Two reports from Cuba Siglo 21 published this Thursday denounce the impact of totalitarianism on society Cuban. The dossier Totalitarianism in Cuba analyzes three features that have characterized the system on the Island: the annihilation of private property, corruption and exodus.
The author considers that the nationalization of property, which has suppressed the freedom of enterprise and marketconstitutes the key element that, in the absence of a patron to finance its deficiencies, has led to the multisystem crisis and more than 80% of the population to extreme poverty.
The study provides a brief account of how the Cuban Government in the second half of the 20th century seized the country’s wealth beginning in May 1959, when, with the First Agrarian Reform, 40% of the confiscated land did not pass. at the hands of the peasants but of the State. By 1975, the state latifundium already covered 75% of the best arable lands in the country.
According to the report, something similar happened with private companies. In 1960, 381 large industrial and commercial companies were expropriated, a process that ended in 1968 with the annihilation of more than 55,000 small and medium-sized companies that were still in Cuban hands.
The consequences are clearly visible, according to the study. Cuba went from being one of the countries with the highest standard of living in Latin America to one of the poorest. Hence the author defines in his other report that In the year 2024, Cuba’s situation will approach that of Haiti: the most backward country in the Western Hemispherel. The author has called this historical setback “Haitianization.”
The author attributes the origin of this “Haitianization” to the fact that The revolutionary government dismantled civil society, eradicated private property, suppressed freedoms and implemented a totalitarian system with which the citizen, an active and essential agent for social progress, disappeared.
The inefficiency of the centralized economy was recognized in 2018 by the Comptroller’s Office of the Republic: of 402 companies verified, 39% were evaluated as poor and 19% as deficient, with losses of more than 2,000 million pesos, double that detected the previous year, when 369 companies They showed losses of 1,057 million.
The report includes a chronology of corruption scandals beginning in 1987 with the president of the Institute of Civil Aeronautics, Luis Orlando Domínguez Muñiz—who had held the position of secretary of the Union of Young Communists and was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (PCC). ).
All Efforts to control corruption have been unsuccessful. But corruption went to a higher scale when in the first decades of the 21st century the communist regime, as happened in Venezuela, Russia and other countries in the world, was transformed into a mafia state controlled by an oligarchy.
According to the Cuba Siglo 21 report, in this new context, The Comptroller’s Office of the Republic is an entelechy without real power to inspect the economy in the hands of the main embezzler of national wealth, which is the new oligarchy. Its main spawn, the military conglomerate (holding) GAESAcannot be audited and operates behind the backs not only of the comptroller’s office itself, but of all institutional mechanisms and – what is worse – outside and against the interests of the people.
The solution to the current crisis has to start from the recognition of the totalitarian State as the main cause of widespread corruption, restore citizen freedoms, decentralize the economy and allow the formation of a productive national class, the report states.
Regarding the exodus, the author affirms that its main cause is internal. This began before the administrations of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama; before the “reformist” measures implemented by Raúl Castro in 2008, the Adjustment Law of 1966, and even before the breaking of diplomatic relations in 1961. The exodus will continue because it is impossible to stop it without cutting its root: the totalitarian model and the chronic and massive poverty it has generated.
The collapse of the Cuban totalitarian governance system or regime is a fact. The attempted solution to the Cuban crisis through changes of officials or any other cosmetic change is insufficient. The experience of the last century shows that, in Cuba, both due to its history, its culture and its current state, any solution to the current crisis requires structural changes.
“What is debatable is, in any case, the way (peaceful or violent) in which it will inevitably transition to another system and whether the society that emerges will still be autocratic (although no longer totalitarian) or finally democratic,” says Cuba Siglo 21.
The author of the reports believes that the recently emerged social movement For the 5 Freedoms against Totalitarianism is encouraging, which proposes a path towards change through the reestablishment of basic freedoms essential to ensure that the change that occurs is genuine and points towards a democratic society, with the rule of law and a market economy.
