MEXICO CITY, Mexico. – The Cuban regime recently inaugurated the Ideas Multimedios center. It will encompass the five media or programs for privileged propaganda put out by the Cuban Communist Party: Cubadebate; Con Filo; Fidel, soldado de las ideas; Mesa Redonda, and Cuadrando la caja. The five are dedicated to communicating the orientations of the Cuban Communist Party to the population about domestic and international topics.
Barely a month from Parliament president Esteban Lazo’s fit of anger for the scant production of food in the country and for having to import everything that is distributed to the people through the rationing system, it is surprising to find no concrete measures to increase food production. We are talking about chronic food shortages that have gone on for 32 years since the end of Soviet subsidies.
In that context, the new propaganda center located in the Playa municipality, features three floors and has electric power partially guaranteed through solar panels and photovoltaic energy. Cubadebate highlighted the speed at which 60% of the building had been remodeled in just three months. It isn’t possible to know the total investment required or the costs of reconstructing the building. The source of the investment is also unknown. Did the investment come from the national budget? Is it part of central government expenses? As is usually the case, the government does not account for its expenses.
The lack of balance in the state budget’s investment reveals the government’s priorities
According to economist Pedro Monreal, the government’s budget line for Entrepreneurial Services, Real Estate activities and Rentals –which includes everything related to hotel construction- tops the sector investment allocation list in Cuba, according to the most recent data published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI, by its Spanish acronym) for the first Semester of 2022.
In percentages, these expenses are equivalent to 33.8% of all investments undertaken, which is alarming if compared to the funds allocated for Agriculture and Cattle which, when considering the shortages context, represents barely 2.6% of the total budget invested, that is, approximately 830 million Cuban pesos.
According to ONEI, in the first Quarter of this year, only 2.9% of the budget was allocated to Agriculture, Cattle and Forestry, while 23% of the national budget was allocated to Real Estate activities and Rentals. In other words, 585 million Cuban pesos for the production of food products, compared to more than 4.7 billion Cuban pesos for the construction of hotels. We can add the precarious sum of 0.4% allocated to the Fishing industry.
It is alarming that the greater portion of the national budget is still being allocated to the construction of hotels. No other sector in the economy is allocated a larger investment. If the official discourse states that food security is a matter of “national security”, in practice, Cuba allocates the largest part of its budget to the construction of hotels, with an occupancy of 14% of its total capacity as of 2022.
How much is allocated for the Party’s propaganda apparatus?
ONEI does not give any details about the Communist Party’s propaganda expenses, but it gives evidence of the huge expense in Public Administration (to which, since 2016, Defense costs are added). Between 2018 and 2022, budget costs for Public Administration plus Defense have increased six-and-a-half times; Central Government costs have increased in similar proportion. Thus, while Agriculture was allocated only 830 million Cuban pesos in 2022, Public Administration plus Defense were allocated 51.4 billion Cuban pesos for the same year.
Is this excessive imbalance the result of the army of government officials that control the totalitarian economy of the island? Or is it the result of an increasing parasitic Communist Party bureaucracy that reproduces the propaganda of the sole Party? Costs allocated for Public Administration, costs for Communist Party propaganda, and costs for Defense are not reported in any detail anywhere in the Annual Statistical Report 2022.
Without public transparency, the dictatorship only fuels distrust among its citizenry for the political regime’s institutions. Even with the partial information that the government reveals, the disproportionate levels of investment and the privileges enjoyed by certain sectors of the economy, are a recurrent topic, as is the excessive increase in costs allocated for Public Administration.
The five media outlets that are privileged by the dictatorship on the new Ideas Multimedios, aim to justify the policies of Cuba’s Communist Party, even when they are contested by the citizenry, as we have seen on social media. For example, the program Cuadrando la caja, which is dedicated to the new bank regulations, hides all the distortions and the errors of the government’s recent policy. Cuba’s Communist Party turns its back on the rigorous analysis of Cuban economists like Pavel Vidal, Pedro Monreal and Elías Amor. These experts are never invited as guests to those propaganda programs, nor are they listened to or taken into consideration by the Cuban dictatorship.
ARTÍCULO DE OPINIÓN
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