HAVANA, Cuba. – “There is no money”, “there is no liquidity”, “excessive expenses must be eliminated” but to Mexico a “non-first lady” went for a walk whose travel expenses (at the level of a presidential figure) will be assumed by those who, at the gates of October, are still waiting for the “errands” of September, by those who suffer more than 15 hours of blackouts because there is no fuel and, above all , by those who queue in pharmacies and hospitals waiting for China, Russia, PAHO or Pastors for Peace to donate the medicine they need.
There is no money to produce food, nor to import it, but, apparently, in the construction of socialism it is essential that, once again, the president travels (in jet luxury) and accompanied by a person to whom no decree, law, or provision drafted and approved by the National Assembly has granted those high-level official functions that he or she performs, and for which the approval of a budget (assumed by the “State”) since, as far as we intuit, the salary that Mrs. Lis Cuesta receives as an employee of the Ministry of Culture, no matter how much she saves, cannot be enough to pay for the clothes, shoes, garments and purses that, Beyond good or bad taste, they have obviously not been purchased at Shein.
Much less could it pay for a security team that, since there were two objectives to protect and not just one, had to be, once again, reinforced with more troops who had to pay for accommodation, meals and everything that involved keeping them in place. service efficiently during the duration of the trip.
Not even the destiny and purpose justify the presence of what, in other circumstances and contexts, could even be considered a “complementary figure”, included to assume that part of the “tight” work agenda that the president could not comply with. But the most “tight” thing about this trip, as in the others, has been the inclusion of the companion.
Mexico, with the “little friends” and ideological twins Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaumwith more than one economic agreement in place, with several political pacts together at the highest level of complicity, it is no longer a place where it is necessary to deploy those protocols and illusionistic projections of “normal government”, of “dictatorship that modernizes” to conquer pockets and favors.
Mexico is a place already conquered by Castroism and in which, therefore, those simulations that only translate into unnecessary expenses would be unnecessary and, giving them a taste of their own medicine – that is, the one they use when they want to get rid of someone from the same team—, in abuse of power.
Unless you walk (with all the “glamour” of an official visit), dine with mariachis, get drunk on tequila and sing. the king —the song that Manuel Marrero likes so much— is such an urgent “need” for that “government” that, faced with the real urgency of a very serious health problem – which has even cost the lives of two generals among the latest deaths –, it continues to rent doctors to the Aztec nation. time when he finds himself unable to collect the mountains of garbage that bury the streets of the Island.
Almost at the same time as the jet where Miguel Díaz-Canel travels and the “not first lady” lands in Mexico, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla spoke in New York on the policy of the United States with respect to Cuba and described the economic embargo as “criminal” based on the high costs that just a few hours of “blockade” represented for the health and nutrition of Cubans.
He said, for example, that four months of embargo is equivalent, in money losses, to what it would cost to acquire all the food in the basic basket for a year, and that 25 days of sanctions translate into the amount that the Cuban Government would need to produce and import medicines consumed on the Island in the same period of time.
As a citizen, and not even as a journalist, I would be interested in knowing how, in the midst of a crisis that is taking away thousands of hungry people with diseases that would be curable or treatable with a minimum of resources, these trips are financially justified. which, at least for the part that only serves as company, are clearly pleasure trips.
What is the cost of each one, where does the money come from to include someone who does not hold any official position in the Government? Has anyone stopped to calculate these trips with the same precision with which they calculate the damage “caused by the blockade”?
