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Castro Regime Cannot Survive without Corruption

May 18th, 2010 , By admin

Find Under Focus on Cuba

by Hubert Matos Araluce

In Cuba, almost anyone can steal from the government. That’s why the current campaign to eradicate corruption will not go very far. Even if the government arrested millions, it could not stop it. Besides, the Castro regime is not going to commit suicide: it would die without corruption.

The vicious circle starts with the Castro government, the number one thief in the country, the one that imposed the law of the jungle. The government took everything from everyone. It led the people to believe that the state was protecting them against imperialism and the selfishness of capitalism. But what it did was use and appropriate the public treasury and the peoples’ assets for its own benefit.

In that way, the system facilitated the theft of the nation’s assets by the Castro government’s staunchest friends. This example became contagious at all social levels. It was the time in which everybody could steal because the great thief had learned to swindle the people and the old Soviet Union. The government preached free housing, food, medicines, and education. The manna from heaven was arriving in abundance from the Soviet Union. The New Class in Cuba enjoyed privileges stimulated and tolerated by Fidel Castro. This caste system in Cuba was an inevitable consequence of the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, as it already had taken place in all the countries where such ideology was imposed, such as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

But things changed in the 1990’s. The Soviet Union disappeared and, in the absence of guarantors, the western democracies stopped granting credit to the Castro regime. Then, the Castro government started taking resources from Venezuela and, even though the manna from heaven had fizzled and there was very little to share among so many, the old stealing habits, the wasteful spending and the lack of productivity, continued at a galloping pace in an economy that had an obsolete infrastructure.

So, when there is not much to steal and to from whom, what to do? How to justify the poverty gripping the country? One alternative is to blame the corrupt: start a propaganda campaign to deceive the naïve in Cuba and abroad, and, at the same, time, eliminate those who they fear or who have become a burden, among them old members of the New Class and its foreign capitalist friends.

Hubert Matos was the one of the three principal leaders in the revolution that ousted Batista in 1959. Soon after Castro took over, Matos strongly objected to the inclusion of known communists in the higher echelons of the revolutionary government. For his beliefs, Castro arrested him as a traitor and sentenced him to a long prison term. After 20 years in prison Matos was able to go into exile in the U.S. where he currently resides.

CFTU Updates

  • The Passing of Bill Doherty

    Bill Doherty, 84, Executive Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO

    William Charles “Bill” Doherty Jr., who led the AFL-CIO’s outreach to trade unions in Latin America for 35 years, died August 28 after a long battle with bone marrow cancer. He was 84.

    Born in Belleview, Ky., the oldest of nine children, Doherty was raised in the Washington, D.C. area where his father, William Charles Doherty Sr. was president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, and later the first U.S. ambassador to Jamaica. He graduated from St. Paul’s Catholic Academy High School, where he met his future wife, Jane Catherine Donovan, a Boston native.  He worked as a Capitol Hill police officer while completing his degree in philosophy at Catholic University of America, where he played defensive lineman for the football team. He also attended Georgetown University School of Linguistics and Georgetown Law School.

    Doherty’s life was defined by his Catholic faith (he spent a brief period of his life in the St. Charles Seminary, studying to be a priest) and his conviction that democratic trade unions held the key to freedom and prosperity around the world. His work with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Postal Telephone and Telegraph International (PTTI) and the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), took him to 129 countries over his career.

    After serving as an aerial photographer with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, Doherty assisted in rebuilding the trade union movement in Germany, supporting the anti-Nazi, dissident labor leaders and nascent democratic trade union movement that is today known as the Confederation of German Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerteschaftsbund, DGB).  He served in Belgium, Europe and Latin America as an AFL-CIO representative to the PTTI, an international trade secretariat.

    When President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was initiated in 1961 to support labor’s international role in nurturing democratic trade union movements abroad, Doherty was the logical choice to serve as AIFLD’s Director of Social Projects, and later as Executive Director.  He led the AIFLD under the direction of four AFL-CIO presidents, retiring in 1996.

    Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Jane Catherine Donovan, eight children and 25 grandchildren.

  • The CFTU Website

    Welcome to the CFTU website!

    We’ve designed it to keep you better informed about developments in the continuing struggle of workers everywhere to establish and maintain the right of Freedom of Association – the right to form and join unions of their own choosing, run by people they elect.

    The CFTU has been active in recent years in attempts to assist workers in Cuba struggling to assert that right – in the face of their government’s insistence that only one union, guided by the Communist Party, can represent them,  and against the background of continuing imprisonment and harassment of those who think otherwise.

    Cuba is not the only country in the world denying workers their rights.  Sadly the list is long – Burma, Vietnam, North Korea, China -  to cite a few.  But too many trade unionists in the free world are unwilling to speak out, apparently believing that somehow these regimes will transform themselves into democratic societies and that through contact with free world unions, the non-representative unions in those police states will remake themselves into legitimate unions. Such a belief flies in the face of 90 years of experience to the contrary.

    The recent hunger-strike death in a Cuban prison of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42-year old brick mason serving a 26-year sentence for his political activities, and the long hunger strike of  dissident journalist Guillermo Farinas, provide eloquent testimony to the determination of those heroes to see their country free and democratic and observant of all the rights of free people.

    Our committee believes that neither dictatorships nor their hand-maiden unions ever yield power willingly and that free trade unions must not be complicit in the denial of freedom of association to workers.  Rather, we believe that those who are joined in the struggle to assert workers’ rights in the face of dictators, those who risk imprisonment and harassment, need and deserve our moral and material support.  We hope you will join us in those struggles.

    Tom Donahue, CFTU Chair