By Benjamin Noria
HAVANA TIMES – I remember reading once in a book that when dictatorships are in crisis is when they become more repressive. Why do I write this? Well, these days I’ve read news that is creating a strange atmosphere in the Cuban government.
The news is that former Minister of Economy and Planning of Cuba, Alejandro Gil Fernandez, will be prosecuted by a criminal court for the crime of corruption.
Personally, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know if this is an imitation of the Great Purge carried out by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union in 1930, during which hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet Communist Party, socialists, anarchists, and opponents were persecuted or monitored by the police, public trials were held, and finally hundreds of thousands of people were sent to concentration camps called the Gulag.
Or it’s a case of scapegoating to exonerate the real culprits; as happened with the trial and execution in 1989 of Division General and former Minister of the Interior Arnaldo Ochoa and also Antonio de la Guardia, Colonel of the Ministry of the Interior; accused of trafficking cocaine, diamonds, ivory, and using Cuban airspace, land, and waters for drug trafficking activities; as well as embarrassing the Revolution with acts classified as high treason.
This is why I have expressed that it is a strange atmosphere. It’s hard to define what is happening behind the actions being carried out by the Cuban government. Everything unfolds like a horror movie or perhaps a political thriller.
The regime’s corruption has increased. People are sanctioned in the courts with excessively punitive sentences. The government’s madness continues by launching strategies such as the party guidelines for change without changing and the economic reforms that continue to stagnate the Cuban economy. Instead of seeking solutions to get out of the economic crisis, it only increases repression and the presence of the military on the streets.
The Castro regime proclaims itself the defender of the nation and considers itself a victim of the attacks made against it in magazines, newspapers, and social networks, which supposedly threaten the country’s sovereignty.
However, since the triumph of the revolution in 1959, they have been destroying all spaces of legality and freedom, plunging large sectors of the population into misery, hiding information, destroying justice, committing crimes against human rights, and establishing a new model of dictatorship for the 21st century that is already beginning to be imitated in other Latin American countries.
The Cuban people have reached the desperation caused by the monotony of the government’s lack of frankness, and now more than half of the population wants to leave the country to try their luck and have a better life elsewhere.
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