The greatest nightmare of any totalitarian regime is a loss of control, something already evident in Cuba, now like a boat adrift "without a rudder or a captain."
The national currency, once one of the cornerstones of state control, today gores salaries and pensions with inflationary impiety while an impotent Government watches the bull from the stands, knowing that it is powerless to deal with a tumultuous foreign exchange market in the hands of traitorous frontmen.
These actors, fattened ticks managing "private" companies with access to infrastructure "owned by the whole people," but that only enrich them, reveal themselves to be untouchable by the Government, conspiring and profiting by speculating against the peso. There is no honor among thieves.
And the more insignificant the national currency is, the more insignificant are the socialist state enterprises that the Constitution sanctions, but that reality crushes, undermine the regime's other nexus of control over citizens who once paraded en masse in order to avoid fingers being pointed to them at work.
The military's disconnection from the rest of the regime's apparatus can no longer be disguised. GAESA is an insatiable black hole that decapitalizes the country by applying a funnel (a big mouth for its tourism, and small ones for everyone else) a policy imposed by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the MINFAR, which, physically and literally, has the Palace of the Revolution within firing range.
The military bullies the Party because, when ideologies die, weapons rule. Like a bully in a schoolyard, they shake down the PCC for every dollar received from grandma in Miami, and there the civilians go, wearing expressions of resignation, to print off yet more pesos, thereby stoking a painful inflationary process more painful than a boil right where the digestive system ends. A fiscal deficit is the only balm that the Government has found to alleviate its ineptitude, but this is a toxic cure, a remedy worse than the disease.
Alejandro Gil, once the country's most important minister, is now imprisoned, along with his wife and the frontman with whom he was cannibalizing the country's most important agricultural company in order to erect, on its ruins, an empire of canned vegetables and fruit juice. The Castroist house of cards is crumbling from above. The sky's going to fall...
Meanwhile, in the Pearl of the South all hell has broken loose. In Cienfuegos, everyone from the first provincial secretary to the gravedigger of its eclectic cemetery has been stealing. Manuel Marrero went there to announce "sanctions in line with a wartime economy." Are they going to mow down the corrupt by firing squad like they do in China? Nothing is as pathetic as a dying man boasting about his strength.
Even further east, where the Guaso River runs, corruption was so infectious, so widespread, that instead of trying to cure the cancer they had to cut it at the root, dismembering the state-owned and utterly socialist Gastronomy Company of Guantánamo, where, with creative insolence, they were capable of selling you everything, even their mothers.
What about the police? It has been harassing dissidents while an unprotected people lynch rapists, thieves and pickpockets, and some rascals managed to steal 3.8 tons of rice, two of black beans, 22.6 of white sugar, and 33 of soy flour from the Port of Santiago, shortly after 30 ruffians took 130 tons of chicken from a refrigerator in Havana through the back door, causing, according to the competent ministry, delays in the delivery of state-rationed groceries. Thirty criminals, less than half of the members of the Central Committee, and they achieved the same result: jeopardizing the country's food supply.
The chaos on this Island is such that the PCC included on the agenda of its last plenary session "addressing and preventing corruption, crime, illegalities and acts of social indiscipline." It seems that the thieves no longer respect Ali Baba. After decades of flouting the law to survive, theft is idiosyncratic and hypocrisy is as deeply embedded in Cuba's DNA as its irreverent sense of humor. Anthropological damage.
This country corrupted by a corrupt system, they let out the leash a little, permitting private merchants to arise, who bribe everyone that can be bribed. Resolution 209 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices establishes limits on profit percentages in public-private contracts, claiming that this is to contain inflation, but it is really to prevent the signing of agreements more inflated than a hot air balloon through which the managers of state companies obtain lucrative bribes, enabling them to fill up their Geely cars.
And among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the disaster, and the hundreds of thousands who do not want to work legally, the island grows ever feebler, and the Government "innovates" with university job fairs to fill vacancies at companies, schools and hospitals. Even the PCC is running out of people… and may lose Maduro.
In the midst of all this disarray, nothing is working for Castroism, and it is increasingly difficult to hide the oozing ulcers of its decomposition. It is falling apart and, in all honesty, the "Welcome to Cuba" tourism posters should soon be replaced by the more honest "Welcome to the Tragicomedy that is Cuba."