Cuba, in a Generation Deficit Due to Incapacity

HAVANA, Cuba. – They call it a “generation deficit due to emergency,” but we all know (even they themselves) that the blackouts are a matter of capacity. And I’m not referring to what the outdated thermoelectric plants, Turkish floating power stations, and Chinese solar panels can or cannot generate, but to the inability of those who insist on pretending to fix what can no longer be further ruined because, quite literally, they’ve turned it to dust—as we Cubans say when something is irreparably destroyed.

This is how they’ve left the country after so much voluntarism and so many failed experiments. Beyond the political propaganda and looting excuses, neither the so-called “Energy Revolution,” nor the “Tarea Ordenamiento” [Currency Reorganization Task], nor any of the nonsense devised by the island’s ministries and other government agencies—where people are placed based on “political loyalty” or family ties, rather than intellectual capacity—have helped.

So now we see, for example, how in the race to replace Miguel Díaz-Canel, a single-neuron specimen like Susely Morfa is emerging—not because of any “brilliance,” but now being “tested” over in Villa Clara.

As my grandmother would say: God help us if Roberto Morales Ojeda’s and Raúl Castro’s favorite sheep ends up winning the contest in April 2028.

But honestly, whether the current administrator stays on for another five years, or is replaced or flanked by “the millionaire psychologist,” won’t change our situation—just as nothing changed under Raúl Castro and his cosmetic “reforms” which, as we now see, only aimed to place GAESA where previously only his brother’s will could prevail. The truth is that Fidel Castro wasn’t truly succeeded by his blood heir. Rather, that heir—too lazy to govern—delegated executive power to that economic monster he had built in the shadows since the 1980s with the help of Julio Casas Regueiro and his late son-in-law Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja.

Yet we should not confuse GAESA’s ability to plunder the Cuban economy with any kind of “genius.” It’s directly proportional to its demonstrated incompetence in every development strategy, failed calculation, and poor investment choice—unless, from the start (or at least at some point), their true intentions were exactly what we’re seeing now: dozens of unpopular measures revealing the presence of an elite clinging to power. An elite that, having failed in their plan to become powerful businesspeople under Barack Obama’s thaw and Joe Biden’s leniency, is now executing a two-pronged strategy: entrenchment for those who can no longer escape Cuba (because it’s too late or too difficult), and retreat for those who can flee easily and perhaps disappear quietly.

In both cases, they all end up with full pockets—even if it means the total collapse of the country they’ve always viewed not as a home but as a plantation to exploit. After all, while they plunder our pockets, foreign accounts, and European development aid, they keep eating, traveling, and living without blackouts or fuel shortages.

Today’s blackouts are increasing and have no solution—in other words, they are becoming eternal—because they stem from this “willful incapacity,” the root cause of our terrifying disaster in all its dimensions.

So too are the hunger, the thirst, the neglect, the constant travel of the plantation foreman, the repressors seeking asylum in the U.S., and the privileged offspring hiding behind endless scholarships in Spain or “arranged” marriages with foreigners (like Ana Hurtado’s with Julio Casas Regueiro’s nephew, who has a long history of corruption across ministries and state companies, shielded by the power of “blood ties”).

“God makes them, and GAESA brings them together,” someone once joked about these so-called “gaesos.” “It’s not that they steal, lie, and abuse because they are thieves, liars, and abusers, but that—from their elite perspective—governing means stealing, lying, and abusing, because anything goes to keep stealing, lying, and abusing.”

This never-ending cycle of theft-lies-abuse—in short, repression—is reproduced in everything that affects us: from the rotating “block” blackout schedule (where hotels and homes of high-ranking officials and the military are never shut off), to the distribution of food, medicine, and fuel in crumbs.

We know we’re being deceived, robbed, and abused, but many are not ideologically ready to accept such evil. Not inside Cuba, not outside. Not even within the “system” itself. Yet, there’s no other explanation for what we’re living through than evil itself—the mediocrity and incapacity of an abusive system to generate the well-being it promises but has never been willing to deliver.

There is much evil behind the so-called “generation deficit” blackouts these days. There was oil in reserve even before the Iran-Israel conflict, yes, and there were at least two tankers unloading in Cienfuegos and Santiago de Cuba while Miguel Díaz-Canel was in Belarus.

But the fuel they’ve saved at our expense—during these blackout-filled, war-alarm days—will be used for the 10th Plenary of the Communist Party in early July, and a bit more will be held for the end of the month. That way, during the July 26th celebrations, they can claim that everything will “significantly improve” in August, by the start of the school year in September, and even by December 2025—because by then, those who needed to forget will have forgotten, just as they’ve normalized the abuse and systematic theft. This country—left in darkness, hungry, thirsty, sad, hopeless, and unattractive both to those who live here and those who visit—is the result of that evil, of our capacity to forget and normalize, and of the inability of that so-called “generational relay” of the Communist Party. A group that, it seems, has selected from its “reserve cadres” the most degenerate from several generations of Cubans who, over more than half a century, have turned double standards and mediocrity

ARTÍCULO DE OPINIÓN
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