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.