Regime reinforces economic apartheid over ordinary Cubans

HAVANA, Cuba. – When stores in freely convertible currency (MLC) were established a few years ago, Cuban leaders divided the population between those who could buy in those stores and those who could not even set foot in the doors of those establishments.

As the months went by, basic necessities were sold in these MLC stores, so that people who only had access to the markets in national currency began to suffer from a chronic shortage of these products. We were clearly in the presence of a kind of apartheid that affected the most deprived layers of Cuban society. Almost always those who had no one to send them remittances from abroad.

In all fairness, Castroism is an expert at excluding people who do not have access to foreign currency. They already did so during the so-called Special Period in the 1990s, when according to the official discourse itself, the measure of decriminalizing the dollar almost saved the regime from collapse. Although, at a social cost that society still pays.

Now, after listening to the words of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz during the sessions of the National Assembly of People’s Power, we have come to the conclusion that a new process of apartheid is looming on the horizon of the nation.

Desperate because no one is depositing in banks the dollars that are received by any means – because a good part of the dollars that enter the country circulate in “illegal” transactions between natural persons and, of course, because no one is going to use the official exchange rate of 1 dollar equals 120 Cuban pesos – Cuban leaders are preparing to implement what they call “partial dollarization of the economy.” That is, to make sure that in one way or another the dollars that enter the country also circulate in government coffers.