-OpEd-
Cuba is on a downward spiral and appears to be headed for economic collapse. Cubans lack essential items such as food and medicine, especially milk and bread, while the prices of other products, such as gasoline and electricity, have increased by dizzying percentages of up to 500%.
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The island nation imports 80% of the food it consumes. In 1958, a year before the communist takeover, it was not only self-sufficient in beef, milk, tropical fruits, coffee, tobacco, fish and seafood, pork, chicken, vegetables and eggs, but it also exported surplus produce. Yet today, according to press reports, the magnitude of the crisis is such that Havana has contacted the UN World Food Program (WFP) for the first time in its history to request help.
Cuba’s paradox
One of the greatest paradoxes of Cuba’s collapse is that it has two virtual colonies: Angola and Venezuela. Cuba survives today thanks to handouts: Mexico and Venezuela, two of the continent’s radical leftist governments, provide Cuba with substantial quantities of oil.
Because Cuba cannot pay for the crude it receives, it exchanges it for medicine, vaccines and medical missions. A recent article in Colombian daily El Tiempo pointed out that these missions, where the Cuban government retains 80% of the medics’ wages, confiscates their passports and restricts their mobility, are a kind of modern slavery.
Cuba, which is able to freely trade with more than 200 countries, prefers to blame the U.S. embargo for the island being mired in misery. It’s a lie of course — as big and brazen as those peddled by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels — that nevertheless millions of people around the world still believe.
Suffocated by socialism
The reality is quite the opposite: Cuba is being suffocated by a self-imposed blockade on all choice and competition, talent, innovation or any idea contradicting the state’s monopoly on, well, everything. Socialism is based on the false premise that wealth already exists, is innate and must be shared.
But wealth must be built, and the system that has proven to be an exceptional creator of wealth – within a free market democracy model – is the private sector.
Nobody understood this economic truth better than Cuba’s own friends, China and Vietnam, whose communist regimes have managed to lift millions out of poverty by giving the private sector massive leeway. Yet Cuba has clumsily chosen to keep its ideology, rather than the economy, alive since 1959.
Fascism and socialism are practically one and the same.
Now, with Cuban interventions and advice, Venezuela is replicating this same clumsy policy of nationalization that has shown its worthless value. Even in Colombia, many of the present government’s backers unfortunately advocate replicating the same failed path of nationalization.
As a post-script: Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, who isn’t satisfied with perpetuating his rule by hook or by crook, is now calling for an “Anti-Fascist” world congress in Caracas. Could someone explain to Maduro that this is nonsense, given that fascism and socialism are practically one and the same? Both toy with totalitarianism and do not hesitate to use violence against anyone who opposes their plans.
