FROM CUBA:
LICENSE TO STEAL

by Pedro Rojas Roque, Cuba's Independent Press Bureau (BPIC).

Havana, August 28th, 1996 (BPIC).- Some time ago, in Matanzas province, they started authorizing exchanges or deals, or whatever you want to call them, so that State run enterprises could exchange, with private entrepeneurs, the cattle that was to be taken to the slaughterhouse. Of course, the entrepeneurs would have to turn in a cattle which weighed more than the one that the State would give them. But at the same time the private businessmen could obtain animals which were producing more milk even if they were in poor condition and the ones that they turned in had never produced enough milk to feed their calves.

Today, a new decree is hurting the new small, private farmers and everyone who involved their cattle in those exchanges. Now they come and take back the cattle alleging that those transactions were not authorized and therefore are illegal and when the private farmers ask for their original animals back they are told that there is no return, since they don't exist anymore and on top of that they are slapped with a 30 pesos fine.

They also confiscate all the animals from owners living outside of the municipality. It should be made clear that these take overs are made in the presence of an officer of the national police, the ones who are supposed to guard the public order and not to allow these abuses.

The list of those being hurt by such arbitrariness in the Cuban countryside is long, and continues to grow, but now it is affecting those who are the most dispossessed because the same one who would steal from the rich to give to the poor in the last century now has turned with a vengeance to steal from the poor to give to the rich. Now they are not dressed in the old pirate's outfit, now they are dressed in camouflage and proudly displays his license to steal.

It occurs to me that the old phrase from an old Latin American song is back in vogue, it goes like this: "Sorrows and cows walk the same path, the sorrows belong to us and the cows belong to others.