Havana Cuba. — “Squaring the box” is a Cuban television program aimed at analyzing the national economy and its relations with the global market. It is broadcast weekly on the Caribe Noticias channel, and is amplified by the portal cubadebate.
Its presenter, Marxlenin Pérez Valdés, PhD in History and Philosophy, and professor of Marxism at the University of Havana, explains the transition of the Cuban economy to new forms of production and property. But Chencho Amargura, the street philosopher from Central Havana, is not clear about the program’s mission from what he has seen so far.
Some of the broadcasts have dealt with: “Economic crimes, their hidden and visible faces”; “Cooperativism, lights and shadows”; and “Excessive profits in Cuban companies”. Of all of them, however, the one that left a few outside the discussion on social networks and the gossip in the corridors was the one entitled: “Is another socialist state company possible?”, broadcast on December 29 and which recounted with the intervention of Agustín Lage Dávila —brother of the ousted Carlos Lage—, a little character who sells himself as a scientist, but who is really one of the ideologues of anti-liberal communist conservatism.
According to “Tin” Lage (as he is called by those close to him), the concentration of private capital in a group of what are now called oligarchs was what further impoverished Russia in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin liberalized the economy. Would the eminent member of the communist cartel forget that most of the oligarchs formed in the ’90s grew up to the beat of the Leninist Komsomol Song? It was ex-communist mobsters who corrupted, prostituted, plundered and sank the state to raise up Vladimir Putin, who would become the butcher of Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine.
Will Agustín Lage fear the insurrection of the entrepreneurs, the conspiracy of the cooperative members or the conspiracy of the self-employed that brings market freedom, prosperity, abundance? Is it afraid that new and stronger economic actors will emerge to unseat the obese bureaucrats who look like oligarchs, committed to the single party, and disrupt the piñata, as the Sandinistas did in Nicaragua, dividing up the state companies among themselves?
In his anti-liberal speech, Agustín Lage reminded us of the phrase of Francisco Franco, the Iberian caudillo: “Everything is tied up, and well tied up.” In Cuba everything is tied, especially to the corrupt mechanisms of GAESA, with its empty hotels in the midst of blackouts and ruins, before the myopia of the Comptroller General of the Republic, Gladys Bejerano.
Among other resounding expressions by Agustín Lage Dávila is his explanation that the importance of maintaining the socialist state company lies in “its irreplaceable role in maintaining free medicine.”
Is the mustachioed doctor in his right mind? Medicine in Cuba is not free, it is paid at the cost of low salaries, mainly doctors, and workers in general. In addition, the existence of other forms of public medicine, such as cooperative and private, would achieve a healthy competition for the good of the health of the citizenry.
The ideological fanaticism of the moderator Marxlenin Pérez, enjoying himself with one of Fidel Castro’s heirs, is a case study.
“Squaring the box” is an idiotizing and opportunistic program, dedicated to defending at all costs a system that impoverishes and humiliates citizens, who, contrary to what Agustín Lage said, suffer from hunger and do not have access to a decent public health system ; they can’t even count on an aspirin to relieve the headache.
The vicious circle of corruption and inefficiency in which the socialist state enterprise operates, prevents balancing the national finance box. The squaring of the Castro circle is endowed with the known attributes to be its main obstacle.
OPINION ARTICLE
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