Havana Cuba. — More and more Cubans are convinced that the dictatorship initiated by Fidel Castro, and which has lasted 63 years, is prostrate, dying and approaching the end due to the inability of his successors to overcome the very serious crisis in which they have plunged the country. What no one can predict is what that ending will be like.
Predicting how a dictatorship will end is too risky an exercise that almost always fails. Sometimes, his end surprises and comes unexpectedly and for unimaginable reasons.
The end of Castroism should have happened many years ago. His survival has defied the laws of history, economics and even biology. His fall did not occur when the communist empire disintegrated and Cuba was left without the millionaire Soviet subsidy. Nor did it happen—unbelievably in a regime as personalist as Castro’s—when Fidel Castro died, who, with seriously broken health, had left the government ten years earlier in the hands of his brother Raúl Castro.
But Raúl Castro, who failed to make far-reaching reforms, also failed to choose his successor when he delegated power to Miguel Díaz-Canel and his team. Those in charge of post-Castro continuity have turned out to be the most clumsy and inefficient rulers that Cuba has ever had; With their boundless stubbornness, from disaster to disaster, from nonsense to nonsense, and with an international scenario that is not at all favorable, they have led the country to a dead end.
Today in Cuba nothing works well. And we Cubans live like indigents, with frayed nerves, between blackouts, without medicine, forced to stand in long lines to buy increasingly expensive and poor quality food.
With as much tension as we live, the increasingly frequent street protests. The amazing thing is that we would not have exploded much earlier and with the force that such a terribly dire situation deserves.
With the country in debt and more and more hunger and blackouts, the situation will continue to worsen. And the bosses, who have shown they are not willing to give up, only manage to repeat the same tired arguments that no one believes anymore, and to threaten, repress and toughen the laws even more. Even so, they are unable to put an end to the protests of a people who do not respect them and who are already losing their fear.
It is becoming increasingly clear that only a regime change that leads to democracy and a market economy will be able to get Cuba out of the abyss in which it finds itself. Some in the ranks of the regime must have reached that conclusion, although the reformists have not yet appeared and absolute unanimity seems to prevail, which we all know is false. From among them, from a palace intrigue, the character who stars in the liberalizing episode that precedes the transition may come out. Only that this dictatorship has put all its efforts into undermining the paths that could eventually lead to democratization.
The possibility cannot be ruled out that the popular protests will get out of control, the bosses will get scared and give the order to crush them at any cost, and the soldiers and police will refuse to massacre their compatriots, rebel against their superiors and stage a coup, or a civil war occurs.
Most Cubans fear violence, bloodshed. But unfortunately, it seems that sooner or later it will happen. It will be unavoidable. The bosses, with their intolerance and arrogance, are leaving no other option to a desperate people who, by dint of not having anything, have nothing left to lose. And there is too much resentment, too much accumulated hatred.
There is also the fear of change and the future. Because after Castroism ends, due to civic ignorance and the anthropological damage caused by six decades of dictatorship, many more years will pass before Cuba returns to being a “normal” country.
Almost all the foreseeable scenarios are frightening. But they also terrify immobility and a perpetual future of zombies starved, degraded and tamed with sticks. Perhaps, although it is hard for us to admit it, a friend is right who says that “an end of horror is preferable to a horror without an end”.
OPINION ARTICLE
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