Carlos Alberto Montaner in The Miami Herald:
Cuba’s reforms won’t work
They were caught in the Panama Canal with their hands in the missile jar.
Castroism doesn’t change. The complicity between Cuba and North Korea proves it. As stated in Havana by the North Korean Army chief of staff, Gen. Kim Kyok Sik: “I visit Cuba to meet with my comrades in the same trench, namely my Cuban comrades.” Lord, have mercy.
In addition, Raúl Castro is very annoyed. The country is a disaster. He said so, publicly, some days ago. The Cubans are thieves and boors, especially the young, who like dirty dancing and the reggaetón. Raúl had promised that everyone would be entitled to a glass of milk and hasn’t managed to provide it. Not even that.
There are fewer eggs, less meat, even less chicken. There’s no way to end rationing or the two-currency scam. The state pays with the bad currency, the worthless money, and sells for the good money, the valuable one. Raúl Castro knows that he’s perpetrating a swindle but refuses to put an end to the crime.
None of this is new. Some 25 years ago, Raúl Castro began to realize that Cuban communism was radically unproductive. Then he sent some of his officials to take management courses in several capitalist countries. He thought it was an administrative problem. He had just read Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s book, and was bedazzled.
At that time, Raúl was still unable to understand that Marxism was a harebrained theory that inevitably led to catastrophe. Fidel aggravated the problem with his ridiculous volunteerism, his inflexibility, his absurd initiatives and his lack of common sense, but did not generate disaster. The problem lay in the theoretical premises.
Today, things are different. By now, Raúl Castro, who no longer fears Fidel and has eliminated from his entourage all of his brother’s acolytes, who has had seven years’ experience as a ruler, knows that collectivist recipes and the gabble of dialectical materialism are only useful for staying in power.
But here comes the paradox. Despite that certainty, Raúl Castro wants to save a system in which neither he nor any of his closest subordinates believe. Why the contradiction? Because it’s not a question of a theoretical battle. When Raúl said that he was not assuming the presidency to bury the system, he really meant that he was not replacing his brother to give up the power.
Continue reading HERE.
The “reforms” aren’t supposed to work, not in the sense of fixing the disaster that is Cuba. Their primary if not sole purpose is to maintain the existing power structure in power. This makes perfect sense, given that the “revolution” wasn’t meant to fix Cuba’s problems, either. Its primary (real) purpose was to establish a totalitarian system with Fidel Castro as dictator-for-life (even though it explicitly and repeatedly promised, before reaching power, that it was all about restoring democracy, which obviously never happened). And the farce goes on.