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“The strategic objectives of Washington and the desires for freedom of the Cuban people are aimed, more intensely than ever, in the same direction,” says journalist and political analyst José Manuel González Rubines.
In an article published in the Spanish newspaper El Debate, the co-director of the civic think tank CubaxCuba indicates that if the Donald Trump Administration aims to achieve a security zone on its southern border, “it needs a non-hostile government in Cuba and a minimally stable country,” which would require foreign investment and the integration of the Island into the international economy.
However, this —the columnist clarifies— would not be possible without a political transition in the country, a condition mandated by the Helms-Burton Act for the lifting of U.S. trade restrictions. Moreover, it would be necessary for the government in Cuba to regain credibility as a counterpart, ensuring legal security and compliance with its financial commitments, which, under the conditions of the dictatorship, is little more than a chimera.
The recent economic liberalization measures announced by the Cuban government under pressure from the White House demonstrate, according to the analyst, that the main obstacle to their earlier implementation, despite being a repeated request from the Cuban people, was not the U.S. embargo; but rather the totalitarian system itself on the island.
However, what the regime in Havana "concedes under coercion, it reclaims whenever it can. Therein lies the Gordian knot of the issue: as long as it remains intact, any reform will be temporary, reversible, and unreliable," the researcher points out, citing as an example the rapid re-freezing of the transformations that were adopted during the "thaw" with the administration of Barack Obama.
The article pauses on a significant point when it cites a recent investigation from the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, which states that 89% of the Cuban population suffers from extreme poverty and 78% express their desire to emigrate. If the Island continues to deteriorate without a system change, a massive wave of emigration to the neighboring North could occur, which would hardly serve the political interests of the current administration, nor the career projections of the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the text suggests.
To understand that the Cuban "socialism" is "an 'intrinsically perverse' political system that prefers to spend more on repression than on production," there is enough data at hand, the writer reflects.
Baste to think —illustrate— that there are hundreds of political prisoners, one of the highest figures in the world, and that public investment in agriculture, livestock, and fishing is only 2.7% of the executed budget capital, according to the latest data from the government itself, which owns 80% of the land in the nation.
Changing that order of things and the regime that produces it is not only a necessity for the U.S. to satisfy its interests, but, specifically, what Cubans have been demanding for decades, without results, yet with a tenacity that withstands decades of repression, concludes González Rubines.
In his opinion, uprooting the dictatorship "like a cancer whose metastasis sowed guerrillas throughout Latin America and planted chavismo in Venezuela and orteguismo in Nicaragua, is a matter that transcends U.S. geopolitics and should be a moral and political demand that challenges any democracy that takes itself seriously."
In addition to being a researcher and journalist, José Manuel González Rubines holds a Master's degree in Democracy and Good Governance from the University of Salamanca and has worked as a university professor, fundraiser and in interpersonal public diplomacy.
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