A congressional delegationfrom the United States has met with Raúl Castro, and the issue continues to be acoustic attacks, while disregarding the tacit state of siege against the self-employed; curiously, Raulism's centerpiece policy, an economic decision described by the academic Richard Feinberg as "deeply disappointing."
This incongruity, which is generating a drain of capital, rather than food on the table, as the General/President had promised, demonstrates clearly that the Raulist state remains adrift, with nothing to correct its wayward course. It continues to try to define itself based on its relationship with a foreign state, to the detriment of its relationship with its own people.
Sen. Ron Wydem, a member of the delegation headed by his colleague Patrick Leahy, affirmed in the most emphatic terms at a press conference in Havana that "Cuban officials repeatedly stated that this was the year to do it, to unify the currency."
Representative Kathy Castor indulged in anticipating an illusory change of command on the island, explaining that she declined to meet with Raúl Castro because he is the past, and she would have liked to meet with Díaz Canel, who is the future. Obviously she needs a new compass, or seer.
What is clear is that matters of capital importance to the lives of Cubans are discussed with foreign politicians, not with Cuban citizens. For the regime, the external world, especially the United States, always has priority over the country's internal reality.
This is precisely the reason why people are not interested in the deceptively termed "presidential handover" that is causing such a stir off the island. The Castroist state has no place in Cubans’ political imagination, as it lacks any meaning in people’s tangible realities. The Council of State is simply a fictitious representation, since it means absolutely nothing in the daily lives of Cubans.
The illegitimacy of Castroism is, thus, manifest in its most crude and realistic form. If legitimacy does not exist in the strongest pillar of any social contract, the minds of the people, the result can only be alienation, as this absence of conviction ratifies the regime’s essentially dictatorial nature.