15 July 2008

Raúl's U-Turn

For FIFTY long and painful years Cubans, lead by Fidel & Co., have traveled on a long, lonely and bumpy road where they have had to sacrifice their freedom and comfort supposedly to reach egalitarianism.

Now, those of us who where on that little red bus and have experienced the proletariat road trip in Cuba, know that Fidel’s shining path to egalitarianism was nothing but an excuse to starve and oppress the people into submission, but the reasons given for the misery, struggles and oppression was always reaching the Marxist Shangri-La of an egalitarian classless society.

Marxism is a materialistic vision of reality where classes struggle for limited resources. Only when no one owns anything can they own the same and be equal since Marxism measures man by what he owns rather than by what he is.

The regime had already been making noises that the orthodox Marxist, (and Fidel’s) path to equality was “inconvenient”, but in a speech to the Cuban “parliament” on Friday, Raúl himself came right out and said so:


Socialism means social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities, not salaries. Equality does not mean egalitarianism.


That’s interesting.

Basically, what little brother is telling the Cuban people, in his own pragmatic and sardonic way, is that the road they’ve been forced to travel on for the last FIFTY years was going the wrong way because the navigator was holding the map upside down.

Ooops! We’re Lost. The directions were wrong…make a U-turn!

Not only does Raúl say that egalitarianism is the wrong destination, he says that it is another form of exploitation:


This is, in the end, another form of exploitation, that of the exploitation of the responsible worker by the one who is not, or even worse, by the slothful.

So, let’s see: Egalitarianism was a destination imposed on the Cuban people by the revolution. So I guess is he saying that the revolution has been exploiting the Cuban people by leading down the wrong path. I mean Raúl didn’t just drop from outer space and find Cuba on its dismal Soviet-style command economy highway, he drove the bus and made the Cuban people get on –high jacked- AT GUNPOINT!

But now, he’s says the bridge is out and that the little red bus is heading towards the precipice and since it is a Marxist bus it’s difficult to steer and the brakes aren’t that good. All he can do is to tell the hostages to tighten their safety belts and hold on because he’s driving and he’s making a U-Turn.


So now that the bus has made a U-Turn, will Raúl “social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities” Castro lead the bus towards Democracy? Not likely. In the same speech, the new bus driver said as much in the same speech:


I reiterate that we will never make even the smallest decision as a result of pressure or extortion, whatever the source: whether a powerful country or an entire continent.

That’s his response to the EU’s decision to lift their symbolic sanctions on the regime and review the Cuban bus’ progress a year from now.

My guess is that the new direction will be to a new Putin style military dictatorship where the Red Mob runs everything with Raúl as the “capo de tutti capi” and all his made men live in luxury. Kindda like now-except the inequalities between citizens have now been officially legitimized.


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