WASHINGTON, United States. – Various press reports indicate that, due to food shortages, blackouts, dengue outbreaks and ongoing protests, Cuba is encouraging foreigners to invest in what the Island Government calls “private business”. It is not known when those measures will go into effect, or if the Biden administration will agree to them.
If when talking about “investments” the regime expects foreign companies to send dollars, that will not happen. The hotel chains, for example, sign administration and cooperation agreements, but the resources for the construction of the hotels belong to the Cuban government, perhaps coming from money laundering or drug trafficking.
Some justify the Cuban crisis with the drop in tourism, the decrease in remittances from the exile community and the decreasing number of Cuban-Americans who travel to the Island. The reduction in the number of travelers led Havana to raffle tickets trip in Miami.
American airlines that fly to Cuba are obliged to be complicit in the discrimination abuses committed by the regime. To Cuban citizens who are not residents of another country, who have their documents in order and their tickets in hand, they are denied boarding the flight back to Cuba and his family by order of the regime. Is it the responsibility of US airlines to comply with such abuses against Cuban citizens, in violation of Cuban and international laws? Are airlines now supposed to treat other people—say, gay, black, or Jewish people—in the same way as foreign governments with whom they have signed contracts? Have US senators and representatives raised this issue with Raúl Castro?
Perhaps the Cuban government considers it to be in its interests to cease this practice before the US comes up with the idea of suspending the permits for the airlines involved to fly to Cuba. If those Cuban citizens have violated the laws of Cuba, where the matter should be dealt with is not in the airports of Florida, but in the Cuban courts.
The real causes go deeper, beginning with the more than 60 years of communist dogma that include the internal blockade, the imprisonment of peasants for selling food, chicken and milk to other Cubans, avoiding the official monopoly on food production.
If President Biden had been able to implement his desire that remittances reach their beneficiaries and not what he himself called “oppressors”, the situation would be different. But the president’s good intentions, like Obama’s hopes for reform in Cuba, have failed.
The blackouts have nothing to do with remittances or tourism. On the contrary, they are the result of the lack of maintenance of thermoelectric plants for more than half a century; of the reduction of oil shipments by Russia and Venezuela; and the use of Cuban oil, with all its impurities, which brings about the predictable failure of electricity production. This reminds us of the destruction of the sugar industry, which was once the engine of progress in Cuba.
It is understandable that the regime feels frightened. Cubans shout at the policemen in the street “We are not afraid”. Several weeks ago, a group of priests repeatedly circulated a video urging Cubans “not to raise a hand against another Cuban.” Monsignor Dionisio García, archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city, recently publicly prayed for a reexamination of the lengthy sentences imposed on participants in last summer’s peaceful protests.
While this is happening, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Union, the United States and other nations continue to call for the release of political prisoners and an end to the repression.
The authorities fear another massive popular explosion in the country. These days, there have been large crowds on the street during blackouts, shouting anti-government slogans and banging on empty pots in the dark. Although it has recognized that there is a dengue epidemic, the Government announced that it will only fumigate those houses where there are confirmed cases of dengue. The protests last summer did not denounce neither the shortage nor the American embargo. Fidel is dead, Raúl broke his promise of a glass of milk for every Cuban and the month of August, with its oppressive heat, is already here.
OPINION ARTICLE
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