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Elizabeth González Aznar published this Sunday on Facebook an open letter addressed to the leaders of the State and government of Cuba in which she questions the economic cost of sustaining the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), the Central Workers' Union of Cuba (CTC), and the Union of Communist Youth (UJC).
González frames his criticism within the context of the reforms that the regime has recently announced, including the reduction of ministries from 27 to 20.
If the government has been willing to reduce state structures, he argues, it should apply the same logic to these political and mass organizations.
"They are organizations that do not contribute anything economically, but they do consume a significant amount of the budget and state resources with these representations at various levels, which, in my opinion, are unnecessary," wrote the author.
González Aznar's analysis focuses particularly on the CDR, established in 1960 as a mechanism for neighborhood surveillance, and today comprises nearly eight million Cubans aged 14 and older in 133,000 grassroots committees.
The author questions what justifies maintaining four hierarchical levels—local, municipal, provincial, and national—when current communications would allow directives from the central level to reach each neighborhood directly.
"What are the CDR doing today for the Cubans and for Cuba? Just talk, pure talk, ideology, but at what cost?" he wrote, listing the expenses involved in maintaining that structure: offices, salaries, phones, food, electricity, vehicles, fuels, and staff at every territorial level.
The author goes beyond administrative inefficiency and exposes irregularities within those structures: "Behind all this, there are also misappropriation of resources, theft, inflated positions, and officials living off the names of those titles."
His criticism of the CDR comes at a time of growing popular rejection of this organization and its national coordinator, Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, who sparked outrage in June by responding arrogantly to criticism over a video at the Hotel Nacional, claiming that his 16 years in prison in the United States give him the right to do as he pleases.
González extends the questioning to the FMC, CTC, and UJC, and proposes a concrete alternative: that all these organizations transform into non-governmental organizations or independent civil societies, without mandatory state funding.
"In the end, all these organizations, especially the mass ones, could become NGOs, civil societies that take care of man as a social being, but not organizations to which the state must allocate costly resources without any contribution," he stated.
The letter is published days after Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz presented, on June 20, a document with 176 proposals for transformation grouped into 23 categories that will require 32 new legal regulations.
None of those proposals consider addressing the mass organizations linked to the PCC, whose funding is included in the state budget under the line items for "Political and Mass Organizations" without public breakdown by organization.
"I ask the leaders of this country to present in numbers how much it costs to maintain the entire structure of these organizations," González concluded, demanding an accountability that the regime has never provided.
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