HAVANA.- A newborn on the Isle of Youth is rushed to a Havana hospital in an Armed Forces helicopter. The news is offered by the regime’s media as an example of the “goodness” and “humanism” of a system (absolutely dominated by the military elite) that does not waste a second in taking advantage of such exceptions to pass them off as daily episodes, when the reality is that thousands of Cubans suffer daily from the precariousness of medical care. Many cannot obtain for themselves and their families a minimum of rights and guarantees to enjoy a healthy life, precisely because they are condemned to live in a country kidnapped by those in olive green.
They spread the news as if to demonstrate what they are capable of, as if to leave us with the moral of how “extraordinary” they are compared to the rest of the world, but it turns out that, even in poorer countries (if there were any more than ours), there are hospitals that have civil helicopters, their own or not, for such services, while Cuba, that “medical power” where there are no ambulances to transport the sick or hearses to take those who die to bury (“normally” due to lack of medical care, due to the impossibility of receiving treatment), has never known of aircraft belonging to the health system. Doctors and patients depend on the “support” of some Armed forces that, we already knew during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has more than enough, for the exclusive use of its bosses, the resources that the Ministry of Public Health did not have to face the crisis.
However, they sold that to us as a “feat,” and even as a “strength” of the system, when in reality the roots of our other crises, before and after the health emergency, were exposed: armed forces that exist as a parasitic entity. So any improvement or political change that we aspire to should necessarily go through its total elimination.
That simple example can be very useful to understand many details of a regime whose specialty is always trying to convert its disabilities and perversities into the virtues it does not possess. Like when they collect garbage with FAR carts and by soldiers, or when they spray against mosquitoes because the entities that should do it have not had the basic resources for years, precisely because they have been allocated to the military, for a matter of “national security”, with what that “figure” implies for a dictatorship that feels insecure all the time.
They present them to us as “aid” when in reality they are a consequence of how disproportionate the distribution of resources is when we compare how much of the State budget has been allocated, for example, to the construction of facilities for Tourism (the majority owned by GAESA) and how much to the repair, modernization and supply of hospital supplies, as well as how much money military companies contribute to that same budget from which they receive a good portion, directly or indirectly.
The latter has always been an enigma, but it is most likely that the figure is very close to zero, perhaps lower, taking into account the billions of dollars that GAESA could accumulate in its reserves, as well as the evident train of expenses that the leadership uses to prop up that parallel universe in which they live, where there are no blackouts, nor hunger, nor hospitals invaded by cockroaches, nor the fear of being used as cannon fodder. Because that is the only way the “resistance” strategies of the military can go, as they have built their companies on our “resistant” and empty pockets and stomachs.
Following the news from which my comment is based, a former Cuban air force pilot spoke to me with inexplicable pride about the million-dollar annual expenses required for the technical maintenance of just one of those Soviet-made helicopters still in service. An enormous figure, perhaps inflated—knowing how corrupt the military leaders are—that exceeds two million dollars, and that could translate, perhaps, into the purchase of another device or, on the other hand, into about 30 ambulances or the repair of a hundred of them.
Similar figures are destined, every year, to the unnecessary support of other obsolete pieces of war, for an army that has not set foot in a war scenario for decades and is aware of how ineffective its old 20th century tactics will be in the face of 21st century technology that they do not master. But the pretext of “national security”—just as the fiction of the “tourism boom” was more than useful at the time to launder money by building hotels that are empty today—has served them for years, even in the midst of the worst crises, to continue absorbing even those cents that should have gone but never went to public health, food production, or the definitive solution to the blackouts.
Recently, another soldier with whom I casually talked about the “benefits” of his job, gave me a brief inventory of what he earned, with the rank of First Colonel. Between salary and royalties; between allocations of food, clothing, furniture, appliances and specialized medical care; between the fuel and spare parts allocated for his private car and the paid vacations in Varadero or any other exclusive resort for the elite, they would be – quickly calculated by himself – between 10,000 and 15,000 dollars per month, not counting what was spent on the repairs and modifications made to his home, which he undertakes, on average, every two or three years.
All this spending by virtue of a “national security” that, declared the current convenient scenario of “war economy”, is imposed on other “securities” that we Cubans have lost or forgotten over time, such as food security, salary security, economic security, health security, or the almost impossible security of aspiring to continue alive once the nightmare of Castroism is over.
Thus, the “news” of a military helicopter transporting a sick child, due to the “distortions” it entails (to use a term “tempered” with current circumstances), we cannot turn it into the celebratory postcard that they wanted to create. We must understand its true meaning: how seriously twisted our reality is, to the point that many can come to accept that the episode is really a gesture of kindness, and not the result of the orphanhood to which those who speak of resistance, of sacrifice, of death, of shed blood have condemned us only because they feel as much owners of our lives as of the country they parasitize.
