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Economic Cross-Dressing
Hidelbrando Chaviano Montes
Attorney and journalist
Member Agramonte Current of independient attorneys
Havana, Cuba

I

n Cuba, the promulgation of the Labor Code
must still wait: it is not a very urgent matter.
Yet, the recently approved Foreign Investment Law is urgent: it means new money, more
jobs and, perhaps, even possible economic
growth. This is the life preserver that Cuba is
seeking from heretofore hated transnational companies that years past were accused by those with
glorious beards and khaki green of being responsible for the poverty of all the continent’s countries, their illiteracy, unemployment, hunger and
ill health.
The first country to contradict this absurd idea
was the Republic of Haiti, the first country in
America to achieve independence. At the time of
their splendor, transnational companies were able
to do nothing at all there. It is a country lacking
resources. It is so lacking resources that even the
effort to apply new technologies faces the challenge of an almost non-existent, qualified labor
force. Despite its early liberation from colonialism, and its plague of neocolonial and neoliberal,
transnational companies, Haiti was poor and will
continue being so now, perhaps precisely because
it never had transnational companies and, above
all, because it never had a decent government in
all its history. Corruption and violence scared
away any potential investor.
Without exception, all the other Latin American
and Caribbean countries suffered a similar fate.
After independence, their governing caudillos,
despots, ignorant military men, and irresponsible
and extravagant socialists took them over. The
pinnacle of this disaster took place in the sixties,

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when communist guerrillas inspired by and on account of the Cuban Revolution, cropped up.
These caused any investors to leave, as they preferred more peaceful places for investing their
money.
Only after certain countries in America tried liberal policies was any economic development or
reduction in violence possible. Furthermore, even
militant leftist governments and converted Marxist ex-guerrillas, whose political convictions and
own lack of skill, have respected the ‘free’ market
as the only way out. Even the y have seen the benefits of more market economies, and less socialist
populism, of more development and less poverty.
Now let us focus on Cuba, a country governed by
a small, hegemonic group founded upon an extremely political formula against free enterprise.
Even after it managed to rid Cuba of the last vestiges of capitalism in 1968, the numbers the Cuban government offered the Comisión Económica
para América Latina (CEPAL) reveal a level
higher only than that of the Caribbean’s small islands or some Central American countries. In
some cases, it doesn’t even bother to report information, as is the case with investment levels.
After several decades of State monopoly of goods
and people, Cuba’s communists have realized
that they need money, technology and capitalist
experience to create capital—it doesn’t matter if
they are Chinese or Swedish. They are unabashedly stripping off their socialist trappings. The result is State capitalism or cross-dressed socialism,
and this is not the first time this has happened
somewhere in the world and it has never worked.