Fear and Incompetence: The Two Keys to the Criminal Stagnation of the Cuban Regime

Fidel Castro knew exactly what he was doing. When he saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and chose to entrench himself instead of adapting, he did so not out of ignorance. He understood that in Cuba, real economic opening was not a reform: it was the beginning of the end of the regime. He studied it in Eastern Europe. He witnessed it in the USSR. And he made a cold, brutal decision: he preferred a impoverished and controlled people over a prosperous and uncontrollable one. He could afford that decision because he was the origin of the system. He had the authority to contradict himself without destroying the narrative because he himself was the narrative. Even so, he chose not to move. And he bequeathed us a broken country.

Fear:

The leaders currently governing Cuba lack the strategic coldness of those who built the system. They possess something different and, in many ways, worse: the panic of those who inherited something they do not know how to maintain or transform. Díaz-Canel and the nomenclature surrounding him are fully aware that real reforms mean the end of their privileges. However, they no longer have the political capital to carry out that transformation, even if they wanted to. If tomorrow they announced real business freedom, political openness, and market prices, the question from eleven million Cubans would be devastatingly simple: what was all this for? Each true reform is a retroactive confession that the sacrifice was unnecessary, that the generations who sacrificed their youth and future in the name of the Revolution were deceived. That confession is politically suicidal. And that is why it does not happen.

Another fear adds to this one, less visible but equally paralyzing: the regime is no longer the monolithic block it once pretended to be. Inside, those who sense that change is necessary coexist with those who regard any reform as a betrayal of the Revolution. This internal fracture turns every decision into a minefield. Those wanting to make a move fear misstepping and becoming responsible for the collapse. The orthodox observer waits for the moment to accuse them of capitulating. Amidst these intertwined fears, nothing happens. No one takes action. And while the regime freezes in its own internal contradictions, Cuba continues to empty out.

Incompetence:

But there is more than just fear. A part of the current Cuban standstill is no longer even a conscious calculation: it is pure incompetence, disguised as ideology. Today's Cuban leaders did not build the system they manage. They inherited it. And they inherited it in its worst version: an economy originally designed to survive on external subsidies, first Soviet and then Venezuelan, incapable of producing its own wealth because it was never conceived for that purpose.

Fixing something like this would require extraordinary vision, exceptional political courage, and uncommon technical ability. Instead, what we have are mediocre bureaucrats, trained to follow orders and manage scarcity, not to transform anything. When they attempted the monetary restructuring in 2021, they executed it so clumsily that they triggered inflation and accelerated exactly the crisis they were trying to resolve. There was no calculated malice in that disaster. There was technical mediocrity with brutal consequences. And most revealing of all is that no one was held accountable.

In Cuba, incompetence does not carry any political cost for those in power. There are no elections to lose, no free press to hold them accountable, and no opposition demanding responsibility. The only one who always pays is the ordinary Cuban.

The speech:

In the center of it all, functioning as the great lubricant of the system, is the anti-imperialist discourse. As long as there is a credible external enemy, the regime has a permanent excuse. That is why Cuba needs the conflict with the United States much more than the United States needs the conflict with Cuba. Therefore, every diplomatic rapprochement destabilizes Havana more than any sanction. A regime that needs an enemy to survive cannot afford peace, even if its people are dying of hunger while waiting for it.

The difference between Fidel and those who succeeded him is not ideological or generational in the way it is often perceived. Fidel chose stagnation with full awareness of what he was sacrificing. His successors no longer have a choice. They are trapped in the trap he built, lacking the intelligence to escape it and the courage to even try. The result for Cubans is the same: a paralyzed country, a people suffering from emigration, and an elite that continues to find reasons not to change anything.