Flares of caution from the comptroller’s office
HAVANA – The timely and alarming information recently printed by the newspaper Juventud Rebelde in an article entitled “Every cent is worth it and you have to take care of it”, based on information gathered and discussed during the XII National Checking of Internal Controls sponsored by Cuba’s Comptroller General, reflects a situation that over the years has become so serious that it could produce an irreversible force capable of dismantling the entire nation economically and politically.
More than 300 million lost constitutes a perilous number, especially under Cuba’s current economic situation. (As for the 300 million referred to as a “total” amount. Are they Cuban pesos or the exchange bills known as CUCs?) And now even criminal networks exist in the business sector.
Since the 1980s the police authorities of the Technical Department of Investigations (DTI) and other specialists in the matter warned of the growing danger with this type of crime. Some went as far as to say that if all these characters involved in such illegalities were politicized, the days of the revolution were numbered.
Some senior officials of the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic claim that the increase in cases of economic crimes in 2017, compared to the previous years, is a consequence of greater effectiveness. Others assert that the disease is metastasizing. The truth is that both the political side and the economic sector must join forces to create new strategies, not only to combat the effects, but the causes of this ‘disease.’
For those interested in the subject, a must read is the book, Socialism Betrayed, by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, published by Social Sciences, 2013, with a prologue, written while in a Kentucky prison, by Ramón Labañino Salazar, one of the Cuban 5 heroes.
Labañino offers an interesting view of the failure of socialism in the USSR and compares it to the Cuban problem. He sates: “… there are details (in the book) that are astonishing because of its resemblance to our current reality. Among these, one could mention the existence of a huge black market …”
In other words, the similarities amaze and the danger is unquestionable.
Therefore the flares of caution fired by the Comptroller’s office should not be taken lightly, or reacted to like the ship officers on the Titanic, but as the luminous shots from the mouth of a cannon that illuminates the night in a combat zone allowing one to react effectively against the evil that invades us, and whose solution is not precisely strength, but wisdom.
