Fearful Debates at “Topics” Magazine

Fearful Debates at "Topics" Magazine / Agustin Lopez
Posted on August 3, 2013

Don't talk about politics because they'll hang you, but I hung myself
first and talked about politics afterwards.

In front of me there are four panelists, I imagine that they're people
who are knowledgeable about the matter, prominent scholars on the
subject of Cuba and its miseries, but full of demagoguery and
revolutionary utopias, they were born, grew up, and came of age within
the political fanaticism of socialism, submissive and obedient to the
directives of the Party and the whims and the ego of the Maximum Leader,
so they substituted their needs and looked for sustenance, listening to
and making what was bad, and they didn't deal with looking for what was
good. I'm not judging, I am trying to be just and find reason.

The debate presented today is: Bread winning: incomes and standards of
living.
Maria del Carmen psychologist and scholar on the subject, presents the
moderator. Jose Luis Rodriguez prestigious professor. Betty Anaya Cruz
also an expert on the subject and the pompous reporter Yasley Carrero
Chavez.

Between them they make a detailed presentation of income, salaries and
standards of living. At no time do they explain how to obtain a salary
that covers the necessities, incomes that raise us to a dignified
standard of living and earn us our bread in an honest, honored form. Of
course, the means don't exist in a socialist system and even less in
this mutation implanted in Cuba. They concur that salaries only cover
50% of the necessities and the other 50% comes from other sources of
income. They don't dare say that it comes from corruption or from
selling or exchanging dignity and decorum for leftovers from the State.
If they make direct political critiques they'll hang.

A leading official representing the State in matters of commerce states
that: "Not even if they raise the salary several times will it cover
basic necessities and resolve the problem." Fuck, I say to myself, why
is this mediocre person here if he already committed suicide, he is more
dead than socialism, I hope he goes home and runs his errands to the
corner store, and to think that he represents society and has a
prominent post.

The panelist Jose Luis Rodriguez uses data to show that people's savings
in banks have grown. Wow! Damn! Now I believe that shame has a price in
the stock market.
So I wrote my first question on a scrap of paper that was on the seats.

If the system implanted in Cuba is socialist, based in Marxism and
Leninism, and I read in one of Lenin's books that the salary earned by
the worker in a socialist system serves to satisfy his basic material
and spiritual needs within the society and still have a little left over
for other enjoyment: What has happened that this hasn't come true, does
the system work? Could we reverse the situation without political changes?

I didn't believe they would give me the floor for my question but they
gave me three minutes in front of the microphone and so I repeated what
I had written and I added these words about the increase in savings: Was
it the honest and honored worked who had saved his salary? The worker
can't save anything. Therefore it's not saving but robbing,
embezzlement, corruption and other undignified forms of raising income.

I understood that all this problem of salary and everything else has
been engendered by a socialist system and we are going to solve it with
more socialism; that's like a doctor faced with a bacterial infection
wanting to heal it with more bacteria. Thank you I'm done.

They finished by giving a social and economic tint to the debate,
supporting the new reformist model, as always avoiding the subject of
necessary political change. Terror and demagoguery. If they directly
confront politics they hang.

19 July 2013

Source: "Fearful Debates at "Topics" Magazine / Agustin Lopez |
Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/fearful-debates-at-topics-magazine-agustin-lopez/