Dreams of the Cuban Revolution
Cuban "revolutionaries" dream like no one else in the world. Their dreams are not fugacious like those of ordinary mortals. They have dreamed for more than sixty years while they continue and will continue to dream for who knows how many more years. They believe that some dreams are already a reality, and they boast of achievements that are nothing more than fantasies. In all seriousness they persevere that their reality is not a vision; that Castro's Cuba is an example that lights up the world. God save their innocence!
As far as the Cuban people it seems that they have forcefully hit the table. Are the images that were seen on social networks true? Can the viewer trust those unveiling stories from the International Media? Did something actually happen in sleepy Cuba? To know what to expect, there is nothing left but to investigate the Cuban reality and abstract from the discourse of the dreamers on the one hand, and from the messages of the Media and Social Networks on the other.
For now, the real or fictitious news served to recall an inconsistency: A Cuban Revolution that has already lasted more than sixty years! Revolutions are by definition transitory, a social political phenomenon that allows a society to pass from one regime to another. That is why a Revolution of more than sixty years! does not add up. Whether the Revolutionary Left likes it or not, the truth of the matter is that the regime in Cuba in 2021 is deeply conservative, it keeps almost intact the world that produced the Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959. How did he achieve this authentic miracle when everything changes and flows to the extreme? How did he manage to live on the fringes of Globalization, the end of the Soviet world and the Cold War, the rise of China as the world's leading economic power, the Space Age, the Technological Revolution, the Digital Transformation, the cell phones? The Internet?
Pass making paths over the sea
That the Cuban communist leaders had never changed the course of their Regime is amazing. The USSR was stuck in the same thing for 70 years but there are explanations for it: it suffered the Second World War catastrophe and then faced the reconstruction of the immense material damage that the War meant. Being both can explain why the political regime had gone into the backstory. The extreme tension with the United States, the so-called "Cold War", also made the transformation of the political system very complex. Yet, the Soviet Union had a more liberal period after Stalin's death (1953) and until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 and another, of course, in the six years of Gorbachev's rule between 1985 and 1991.
China was quicker to change its policy: it had 30 years of orthodox communism until 1978, when it introduced the Economic Reform that allowed the private sector and free market economy system that in 2014 turned China into the world's first economy (PGB adjusted for purchasing power parity). (Forbes)
May the communist leaders of Cuba have been smarter and more capable than those of China and Russia? May they have seen something that went unnoticed by the Russians and the Chinese? It is not easy to believe in so much Caribbean clairvoyance. This question resonates and persists. Why does conservative Cuba persist in formulations that it introduced sixty years ago?
Accomplished dreams?
In Communist Cuba they boast of their success regarding the health of its people. Is it true? It is easy to know if Cuba has a record in this matter as proclaimed by its hierarchs. It is enough to observe what is the best measure to analyze the result of Cuban health programs: its population's life expectancy. In 2019 it was 79. (in 1960 it was 63.8). Meanwhile in Chile for that same year it was 80 (in Chile, in 1960 it was 57). In Argentina, whose public policies have not been outstanding for a long time, life expectancy reached 77 in 2019. Barbados in the Caribbean, like Cuba, also reached 79 years. Costa Rica achieved 80 years, the same as Puerto Rico. Uruguay 78 years. Conclusion: if it is necessary to individualize, it seems the true champion of Latin America in health policies, it should be Chile. The Cuban Communist Regime has done well in Health but there are several countries that have achieved better or similar results from those attained by Cuba. If this is the great achievement of the Cuban communists, it does not seem that they should boast so much of it, much less believe that success is exclusive to the policies that the Revolution brought.
Education is another area in which Cuban communists believe they excel. Unfortunately, Cuban students do not participate in the international Pisa tests, which are a globally recognized indicator of the quality of education. Why? If Cuba were seriously committed to improving education, it would not be absent from the Pisa Tests. Chile, out of all the Latin American countries that participate in such tests, obtains the first place, as in Health, which is not saying much when compared with the results obtained by countries in other regions of the world.
Patent registration is an indicator of progress in scientific research. In 2019 Cuba registered only 27 patents. A ridiculous figure! Barbados registered 31 and Chile 438; Argentina 442 and Uruguay 23; Austria 2,066 (with 80% of Cuba's population), Finland 1,321 (half of Cuba's population), Russia 23,337, China 1,243,568, United States 285,113, Germany 46,632. It is clear that the Castro Communist Regime of Cuba does not contribute anything to the progress of humanity and that its interest in research is close to zero. Instead of scientific successes, we should speak of the scientific obscurantism of the Cuban Communist Revolution.
And in the Humanities? Perhaps a reader can report on significant concerns of Cuba in Literature, History, Sociology or Philosophy. Right off the bat you don't hear or know that Cuba distinguishes itself particularly in these disciplines.
Everything points out that what Cuban leaders call education is something very basic, such as knowing how to read and write. But today that is very far from what the modern world calls education. If education of excellence really existed in Cuba, there would be a significant flow of foreign students traveling to Cuba in search of postgraduate studies. As far as it is heard, Cuba does not seem to be a desirable destination for those who want to consolidate their studies.
The conclusion about education, science and research that Cuban communist leaders and their supporters boast so much about simply amounts to nothing solid that may allow it to be considered an achievement at all. It is better to make a pious silence about an area in which Cuba performs in the best style of Latin American mediocrity.
Sports is an area in which Cubans excel. With 15 Olympic medals, Cuba ranked 17th in the recent Olympics in Japan. Without a doubt an outstanding achievement for a small country of little more than eleven million inhabitants. But it is not the only one: Hungary with slightly less population, surpassed Cuba. In any case, Cubans do extremely well in this field.
As there is no other field of extraordinary brilliance of the Castro Revolution, its success in sports is the only thing Cuba can place on the scale to compensate for the mistreatment suffered by the population in Cuba: misery, backwardness, prostitution everywhere, emigration of a fifth of its population, economic failure. It is impossible to balance the scale!
Emigration
In September 2019, the Pew Research Center published in the United States a report on residents who declared to be of Cuban origin: immigrants and those of Cuban descent born in the United States. The report measures 2.3 million people of Cuban descent (emigrants and children of emigrants) residing in the United States, so it seems appropriate to project in 2.9 million people of Cuban origin living outside of Cuba (the United States and the rest of the world). This figure shows that of the total population of people of Cuban origin, just over 20% live outside the island. A country with these emigration rates is not a well-run country. It is enough to think that leaving one's own homeland is one of the most painful decisions for human beings and therefore a gigantic shame for the leaders of a country where a high proportion of the population abandons it in search of better opportunities. How to qualify the leaders of the "revolution" that created the necessary conditions to cause such a terrible tragedy for FOUR MILLION OR MORE! Cubans? (Not included in the account of the 2.9 million are the ones who died in exile). Does it seem an excess to label the Hierarchs of the Revolution as criminals?
Mass emigrations suggest that regimes such as those of Cuba and Venezuela could unleash them as a way to weaken or get rid of the eventual opposition. Usually, the most prominent
inhabitants of a country leave during the emigration wave: intellectuals, businessmen, artists, professionals, the type of people who are capable of surviving in an environment that is not theirs, and who, in their own environment can be an effective opposition to inept governments. Could it be that Cuban leaders look at emigration impassively because it removes possible opponents from the political scene?
Emigration distorts statistics on equality in the post-revolutionary Cuban society. How can a reliable measurement of social equality be made when one fifth of the population is left on the sidelines: those who had to emigrate? It suggests that the hierarchs of the Revolution have found the clue to improve equality indicators by facilitating the emigration of those who thwart the statistics. That is why talking about success in terms of equality in Castro's Cuba is a derision.
Prostitution
It was one of the great causes supporting the Revolution. The revolutionaries said that Cuba should stop being the brothel of the United States. The image of pre-revolutionary Cuba that was chronicled in the world was one full of American gangsters, gambling casinos, and Cuban women on the lookout for "gringos." Obviously, Cuba must have been much more than that by then, not in vain it was part of Spain until sixty years before Fidel Castro's Revolution. But at the time of the Cuban Revolution, the images that reigned in the United States inevitably reigned throughout the world. And to the North American tourism of those times, it was a lot to ask to understand a Cuba so closely derived from the Hispanic world. Thus, "Vox Populi vox Dei": the simplistic image of a Cuba dominated by casinos and prostitutes spread throughout the world.
As a result of the Castro Revolution, American citizens stopped traveling to Cuba in search of pleasure. Instead, Spaniards, Italians and Canadians, to name those who make up the majority, came by thousands, all of them with the same spirit of the "gringos" of the 50, but also lured by desperate Cuban women in search of an income to survive, victims of the dreams of the revolutionary leaders who, soon after seizing power managed, (due to ignorance if one wants to be well thought out) to upset the economic system up to its outburst. That is why today prostitution in Cuba has reached a colossal mass that is more than shocking for visitors who come to Cuba to witness the achievements of the Revolution. Another immense disappointment of the Revolution believed to engender the New Man.
The Revolutionary Economy: Fidel's Seal
What could one expect from Fidel Castro's understanding of economic theory, while being a 35-year-old "enlightened one" who had just come to power, a licensed lawyer with no professional practice, whose occupation in life until that age had been that of a professional revolutionary? Practicing the Revolution and the guerrillas is one thing, and another very different one is to carry the weight of a Government. As Herbert Matthews, a New York Times journalist told a triumphant Fidel Castro already in Havana (he had interviewed him before in 1957 in the Sierra Maestra): "... the tasks you will undertake now are infinitely more difficult than any challenges
you had been faced upon in the Sierra Maestra and the power you now have could do a lot of good but also an enormous wrong to Cuba... Fidel, with an almost perplexed expression retorted: " But, what type of wrong could I do ...?" (Quoted by Georgie Anne Geller "The Patriarch of Guerrillas"). The result of Castro's Government was a sorcerer's apprentice disgrace: gigantic damage to his country and its people.
The Cuban economy after the Revolution is an incoherence from beginning to end. What do prices mean? Nothing. Do they matter? Absolutely not. Economic decisions are not made according to economic judgement. Everything is a consequence of the preferences of the planning bureaucrats. Who inspires them? Certainly not Heaven. Is Fidel Castro the mastermind? Very possibly because, at the end of the day, the island of Cuba ceased to be a Republic to become the Commandery of Fidel Castro, who understood his administration as the one of landowner who must manage a large Treasury.
Signs After Signs
It is incomprehensible that Fidel did not appreciate the turn in Soviet public opinion in the 1960s; that in the Seventies he had ignored the Economic Reform of China, that in the Eighties he had not noticed Gorbachev's strenuous efforts to find a way out of the Soviet world, that in the Nineties he did not see the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, and at the turn of the 20th century did not notice the major success of China due to its Economic Reform. Castro's stubbornness, rigidity, extreme ignorance?
Alexander Solzhenitzyn in 1973 in Moscow, in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, wrote: "How can one not feel shame and compassion to see our women carrying heavy handrails with stones to pave the streets or to spread them between the rails of our railway lines? By contemplating those scenes, what else is there to say, what doubt can there be? Would anyone hesitate to abandon the funding of South American revolutionaries to free our women from this oppression?" With a minimum of curiosity to know what the Russian people thought, on whom Cuba lived, Fidel Castro should have found out about the reality that the text revealed. He had seventeen years for it. What did he do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. When Russian public opinion prevailed over communist leaders and the Soviet Union ended, the allowance on which Cuba lived immediately ended. What was Fidel's solution for Cuba: Tighten the belt eyelets. And Cuba entered the so-called "Special Period": "start eating cockroaches."
The imagination of the Castro did not contemplate any change to his economic strategy; no serious reform such as the one first undertaken by China and then Russia, so much so that now, thirty years later, the tone of the discussions in the ruling Cuba is turning around the same arguments that were being discussed when Cuba entered the so called “Special Period”. It is the evil of the communists. In the same letter cited Solzhenitsyn refers to the pathological immobility of the Soviet Communists. “Given the clumsiness of our movements and inertia, our hesitations and inability to change a syllable, not even a syllable of what Marx said in 1848 about industrial development, what are we bound to turn into? ". The Cuban disciples suffer the same evil as the Russian communists. The sixty years of immobility show it. It takes ten years to take a step because the right foot takes time to ask and the left one some more time to respond.
The United States Blockade
For the resulting disaster, the Castro’s (first Fidel and later Raúl) have blamed the United States for the sixty years of economic blockade. For sixty years! It is worth knowing the recent experience of Russia after its incorporation of Crimea to understand how what the Cubans of the Revolution call "blockade" is handled. From 2014 on, international sanctions rained down on Russia that, in addition to the great fall in the international price of oil (which in the process ended up sinking Venezuela) produced a very complex picture in its economy. How did Russia get out of this challenge? Like all foreign trade crises: Russia devalued the Ruble placing itself in a competitive position that, among other things, led it to be the world's foremost grain exporter. Today, its international reserves reach US$ 600 billion. That is why the new United States sanctions are a breeze posing no harm to Russia.
What did Cuba do in the face of sanctions? It became an international beggar, first receiving alms from the Soviet Union until its fall. Ten years later, the charities came from Venezuela. And throughout the entire revolutionary period receiving the allowances Cuban migrants sent to the island. Regardless of how much the "necessity has the face of a heretic", what a lack of dignity of the Cuban Revolution!
Castroism led the emigrants to live for the most part in the United States, the country of the hated imperialist power, the nemesis of Cuba. Later, Fidel Castro, chief of the Treasury of Cuba, stretched out his hand as a mantenuto to receive the allowances from his servants abroad.
Undressing the Cuban Economy
Cuba's economic incoherence persists. The artist of power and intrigue that Fidel Castro was, left much evidence of his complete ignorance of the basic fundamentals of an economic system. Therefore, the prices of the Cuban economy are a total entanglement that makes it impossible to subject the Cuban economy to the analyzes common to almost all the countries in the world. However, there is a reality that strips the Cuban economy: its foreign trade.
The inconsistency is reflected in the following table that speaks for itself. Exports are measured in Euros:
1) Cuban Export of Goods
Date Exports Exports (% of GDP)
In the 1980s, Cuban exports, thanks to the Soviet bloc, in most years exceeded 25% of Cuba's GDP. The disappearance of the communist colleagues from Europe reduced them and then they fluctuated around 5% of the product. As of 2010 they rose to 7-8% to fall again in 2015, to 3% of GDP. Frankly absurd figures. Whoever edited the previous table added: "Foreign sales (of Cuba) represent 2.37% of its GDP, –a very low proportion– which places Cuba in the 188th place out of 191 countries in the ranking of exports with respect to GDP." This table shows the meaningless argument blaming the Economic Blockade that Trump would have reinstated as Cuba’s main economic problem. Trump came to the government in January 2017 and yet Cuban exports become definitely insignificant in 2015. What happened in 2015? The virtual bankruptcy of Venezuela the provider of resources to Cuba. From then on, Cuban figures became simply ridiculous.
The current President Díaz Canel, who proposes something like squaring the circle, does not help to solve the problem of the almost nonexistence of exports. He wants to facilitate exports and substitute imports. The old theory that plunged Latin America into underdevelopment, that plunged the rural sector and gave way to elephantine cities that today are incapable of providing a dignified and humane life for their inhabitants! Díaz Canel proposes exactly the opposite of what the 1975 Economic Reform did in Chile and that was basically continued by all his governments until today: freedom to import and to hell with the horribly inefficient "import substitution"; the more imports, the more demand for foreign currency, the higher their value and the more stimuli to exports.
The results of the Cuban and Chilean theories are evidently visible!
Chile presenta las siguientes cifras en euros a partir del 2000:
2) Chilean Export of Goods
Date Exports Exports (% of GDP)
Comparing Chile's export figures with those of Cuba is like "counting money in front of a poor man." The almost total lack of exports shows that the Cuban economy functions very badly. It shows not badly but very badly of its state-owned companies unable to sell their products abroad and states horrors of the price system and, particularly, of the exchange rates. After these figures of the Cuban economy, it is not necessary to investigate anything else: the case of the Cuban communist economy is catastrophic. What does the Cuban government intend? Produce everything in-house? In a country of 11 million inhabitants? Complete insanity. As much madness as the appointment of Che Guevara, in 1959, a physician by profession and a guerrilla leader as President of the Central Bank at 31 years of age.
Cuban imports in the last ten years before the Pandemic and their relative importance are presented in the following table:
3) Cuban Import of Goods
Date Imports imports (% of GDP)
Imports fell in 2015 and 2016, before Trump took office. This fall is not related to the United States Blockade but to the fall in the price of oil that strongly affected Venezuela, which in all probability should have cut Cuba's allowance.
For Chile, imports in the same period are reflected in the following table:
4) Chilean Import of Goods
Date Imports imports (% of GDP)
If imports are adjusted for the difference in population (70% more inhabitants in Chile), the Cuban figures are still very poor: for 2019 the adjusted figure for Cuba would be 15,000 million euros against 62,000 million euros for Chile.
Cuba and China
To demystify the ridiculousness of the US blockade as the cause of Cuban economic problems, it is convenient to consider the following figures for trade between China and Cuba. Obviously, China is free of suspicion of participating in the "sanctions" of the United States on Cuba.
Cuban imports from China in 2019 amount to US $ 791 million. Cuban exports to China in 2019 add up to US $ 479 million.
Chilean imports from China in 2018 reached US $ 17,504 million.
Chilean exports to China in 2018 US $ totaled US $ 25,287 million
The difference between Chile and Cuba with China is simply abysmal.
Conclusion
What is truly shocking after this review of the Cuban Revolution reality is not that Cubans rebel and express their despair as they did recently. That is absolutely natural and logical. It is that they have taken more than sixty years to do it. Has a powerful opposition been lacking in Cuba? Is that why the Regime does not allow any opposition movement to raise its head?
The 1959 Revolution has given Cubans a good health system that other Latin American countries have achieved or surpassed, as in the case of Chile, without sacrificing economic possibilities for the population. The Revolution has also given Cubans good sporting results. But it has given them a mediocre (or poor?) education, a catastrophic emigration and an economic system that if it weren't tragic would be laughable; also, an economy that has spread prostitution and that keeps the Cuban population in a terrible impoverishment.
A sad and unfortunate situation for the Cubans, so much so that the great musicians of the Revolution had to demonstrate before the recent protests. Although reluctantly of course, Silvio Rodríguez, the great musician of the Revolution, found an anodyne formula of protest, as if to get along with God and the Devil. Pablo Milanés, on the other hand, had no doubts. Also categorical was the support for the protest of the great pianist Chucho Valdés.
A final warning
In the Latin American quarter, Cuba is a parasite that seeks to join a country to make a living from it, as it did with the USSR first and with Venezuela later. They are looking for a slap that allows them to grab some of the precious foreign exchange that they desperately need for their country. For this they have a military force that has shown its capabilities in the last sixty years in different parts of the world. It is an ability to be feared. Surreptitious Cuban military support for revolutionary movements in other countries may well provoke changes in the governments of those countries, leaving them in the hands of close friends of the communist regime in Cuba. Hence there is a step for the "Cuban Revolution" to take advantage of the riches of the unhappy country on which it falls, just as it did in Venezuela.