Cuba Hit by White Collar Corruption

[naaman fletcher]

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=22348

HAVANA TIMES, April 1 – In Cuba they say that under socialism each person is the owner of the means of production, a principle that was apparently taken to heart by several important executives of Cubana Airlines and some travel agencies.

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The national press is staying oblivious, as they always do concerning the most important events occurring in Cuba.

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For decades leaders didn’t live off their wages. Houses and automobiles were “assigned” to them for no cost or at token prices as perks for their merits. This operated as a mechanism that took place on the fringe of the law and of established norms.

Some time back, a Cuban military officer who had fought in a Latin American guerrilla war admitted to me that when he returned to the island “they gave me a bunch of keys to empty houses and told me to choose the one I liked most.”

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They are devoid of ideology; they defend the system as long as it turns them a profit, as they wait patiently for it to collapse in order to become the owners of the companies they manage. They are a breed that —paraphrasing Marx— that could become the gravedigger of Cuban socialism.

[protocol rv]

1. They are "red Oligarchs"

This is what happened in other communist nations. They are symbolized by the pigs in "Animal Farm" by Orwell.