknown shareholders, as well as main offices and bank accounts located abroad. GAESA is also an entity linked to illegal international operations that compromise the prestige and national security of the country. This entity must be subjected to a strict, transparent and independent audit and its resources be redirected urgently towards the critical situation of health services and food and medicine production.
What legacy do these 62 years leave behind? A society with broad sectors in poverty, with water, health, education and transportation services in ruins. With a housing deficit in the millions. A people plagued with fines and impossible prices for basic services and food. A society subjected to the longest-lived dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere. A country in ruins controlled by a group of mafia families who flaunt their opulence before a starving people. There is no way to mask that reality with speeches and doctrines in the 8th Congress of the PCC.
The current system forms an integral whole that cannot be reformed selectively, by sections, like a Frankenstein. We need freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Without the rule of law the economy cannot be fixed and without freedom and democracy the social rights of the less privileged cannot be protected. The current system is politically and economically irreparable. It must be replaced comprehensively. And for this, it is also necessary –among all- to replace the mafia elite with a legitimate government. Any partial reform under its control will only serve to prolong the agony of society.
Today it is clear that the feeling of all Cubans is Patria y Vida, and that we are already raising definitive questions about our future in the short, medium and long term. Yes, our future, because what is at stake from now on is the future of all Cubans.
Today it is necessary to answer frankly and fully some obvious questions:
Who turned the country over to foreign interests?
Who destroyed the national productive apparatus and condemned entire generations to poverty and the search for a better future beyond the seas?
Who are persecuting free thought, art and the very essence of freedom by killing, torturing, imprisoning and banishing our brothers and sisters?
Who allowed foreign intelligence advisers and troops to establish themselves in our homeland to then do the same in Venezuela?
Who allied themselves with international drug trafficking to profit from crime thus muddying Martí’s legacy?
Where are the billions of dollars that our families save and send to Cuba when they give us devalued Cuban pesos? Who controls that money and who controls those who seize it?
In whose name are the shares of GAESA companies and why are their main offices located in other countries?
Who stole (and continue to steal) every last dollar from these companies to take them to tax havens, and to bank accounts abroad outside of all institutional control?
Who traffic in our doctors, export them to enslave them with abusive contracts that deny their labor rights, take 80% of their wages, force them to work as informants against their own patients and expose them to death while in our hospitals their absence is so sadly felt?
Who sells abroad the drugs produced by the national industry and then orders them to be destroyed to justify the charge for care to false patients reflected by their adulterated medical statistics? All this while our loved ones die due to the lack of the most basic medicines in all the national hospitals and pharmacies.
Who is responsible today, six decades later, for the constant growth of poverty, the abandonment of public services and the food and medicine crisis faced by ordinary citizens?
The answer is obvious: the same ones who continue to demand sacrifices from the people and oppose any important change while they live in plenty.
The new Cuba will belong to all and will be for everyone, without distinction of skin, creed, ideology or opinion, the Cuba that we will build together; because a Cuban is a Cuban in Havana and Pinar del Río, in Miami or New York, in Tokyo or Madrid.
We are a transnational society divided in two by the current system. Those who broke our families, prevented all contact between them for many years and still treat us as second-class citizens have presented the exiles as a hotbed of hatred and revenge waiting for the moment to take away from the people their homes, schools and health centers. Today it is clear that they were the ones who turned those services into ruins. What now sustains the economy of many families in Cuba are the remittances sent by their relatives from abroad. Those who nevertheless still require a permit – under the euphemism of “enabled passport” – to be able to visit the country in which they were born. We Cubans do not need reconciliation to be preached to us. We are reconciled.
Those of us abroad will help to repair and build the million homes that are needed.
We will finally be able to reunify and rebuild the Great Cuban Nation. Among all, we have what it takes to relaunch Cuba in the world and to begin immediately to reverse poverty and promote prosperity. Not in 20 years, not in 25 years. In just 5 years Cuba will be another.
The Cuban people is just one and we have the human resources, the talent, the initiative, the global relationships and the financial resources to achieve that prosperous Cuba for the good of all. Together we can build that future, and finally connect Cuba to the world of the 21st century.
It’s over! The time is over to go from congress to congress begging for reforms, getting frustrated with the crumbs and waiting for the next one to see if we have better luck.
It is time for those who act as absolute owners of our lives to step down. We don’t want them, we don’t need them.
Women, men, young, old, white, black, living on the island or in exile. Today, We are One!
FOUNDATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN CUBA
April 13, 2021