Poverty, the Cuban Dictatorship’s Recourse

Poverty, the Cuban Dictatorship's Recourse / Jeovany Jimenez Vega
Posted on October 22, 2015

Jeovany Jimenz Vega, 12 October 2015 — Doctor A, with 20 years of
uninterrupted work to his credit, owes nothing to the little he receives
in salary. Besides not being enough to feed his family, it has not
allowed him to procure a proper roof and so he still lives in his shabby
doctor's office. After many disappointments, A is now tired of waiting
for an improvement that will never come and chose to add his name to his
polyclinic's list of Collaborators: to go work abroad on some official
"Medical Mission," the only alternative he can see to better his life in
the near term.

Engineer B works in the Mariel Free Zone and almost never seeks the
light of day with his children due to the rigor of his work schedule. He
knows that in the Development Zone foreign engineers and technicians
receive several thousand dollars a month for the exact same work he
does, but at the end of the month he receives some one hundred dollars,
more or less; his share of the hard cash that goes directly from the
foreign firm to the government coffers in exchange for his labor,
without ever passing through his hands, and thus he is exploited by the
government.

Teacher C is overwhelmed with work plans and rare is the day that
doesn't end with her at home planning her next class. During her thirty
year career she has trained two generations; the father who today trusts
his son to her was, in turn, taught to read by her. Nor can C live on
the salary paid by the government and soon she will receive a pension
that will condemn her to penury. But C can't do anything about that,
sowing light in new minds, and despite everything leaving home every
morning to practice the profession she loves.

Cigar maker D is a master of rolling Habaneros. For decades he has taken
the best leaf in the world and made cigars smoked by millionaire
celebrities. Every day D stocks a showcase where this tobacco is sold at
$250 Cuban Convertible Pesos (almost $280 US) a box, and like a good
veteran, every Feria del Habano awakens a confused mixture of pride and
frustration in him that he is unable to define. But D does not receive a
fair wage for rolling what represents $2,000 US a day — instead, like
the majority of Cubans, he receives a pittance compared to the wealth he
generates.

Millions of frustrations accumulated over five decades of the Castro's
misgovernment in Cuba would make this summary interminable. A revolution
that triumphed supposedly to destroy the exploitation of man by man has
over time degenerated into a scheme of domination that ended up sowing
poverty evenly over our country.

When the causes of such an accumulation of so much inequity and misery
are analyzed–regardless of the path followed to reach a synthesis–the
unavoidable conclusion upon identifying the source of all power today in
this tyrannized Cuba, is a single, simple one: the poverty of my people
has been the supreme economic and strategic resource of the Cuban
dictatorship.

In essence, it is not nickel, nor tobacco, nor tourism, nor the
systematic frauds committed by the ETECSA monopoly, neither is it the
"emergent" petrochemical industry (which lost its momentum when Caracas
succumbed); it is not even the billions generated annually by the more
than 60 official Cuban medical missions around the world, which have
allowed the rule of the Castro regime to last for more than a half
century despite governing in such a disastrous manner from any point of
view. If one wants to get down to the heart of the matter, if one wants
to find the common backstory behind all the ills, we will always find
poverty as the sine qua non condition that perpetuates the disaster.

Only a physician sunk in poverty that threatens his family's stability,
his health and even his life, would choose to go work in the opposite
end of the earth, even with the knowledge that they will steal 80% of
what he is supposed to be paid. Only under pressure by the most dire
proverty does that engineer, that tobacco farmer or that teacher find
himself forced to go out every day and plunder life. Only by being
dragged down by the most absurd shortages has it been possible for my
people to remain submerged in this protracted torpor, with their
thinking reduced to what is on their plates and far from the hazy
"utopianisms" of civic philosophy.

Anyone seeking to understand how a once proud and prosperous people, who
knew how to rid themselves of more than one tyrant, ended up in this
shameful state, should firstly disabuse himself of any simplistic view,
such as the one that holds that if we allowed so many outrages, it is
simply because we are a pack of cowards. But anyone who has had a close
encounter of the fourth kind with a Cuban who is all fired up will have
perceived that this explanation is not congruent with a temperament that
tends towards the explosive. The true answer will, of course, be much
more complex.

The causes that keep this game of dominoes closed have to be found in
the devious despotism riding on the train of a Revolution that triumphed
with the unconditional support of 90% of its people. Anyone who ignores
this pair of dichotomies–the initial massive support for that movement,
along with the demogogic, cunning character of the top brass–will go off
in the wrong direction if he tries to understand the evolution of
post-1959 Cuban society, because it was that very initial turmoil that
allowed the despots to modify the social framework according to their
preferences before the eyes of a people who were all too credulous. The
rest was determined by the rebels in the Escambray mountains, hanging
teachers with barbed wire, among other bloody events, which conferred
clear-cut justification on the politico-military elite to reshape the
dog's nest while letting him sleep.

The rest is known history and today, even when more amicable winds are
starting to blow from the North, and weary now of the arguments pulled
from the top hat of the Central Committee–that same elite that once
dictated and sustained a scorched-earth economic policy with regard to
any hint of private or family business–and which continues betting on
keeping us in poverty as the only way of ensuring its continued power.

Thus it was for more than 50 years, and thus it has been since last
December 17. Now almost a year since that historic announcement, and
with both embassies fully functioning, the Cuban regime yet maintains
itself as static as the walls of La Cabaña prison, restricting in just
the same manner all possibility of incentives for the Cuban people, and
continues displaying the same terror as always toward any alternative
that supposes prosperity for my people–for it knows this to be
incompatible with its monopoly of power.

Today every passing minute shows evermore that the true culprits of our
misery and insolvency have always been at Revolution Square; never was
there need to search for them even one meter to the North. They have
always been the same, but today they remain convinced that the only way
to keep a people subdued is to keep them in poverty and privation.

Poverty seen as a deliberate cause of evil, and not as its
consequence–the poverty of my people adopted as a deliberate strategy of
long-term domination: this is the fundamental and revelatory concept
that once and for all puts everything in perspective.

Source: Poverty, the Cuban Dictatorship's Recourse / Jeovany Jimenez
Vega | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/poverty-the-cuban-dictatorships-recourse-jeovany-jimenez-vega/