Few nations of the world are rich as Cuba in symbolic capital

But ethics demands an answer: Do we search our happiness that could be at the cost of another’s happiness? Or do I search for the happiness for all although mine may require the sacrifice of my own life.

We know that this capitalist world is a world-colonized. Development as Marx analyzed always signifies a larger accumulation of wealth in private hands, never for the real needs of the majority of the populations. Streets are asphalted and illuminated in plots of empty lands destined for luxury condominiums while the populous streets in the periphery of the cities are not entitled to any asphalting and human wastes flow through those channels.
Perhaps the most significant example of the perverse logic that rules capitalist development is the extraordinary fact that the human being has placed his feet on the lunar surface at a cost of 6 billion dollars while it is incapable of placing the essential nutrients in the stomachs of millions of children of Latin America, Asia and Africa that Pope Francisco never tires of repeating.

The instrumental reason for modernization failed because it submitted to the pragmatism of the market and has taken a distance from ethical values. In capitalism all axiomatic systems constitute an obstacle; ethics only exists in speeches to deceive the naïve, such as the green stamps that mark propaganda of the large companies that devastate the environment such as some companies in Brazil that in November last year when a dam broke causing the largest ecological disaster in the history of Brazil poisoning a river that benefited 3,5 million persons; one of our most important rivers and has caused damages estimated at a minimum of 4 billion dollars.

In a capitalist world development is business and not a program to improve the quality of life of the population; a test is the real estate speculation. While a third of the population of Rio de Janeiro live in the Favelas (slums), while a large stretch of thousands of apartments are closed during most of the year and are only open in the vacations of its owners that coincides with the summer season.

In the evolution of capitalist development there is a virus that seems unbeatable: corruption. Unfortunately Brazil excels today as the country in which corruption has contaminated the government and most of our companies such as Petrobras. We must remember that the same occurs in many countries, the difference is that in Brazil it is the governments of Lula and Dilma who have not moved a single finger to prevent the federal police and General Attorney to denounce and investigate the corrupt in public and private power including the corrupt presidents of large companies, ministers of government and leaders of the Worker’s Party.

All the history of Brazilian development is marked by the marriage of corruption and impunity. The government of the Workers Party has promoted this divorce establishing transparency and has favored prisons and punishments in a process unfortunately far from reaching its end.

Cuba today is going through a historical moment of large transformations. Its revolutionary logic revolves around the rights of the majority of the population opening public and private associations.

The construction of the Mariel port, the most important in the Caribbean and perhaps in the Atlantic Ocean begins new possibilities for economic development. The development of tourism increases through the excellence of its services, primarily medical and high educational level of the workers and also promising strategy to capture foreign currency.
We all know that the government in Cuba is determined to solve the problem of the double currency; it studies and tests a series of new measure to boost development in this country.
The originality lies in the logic of development of this nation and is precisely its symbolic capital based on spiritual values as a sentinel of liberty and independence, of cooperation and solidarity that marks the history of this country since the struggle of the slaves to the implementation of a socialist State.

Many abroad think that Cuba will become a mini China politically socialist and economically capitalist. This danger will exist if Cuba abandons its most prized possession: its symbolic capital.

This country does not have large natural resources and what it does have has been shared to guarantee each inhabitant the right to dignity as a human being. But few nations of the world are rich as Cuba in symbolic capital is exemplified by figures such as father Félix Varela, José Martí, Ernesto Che Guevara, Raúl and Fidel Castro.

This symbolic capital is not just the result of a victorious Revolution in 1959 ,it is the result of centuries of resistance of the Cuban people against the dominant Spaniards and the United States.

But we should not be naïve; corruption has no ideology; it interferes in the right and left directions. It is a virus that penetrates when a revolutionary loses ideological immunity. This occurs when the depersonalized are fascinated by the functions occupied in the structure of power.

Then corruption is more important for the person and who will do anything to prevent losing it; like a shipwrecked person holding on to a log in the midst of a thundering sea.

Corrupt is not only one who promotes the achievement of interests that are not of the collective community; corrupt is also the persons who lives in a glass bubble and admits no criticism and much less risk his alleged position to assume his position as a simple soldier in the trenches of the Revolution.

The corrupt is born of an excessive ambition, of an exaggerated vanity, of the self convincement that they are untouchable and irreplaceable that hides by a certainty of impunity.

If the Cuban revolution intends to last like a sun in a moral world, as Luz y Caballero expressed, the perfection of socialism is a challenge and the ethical issue becomes the core of the processes of education in this country.

Each Cuban should ask why Martí lived almost 15 years in the United States and did not sell his soul to the rising imperialism. Why Fidel and Raúl, sons of large land owners and educated in the best schools of the Cuban high bourgeoisie, did not sell their souls to the enemy.

Why Che Guevara, a doctor formed in Argentina was a revolutionary consecrated in Cuba decided to abandon all his political works and inherent commodities to enter, anonymously in the jungles of the Congo and Bolivia where he met his death. Here is the answer; the lives of each one of us are defined by the sense it implants. This sense can only be transformed in symbolic capital when there is a sense of the ethical.

Capitalism with its powerful publicity machinery wants humanity to only have a sense of having and not of being. It wants to form consumers and not citizens.