Raúl Castro has announced that he will postpone his retirement as President of Cuba. He will not leave on Feb. 24, 2018, but on April 19. The dictator claims that the huge damage caused by Hurricane Irma is the cause. In Cuba, almost no one believes that. The rumor circulating through the island is that, within the general’s entourage, there is great unease about engineer Miguel Díaz-Canel, First Vice President and heir designate. Although no evident symptoms exist, apparently certain members of the First Family consider him a crypto-reformist. Frankly, I doubt that.
Some of Raúl’s children and relatives prefer Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez. They like him more. He’s more eloquent. He furiously whipped Barack Obama after the speech the former U.S. president made in Havana. According to Rodríguez, Obama was the same dog with a different collar. He sought the destruction of the revolution through other means. The Cuban chancellor verbalized exactly what Raúl Castro (and especially his son, Alejandro Castro Espín) thought.
Shortly thereafter, Díaz-Canel leaked a video in which he presented himself as a Caribbean Stalin, strict, a communist à outrance, implacable against dissidents. From what I’m told, the speech was aimed at convincing the powerful family that he was trustworthy. He insisted that his nature held not the slightest reformist feature. The video circulated widely but its intended targets were few and all were in the small circle of power.
Raúl will leave the presidency of Cuba in a much worse situation than when he assumed it. His administration has been an absolute failure. At that time, Chávez was alive and the exploitation of Venezuela was great business for the Cubans. They plundered it mercilessly. The thieves in the two countries colluded to steal even the nails. Cuba even leased to his colony the oil rigs that operated in Lake Maracaibo. It was a «briefcase enterprise.» The invoices were for twice the real cost. The equipment came from elsewhere. The profits — half a million dollars a day — were split between the bandits on each coast.
Raúl’s Cuba still uses two currencies. Cuban workers are paid in a useless national currency but have to pay in dollars for everything that’s valuable. Raúl has been incapable of solving this very serious problem. He hasn’t even been able to increase milk production so that children older than 7 can drink a glass whenever they please. The great problem of authoritarian collectivism is the stubborn lack of productivity it generates.
For many years now, the country has been a disaster in terms of filth and shortages, rubble and growing poverty. The fairy tale about glorious and universal medicine is for naive sympathizers. The same happens with education; no Cuban university ranks among the world’s top 400. The government refuses to conduct PISA-based tests (Program for International Student Assessment) because it knows that the young students would end up in the last places.
So, what is, in the end, the Cuban model? They are prodigious policemen. They repress and watch like nobody else. This is the grim legacy that Cuba has left for Venezuela. They learned from the KGB and the Stasi but they improved on their teachers. Power is sustained thanks to the State Security. The government has several Circles of Repression. The most visible and most basic is the shield-and-truncheon police force; the most efficient is the counterintelligence. There are tens of thousands of invisible people engaged in controlling the lives of others, listening to their conversations, derailing their projects, spreading or quashing rumors.
Totalitarian bureaucracy is very expensive. The government, the Party, the security agencies, the Armed Forces get the lion’s share. That’s why they don’t fall but, also for that reason, the societies subjected to the system don’t prosper, and all show the same gray semblance of misery and despair. Raúl Castro knows this but is not willing to change a thing. He said so when his brother fell ill and reiterated it when Fidel died, on Nov. 25, 2016. He didn’t come to power to bury communism. He did it to fail — like his brother.
