HAVANA, Cuba – A grandson of Fidel Castro a parachute jump is invented as a “gesture of tribute” to the deceased grandfather. He does it as a spectacle on a beach where bathers contemplate the “feat” as if it were a “joy” in the middle of another summer of hunger and misery everywhere, and only for that they applaud, even though it being August 13, the majority ignores the “true” reasons for the jump as well as knowing very well that, for Cubans, skydiving for fun is a privilege of an elite.
It is the same elite that does not need the guarantee of reliability of the Communist Party or special permits from the Home Office to go fishing on a yacht in the open sea or to board a military aircraft because he fancies a quick flight to Varadero for a game of golf or a “comelata” at a gourmet festival. After all, all these whims of rich children and personal extravaganzas are justified and masked in official events and even in “tributes” and “homages” that are given and received within the elite itself.
It is a way of “justifying” the money they squander, the public treasury they squander, and it is also a practice that both the Castro elite and those outside it, the excluded (that is, possibly, and being very conservative, much more than 95 percent of Cubans), accept as “normal” by virtue of custom, of our capacity to “accept” being excluded, that is, of that “official hypocrisy” that is not only manifested in parachute jumps and golf championships, but in an entire system of camouflage that could well be the essence of what they still call “Revolution.”
Using the same “enveloping” jargon of the communists, they try to disguise as “socialist”, “revolutionary”, and even as a “political initiative” and “current necessity”, what we could call without so much beating around the bush “bourgeois attitude” or “capitalist mentality”, which in the end is what lies behind all this theatre where personal ambitions try (in vain) to hide behind the populist discourse of the “common good”, of “we are all equal”.
Thus, for example, the ambitions of a large landowner of the once poor peasant Guillermo Garcia Frias They became a reality in the creation of the Flora and Fauna Group, which, despite being “state-owned”, is well known to be the size of a “family business” hidden among farms, forests, protected areas, warehouses, production and distribution of meat, cockfights, buying and selling of thoroughbred horses in the very style of an Arab sheikh.
In that same route of “simulations” we find, of course, the brats who, under the protection of their surnames, today become “private” businessmen, being owners of SMEs —without being affected by the witch hunt, rather benefiting from it— but, above all, those who, without leaving the murky terrain of the state (where, contradictorily, the fattest “cows” graze) occupy positions or “responsibilities” in the strategic axes of the national economy, just as “responsibilities” function between members, within a family that owns a great fortune.
Not so much because of merit and ability, but because the “Revolution” was quickly transformed into a family business is that GAESAthe most important business group on the Island, was managed by Raul Castro’s son-in-law; just as it is not due to the “chance of life” that, the “executor” having passed awaya grandnephew of Fidel Castro has been appointed as Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investmentreplacing Ricardo Cabrisas, who always traveled accompanied by the former (and later by his replacement).
An elite has divided up the “business” of the island of Cuba —fairly speaking, the largest private archipelago at present— with the same cunning that they have used to disguise a summer diversion, a child’s whim, as a “tribute to grandfather.”
The regime’s press has reported it as a heroic act. After all, that’s what there is, when you are short of something. Deborah Andolloabout which I have always wondered if she would have been able to implant those marks had she not been born within that military Castro elite, had she not been the daughter of General Andollo, who was second Chief of Staff of the FAR. That is, had she not had access to a yacht (and a reinforced diet) that would allow her to practice her hobby beyond the limits permitted to poor “mortals.”
Without those “elite freedoms” either Tony Castro If he had become a golf champion – much less when it was a sport banned for a long time by his own father – we would not have seen the other “grandson” put on such a show on August 13. Neither of them was going to ruin their beach vacation by bringing flowers to Santa Ifigenia. It is better to say that they are skipping the deceased and do it as a public “tribute” to kill the rumors on that corner about the “good life” they lead.
If we were to thoroughly review the structures of each company, each agency, and even each “political and mass organization,” each prosperous MSME, and even the most innocent sports club (like the golf club in Varadero or any other related to fishing, yachts, baseball or horses), each hotel facility or music or cooking festival that they advertise, we would undoubtedly immediately be hit in the nose by that smell of “family blood,” which is the same as what I call “official hypocrisy.”
OPINION ARTICLE
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