HAVANA . – The day before the Minister of Energy and Mines appeared on a television program in CubaVicente de la O Levy, Cubadebate – a state media that manipulates national and international reality in a surprising way – in its Sunday edition published a note on fuel prices in several countries around the world.
It was an informative text to tell readers that in Hong Kong a liter of gasoline costs more than three dollars and in the United States it costs one dollar and thirty cents. The style tried to be aseptic and neutral. The brief news was a summary of what not to do in journalism and a sample of the procedures used by the Havana regime to deceive people.
“It is the typical note in the manual used by Russian agencies specialized in disinformation and that we now use in the local press. The information is irrefutable. When you check on Google you can check the prices. But the manipulation is evident, since it does not put the average salary in each of those nations in context in relation to its equivalent in Cuba and allows the reader to compare,” an official journalist who requested anonymity told DIARIO LAS AMÉRICAS.
The manipulation
Similar news that combines half-truths, rumors and outright lies are published daily in the national media. “Most of the time they are a copycat of Russia Today, Sputnik and other Russian agencies. Or a compendium of articles published on far-left sites and crazy speculations by anti-capitalist academics. After 2016, in its mission to sell an optimistic narrative and soften the harsh daily reality, the Cuban press has returned to the Soviet-style information stage. Now renewed with the courses offered by Russian agencies to their counterparts on the Island,” comments the state reporter.
But times are different. And the Cubans may remain silent out of fear, but they are not stupid. And 95% of the more than 300 comments published in the Cubadebate article accused the text of being manipulative. The lie has short legs. And Cubans, who eat once a day and wait in lines for two hours to withdraw money from the ATM, are already tired of the constant propaganda and so many unfulfilled promises.
Nobody in Cuba believes the slogan of ‘prosperous and sustainable socialism’ that the dictatorship sells. Few trust their institutions and the mediocre gerontocracy that governs the country. In the time slot where the news shows productions that do not exist and designs a political fiction story, people turn off the TV or watch a pirated American series.
Arms drooping
Cubans have rebelled against the dictatorship in many ways, two very obvious: working less and stealing more from their jobs. For quite some time now, they have been carrying out a silent sit-down strike. They criticize the inoperative order and command system in collective taxis, neighborhood corners and on social networks.
Despite the repression and the fear of being sentenced to several years in prison, when frustration overcomes them, some people ring their empty cauldrons during a blackout or go out into the streets and shout ‘Díaz-Canel, singao.’ The unpopularity of the current ruler is notorious. Very few citizens approve of the president’s management, a kind of mayor hand-picked by Raúl Castro to try to rescue a failed model.
At some point in January 2021, when the regime implemented the failed ‘Ordering Task’, the majority of ordinary Cubans recognized that these measures were going to fail. And they argued: if agricultural and food production, as well as the offers of goods and services, do not increase, the peso will devalue, inflation will increase and extreme poverty will grow throughout the national territory.
Economists and independent analysts agreed. That’s what happened. The arrogance of the regime and the disrespect for the opinions of its citizens led them into the swamp. They are stranded in a deadlock with no way out. Any logical reasoning leads to the approval of a battery of far-reaching economic, social and political reforms. But obstinacy and panic at losing power and its benefits pushes them to immobility. Fidel Castro’s so-called revolution was a political monstrosity divorced from the economy and reality.
No to development
Castro was more interested in international geopolitics and subversion in Latin America and Africa than in Cubans eating beef or being successful entrepreneurs. He criticized Deng Xiaoping when China opted for a market economy and privatization. The supposed successes of Castroism, which the world left boasted so much about, were thanks to millionaire subsidies from the defunct USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and later the petrodollars of the Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez.
Disparate thruster
In the last five years, on the island of Díaz-Canel, the driving force behind continuing the nonsense, crops have fallen by 50 percent, pork production by 80 percent and the harvest produces less sugar than in 1868, when there was an independence war in Cuba and it had a population of one and a half million inhabitants. In the last three years, more than 500,000 Cubans have emigrated, half a million from a decreasing population. And the stampede doesn’t stop. It is as if all its inhabitants left the provinces of Mayabeque and Cienfuegos.
The new Marxist ‘economic package’ launched by the government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and overcome the fierce economic crisis, is like pouring gasoline on the fire. By increasing the prices of fuel and transportation by more than 500%, and by 25% the cost of electricity for those who consume more than 500 MW (any family with two air conditioners and modern appliances easily exceeds that quota), it will cause a increase in the price of food, transportation and services.
Inflation will skyrocket. And discontent, even among those who supported the regime, will multiply. A political suicide. Cuba today is a mixture of fear and pain. There is a wave of violence in the streets. Robberies and murders increase. Also beggars of all ages.
Retirees beg the rulers to raise their ridiculous pensions, but no one listens to them. The salary of a professional is between five and 10,000 pesos per month, equivalent to between 19 and 28 dollars at the exchange rate in the informal market, which is not even enough to buy a box of chicken. You are going hungry. More than 80 percent of the population lives in poverty. 30 percent border on poverty.
You breathe a gray, dense, strange air. Meanwhile, the regime continues with its rhetoric. Through slogans and propaganda. Manipulating and lying. He says the State will subsidize the most vulnerable. It’s the other way around. In Cuba everyone knows that paltry salaries and remittances are the main subsidy of the current ruling leadership. The question is, until when.
