Category: Carlos Alberto Montaner

The Cuban Human Rights Foundation, chaired by Tony Costa, in a bulletin written by the historian Juan Antonio Blanco, adds a forceful denunciation in response to statements by dictator Raul Castro. The general explained that almost all the resources available to Cuba in the last quarter of 2017 will be used to rebuild the hotel infrastructure destroyed by Hurricane Irma.

The companies, almost all foreign, co-directed by Cuban generals, will have priority. If a street or a building has to be fixed, a power line or telephone has to be fixed, it will not be the Cubans, but the foreigners. It has always been like this. It is the government, without consulting the citizens, who will decide how it will spend the resources generated by the work of Cubans.

When these catastrophes occur, the cruel absurdity of the systems in which the government, owner of all property, of all resources, and of all decision-making mechanisms, chooses the certain bad luck of its subjects.

In societies in which private property prevails, citizens protect their assets through insurance, and if they do not have it, they acquire loans to repair their homes or estates. They do not expect the State to solve their most urgent needs because they know, as Ronald Reagan used to say, that there is no more dangerous creature than the one who tells us: “I am a representative of the government and I have come to solve your problems.”

In Cuba there are thousands of victims of hurricanes that happened six, seven or ten years ago, and who continue to live in temporary shelters that are falling apart. Often the aid that comes from abroad is then sold in dollars in special stores.

I remember a shocking revelation made me by Jaime Ortega, very upset, who was then bishop and soon cardinal, in the nineties, at my house in Madrid: when Germany, already reunited, tried to give thousands of tons of powdered milk, to be distributed by the Catholic charity Caritas, and their diplomats in Havana learned that the government sold these coveted gifts, the indignant representative of the Cuban government, a deputy foreign trade minister named Raul Taladrid, on the instructions of Fidel Castro, uttered a tremendous sentence that should pass to the universal history of infamy: “Cuban children will drink water with ashes before milk distributed by the Church.”

Now it was Irma’s turn. Little by little the country will erode sharply, from hurricane to hurricane, from storm to storm, until it becomes an incomprehensible ruin, as long as the current system continues. I am not surprised by the bitter joke. Fidel reincarnated in “Irma.” Tomorrow it will be as “Manuel” or “Carmen.” Until Cuba is a fuzzy memory, or until this chastened society can get rid of the heavy chain and take the long road to national reconstruction away from the socialist utopia.

In the Spanish theater of the Renaissance, the word “decorum” described the congruence between the post held by a character and the language or costume used onstage. The list of Republican leaders concerned by the lack of decorum shown by President Trump is impressive: Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House; senators Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse and John McCain; representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and I’ll stop writing names so as not to turn this article into a boring telephone book.

The argument made by Ana Navarro and numerous other Republican figures is that Trump’s behavior is not proper for a White House tenant. Just as, during the campaign, it was not proper to tack nicknames onto the names of adversaries or mock a critical journalist who suffered a neurological syndrome that produced spastic movements. That’s just not done. It’s something typical of yokels, not of true statesmen, even if it’s useful to gain the votes of a certain type of voter who lacks empathy.

In the 1950s there was a legend that the U.S. political parties might face off harshly, but when it came to National Security they acted in concert. Not true. It never was true. American parties are like other parties in the rest of the world and carry their conflicts everywhere.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference in favor of the American experience. The legislators on the ruling benches in the U.S., both in the House and the Senate, are not obligated to obey the president when the time comes to vote. The idea of representative democracy in this country is that the politicians represent those who elected them, not the parties of which they’re members. For that reason, Trump — although he holds an absolute majority in both chambers — does not have the votes he needs to replace the health plan known as Obamacare.

I suspect that the conflict between Trump and the party that sponsored him will grow. That’s what a Republican congressman tried to say when he told me confidentially: “I can’t wait for the year 2020, when this nightmare will come to an end.” He was hoping that Trump will be a one-term president.

Translation from the Interamerican Institute for Democracy

The operation to destroy the National Assembly began in earnest after the electoral defeat in December 2015. It was to be the Venezuelan version of the Nicaraguan piñata. It was then, during the few weeks that remained before the new Parliament was due to take charge, when, foot to the pedal, they undertook to reform the high echelon of the judicial branch, trampling on the Constitution and getting ready to govern by brute force as necessary.

And what does Raúl Castro think about all this? The bottom line is that the headquarters of 21st Century Socialism is in Havana. Nicolás Maduro is but a puppet (and a bad one at that) trained in the Marxist-Leninist workshops at the Cuban Communist Party’s School for Cadres, first suggested to Hugo Chávez by Fidel Castro.

To the Cuban intelligence services Maduro seemed to be a malleable and docile simpleton who speaks to the birds, and is much less corrupt and more tractable than say Adán Chávez, brother of the late Lieutenant Colonel. He was not perfect, but, from the available Venezuelans to choose from, he was the most useful to “the Cubans,” precisely on account of his weaknesses.

And what is going to happen now? Not much, unless the United States abandons its ridiculous attitude that “Venezuela is not a danger, but rather an inconvenience,” policy started during the Administration of George W. Bush and adopted by Barack Obama.

The government of Venezuela, although chaotic and disorganized, is a danger to the security of the United States due to its connections with Islamic terrorists and because of its military links to Iran and Hezbollah. It doesn’t have nuclear warheads but it possesses other means of severely harming its archenemy.

It is a danger because of its association with drug traffickers and for assigning some of its generals to be involved in this murderous trade. It is a danger because of its militant “anti-Yankeeism” always on the lookout for new conquests, and because it is one of the most corrupt nations on the face of the planet.

How does it help the Treasury Department in Washington to prosecute corruption by the heads of FIFA, the international soccer association, or a dozen bankers for laundering capital from the drug trade, as the DEA has denounced, if Venezuela is a narco-state working with impunity in all these activities while additionally openly helping the Colombian narco-guerrillas too?

Lastly, the government of Venezuela is endangering its own population, deliberately starved, while the country approaches a terrible humanitarian catastrophe with a lethal combination of terrible government and corruption. Hadn’t we come to the conclusion that we “have the duty to protect” the victims of these political horrors?

The United States is the only nation in the Americas with the strategic vision, resources, material wherewithal and sense of responsibility necessary to defend itself from its enemies and to formulate a “roadmap” as it is called today, intended to change a regime which greatly harms it and poisons all of Latin America too.

Perhaps it is not wise for the United States to eliminate its purchases of oil from Venezuela –the only cash source of income for the country– but it would be feasible to deposit the revenue from these transactions into an escrow account until the National Assembly certifies that Maduro’s behavior comports with constitutional norms. It would be an irresponsibility to feed an illegitimate government which usurps functions not within its purview.

It is not true that the Cold War completely ended. The USSR disappeared and with it the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe disappeared too, but the United States continues to have persistent enemies dedicated to fighting this country by any and all means. If Washington wishes to continue to be the head of the free world it cannot evade the Venezuelan issue. It has to step forward to lead the Continent. Nobody else can, or knows how, to undertake this task.

Note: English version from Montaner’s website

The other four countries, obligated by the peaceful and electoral manner in which they acceded governance, pretend to be liberal democracies with freedoms, separation of powers and periodic elections. But they don’t believe in those elements either, and are willing to turn a blind eye to these minor “formalities” or to convert the institutions of democracy into instruments of tyranny.

That’s what just happened in Ecuador. The first unsavory trick was to set the majority at 40 percent of the vote. They did that to adapt the balloting to the ceiling of the party in power and not to take a chance on a second round or runoff. Unless Pythagoras was pulling our leg, a majority is one-half-plus-one of the votes cast. Anything that disagrees with that way of counting is a subterfuge counter to decency and common sense.

But, because resistance to Rafael Correa is in crescendo, because more than half of the country is tired of his bullying, and because Ecuador’s economic situation gets worse each passing day as a consequence of the corruption and the exponential increase in public spending, it became evident that the government would not garner 40 percent of the vote, which meant that there would be a second round.

It was at that point that Rafael Correa and his Defense minister, Ricardo Patiño (Cuba’s man), decided to alter the results to exceed the dishonest percentage of 40. To that end, they took best advantage of their revolutionary rhetoric. The value of the Revolution and the glorious destiny of the socialist motherland rose above the petty will of a temporary majority that, in the future, would be grateful to them. How important was to alter a few tenths of a percentage when the fate of the Revolution was at stake?

Fortunately, they could not perpetrate their plans thanks to the vigilance of Gen. Luis Castro Ayala, inasmuch as the Constitution makes the Armed Forces the guarantors of any election. When the so-called “chain of custody” was lost (the transfer of votes to the National Electoral Council), the general realized that fraud was in the making, refused to be complicit to that shameful act and stood up to the plotters.

Castro Ayala saved the people’s will and went into history as a man of honor, but lost his post. Correa — despite alleging his friendship with the general and proclaiming, with some cynicism, his “deep sorrow” over his action — called for his resignation and placed at the head of the Armed Forces some officers who responded to his ideological line, which is also Patiño’s.

The Ecuadoreans will return to the ballot boxes. To win, and to make sure the election is not taken from them, they must count on two basic factors. First is the unequivocal and enthusiastic support of all democrats to the candidacy of opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso. Second is their willingness to defend their votes tooth and nail because 21st-Century Socialism is capable of any foul trick to cling to power.

One final and melancholy observation. Those socialists — who are totally unlike European social-democrats — are willing to commit any abuse in order to prevail. If they do prevail by hook or crook, they will speed their race toward tyranny, as happened in Maduro’s Venezuela. The Ecuadoreans are not just betting on a change of government; they’re gambling on their very freedom. In that country, democracy has an expiration date: April 2. After that date, night might fall forever.

Note: English translation from Montaner’s blog.

Are we in the presence of a communist disguised, as Fidel Castro was until he confessed his true militancy in 1961 after denying it half a dozen times?

I don’t think that Correa was a communist. It’s something else. Although he is a mediocre economist without original thinking, he knows enough to realize that Marx’s ideas are harebrained.

Despite his speech before the Comandante’s ashes in November 2016, filled with admiration and radicalism, Correa is the quintessential Latin American populist. How do we know this? We know it by a study of his symptoms. Populism is a syndrome.

There’s not the slightest contradiction here. The Castros and Rafael Correa are brothers in populist devotion, authoritarianism and histrionics. Correa is a Fidelista by reason of being a populist. Perón also sympathized with Fidel and vice versa, as did Mussolini and Lenin. They loved each other in secret, like bolero lyrics used to say.

Naturally, you can be a populist and a communist or fascist. Makes no difference. There are populists to the right and left of the political spectrum. Populism consists of government measures to seize power and hold on to it. It’s related to the deep psychology of the man in charge. In addition, there’s no dearth of democratic leaders and parties that, lamentably, exhibit some populist elements.

It’s a question of parallel forms of governance that include several defining features:

Strongman-ism with all its defects, such as narcissism.

Exclusivism (the others are always a bunch of scoundrels.)

Patronage, through the abundant use of subsidies.

An exacerbated nationalism that is mistaken for chauvinism.

“Adamism” (they believe that the nation’s real history began with them.)

Statism, given that they mistrust private enterprise.

Excessive public spending to hold on to their political clients, which usually results in kickbacks and other forms of corruption in addition to total ruination.

A rejection of the market and international commerce (Correa — like Trump, although on the opposite end — was an enemy of the North American Free Trade Agreement).

Caustic language and a total absence of any vestige of civic cordiality.

No question about it. Rafael Correa is more akin to the fascists than to the Marxist-Leninists. He shares much with Perón and Velasco Alvarado, that ignorant Peruvian general who destroyed his country’s economy with populist measures.

Correa is a strongman convinced that he holds all the truths and that his adversaries are despicable people. Whosoever holds or expresses a different idea is a rascal who must be insulted and — if he doesn’t escape, like journalists Emilio Palacio and Fernando Villavicencio did — locked away.

A populist has not the slightest respect for institutions, the law or the adversary, but demands to be treated with reverence. When a ragamuffin once “gave the finger” to Correa from a sidewalk, the president stopped his motorcade and had him arrested.

The opposition has tallied several dozen insults and slanders spouted in Correa’s “Saturday chats,” radio programs that someday will be used as study readings in courses on the psychopathology of power.

Correa does not believe in tolerance or freedom of speech or in those who posit, as did Thomas Jefferson, that a society without an independent government but with a free press is preferable to the alternative.

He mocks or pursues those who criticize him and tries to ruin them, as he did with the owners of El Universo, a major newspaper in Guayaquil, because the rich — unless they’re on his side — are his natural enemies.

Anyway, in the first round of voting on February 19 the Ecuadoreans earned the right to be free. Bravo. They earned it in the days after the election, through their determination not to be cheated out of a victory. Now they’ll have to win in the April 2 runoff to finish the task. If they don’t, Correa will be back. He’s already threatening it.

English Translation from Carlos Alberto Montaner’s blog

Trump confirms the intuition that the extremes — the populists on the left and the right — meet.

Following the negative opinion of the Spaniards come the 80 percent of the Britons, the 78 percent of the Germans and the 77 percent of the French.

What worries many Europeans and especially their governments?

They’re concerned by Trump’s support for Brexit and his close friendship with Nigel Farage, leader of the dissolution of ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union. By Trump’s criticism of Angela Merkel and his corrosive intromission into the affairs of the Group of 28.

Simultaneously, they’re leery of Trump’s favorable opinion of Vladimir Putin, the man who invaded Crimea and is threatening the Balkans. The same Ipsos survey found that 74 percent of Russians applaud Trump’s triumph.

But Russia is not the only country with a cheerful perception of the new White House tenant. Sixty-five percent of people in India also see this with optimism. Even more than in the United States, where 52 percent have a positive opinion and 48 percent a negative one.

Angela Merkel and François Hollande have a legitimate concern over the fate of the European Union. The great diplomatic feat of the 20th Century has been the gradual union of Europe, forged by Germany and France, the rivals who bled the continent from 1870 to 1945 in horrid wars.

First they proceeded cautiously, creating the European Community of Coal and Steel (1951). Those were the early years of the second post-World-War. It was the work of French visionaries Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, of the Italian Alcide de Gasperi and the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. They were joined by the Benelux countries (Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg).

The Germans and the French earnestly wanted to put an end to the habitual carnage in Europe. They would do so by creating common interests and legal institutions that would link the states and tie the hands of politicians.

Then came the European Economic Community (1958). The six original countries were eventually joined by another half dozen. And so they went, until in 1993 the EEC was replaced by the European Union, created in Maastricht after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.

Because Germany and France are two reasonably efficient countries, albeit endowed with huge and intricate bureaucracies, they instilled that characteristic into the new body. Essentially, however, they achieved their purpose: to banish exclusionary nationalism, maintain the peace and bring prosperity to all nations together, even if at a slower pace.

Naturally, this has been possible thanks to the political stimulus and the military protection of the United States, through its bases and the existence of NATO. And this is exactly what many Europeans fear will be weakened by Trump’s rise to the presidency of the United States.

F.D. Roosevelt, Truman and the rest of the American presidents correctly understood that the U.S. would benefit from a strong, united and peaceful Europe, with which to transact business and share responsibilities, the same way that, some years ago, Americans understood that they would benefit from the existence of the euro, because nothing muddies the commercial waters than the existence of weak and erratic monetary signs.

So it was until Trump settled in the White House. He was a politician with a different, old-fashioned message that could spoil everything. That is why Europe is terrified. The world’s leading power has changed the signs and rules of the game. Europe fears the dissolution of a matrimony that has been extraordinarily fruitful for the past 72 years. It would be terrible if something like that happened.

I remember being considerably intrigued after repeatedly hearing a nationalist slogan that ended up as a political reality: “We have to liberate Russia from the weight of the Soviet Union.”

The USSR had been born in 1922, stimulated by Lenin in the midst of a hopeful All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He added Marxist ideas to the imperialist spasm that, in a few centuries, had turned the small Principality of Moscow — then animated by the superstition of being the “Third Rome,” the heir of Bizantium’s Christianity — into the world’s largest nation, roughly speaking twice the size of the United States or today’s China.

To Lenin and his communists, the USSR did not intend to abandon the Russian imperial momentum, of which they were secretly proud, but to refocus it on a new ideological project of world conquest based on the harebrained ideology of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who lived much of his existence in London, a city where he died in 1883.

Naturally, the newly created structure — Russia plus Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Byelorussia and later Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadjikistan — served for that purpose and for another one, of a defensive nature. The USSR would protect communist Russia’s conquests and would be another obstacle to impede a hostile reaction from nations that opposed the bloody revolutionary experiment that emerged in 1917.

To that end, Lenin and later Stalin (after Lenin’s death in 1924) helped to create a worldwide federation of communist parties whose primary objective was to protect Moscow, the motherland of communism, even if their national interests were in conflict with those of the distant Russia. Beyond staging a revolution carbon-copied from the Bolshevik upheaval, the grand task of the local communist parties was to serve the Russian Big Brother.

As things stood, the national communist parties, Moscow’s shields, took on the task of persecuting Trotskyites and exterminating those who disobeyed the directives from the Comintern, as people called the Third International, the structure also created and financed by the Russian communists for their own benefit, as they had done with the USSR.

This was seen very clearly in Spain during the Civil War (1936-1939) and even before, when the Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, a dissenter from the official line, was murdered on a Mexican street in 1929, a prelude to what would happen to Trotsky himself in 1940. Trotsky was assassinated by Ramón Mercader, a Spaniard in the service of Stalin, son of a fanatical Cuban communist woman.

A quarter of a century after the USSR disappeared, Vladimir Putin is threatening to rearm Russia’s nuclear arsenal to foil the shield of protective missiles with which the United States has endowed the West’s defenses and its own. His words were not only those of a nostalgic former communist but also those of a Russian convinced of his homeland’s hegemonic fate.

According to the former KGB agent, now his country’s political leader, the U.S. and the European Union cannot prevent the total destruction of their defensive barriers (and the E.U.’s) by an attack by the so-called triad: the effect of land-based nuclear missiles, the action of submarines carrying atomic bombs, and bombs dropped from planes.

Oddly, Putin’s bullying will have a positive strategic effect on the West. To begin with, Trump will realize that Vladimir Putin is not his friend, to the extent that Putin repeats Russia’s old imperial habits. Likewise, he will realize that NATO continues to be the best instrument to keep the planet from being incinerated by Moscow and will refrain from weakening or demolishing it.

Evidently, we’re at the start of the Second Cold War.

Note: English text is directly from CA Montaner’s blog.

Why did they place the urn with the ashes in the Granma Hall of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, far from the presence of the multitudes? Did they fear the improbable scenario that passions might overflow?

Or did they only want for his old comrades-in-arms, like Ramiro Valdés, to bid farewell privately to the caudillo and chief who guided them to victory and turned them into important — though hated and feared — personages?

Is it true that the Comandante’s mortal remains did not travel in the precarious jeep that allegedly carried them to their final destination so as not to endanger them on a pothole-riddled road made hard to navigate by government neglect? Did the idea of giving Cubans a symbolic farewell prevail? What did it matter if the vehicle carried sand or the ashes of another dead man if the act was purely ritual? If Raúl swapped Hugo Chávez’s cadaver, why wouldn’t he do the same with his own brother’s?

Is it true that they planned to switch the ashes at dawn Sunday, shortly before the burial? Using a body double was a trick that Fidel Castro used frequently in life. Was the custom followed after his death? Is that an example of the revolutionary cunning Fidel boasted of so often when he inhabited this vale of tears?

Why did no one interview his official widow and the five sons he had with her? Why didn’t the journalists record the reactions of the other 10 (more or less) unofficial heirs known or presumed to be his? Or the reactions of the 10 other grieving and presumably desperate women who at one time loved the Maximum Leader and dared to give birth to his child?

Is it true that between Raúl’s and Fidel’s families there are barely any channels of communication? Is it true that Raúl’s heirs consider themselves devoted revolutionaries and see their cousins as contemptible bon vivants who mindlessly waste the resources given to them in the sins of the dolce vita, while they themselves aggrandize the legacy of their elders in patriotic endeavors?

Or is it perhaps the domestic and familial variant of the face-off between Fidelistas and Raulistas who, according to the well-informed, has existed deep in the ruling cupola ever since, precipitously in 2006, Raúl came to power hanging from Fidel’s bowels, severely damaged by diverticulitis?

How does Raúl Castro really feels after the disappearance of the older brother who gave him the ideas, the vital drive, the structure of values, who made him Comandante, then Minister, then President and handed him a country he could make or break at will, all the time reminding him that he was an intellectually inferior pygmy without imagination, learning or charisma?

Is Raúl a victim of the love-hate and admiration-rejection provoked by relationships where one party feels he is someone else’s caboose? Does he resent the humiliations received or does he thank Fidel for giving him a remarkable life? Gratitude is the most difficult emotion to handle by most human beings.

Is Raúl aware that the solid juvenile adherence aroused in him by his brother-hero turned to a critical evaluation of the brother-loony with more darkness than glow who lived in a universe of unhinged words or initiatives — dwarf cows, moringa plantations and a thousand other inanities — that gradually destroyed the material foundation of Cubans’ coexistence?

There remains, of course, the most important of all questions. What will happen in the future, now that Fidel Castro lies in Santa Ifigenia Cemetery under a heavy stone, near José Martí’s tomb? That will be the subject of a future article.

Ed. note: English translation comes from Mr. Montaner’s own blog.

They were wrong. The social control is not the same. In Cuba, the opposition was liquidated by gunfire in the first five years of the dictatorship. There was resistance, but the authorities killed some 7,000 people and jailed more than 100,000. Two decades later, in the late 1970s, when the cage had been hermetically shut, they began to release them. The Castros have held Cuban society in their fist for half a century now. The Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi taught them how to lock the padlock. Today, Raúl has perfected his repressive strategy. It was the one the Chavists futilely tried to use in Venezuela.

The Venezuelan opposition holds on precariously in a virtual zone of the state apparatus. They are mayors, governors or deputies. They hold posts but neither power nor a budget. Chavism has deprived them of resources and authority, although, because Chavism emerged from a democratic setup, it has not been easy for it to build a cage. According to surveys, the Chavists are opposing 80 percent of the population, including a good portion of the D and E sectors — that is, the poorest.

They are an undisguised gang of inept caretakers engaged in larceny. To hide and disguise reality, they bought, confiscated or neutralized the media, except for a couple of heroic newspapers, but the country’s situation is so catastrophic that there’s no human way they can hide the disaster.

Nevertheless, the opposition lacks the muscle needed to force Maduro’s overthrow and the system’s replacement. In general, the oppositionists are peaceful people, trained for 40 years in the sweet exercise of electoral democracy. What could they do? They could march. Bang on pots and pans. Stage peaceful protests. It was the only way to express their opposition in the desperate situation in which they found themselves.

They could fill the public squares in the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but against an adversary much more unscrupulous than the Anglo-Saxons. They have done so, dozens of times. It was a civilized way to confront totalitarian harassment. The people who kill, the scoundrels, the organized criminals are on the side of Chavism. The armed forces have been taken over by the Cubans and the top leaders are knee-deep in drug trafficking. Letting the army brass dirty their hands was a clever and vile way to tie them. Today they are not united by patriotism but by crime and the fear of the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration.

In the end, do marches and peaceful protests serve a purpose? Of course they do. The Poles and the Ukrainians demolished their dictatorships marching and shouting slogans. It’s a matter of persistence. He who tires, loses. But there is a very important physiological factor. Participating in a common cause that expresses itself physically — marches, slogans — provokes an exceptional secretion of oxytocin, the hormone of affective linkage produced by the pituitary gland.

That’s the feeling of unity, of bonding, experienced during military marches, sports competitions or the innocent crowd gatherings to listen to popular musicians. That’s the substance that generates “esprit de corps” and permanent loyalties.

The opposition feels fraternally united in these street demonstrations. There’s a burst of trust in the coreligionist and hope in the resurrection of the homeland. That’s all that Venezuelans desperately need to find themselves again in a close and brotherly embrace, because their country in fact is dying. It’s being killed by Chavism.

Note: Translation taken from the English text on the author’s blog.

For the Cuban regime the visit was another step to ending the old trade embargo, and achieving the coming of American tourists and investments; the promise of soft credits when the law permits it; and the possibility of alleviating the difficult economic situation that Cuba is facing with the end of the subsidies from Venezuela, which the economist Mesa Lago has, in the past, estimated to total thirteen billion dollars a year.

Raul Castro had not the least intention of modifying his communist dictatorship. At the end of the day, as Fidel Castro himself has reiterated a hundred times, the regime established itself based on ideological convictions and not as a response to US hostility. The sequence was the inverse.

Nor is it in his plans to bury “anti-Yankeeism,” one of the central elements of 21st Century Socialism. For him, for Nicolas Maduro, for Evo Morales, even for Rafael Correa and Daniel Ortega, the Cold War is not over, as is evident in their good relations with Iran, North Korea and Syria.

For United States exporters and investors Obama’s approach was fairly tempting. Money, as we know, is cautious. They accompanied him with more curiosity than real interest. As long as the embargo law continues, any exports to Cuba must be paid for in advance, a measure healthy up to now, because the island has a bad reputation as a payer. Throughout the 57 years this government has lasted, almost every business or country that has extended it credit has been defrauded.

The only businesses that are profitable in Cuban are those engaged in tourism, because they are paid ahead of time and in dollars. Everyone also knows that it is very dangerous to do business where there are no independent courts. In Cuba, as in all totalitarian governments, the judges are an appendage of the central power.

The democrats of the internal opposition have been the main beneficiaries. There were thirteen people from diverse groups, as befits any people aspiring to respect for differences of opinion. Obama met with them for almost two hours, listened to them, supported them, and then devoted the main part of his speech to demanding that Raul Castro respect human rights and the need for plurality required by a society affected for so many years by the sclerosis of a single way of thinking. The moment when he turned to the general and told him, “do not fear the voices of Cubans who want to express themselves freely,” is and will be for a long time a landmark in the struggle against the dictatorship.

Will the strategy of engagement work? Obama himself is skeptical, and rightly so: the Cuban dictatorship is not going to change. It is proudly communist and the Constitution awards the Party exclusive leadership of society. For the dominant elite, human rights – specifically the freedom of expression and association to which Obama referred – are subterfuges of the hated bourgeoisie to extend its social control, and those who demand these rights are criminals.

In this case, is there a sense of a change in tactics? It is difficult to know at this point. For now, the dissidents are encouraged. They believe that Obama’s trip is a turning point. We wait, with fingers crossed. It is part of the game.