According to Cuba’s corrupt apartheid dictatorship, they made a total of $5.29 billion in payments to their creditors in 2016. That figure is as dubious as it is impressive for an economy that has been in shambles for decades and is run by a venal crime family with billions in stolen cash safely tucked away in their private Swiss bank accounts. Nevertheless, the Castro regime’s claim was happily repeated by a press. The same press that has spent decades desperately trying to bestow legitimacy and credibility on Cuba’s notoriously corrupt and repressive dictatorship.
However, what is impossible to ignore is that this figure comes from a criminal regime that claims to have no political prisoners, that brags its fourth-world healthcare is the best in the world, and that Cuba is a free and democratic society. There are plenty more dubious claims, but you get the picture. Cuba’s Castro dictatorship can claim whatever they want, but history will continue to call bull shit!
Cuba’s former Economics Minister José Luis Rodríguez.
The anxiety affecting the dictator and military higher-ups in charge of Cuba is palpable, eager to dispel their bad international reputation for non-payment, as they yearn to attract unwary foreign investors and receive loans so that they can line their pockets as soon as possible, as they see time running out on them.
This can be inferred when, according to former Economy Minister José Luis Rodríguez, in 2016 the Government paid over 5.29 billion dollars to its foreign creditors. However, many doubts and questions remain in the air that, of course, will never be answered, given the regime’s secrecy.
To begin with, it is astonishing that the Government was able to pay its creditors that kind of money, a huge sum given the size and very poor performance of the Cuban economy, which had its worst year in a long time, to the point that, for the first time in decades, it actually admitted that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had decreased.
This payment was, apparently, made in the context of plummeting subsidies from Venezuela and Brazil, and the low prices for Cuba’s few exportable assets, while nearly 40% of the country’s land remains unharvested, idle and overrun by marabou. Its industrial sector, meanwhile, is burdened by a lack of raw materials and the inexorable deterioration of the economy as a whole. Without cash for imports, the chronic economic crisis worsened dramatically.
No less shocking is that this good news for the financial image of the regime was not publicly announced by a high-ranking Government official, but by a former minister who is now writing the same kind of boring, nonsensical, rigidly socialist articles he drafted when in the 80s he was the deputy director of the World Economy Research Center (CIEM), where he is now an advisor.
The fact that it was Rodríguez who gave the figure to CubaDebate (which debates nothing) raises doubts, as he was the minister (1995-2009) to which Castro assigned the task of skewing, more than anyone, the official economic statistics and figures.
It suffices to recall that in December 2006 Rodríguez claimed, without blushing, that Cuba’s GDP that year had grown by 12.5%, the highest increase recorded in the recent history of Latin America, and the highest in the world that year, outperforming even China, whose GDP grew by 10.7%. Of course, shortly thereafter leading economists on and off the Island in 2006 concluded that Cuba’s GDP had actually risen 3.2%, a third of that officially announced.
Where did they get so much money?
In any case, such a large sum of payments to creditors does not seem credible, and we must take into account here the Castroist practice of falsifying statistics for political purposes.
This culture of statistical manipulation was introduced by Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the early 1960s. As the fledgling president of the National Bank he was incensed to learn that Cuba’s GDP in 1959 had grown by only 1%, so he ordered that it be calculated in another way, so as to inflate it and project a “good image” of the Revolution.
The questions in this case are: where did so much money to pay creditors come from? To what extent did the dictatorship further impoverish the people in order to pay? Was there some behind-the-scenes benefactor who gave that money? Or is Castroism just lying again?
The only good news would be a Disney-like fantasy: that Houdini suddenly reappeared and turned the CUC into a genuine freely convertible currency. Any other answer entails a maneuver exacerbating poverty and hunger in Cuba. Or the Government is lying.
