Havana Cuba. – It was seen coming, but that is not why the discomfort is less. Nor is it that the majority of Cubans are aware of what that decision implies, because in this country almost nobody wants to know anything. In the streets, more or less informed people sum it up with one sentence: “the Russians are here again”; but the truth is that they never left. They stayed at medium distance playing the game in their favor, canceling 90 percent of the mega debt that Fidel Castro had acquired with the Soviet Union, granting credits that Cuba could not pay, extending extensions and sending donations of fuel and supplies to add to the substantial financial debt the suffocating weight of moral debts.
And here we are, trying to digest the news that the submissive and profoundly anti-Cuban government of Miguel Díaz-Canel has ceded land in usufruct and free of taxes to Russian companies, for their exploitation for 30 years. It is not known what land they were given, nor what the Russians are going to do with it, but the business is underway, as well as the crazy project of allowing the circulation of the ruble in a country that went from dual currency, supposedly with the objective from strengthening the Cuban peso, to an economic scenario so poor and unstable that today within the Island, in addition to the useless national currency, the dollar, the euro and the freely convertible currency (electronic dollar) circulate.
Soon the ruble will do the same, with which Cubans will be able to buy in the great market that the Russians plan to open in Havana, to sell to a poor and malnourished people what they cannot sell to India or China, both powers that have helped the Kremlin weather harsh sanctions imposed by the West in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
While those nostalgic for CMEA and 1980s “prosperity” await cans of spam, the regime will import Russian technology duty-free and allow comrades to take the profits back to the dacha, a privilege no other entrepreneur enjoys. foreigner with investments in the Island.
The economic consequences derived from the invasion of Ukraine have forced Russia to pull the strings of geopolitics. Whoever believes that the usufruct lands are for planting is naive or an accomplice of both dictatorships. But if they are actually used for agricultural purposes, it won’t be to alleviate national hunger.
It will be up to the insulars to see how the continuity regime offers a foreign power preferential treatment that it does not grant to its own peasants, nor to Cuban émigrés interested in making the land where they were born produce.
Russia is going to plunge into Cuba because it wants the United States to know that it means business, and that if NATO insists on moving closer to its borders, the Kremlin will also move closer to US shores from its vantage point in the Caribbean Sea. Right in the middle is the Cuban people, who will soon begin to suffer, more severely, the consequences of supporting the regime of Vladimir Putin, an enemy of the West.
While Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel give away the Island piecemeal, the truly stateless justify this violation of Cuban sovereignty arguing that handing it over is not the same as letting it be taken away. This type of reasoning, which works at the convenience of the elite in power, corroborates that Castroism has never been anti-imperialist. He has been nothing more than a low-level troublemaker, a threat to the United States, which insists on giving him a hand, easing restrictions and allowing him to receive millions of dollars that, in the very near future, could end up in Moscow’s coffers to continue financing the war in Ukraine, which is a war against the West.
It is strange that the dependence on Russia increased shortly after the Cuban government once again allowed the deposit of dollars in cash, even at the risk of “stagnating” as happened in 2021, since there was no way to deposit them in foreign banks because of of the “blockade”. Boris Titov, it seems, figured out how to circulate that moldy money in Castro’s vaults, offering in exchange agricultural technology, trinkets and the depreciated ruble.
Three Russian banks have expressed interest in operating within the Island, and their objective cannot be other than the collection of foreign currency. Thus, the remittances from Cuban emigration, stripped of their citizen rights and squeezed to the last drop by the dictatorship, will also finance the destruction of Ukraine, while the White House continues to put lukewarm cloths and Josep Borrell prefers to talk about the support of the European Union to the new MSMEswhich fulfill the function of a huge money launderer for Castroism.
With the major Western powers washing their hands of Russia’s advance on Cuba, there is no choice but to give Putin what he asks for. The Kremlin, in need of alliances and being the sugar daddy of the pot-bellied PCC, has come to collect. The time has come for this Island, which apparently has not been humiliated enough, to kneel.
OPINION ARTICLE
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