Carlos Alberto Montaner in The Miami Herald:

Don’t be fooled — there’s no real change in Cuba

Raúl Castro’s regime wants to change the general perception about Cuba. It is intent on displaying an image that fundamental changes are taking place on the island, but that’s not true.

Cubans are better able to speak on the phone or enter the hotels, restaurants and stores that used to be reserved for tourists. They can open minuscule family businesses to provide services or are allowed to exploit small parcels of land to produce food. But none of that is essential.

These are nothing but token gestures intended to alleviate the disastrous economic consequences of a system that’s mostly unproductive in a material sense and cruelly harmful in an emotional sense.

What is the essence of that and all other totalitarian tyrannies? It’s evident: the monstruous fact that one person, one group of big shots or a party makes all the basic decisions, tramples on the will of individuals and builds a false reality that matches the image the rulers themselves prefabricated, in accordance with the dogmas of the sect or a speech by The Boss.

What’s terrible is the concealment of reality and the propagation of lies, vile tasks to which those regimes devote almost all their energy. From that clumsy sleight of hand comes the rest of the catastrophes. Everybody lies in order to survive, to keep from being crushed.

The Boss lies when he promises a future that he knows will never come, because his reign is made of promises, not realities. The functionary lies when he falsifies his data to adapt it to the plans imposed on him by his leaders. The worker lies when he pretends to carry out those unattainable or absurd projects. The citizen lies when he applauds a reality that he knows to be false, as false as the Potemkin villages, mere facades of nonexistent buildings erected in Russia to please the Czarina and deceive the travelers.

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