A US publication has dealt with a crucial issue: what is Fidel Castro’s fortune.The obsession with statistics is a typical American characteristic, as the citizens of that nation consider that something which cannot be seen in the form of numbers doesn’t exist. “Tell me the truth, give me the numbers,” is a common phrase among executives, politicians and media specialists.
Along that line, Brazilian comedian and author Millor Fernandez was able to address one of the American obsessions when he said he calculated the value of the Statue of Liberty. He looked at the price paid to build the monument, as well as how much it had appreciated over time, the price of the appraisal of the structure, tour tickets, etc. He came up with a figure of several million dollars; that would be the current value of liberty, that object which materializes the vision of American eyes and those of that country’s admirers.
In assessing the net worth of Fidel Castro —a man who was the object of several hundred assassination attempts by the US government, but who above all won the prestige of Cuba by Latin America and the world— they decided to quantify him so as to arrive at their “truth.”
The appraisal done by the corporate giant Forbes magazine is simple: they took Cuba’s Domestic Gross Product and calculated the percentage of it which they assumed” to be Fidel’s fortune. They concentrated on the revenues of the Havana Convention Center, the CIMEX export conglomerate and on the sales of vaccines and medicines. That appraisal amounted to $900 million, making the Cuban president the seventh richest ruler in the world.
The intention is clear. Because the Cuban economy is centrally planned, those with a capitalist mentality assume that the highest level of government will appropriate all of the nation’s wealth. Being accustomed to how wealth is typically administered in capitalist nations, they totally confuse public and private enterprise.
Cuban Central Bank president Francisco Soberon, using those same standards —including the real costs of the Iraq war, according to Joseph Stiglits— calculated the personal fortune of the US president to surpass the fortune attributed to Fidel hundreds of times over.
Forbes is right: Fidel has a fortune that is impossible to calculate. However, that wealth is not his personal property, but that of the real owner: the people of Cuba. They attribute that wealth directly to him, because it was earned under his leadership.
It is the greatest wealth in the world, because no other country possesses it. And it is impossible to calculate, because it can not be accounted in numbers, no price tag can be placed on it, and it cannot be bought or sold.
It has to do with the economic, social and cultural rights won over almost five decades. It has to do with the human values closely associated to those above mentioned values.
This is a population where each and every person is not only literate, but also has at least nine years of schooling. This was achieved through a unique system involving all sectors of the population. We can also point to a university system which graduates tens of thousands of Cubans all across the country. That is a fortune which can not be calculated.
This is a population which has the best public health care system in the world, a population where nobody is left helpless or abandoned, probably the only population in the world which experiences such a situation; and that is a real fortune.