Havana Cuba. – “What they have with the dollar is a mess”, Cubans comment both on the street and on social networks, and it is that, with the Resolution 63 of 2023published this April 10, The regime has once again said “I say” where just a couple of years ago it said “Diego”. What’s more, just in January of this year, the Minister of Economy had assured that the country would move towards de-dollarization but, apparently, those vaults where the Greens had stagnated in June 2021, and that according to the “official version” forced to exclude the US currency from banking because they could not be used in international transactions, now they have woken up emptied without any explanation.
As empty, perhaps, as those state reserve fuel tanks that in an “enigmatic” way have vanished these days, leaving the country on the verge of total paralysis.
Although what has happened today with the dollars is another thing very distant from the disappearance of some reserves, it would not be the first time that something like this has happened, nor the first in which all “facho” remains as it is; After all, the affairs of our National Bank are running so well that (also according to the very “official version” put forward as a defense during the much-touted London trial), any civil servant in the crowd can negotiate and sell the Cuba’s external debt in a personal capacity without alarm bells going off up there. Unheard! But so incredible that it necessarily leads us to suspect that if the regime, in managing the economy and finances, had a modus operandi it is precisely to turn a “blind eye”.
And if we were still not convinced, then let us remember what happened in 1989 with the so-called Cause No. 1, which ended with the execution of high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior. Many of us still find it hard to believe that no one among the “big bosses” knew what was happening in the very offices of MINFAR and MININT, just a few steps from the State Council building, and even in the control towers where they so jealously traffic in air corridors is monitored.
But, at least this time, no one stole the dollars, and they didn’t do it because there never were (not in the amount they’ve always wanted), and because neither, with so many unnecessary hotels being built all over the Island, with so many fees paid and still to be paid in London, with so many cops and cyberclairs “migrating” through the parolewith so many state-owned MSMEs disguised as private importing trash to the money from Panama, Bogotá, Moscow and Miami; And with so much fattening belly of bosses, there hasn’t been time for the dollars to accumulate. And now that they have taken a liking to smuggling, and have even protected it with new laws, they need more, many more.
Although there has been an assault by “some” of the regime, it has not been to their own vaults but to our pockets, and it has been a robbery that began much more than two years ago when the remittance dollars had already been converted into CUC , the scam was not enough for them and they went on to fine the transaction with a 10 percent tax.
An assault that became more violent when they launched that other coup they named “Ordering Task” and that, in the midst of the uncertainty and despair caused by the pandemic, it evaporated in the blink of an eye the savings of ordinary Cubans, making their lives much more miserable and driving thousands of men and women to despair and , perhaps, until the death, already by hunger, already by suicide. That’s how ruthless the scam has been, so that this now cannot be anything other than a auction operation. Turn our head and shake until we release our last breath, because there are no more pennies left.
Someone, in one of the most lucid comments I have been able to read on social networks, has explained the embezzlement in the simplest way: “Two years ago you gave the bank 100 USD, they converted it into 90 CUC and they put it in One account. The Ordinance came, the CUC disappeared and they exchanged it for 24 CUP, then your account started to have 2,160 CUP. Today they establish the change of USD per CUP at 1 x 120 and your 2,160 only represents 18 USD. Of 100 USD that you gave to the bank two years ago, they left you with only 18 USD. And to top it off, you can’t get those 18 USD”.
although for some experts that of this April 10 has been a measure that would rectify the error committed with the prohibition of the dollar, in reality, taking into account the regime’s own history of looting, I do not think that the intentions are there, but precisely because of where the “official version” has said, that is, it is a “change” that “responds to the current circumstances and priorities of economic policy.”
A phrase that can be well interpreted in this peculiar context where hundreds of MSMEs, protected by the law-trap, have focused on that “gold mine” that has always been smuggling and imports for that purpose, for which they need many dollars in cash, and also, in that same sense, in the scenarios of the new commercial agreements for the importation of food, without minimizing the expenses of a trial and an appeal in London that are not fought, as they say in Cuba, “for free”.
So the current circumstances, not of “prosperity” but of great despair, possibly suffocation, have caused the regime to once again bite its tongue.
The dollar, that “enemy” money prohibited in Soviet times but forgiven and rehabilitated once communism fell in Eastern Europe, is back “in season”, as they will return to “punish” it as many times as it suits them. As I have heard mockingly from some on the streets of Cuba: “The dollar has been released on bail, and its freedom will depend on its social behavior and its political performance.”
OPINION ARTICLE
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