HAVANA, Cuba. – If one reads about the Ming dynastywhich ruled in China between 1368 and 1644, the comparison between the ultra-conservative bureaucracy that with its methods led to the decadence and isolation of China and the obtuse, immobile civil service that refused to reform the regime of post-Fidelista continuity is inevitable.
Like the civil servants of the Ming emperors, with their interested interpretation of the ideas of Confucius as a pretext and alibi, the backward officials and the ministerial bureaucracy engendered for decades by the Castro regime, with its reluctance to reforms and the market economy, More than the development of the country, he is interested in preserving the order of the past to maintain his privileges and power. Hence his paranoid hatred of everything that escapes his control and his stubborn attachment – despite repeated failures – to centralized planning, the socialist state enterprise and his hatred of private businesses.
British historian Paul Kennedy said in his 1987 book Rise and fall of great powers: “The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying low and selling high, the ostentation of the nouveau riche… All of this offended the bureaucratic elite… Although they did not want to completely stop the market economy, the mandarins frequently intervened against the merchants, confiscating their property or prohibiting their businesses.”
The hypocritical moral puritanism of the mandarins and their aversion for merchants and businessmen, whom they limited and whose progress they conditioned, is similar to that shown by the bosses of late Castroism, at the service of the oligarchs of GAESAwith its pseudo-communist puritanism, by imposing obstacles on private businessmen and prohibiting the accumulation of capital and property, condemning Cubans – except for the privileged elite and their families and friends – to perpetual misery.
The bosses of Castro’s continuity proclaim the need to increase agricultural and industrial production, but they hinder it by continuing to bet on centralized planning and state enterprise, even though their ineffectiveness has been amply demonstrated.
Where this can best be appreciated is in agriculture. Decisions about land, crops, investments and necessary inputs are not made by those who work the fields but by the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Agriculture. This is the reason for the low yields, and the crops that are lost in the fields due to lack of packaging, transportation, fuel, or due to the poor performance of the state collection company, incapable of guaranteeing adequate storage conditions. All of this, added to the failure of the economic reorganization, causes very high prices in agricultural markets, which do not go down no matter how much the authorities try to stop them.
Although the largest amount of arable land is in the hands of state agricultural companies, peasants and tenants produce much more. And they would produce even more if they were allowed to have more initiative, and decide, those who do know, taking into account the functioning of the market, the state of the weather, the conditions of the land and the crops. In this, rural producers vastly surpass the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Agriculture. Even so, the State does not grant them the initiative and maintains its commitment to state companies and Acopio, although this implies less production and, therefore, having to increase expenses in buying food abroad that could be produced in the country.
The bosses refuse to recognize the failure of socialist methods in the economy because recognizing the superiority of private initiative would mean for them the reduction of their powers, and not in the very long term, the end of their regime.
The bosses of the post-Fidelista continuity do not even remotely possess the erudition of the Confucian mandarins of the Ming dynasty, but they are not stupid at all. Hence, although they have ruined the country and plunged Cubans into a purgatory of hunger and blackouts, they remain, like limpets, clinging to power.
