Misery is not just a byproduct of socialism, but it’s also a tool of oppression and domination the communist Castro dictatorship has put to diligent use throughout its 65-year history.
Cuban independent journalist Rafaela Cruz explains in Diario de Cuba:
Misery as an instrument of domination in Cuba
In 1989, despite the glaring failure of the Soviet bloc as empirical evidence (the theoretical impossibility of socialism has been common knowledge since the 1930s) Fidel Castro decided to maintain a system banning all private property and all economic freedom other than his own.
And, if even further confirmation was needed of the folly of keeping the economy nationalized, and exacerbating Cuba’s stand-off with the United States, the strong results that the Chinese and Vietnamese were obtaining just few years after abandoning socialism, and making diplomatic efforts to patch up their historically strained relationships with Washington, left no doubt that this was the path to prosperity, and not the “construction of socialism.”
Castro I and his accomplices knew that what Cuba needed was the exact opposite of what, with premeditation and treachery, they decided to give it, in a flagrant act of aggravated “countrycide.” Both that sociopath and his current heirs were convinced that they would last longer in power if they were to rule over a fractured people, one dependent on the State and emigration, and that a prosperous civil society based on private property, would inevitably generate pockets of power standing as alternatives to Castroism.
Although the extreme misery into which they have intentionally plunged the country is a potential source of political instability, it is much easier to manipulate people who are hungry for bread and electricity, or to bully them, than to grapple with a prosperous society that begins to think about freedoms, dangerously connected by economic and family ties to the greatest known democracy.
It must not be believed, then, that the current state of national decomposition is a by-product, something that “happened” when, attempting to implement socialism, they ended up creating this hell. This Cuba of rubble, garbage dumps and reggaeton is a direct result of the fact that Fidel Castro and his gang put in place a system they knew full well would never create wealth and well-being, one they knew would produce poverty, death and destruction. Despite all this, they decided to preserve it, even when it had just failed in Europe and in Asia it had been abandoned, to keep the population in survival mode, thinking with their stomachs.
This is a genocide that has been perpetrated while constantly laying the blame on the US embargo. But it is not because of Washington’s stubbornness in maintaining this policy —part of a hope that this nightmare will end some day in Cuba— that Castroism has had a partner in crime, but rather because of the hundreds of governments that, out of ingenuity, ideology or interest, have legitimized, with their recognition and institutional normality, the power of the mafia that has hijacked this nation.
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Yes, as we’ve know for a very long time. People mired in misery and privation and forced to spend most of their time trying to survive are much less likely to rebel and risk winding up in an even worse situation.