The cases of high-ranking officials of the government and the Party, as well as high-ranking military personnel accused of corruption, subject to judicial proceedings and sentenced by the courts to rigorous sentences, are not new in the history of Cuban socialism. Nor those of first-level leaders (as the nomenclature discourse calls them), subject to investigation and politically questioned for acting inappropriately according to the norms established for these cadres, and exposed in public, even if they were not branded as corrupt.
Since everything Cuban tends to be judged with a separate yardstick, as if we were a kind of platypus or an error in the syntax that governs history, the news here would be that when it comes to corruption we are not so strange.
Transparency International, the agency that monitors corruption in the public sector, uses a universal scale, based on the assessments of the citizens themselves in each country, whose indicators are: bribery, diversion of public funds, officials who take advantage of their positions, capacity of the government to confront it, nepotism, laws that require financial reporting by officials, legal protection for those who report on bribery and corruption, predominance of particular interests in the control of the State, and access to information about government activities.
According to that scale, Cuba’s global position has fallen, in relative terms, in the last five years, from 60th place in 2019 to 76th in 2023. We currently occupy the same position as Hungary, Moldova, Macedonia; above Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Ukraine; in short, before 104 countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, India, almost all African, Latin American and Caribbean countries. In Latin America, only Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and several Caribbean islands are above it. In other words, we are in that group of the least corrupt, and it has been that way for more than twenty years.
However, in the appreciation of Cubans themselves, in the last five years this perception has fallen from an index of 48 to 42. Because one thing is how we are with respect to others, and another is how we have fallen with respect to ourselves.
That said, it would be difficult to find in any other country in the region or Europe, not to mention the United States, a more continuous and public line of punishment for corruption. I do not have space to dwell on those that have marked milestones in the history of the last forty years. The most notorious cases of 1987, 1989, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2024 can be examined separately, compared and their cases specified, and the thesis that they reflect a pattern can be discussed. Distinguishing them from cases not associated with corruption requires a broader study, with data. To classify them in one fell swoop as maneuvers aimed at finding scapegoats to mask the rottenness of the regime can only be explained by attachment to conspiracism, propaganda, bad faith or pure ignorance.
Just as anti-corruption actions have a record of precedence, according to the jargon of lawyers, and a location with respect to the world outside, it is not unusual for an investigation by national security agencies into senior officials or soldiers who may have enjoyed the greatest political confidence. Neither here nor anywhere.
Let’s say, is it that when it is discovered that a politician or a high-ranking military leader is involved in dirty business, connected to drug trafficking cartels, giving them perks or passing confidential political information to private interests in exchange for personal benefits, it is due, most of the time, to a couple of kamikaze journalists who reveal it in an “independent media”? Isn’t it one of the tasks of the counterintelligence apparatus, which deals with this, according to the usual rules of compartmentalization and secrecy, without making it known to the rest of the government until they have the evidence to initiate a judicial process?
Some political commentators seem to ignore that precedence, and that global pattern. Perhaps because, let’s say, they did not watch the so-called Case 1 on television; and then the sanctions of Case 2.
This ignorance goes back to the gaps in history that they were taught in their schools, and to the fact that they have not begun to investigate or study seriously, instead of playing it by ear, and applying the most popular theory to interpret Cuban reality: the conspiracy. Theory translated into an exercise of imagination that works just as well to talk about politics as it does to write a thriller.
Drawing conclusions and launching “hypotheses” about the most recent case, anticipating the prosecutor’s report, is thus presented through substantive political analysis. For example, the idea that the complaint of the case reveals a kind of slow-motion coup against the President of the Republic.
In this political fiction novel, the characters who play the coup plotters are revealed from the first page, naturally. Although there is no evidence, no indication that Díaz-Canel has lost the support of whoever proposed him and has continued to publicly accompany him, nor that of the main political and military power structures; without taking into account that he is barely a year into his second term, after which, according to Article 126 of the Constitution, he will not be able to be re-elected.
Although the current that confuses political journalism with speculation is not exclusive to the anti-government media, in these it has reached, let’s say, an exalted condition: the more lacking in verisimilitude, the more “literarily” effective; the more professional they are claimed, the hollower and more lawless. Typifying that press, with its nuances and differences, patterns and coloring, also requires a separate exercise, to which I will return.
Finally, how is corruption, or more strictly, the public perception that there are still unproven judicial cases, more than one, of corruption, related to the complex context of the current Cuban crisis, not just the “economic” one?
According to political psychology, when a crisis occurs, the sense of support and solidarity between family and friends is reinforced; as well as when a natural disaster or epidemic occurs. This is what happened in the harsh context of COVID-19, to a large extent, despite the deterioration in the quality of health services, the shortage of medicines, etc.
However, as I have discussed in this same column, social relations and the rationalization of the effects of the crisis are one thing, and the wear and tear of daily life is another, to which COVID-19 added all the necessary drops to overflow the cup. Not by chance, the day the coronavirus curve shot upwards, in a province that until then was among those with the best parameters in confronting the pandemic, was precisely July 11. And it was precisely in that province where the most violent public protests were precipitated, long before than in the capital and other cities.
When not in the middle of a natural disaster or pandemic, the ability to assimilate the deterioration of daily life is reduced, and the limit can be more easily reached. Especially when the depression situation lasts longer. As the old philosopher Aurelio Alonso told me in his humorous style, “it is no longer about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but about seeing the tunnel.”
Income is not polarized in any way in terms of social dynamics. On the one hand, to the growing number of poor people, the number of impoverished people is added, because they have lost the level of well-being to which they were accustomed. On the other hand, some social groups improve and expand their access to the market, including the luxury market; they can afford to travel and import objects for sophisticated consumption, save in currencies that do not devalue, and face inflation under advantageous conditions.
In this context of polarization, it is not strange that “patrimonial crimes,” corruption, theft, bribery, the enthronement of the black market in consumption and living habits are established in “everyday life,” as psychologists say. .
The incompressibility of the black market, maintained by the contraction of the ration book, the shortage of basic necessities for family consumption in state stores, and limited access to legalized private businesses, is structurally connected to a dissatisfied majority of social demand.
Last but not least, the elasticity of demand for goods and services by those who have resources, by contributing to maintaining the rise in prices in all markets, indirectly affects that type of income redistribution mechanism called theft and “petty corruption.”
It is a systemic phenomenon (inseparable from the remaining problems of the model), not simply derived from the demand of those with high incomes (the private ones).
Building the anti-corruption policy based on accounting controls and audits, and moralizing campaigns, which make the cadres swear probity, without acting from the social and economic context of the crisis, which encompasses the State and civil society, is an ineffective exercise.
Spurred on by this perfect storm, where numerous internal and external factors that we already know converge, the recent March 17 protests are an organic expression of that civil society tormented by a crisis of which the increase in corruption is a part.
As in the July 11 protests, the manipulations tend to blur their nature, but at this point we already know that they constitute a popular reaction that is not only predictable, but legitimate, which is not willing to wait for the legislation derived from Article 56, five years after the new Constitution recognized the right to street protest. [The rights of assembly, demonstration and association, for lawful and peaceful purposes, are recognized by the State as long as they are exercised with respect for public order and compliance with the requirements established by law.] And I say that we know this because the response of the authorities has been political, not police.
The experience of corruption as a chronic problem in other socialisms that some consider models for ours reveals that the harshness of punishment barely removes some corrupt people, but does not act on the root of the problem.
As in public health and epidemiology, about which we know more than other very prosperous people, understanding the factors of epidemics and preventing them is the most effective way to deal with them.
A doctor friend explained it to me this way: “as long as we don’t get infected with the ‘switched off neurons’ virus, we can defend ourselves against all epidemics.”
Author
Rafael Hernández
