HAVANA, Cuba. – In recent days, in Parcelación Moderna, my suburban neighborhood in Arroyo Naranjo, where sellers, authorized or not, usually fight for their respect, and you can get everything as long as you have money, a lot of money, commerce has almost completely paralyzed.
And since last December 2, based on the announced “Exercise against crime and illegalities”there is a pack of inspectors on the street ready to impose fines – with or without reasons -, confiscate and order the closure of businesses.
In many establishments they say that they do not open until further notice. Chicken, taro, white cheese, sugar and yogurt have disappeared, or are hidden waiting for better times.
You don’t see the shift resellers and “balitas” transferers in the very long lines to buy the liquefied gas that hadn’t come for more than a month and that had many cooking with firewood (with so many blackouts you can’t count on the Chinese stoves and electric pots, which are also bad and break frequently).
The drunks are heartbroken because after they announced the discovery by the Police in San Miguel del Padrón Of the hundreds of bottles stolen from the rum factory, the rum was lost, and even the spark-e-tren and the “jump back.”
And cigarettes are also scarce: they disappeared from cafes and are only sold, in some houses, with a lot of mystery and increasingly more expensive. They can cost between 200 and 350 pesos, depending on the quality. “The chemist It’s cheaper,” say some kids from the neighborhood, who know who to go to to get drugs, and that if they can’t leave the country, they prefer to be trapped, even if their brains burn out.
The ruler and first secretary of the Communist Party, Miguel Díaz-Canel, assured that the “Exercise against crime and illegalities” was directed against “tax evasion, the inadequate relations and distortions that may exist between the state sector and the non-governmental sector.” state, everything that affects citizen tranquility, and against abusive and speculative prices.” But we all know that after December 7, when it ended, the waters will return to their level and everything will remain the same or worse.
Are the inspectors, blackmailing and extorting business owners, going to end corruption? Will the bureaucrats entrenched in the ministries be interested in ending it?
Corruption in Cuban society, at all levels, from the barracks and slums to management and ministry offices, is incurable. Attempts to stop corruption only increase it. Misery forces us to look for ways, whatever they may be, to survive. In this chaos, anything goes. To hell with the law, if in Cuba everything that is not prohibited is illegal. And forget about morality: with so many double standards, we ended up having absolutely none. Starting with the bosses and their descendants.
The only thing that the regime achieves with its crusade against what it considers illegalities, coercive measures and the monopolistic strangulation by the State of private businesses – between price caps and other regulations, They have just banned MSMEs from wholesale trade If it is not through state companies, it is making the subsistence of the majority of Cubans more onerous and difficult.
Maybe the bosses think that misery is a way to maintain discipline and social control, so that people only think about what they are going to eat tomorrow. But that’s a dangerous thing. They are exaggerating. And at the rate we are going – with so much hunger, it is already a matter of life or death – they are inevitably going to burst.
