Saturday, August 29, 2009

Secret Agents


I read recently in Cubaencuentro about a call for "secret agents.” It may be an example of what happens when everyone is corrupt: there are staff shortages. Being a secret agent is not necessarily synonymous with working for the secret police, I don’t believe that the secret services are so bad as to put out mass calls.

What it’s about, as people say, is again more of the same: who sells chickens, eggs, meat; who has a particularly prosperous business; who rents movies; who gets money from abroad. In the end this sad note is more than a desperate cry of the government which seems to have fewer squealers than we can imagine.

So I wonder what happens with the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), with the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), with the mass organizations that are structured at all levels of society and that are supposed to report all these things. “The direction of the Revolution” has spent years tolerating that people live with illegality, no one has intended to solve the problem of wages and in they slyly overlook corruption. At this point it would be too complicated to have informants, the illusion would be to find informants who aren’t tainted by the black market.

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