Pedro Campos

A brief review of the current Cuban climate reveals a sudden increase in repression against Cuban opposition and dissidents over the past few weeks since Trump made a speech in Miami announcing the changes he plans to implement in US policy towards Cuba.

It has already become a habit: Cuba’s “revolutionary government” sends out memos and statements without anyone signing them and the party itself and its political and mass organizations make announcements and issue statements about important foreign policy issues without anyone knowing who is answering for them.

An announcement in Thursday’s edition of Granma newspaper about the preparations for the upcoming elections states that “according to that stipulated in the 1992 Electoral Law, all Cuban citizens who are 16 years old and over and are living in the country on a permanent basis for at least the last two years before an election, have the right to vote.” This implies discriminatory treatment of those Cubans who live abroad, when it comes to everything related to the current election process.

The so-called “Socialism of the 21st Century” defended by Maduro was nothing but the Venezuelan version of Cuban state socialism, with all of the disastrous consequences that this entails for the economy and society.

On April 16, 1961, on the corner of 23rd and 12th Streets in Vedado, Havana, Fidel Castro announced the “socialist and democratic nature of the Cuban Revolution.” However, since the ‘60s, many Cuban socialists from different generations have been reporting the truly anti-socialist path that the Revolution has taken since its first actions in 1959.

What the government is doing by handing out bills for doctor’s visits is shameful, in a country where the State retains most of Cuban workers wages, rewarding them with poor salaries plus “free” health & education.

The 2017 Teaching Congress has just kicked off in Havana, under the motto “Education: the cornerstone of progress.” According to the Cuban government’s own statistics as well as those from UNESCO, Cuba is one of the countries with the greatest progress in education in the world, one of the countries that churns out the most doctors and professionals per capita per year, one of the countries with the lowest illiteracy rates, etc.

Repealing the US “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy will reduce the Cuban exodus, but it won’t eliminate it because the root cause of this problem continues to prevail: the centralized and authoritarian State regime which directly pays workers, imposed and maintained by those in power in Cuba, in the name of an nonexistent Socialism.