Cuban economic scheme: there is only place for the “chosen”

Havana Cuba. – A “Panamanian company signs an agreement with a Cuban company to import food”. If we decide to believe at face value what he says the note from the official agency Prensa LatinaSo with this “interesting business” everything seems to be going great for the Cuban government; However, if we investigate the background of this event a little, we will discover that someone may be giving us a pig in a poke, while the so-called “Panamanian company” is nothing more than one of many businesses of former Cuban officials who today reside in the isthmian country. perhaps as a personal decision but also, most likely, because someone from the government would have given them the mission of “migrating” and becoming entrepreneurs.

And it is that the Belraysa Group was created, just as a tour operator for trips to Cuba (under the firm Belraysa Tours & Travel), a little over a decade ago by the Cuban lawyer Magaly Iserne Carrillo, a former official of the Ministry of Justice, and her husband, Jorge Guerra, a former employee of a foreign company with offices in Havana. And although they have been dabbling in the maritime transport of cargo to Havana for some time —coincidentally coinciding with the authorization to import to the MSMEs—, it is curious that, once again, suddenly, they have opened another line of business that responds to the current needs of the Cuban Government forced to demonstrate that it is doing something to face the crisis of shortages.

So this is not an agreement “between Panama and Cuba” —as one could infer from the wording of the note— but rather a matter entirely between Cuban officials, and perhaps one could even suspect that it is not even between an entrepreneur national based in Panama and a state company (Alimpex) but of some kind of scheme behind which the regime hides its real participation and, above all, it almost resolves that contradiction between a more populist than “public” discourse in which it promises to fight against abusive prices in the “private” sector and its direct responsibility (participation) in the creation of a “parallel market” led by MSMEs and which will soon compete, in the retail sale of food, with Russian, Italian, Spanish and “Panamanian” companies.

It is not, as some on the street think, that the regime has taken a liking to the speculation practiced by those dozens of MSMEs whose business is to import and then resell at high prices (as a kind of “new generation” “mules” , that is to say, with a letter of marque issued by the Government itself) but it is the regime that has cunningly taken total control of smuggling, for its total benefit, based on the design of this new market scheme where it is judge and part, that is, where it not only decides who participates and how, but has created new actors that act on its behalf (under its laws and accepting state importers as intermediaries), pretending to be relatively independent, but actually responding to the will of the regime, absolute owner of the scheme.

It is in this sense that Belraysa’s mutation from a tour operator to a supplier of food “on consignment” is understood, that is, from an issuer of tourists at a time when tourism is declining, to a supplier company that is only will settle when your merchandise has been sold in the retail network.

An almost schizophrenic mutation that has ended in an agreement that any other foreign company would never accept, since the normal thing, with Cuban state companies and their well-earned reputation for bad payers, is that they have to liquidate, even a minimum percentage, before place the cargo in Cuban ports.

So, everything indicates that Belraysa is nothing more than the Cuban Government itself unfolding in the role of a “Panamanian company” which, as an entity apparently unrelated to the Communist Party, will be responsible for assuming responsibility —to show its face— for the discomfort of Cuban consumers in the face of high prices. But that matters little to the rulers, as long as the image is projected to the world that new retail trade networks are opening up and it seems that the problem of shortages is finally resolved.

Belraysa will not be the only “foreign” company we will hear from in the coming years in relation to this scheme, nor will Panama be the only country from which similar “deals” will arrive.

Already in internet commerce we have several agencies operating with abusive prices for some years, mainly based in the United States, and whose “owners” are closely linked to the regime, they are even part of its most intimate circle. But the real “wave” of this type of business will soon come when many of those thousands of Cubans who arrived in Miami during the most recent migratory exodus, they end up externalizing their true “internal self” —almost as a “chance”—, and become “Cuban-American businessmen” who reach commercial agreements with the regime, when not as “agents of influence” and even as another type of “shadow agents”.

I have already had the “luck” of personally listening to several of these “emigrant” state officials, or in the process of emigrating (with total certainty that they will!) their ideas of opening similar companies to trade only with Cuba in a near future, taking advantage of the facilities to create MSMEs, even from state cooperatives whose members sell their participation to the highest bidder for a few dollars, with which the state directors of these same cooperatives end up transformed into “private actors” by work and grace of “continuity”.

In other words, it would be about state officials, even ex-military and ex-police officers, who are leaving only to later return and insert themselves, as foreign citizens with sufficient capital, in those new speculation and smuggling schemes that have the approval of the communists. (And I do not doubt that, in addition, with the approval of that part of the United States Government to which Castroism arouses so much sympathy).

So, if all goes well, in the months and years to come, probably on the advice of Russian and Chinese advisers, the communists will have transformed the economy into a “Frankenstein” scheme in which there will only be room for the “chosen ones” to whom they (and only they) decide to reveal the rules of the game, and by the way invite them to participate.

For the rest of the Cubans, without the possibility of emigrating and without remittances, there is very little hope. However, the “good news” is that this is another game between mediocre and hypocritical, between petty and miserable, and very soon they will be asking for each other’s heads. It is only a matter of time, discretion and patience.

OPINION ARTICLE
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