Havana Cuba. — For months, Cubans have been complaining about the excessive rise in the price of food and the passivity of the government, which limited itself to preaching against greed and hoarding, appealing to conscience and asking to “think as a country.” But after the authorities decided to act and unleashed a fierce battle against coleros and resellers, whom they blame for the problem, the complaints have increased.
Raids by police and inspectors and fines and seizures of merchandise from vendors, even licensed ones, far from driving prices down have worsened the shortage. As happened when the State tried counterproductive price caps, many products that were already in short supply have disappeared. When they appear, offered surreptitiously, it is at a much higher price.
It happens with bread, for example. Before the raids began, street vendors sold the bag with nine loaves for 150 pesos. Now, those who dare to go out into the street, proclaiming almost in whispers, taking care not to be detected by the police, sell the bag with eight loaves, smaller and of poorer quality, for 180 and even 200 pesos. Thus, eating bread has become a luxury in Cuba.
On the platforms of the stalls, many agricultural products have disappeared. Or they sell them secretly, at a higher price, without appearing on the tablets. A bundle of onions does not fall below 120 pesos. A pound of tomatoes or peppers costs 250 pesos. The sellers, in a stubborn fight with the authorities, say that they lose if they lower the price and that, rather than lose, they prefer not to sell them, even if their onions, tomatoes and peppers rot, stored or in the field.
A long-standing generalized perception among the population is confirmed once again: every time this regime announces that it intends to solve a problem, what it does is make it worse.
What are they going to fix? The bosses of Castro’s continuity, despite the fact that they fail over and over again, are not convinced that their statist formulas do not work and will never work. Instead of deciding to totally unblock the productive forces at once, they maintain their commitment to prioritizing the unproductive state companies, which are now joined by the MSMEs, that monstrosity mediated and condemned to failure from its very unnatural conception.
The bosses get entangled and foolish in their attempts to implement a militaristic state capitalism while invoking a poorly learned and less applied Marxism. In the obstacles that put up private entrepreneurship without state interference or tutelage, they seem possessed by the spirit of Fidel Castro during the disastrous Revolutionary Offensive of 1968.
They want to solve everything based on repression and the implementation of stricter controls. But repression will not contain inflation. Instead, it is increasing it by creating more scarcity and making sellers charge for the risk they face of being fined or having their goods seized.
Nor will they be able to put an end to corruption: neither with that of the bureaucrats of the ministries nor with the most modest of the policemen who allow themselves to be bribed in exchange for turning a blind eye to illegalities, nor with that of those in charge of organizing the queues and the employees of the stores, for whom an army of inspectors will be necessary to watch over them and prevent the dealing of what they steal from the State.
The coleros and resellers are not the cause of the shortage, but its consequence. Nor are they to blame for inflation, which was caused by the Ordering Taskan uneconomic nonsense implemented at the worst possible time and from which it was known that nothing good could come of it.
Reissuing the Bolshevik methods of war communism will do the regime no good. It will only make the misery of Cubans even greater and their rejection of the abusive bosses of continuity.
OPINION ARTICLE
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