14ymedio, Pedro Corzo, Miami, March 19, 2024 — For many years Cubans have realized that the dictatorship the Castro brothers imposed on the Island was quite different from those we had experienced in the past, and not only because of the endless repression and extreme cruelty. Its control over the population was unprecedented, extending even to property management, over which the state gradually acquired a monopoly.
The early years were extremely chaotic. Everyone was impacted by missteps and confusion. I still remember the apprehension I felt over Fidel Castro’s identifying each year by name. The purpose was to indicate the most important task of those ensuing 365 days, so 1962 was supposed to be “The Year of Planning” and 1963 “The Year of Organization.” Instead, the opposite occured. After that, the economic disarray just increased along with the number of executions, political prisoners and exiles.
At first it was a genuine, populist-inspired military dictatorship, though one distinguished by abject inefficiency and waste, massive propaganda and the deification of Fidel Castro
If one thing was certain from January 1959 onwards, it was that no one could be oblivious to political issues, which encompassed everything. We found ourselves caught up, voluntarily or involuntarily, in the Castro system, which we would come to see as a form of totalitarianism. It was very similar in its criminality to the Nazi and Soviet systems but much more economically encompassing, so much so that the writer José Antonio Albertini said at one point that they were about to nationalize toothbrushes, which shortly thereafter disappeared from store shelves along with toothpaste and everything else.
At first it was a genuine, populist-inspired military dictatorship, though one distinguished by inefficiency a
