Cuba: Marxism is to blame

The last elections have been a scam. One in four Cubans did not vote. This is the official figure that is calculated. In protest, many voted for Superman or Tarzan. (Especially in the province of Holguín, according to the interrogations). If those who did not vote are added, to the ruined ballots I profess more than 50% leaves the electoral roll. Such a record within the brief history of totalitarianism.

The first elections, in the mid-seventies of the last century, were also a scam, but they were the product of illusions. Then an orderly march towards socialism was promised, which the support of the USSR indicated. Not even that remains standing. That was blown up when the USSR disappeared in 1991 and the July 11, 2021, hand in hand with San Isidro Movement, when the Cuban revolution faltered.

There remain more than a thousand political prisoners, and among them Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara -the leader of the movement- and the musician Maykel Osorbo (after getting two Emmys for his song, Homeland and Life, that Yotuel defends like no one else abroad).

This has been happening for more than 64 years. In Cuba one does not choose between various options, but rather ratifies, reiterates, waiting for the spark to ignite the prairie. The technicians of the Communist Party are experts in finding excuses for the crises that the system inflicts on them, but they are not magicians imagining solutions. There is still the option of leaving the island, but that is useful as long as the causes of the “espantada” are corrected. Three hundred thousand Cubans ran to the United States and settled there last year. Two of the last arrived on Delta wings in just two hours.

The first excuse is the “embargo” or “blockade”. My friend, businessman Carlos Saladrigas, wants to put an end to excuses and alibis. As? Bending to them, as he did President Barack Obama, knowing that that is not where the shots are going, but on the other hand much more sensitive: human nature is contrary to Marxism-Leninism, as Alexander Yakovlev, the “father” of the volume, an unforgettable afternoon, very close to the Kremlin, in the enormous office of Mikhail Súslov, ideologue and guardian of Marxist essences, already dead at that time (1982).

Why do we know it? Because it has been attempted in a hundred different ways under a hundred different leaders, with all the gradations of the elusive charisma, and under various ethnicities - Germanics, Slavs, Latins, etc. - and behind different religious backdrops - Catholics, Lutherans, Buddhists, etc. .- and in absolutely all of them it has failed.

The idea of equalizing human beings is absurd. As is the theory of value in Marx. Don Karl knew this since the refutation of the economist William Jevons and his “marginalists.” His theory of value, which is similar to that held by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was, in essence, wrong. It bothers classical economists, I suppose, to be in such company because Mr. Marx thought of copying an error made by two distinguished founders of the sect and not revising it.

Friedrich Engels was given the task of choosing the path to immortality for his lifelong companion. He had to say goodbye to the body in March 1883. Engels considered himself the “second violin” of that strange orchestra, in which, of course, Karl Marx was the “first.”

Marx, according to Engels, could only make two contributions: the hypothesis that capitalists kept the lion's share thanks to surplus value, and the foundation of class struggle: the obvious fact that there are always prerequisites before resort to the battle of ideas. All of which is based on Georg Hegel.

That is, according to Engels, “surplus value” was an instrument of theft of the proletarians, and not as it usually is: an agonizing reward, almost forgotten, because five out of six companies fail in the market. And Hegel is not the profound philosopher who inspires Marxism, but rather an idiotic reference. Just nonsense.

There were enough elements in the 1950s to discard Marxism. The two Germanys were beginning to take shape. The two Chinas (Taipei and Beijing) were beginning the competition. Even a deep look at Cuba itself could reflect how the island's proximity to the centers of greatest development was translated. The real Cuba lived linked to the United States, to its great size, to its capital, to its creative centers. More than six decades later, it has been seen that it was crazy to throw everything overboard.