These will be like a coup de grace for those who managed to survive the Ordering Task, and the Ordering of the Ordering.
HAVANA.- They have done it once again: another devastating hurricane, another package probably more lethal than the previous one. Just as they waited for the Covid-19 pandemic to annoy life with something worse than the coronavirus, now in the midst of the epidemiological crisis and a hurricane on top of it, they feel like continuing to annoy people with new “economic measures.” These will be like a coup de grace for those who managed to survive the Ordering Taskand to the Ordering of the Ordering.
There seemed to be no better time to “encourage” and “support” the thousands of families who are about to lose their homes and belongings to the water and winds of Melissa; to those who, fortunately, have once again pledged their poor salaries and savings to acquire medicines and food to heal and try to move forward. They still do not support those who have abandoned the bad luck of living in a country that is sinking into misery due to successive and failed economic packages. Which barely serve to measure the astonishing magnitude of our endurance.
Although they try to sell us their “Government Program to correct distortions and re-boost the economy” as a roadmap that promises to “advance in economic recovery and overcome the complex situation,” we know that that 92-page block, those 106 objectives, 342 actions and 264 indicators and goals will only be a function of obtaining sufficient income that will allow them to strengthen their repressive forces, maintain the high living standards of the military elite.
Stop this by retaining power indefinitely, at the cost of more impoverishment, more institutional indifference, more blackouts, that is, more “every man for himself.” The package will arrive by eliminating subsidies, raising electricity, water, transportation and fuel rates, but above all, taking money away from the non-state sector and the population because their volumes in circulation are considered excessive.
As if inflation and distrust in the banking system were not a consequence of their erroneous, rather evil, economic policies, and as if, once again, the solution to show in their reports the “effectiveness” of the new measures could not be other than to continue ruining family economies and individual businesses. They try to create an artificial, false, showcase “prosperity” in the best style not of China, nor of Vietnam but of North Korea. With the big difference that at least there they have clean streets and the occasional piece of the city illuminated if only to look more or less good in the satellite images.
They will solve the issue of excess currency by emptying citizens’ pockets again and closing legal and informal businesses through fines, capped prices, forced banking and a “partial dollarization” that they have rapidly converted into total. They have forced people to exchange their precarious salaries in the foreign currency to eat, dress and care, adjusting their lives to the 5 or 6 dollars a month they earn, just as they adjusted to the scam that turned savings in CUC – which some deluded people thought of as a guarantee of a peaceful (not dignified) old age – into pure pocket change.
As has already been reported, the regime has taken advantage of a moment when the media and people are distracted by information (and misinformation) about Hurricane Melissa to sneak in its big package. And it has done so in what may become the most complex week that we Cubans will experience this year when the natural disaster, days of more aggressive blackouts come together with the exit of the CTE Antonio Guiteras for maintenance, the health crisis which already accumulates dozens of deaths and possibly millions of infected people, plus one dollar reaching another record figure, but which still continues below its real value.
If in a situation as complex and unprecedented, almost apocalyptic, as the Covid-19 pandemic was, they did not heed the popular demands to stop the construction of hotels and allocate that money to the health emergency; Now that they know that our discomfort never goes beyond that, they will deploy all these measures against our pockets. The measures that they were careful to implement the other times, in the previous packages, fearing a rebellion.
It is not that there is actually a will to “correct distortions and re-boost the economy” but that they are now preparing to apply those actions, measures and experiments that are too unpopular, extremely abusive, that they did not dare to put into practice at first.
It is not another “rectification of errors” or “correction of distortions” but the next phase of the same plan that will not end up yielding benefits for “the good of all.” Nor will it conclude with this new chapter of a series that aims to be somewhat more extensive. A drama that does not have as its goal the “construction of socialism,” much less making it “prosperous and sustainable,” but rather to finish confirming the military elite of Castroism as the legitimate owner of everything that exists on the Island. And, only after that, let what they know (and even suits them) inevitably happen.
