The Irreversible Failure of the Castro Regime / Miriam Celaya

Miguel Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro (Reuters)

Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, West Palm Beach, 14 June 2018 — The adversities of the lugubrious panorama of the political heirs of the latter Castro regime don’t seem to have an end. Everything seems to conspire against the confused performance of the recently inaugurated Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, including Mother Nature, who in recent days has been punishing the already suffering Island with torrential downpours, deepening the country’s economic drain in their aftermath.

According to the schematic official reports, the territories that suffered the heaviest rain were from the provinces from Pinar del Río (western end of Cuba) to Ciego de Ávila (central region), in which “the main damages were in agriculture, roads and housing,” although “progress is being made in the recovery process.”

The cold outline, however, conveniently overlaps with the drama of those Cuban families who have lost their homes and their few assets, whose misery is in addition to that of the countless affected by other meteorological events that have plagued the island in recent years, whose claims are far from being resolved.

During the substantial analysis of our distinguished leaders, convened last Monday, June 11th, they insisted that the greatest impact “was in the municipality of Ciénaga de Zapata, mainly in Cayo Ramona, where 205 houses were still flooded, because the water is receding very slowly.” For this reason, they pointed out, “more than 3,000 people who were evacuated are still not able to return, including 219 students who are missing school.”

Such a difficult situation provoked a brilliant revelation on the part of the very sagacious Cuban president, who indicated “a detailed study would be conducted of the terrain and the reasons that have caused the area to still be flooded more than 15 days after the rains ceased.”

Obviously, not one of the smarty pants assembled there saw fit to point out to the President that it would be pointless to waste time and resources in such a “study,” since Cayo Ramona is adequately charted on the maps, where it is shown as a slightly elevated land in the midst of one of the largest wetlands in this geographical region called the Caribbean, characterized by the presence of abundant springs or “waterholes,” which causes the soil drainage to slow down even more when its islets are flooded.

On the other hand, what would the specialists propose, then? Drying the bog? It would not be a novelty either. Already in the 1960’s and 1970’s his Majesty Castro I was caressing that idea, when he dreamed to turn the huge swamp into the largest producer of rice in the hemisphere, a project that he discarded perhaps when in one of his many epiphanies he also glimpsed the creation of the largest crocodile farm in the world … “Plan Crocodile,” he called it, although in reality that hallucination was so ephemeral that it was barely given press coverage. Or maybe he had a plan that included raising crocodiles in the paddy fields. We will never know exactly how many hallucinations went through that arcane brain.

But in reality, this flood of “Councils of Ministers” and analyses of the national situation among senior leaders not only reaffirms that what is involved is to deliberately follow the traditional strategy of the Cuban government, whose representatives of the so-called historical generation continue to throw their shadowy shadow, consisting of holding hundreds of meetings from which “commissions” and “detailed studies” are derived, with the sole purpose of lengthening, over time, the solutions to the problems until, finally, the people resign themselves to living with the problem.  It also evidences the uncertainty of a government, tied hand and foot, to an ideology that is no longer useful even for Power.

The current times, marked by the sociopolitical and economic crises of the allied governments of Latin America, the retreat of the left, the epidemic of widespread corruption — in Cuba and the rest of the region — the collapse of the Cuban economy, the failure of the socialist “Model,” national despair and an infinite number of reasons that encourage social discontent and the sense of fatality of a people plunged into dismay, constitute the greatest challenge for a fatigued dictatorship that seeks to perpetuate itself in spite of the reality that surpasses it.

That is why neither the fake elections, nor the “youth” of the stand-in replacement president, nor the useless Guidelines nor the projected new Constitution, weighed down by the same old precepts that led to the “revolutionary” shipwreck, will be able to stop the inevitability of the changes. Because if something is truly irreversible in Cuba today, it is the failure of the Castro regime.

Translated by Norma Whiting