Cuba’s communist dictatorship has 65 years of experience in failed socialist policies, yet it continues to impose the same broken policies over and over again. Is it incompetence or malice?
Roberto Alvarez Quinones explores that question in Diario de Cuba:
Castroism repeats the same old blunders: incompetence or malice?
The devastating new measures taken against Cuba’s private sector are a repetition of mistakes made previously, and the regime knows it. Why, then, are they applying them?
The proverb “never stumble upon the same stone twice” arose in classical Greece. Another very old saying is its antithesis: “Man is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone,” an idea alluded to by Confucius when he said that “a people that does not know its history is condemned to repeat it.” That is, those who do not learn from reality will always make the same mistakes.
That wise conclusion voiced by Confucius (2,500 years ago) goes hand in hand with that of another genius, Albert Einstein, for whom doing the same thing over and over again, and hoping to obtain different results, is a clear expression of madness.
I begin with this philosophical preamble because it applies to the new devastating measures implemented by the Cuban regime against the country’s private sector, which have, logically, been perceived as a repetition of mistakes made previously, which raises the question: why?
I am referring to new decree-laws that stifle MSMEs and other private businesses, a resolution for “the contracting and commercialization of agricultural products” and to “strengthen the functioning of the socialist state enterprises,” and the creation of the outlandish National Institute of Non-State Economic Actors (INAENE), for the fulfillment of “projections and to correct distortions and bolster the economy.”
These measures conjure up a déjà vu of the “Revolutionary Offensive” from 56 years ago, and the “Process for the Rectification of Errors and Negative Trends” from 40 years ago.
More than making mistakes, Fidel and Raúl Castro have committed misdeeds
One must be careful not to misunderstand the situation, as we are not dealing here with a repetition of errors due to ineptitude or a lack of experience or knowledge. They were not so decades ago, and they are not now.
Over the course of Castroism’s 60 years, Fidel and Raúl Castro, more than making mistakes, have engaged in intentional misdeeds. For example, both of them, along with the Argentine Guevara, were perfectly aware of the horrific consequences of the introduction of Communism in Bolshevik Russia, and then in China.
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It is neither incompetence nor malice. It is simply socialism, which is NOT truly meant to work as promised for “the people,” only for the ruling class. As long as that’s the case, the ruling class is fine with it.