Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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It’s been a little over 20 years since I have last visited Cuba, but my travels there remain firmly embedded in my memory to this day. Even though these were vacations in a sunny locale with great beaches and entertainment (the food is not so great), they ended up being field trips for me in that I would end up spending more time exploring the area where I was located, talking to locals, and visiting out of the way places. Being anti-communist, examining how their country was run and how their society functioned was foremost in my mind.

The lack of product advertising everywhere was one of my first observations. The second was the very visible and frequent presence of police wherever you went. I then couldn’t help but notice that much of the staff working at the resorts for foreign tourists was made up of doctors and engineers. Over time, I also noticed how the various races seemed to get along quite well in the small towns far away from the resorts. I wrote an essay about Cuba almost three years ago:

It was interesting to see a country run along very different lines than the rest of those in the western hemisphere, but this was a luxury for me as I did not have to live there, unlike the Cubans themselves.

A tricky thing about revolutionary movements such as the flavour of Marxism that dominates Cuba is that no revolution can be permanent; we humans are not built for such continuous zealotry. In Cuba, the revolution has long been proclaimed a “permanent” one, but people just want to live in peace, and revolutionary fervour dissipates over time. This is also a problem with fascism, in that fascism is a reaction to a perceived existential threat, but it burns itself out rather quickly as the discipline and energy required to sustain it over time also dissipates, resulting in stagnation and corruption…..or worse.

In Cuba, the revolution has not brought much benefit to ordinary Cubans outside of the socialized health care system. Cuba was already in the “paying lip service to the revolution” phase of its existence when I was visiting there. It is now running on its last fumes.

argues that it has reached the terminal “mafia” state in this essay:

The search for an answer leads to two radical transformations that have taken place, largely unnoticed, in Cuba. The first concerns the regime, which has given up any revolutionary pretensions and become what ordinary Cubans call a “mafia.” Don’t think of the pushy American racketeers in the style of “Godfather II.” The mafia in Cuba is indistinguishable from the regime itself. The matter is naturally shrouded by fictions and smokescreens, but the godfather may well be the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Outwardly, nothing has changed. The worn-out slogans are still piously intoned. The Communist Party, with its repressive apparatus, still dodders on. Raúl Castro, 92, remains a shadowy but frightening presence. But new people are in charge of ruling a society that, top to bottom, has lost all faith in the system—and, as often happens in moments of exhausted zealotry, those who command power and resources want nothing more than to enjoy the good life and protect themselves against an uncertain future.

This is the phase where everything that is not properly bolted down is stolen by those who have the ability to do so.

The machinations of the mafia are transparent to most Cubans. In a remarkable 24-minute video titled “The Mafia of Cienfuegos,” digital dissident Yamil Cuéllar calls out mafia members by name, shows their photos, reveals addresses and exposes methods in detail, linking high officials in the provincial government of Cienfuegos, a city and province on the south-central coast of the island. Cuéllar’s targets include the province’s governor, local chiefs of the Ministry of Interior and Military Counterintelligence and, ultimately, the biggest fish in Cuba’s ruling structure, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and Díaz-Canel himself.

Corruption can be simple or complex. Officials fortunate enough to have control over scarce resources like fuel sell these on the black market and realize enormous profits. The preferred approach is more indirect, however. Following the outbreak of anti-regime protests in July 2021, the government allowed the establishment of private “micro, small, and medium enterprises,” theoretically as a way to open up the economy to market forces. But most if not all of the 9,000 private enterprises operating in Cuba today are owned by powerful regime figures who then funnel public works contracts to them.

The concession to market forces was very much a de facto recognition that the revolution had failed.

Sending ill-gotten gains abroad:

Where does the money go? Some of it buys what passes for the good life in Cuba. The vast majority of the island’s inhabitants, we must remember, subsist in conditions of abysmal poverty, enduring constant power blackouts and food shortages while stuck in housing that is literally crumbling into ruins. But a thin crust at the top can afford to live in modern comfort. Even minor members of the Cienfuegos mafia dwell in new suburban-looking homes with garages, sun panels for air-conditioning and water heating and generators to avoid those pesky blackouts on cloudy days.

Higher-ups like the governor own luxurious residences—according to Cuéllar, designed by the minister of interior’s favorite architect—as well as places of rest and recreation at the beach and in the countryside, a magnificent sailing ship and shiny BMWs. Two palatial buildings in the city and an extensive marina are said by Cuéllar to be controlled by the country’s prime minister, Marrero Cruz. Since another money trail leads directly to president Díaz-Canel’s brother-in-law, we can safely assume that the local rackets enjoy the benevolent protection of the regime. Life is truly good for the Cienfuegos mafia.

But most of the money is converted into dollars and sent illegally out of the country. In an economic distortion possible only under late-stage dementia communism, it is likely that Cuba’s dearth of foreign currency is due to the mafia siphoning all dollars in the island, then smuggling them to safe havens overseas. Cuéllar maintains that the governor’s wife, a Chamber of Commerce representative who in her official capacity frequently travels abroad, acts as the “mule” or smuggler for the Cienfuegos gang. That may or may not be the case—but it’s plain that here, at this turn of the screw, the Cuban regime’s new criminal vocation connects with the arrest at the Tampa airport. Ocana was bringing millions into the U.S. on behalf of some member of the Cuban government. That person is probably known, and as we’ll see, the revelation could trigger a crisis within the regime.

What is interesting to me is why they would smuggle money out of Cuba to the USA, a country whose government is very, very hostile to them? Wouldn’t it be much smarter to try and launder the money in money-laundering-friendly Canada, a country that maintains good relations with Cuba?

Why are they taking money out of Cuba?

Why are Cuba’s rulers intent on taking their wealth out of the country? The answer should be apparent. For all their power and luxury, these people are terrified of the future. To be a member of the Cuban ruling class is to perform, every day, a high-wire act over an active volcano. Since the courage provided by ideological fervor has dissipated, the only safe move is out.

The wreckage of the Cuban economy really can’t be exaggerated. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is begging the United Nations for food aid. Nearly half a million persons have fled the island in despair during the last two years—that’s 4% of the population, the equivalent of more than 12 million Americans. Yet the failure cascade is moving faster than the capacity to emigrate. People feel trapped and hopeless. The volcano is growling. Despite the words we use, national economies never actually implode—but the regimes that exploit and mismanage them often do.

It is important to note that this essay does not address the 800 pound elephant in the room: the decades-long US sanctions regime against Cuba. I do not know how large of an impact it has had on Cuba’s economy over the decades, so hopefully some of you can fill in the blanks here for me.

Oddly enough for such a dictatorial regime, dissident is flourishing on the internet:

Most moving are the expressions of little-known individuals trapped in the catastrophe of a failed utopia, trying to make sense of the nightmare of everyday life. Those unable to flee Cuba today escape to the web. They post on Facebook and X, they exchange links and opinions on WhatsApp, they complain of the dark and the heat and the mosquitos at night, they mock the regime, they pray to God for consolation. “How lucky we Cubans are that we can go to the web!” reads a Facebook post. “That’s the end of the state monopoly over information!” During a blackout, one poster asks, “Where can we protest?” Another answers: “Right here.”

Cynicism toward the authorities is absolute. “They’re trying to do damage control and offer Alejandro Gil’s head on a silver platter.” “This was a plan, this wasn’t about errors, this was a plan to destroy from within everything we had believed and built.” Amid a volley of emojis, one wag claimed on Facebook that the words of the communist anthem, the “Internationale,” had been written about Cubans: “Arise, wretched of the earth, stand up you slaves without bread …”

Once the jokes and the defiance stop, we are confronted with the awful spectacle of human existence in a state of pure desperation. “Of course I’m unwell with blackouts of 15 hours one day and eight hours the next. I feel dissociated, I’m not well. I think I’m entering into insanity,” a woman wrote. A poster warned: “This can’t continue indefinitely.”

Raul Castro is 92 years old. When he goes, so goes the last direct tie to the failed revolution. I don’t know what will become of Cuba when he dies, but one thing that I am certain of is that Cuban exiles are not going to be able to walk back in and take control of the country. They have been gone far too long, and the power structures that are in place in Cuba are full of pragmatic, non-ideological types who are more than happy to do business with the USA, especially the CIA.

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In last week’s SCR, we discussed the “competency crisis”, and the impact that it has had on Boeing. This theory is one of the main arguments that is brought up by American ‘declinists’.

The competency crisis naturally pairs with the DEI trend that has swept the country, from government to corporate, through military and even health. DEI is the antithesis of a merit-based system. Even if you do support DEI efforts, there are some things in life that you do not want to personally risk for the sake of ideology and experimentation. One of those is your own personal health. You need a doctor? You would prefer that the doctor you get is the best one available to you. After all, this is your physical health that is at issue.

DEI is an experiment: can the USA create a culture of more equitable outcomes by reducing individual merit as a basis for hiring? Logic would dictate that such experimentation would be conducted in areas that are not critical, thus limited the damage from negative results from said experimentation. It is quite possible that the USA has entered a ‘Post-Logic Era’, because this experimentation is definitely not being restricted to non-critical areas, and has instead become universal, with DEI initiative popping up all across the board.

There has been some pushback, but nowhere near enough. Roger B. Cohen, a “celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania”, is certainly pushing back against its adoption by the American medical establishment:

The United States enjoys a reputation as a bastion of excellence and scientific rigor in medical education. Our country also leads the world in medical progress and innovation. That has not always been the case. It is hard to imagine the backwardness of American medical schools before a man named Abraham Flexner set out to transform them into institutions built on rigorous science. 

Flexner was a non-physician commissioned in 1910 by the Council on Medical Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to analyze and improve a woefully inadequate medical education system. Flexner recommended closure of all but 31 of 155 American medical schools, which included 80% of the white schools (119 out of 148) and 71% of the black schools (5 out of 7).

Recently, Flexner has gone from hero to villain in the wake of the “woke” tsunami that has engulfed American medicine. In 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) stripped the reformer’s name from its prestigious Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education. David J. Skorton, AAMC’s president and CEO, admitted that “the Flexner report recommended valuable changes in medical education, many of which still have positive impact today.” Yet Skorton demurred:

But that report also contained racist and sexist ideas, and his work contributed to the closure of five out of seven historically Black medical schools. Our action today recognizes the long-standing negative impact of the Flexner report on the training of Black physicians and the health of the Black community in the United States.

A year later, a paper in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics denounced the Flexner report’s “racist legacy,” charging that the reforms it inspired “damaged and marginalized historically Black medical schools.”

Throughout COVID-19, we were told to “TRUST THE SCIENCE”. But in this case, we are told that “The Science” must take a back seat to ideology.

A remarkable claim:

The anti-Flexner activists make the truly remarkable claim that Flexner’s recommendations to close shoddy schools gutted the ranks of future black physicians who would have rendered exceptional care to their fellow minority citizens. Of course, that is a pernicious fantasy. Bad medical schools and poorly educated physicians, regardless of race, never benefit patients. Quite the opposite. Better schools produce the best physicians who deliver the high quality medical care that everyone should receive. To claim that Flexner was motivated by a racist desire to deplete the ranks of capable black physicians is both preposterous and slanderous.

Flexner’s idea was to impose a scientific standard of excellence on medical education. His models were the German universities and Johns Hopkins Medical School. In repudiating Flexner, we are turning away from the goal of medical training based on scientifically informed and rigorously grounded standards. Indeed, it is fair to say that we have now entered the post-Flexner era. The watchword today is not science, but anti-racism and identity politics. The New England Journal of Medicine, among others, repeatedly reminds us in its ongoing “Race and Medicine” series that medicine is stubbornly racist by design.

In May 2021, the AMA released its Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity, “dedicated to embedding racial justice” in all medical practice. Among the plans key priorities is one whose implications for medical education and medical school admissions are readily apparent: “Develop structures and processes to consistently center the experiences and ideas of historically marginalized (women, LGBTQ+ , people with disabilities, International Medical Graduates) and minoritized (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color) physicians.”

“How does this make you feel?”

The New Orthodoxy:

The medical profession’s leaders, almost without exception or dissent, now vigorously enforce this new orthodoxy of anti-racism. Most notably, they have designed and implemented a new version of medical education explicitly grounded in ideology rather than scientific excellence. In pursuit of this project, the president of the AAMC (which accredits U.S. medical schools) and the chair of the AAMC’s Council of [Medical School] Deans stated publicly in July 2022: “We believe this topic [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

The AAMC’s DEI Competencies, issued in October 2021, details the new required social justice skills that medical students must acquire. In addition, the AAMC has discouraged the use of the rigorous Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) as a filter to help select medical students. Dozens of the 158 allopathic (MD granting) U.S. medical schools have made the MCAT optional. Several medical schools, including the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, have programs to admit students from designated “underrepresented” identity groups without requiring the submission of MCAT scores at all. The MCAT itself has been revised to include social justice questions that are easy to ace because the answers are always the same: structural racism is the cause of any group disparities that disfavor underrepresented groups. But even this re-engineered test shows persistent group disparities in test scores, which means that Asian applicants must score almost 4 times higher than black applicants to have an equal chance of admission.

This is what the kids call “ideological capture”.

BTW, this gets worse:

This reckless demolition of longstanding standards now extends to medical licensing exams. In an effort to reduce purported “racial bias” against self-identified black, Asian, and Hispanic examinees who score lower than self-identified whites, the Step 1 federal licensing exam, taken at the end of the second year of medical school, is now pass/fail and no longer numerically graded. This change works to the disadvantage of graduates of foreign and lower-ranked U.S. medical schools who rely on their performance on that exam to demonstrate excellence and their future potential as physicians. 

The basis of the “group quota regime”:

Why are we conducting this grand experiment in discarding the tried and true methods for choosing future doctors? What problem are we trying to solve? One oft-repeated claim is that we need more black and Hispanic doctors because patients experience better medical outcomes if their doctors “look like them.” This “racial concordance” claim has been extended to “identity concordance” of all kinds, with absurd and alarming implications: must we have gay doctors for gay patients, and white doctors for white patients? And what is the evidence that supports this demand?

A body of highly questionable and downright shoddy research in medical sociology is exemplified by the ‘Oakland study,’ which purports to show that black patients with black doctors have better health outcomes. This study is riddled with basic methodological defects, including the lack of an adequate control group. The study went on to project extravagant lifetime mortality benefits from a single point-in-time observation in a limited sample showing that black patients were more willing to accept recommendations for preventative care from black doctors. There was no evidence presented of any increased use of preventative services or of any actual health benefits.

Suffice it to say that the rich and powerful will not be impacted by this experimentation, as they will continue to receive the best health care treatment possible. The impact will be felt by those lower down the ladder.

Click here to read the rest.

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I have a soft spot for charlatans and rogues. The amount of self-confidence it takes to try and pull off scams is something to admire, even though it it put to bad use. I think about financial swindlers like Boesky and Madoff, and wonder how they managed to sleep at night. Or even someone like Rachel Dolezal….was she aware that her act would at some point be found out?

On a long enough timeline, the truth will always come out. The question for scammers is: can they outlast that timeline? Jimmy Savile was a conman, and managed to beat his judgment by dying. I think that he was a rare exception these days, as too much public information is available too easily for too many people to access. In the old days, the “Medicine Man” would simply pack up his things and head over to the next county after his “cures” were found out to be nothing of the sort. Today, we have many search engines that have reams of data on each and every one of us.

It takes a lot of balls in this day and age to try and scam people on a massive scale. Yolande Beckles appears to be in possession of a pair of titanic-sized cojones.

Last April, Yolande Beckles stood outside the California State Capitol building and addressed a crowd of thousands. “We are here today to ensure that the governor gets the message that the $300 million in the ‘Equity Multiplier’ goes to black students, not cappuccino, not lemonade, not light coffee, but hot chocolate,” she bellowed in a broad East London accent. The speech was remarkable, not only in its content but also in its symbolic meaning. It represented Beckles’s complete reinvention from disgraced British reality TV star and fraudster — who fled the U.K. for Los Angeles nearly two decades ago with 19 standing court judgements levying almost £70,000 in fines at her defunct businesses and a front-page exposé revealing that she had defrauded underprivileged schoolkids of £12,000, and who was then sued by a landlady in LA who claimed Beckles “ruined her life” by stealing her belongings and refusing to pay almost $20,000 in rent — to respected California education policy consultant.

Beckles, a British woman, spoke at the rally in her capacity as president of the National Association of African American Parents and Youth (NAAAPY), a nonprofit she founded in 2022 to “empower Black Parents, families and Guardians to become educated, trained advocates for their children and students.” The authors of the recently approved California Math Framework (CMF) — most infamous for advocating against teaching most gifted middle-schoolers algebra in the name of equity — consulted her as an “engagement expert,” and last month she was invited to give a talk on “Unleashing Black/Brown Family Power in Students’ Math Thinking” at the California Mathematics Council (CMC) annual symposium.

Beckles path to such prominence was opened up by a fellow Brit named Jo Boaler:

Beckles frequently collaborates with fellow Brit Jo Boaler, the Stanford mathematics education professor who played a key role in shaping the CMF and who has recently come under intense scrutiny for allegedly engaging in academic fraud. (See our write-up on the Boaler allegations here.) Beckles wrote a blurb for Boaler’s forthcoming book “Math-ish,” in which she thanked Boaler for “including us in the math Equity story of change,” and next month the two will co-host a webinar at Stanford University on “Building Mathematical Mindset-Strategies for Parents & Guardians.” Boaler and Beckles also got together in Sacramento last July to “celebrate the unanimous passing of the CMF” and again in Bakersfield at the CMC symposium, where they were both invited speakers.

From Beckles’s Facebook: “The A team meet again: me, Jo Boaler, Gabby Mitchell and Cathy Williams fight together for Math Equity for Black and brown students in California at CMC Central.”

Scammer:

But where Beckles is considered an “engagement expert” by California policy makers, and a math education specialist by Stanford, in her native U.K. she is better known as a “disgraced education ‘guru’ and reality TV star who vanished after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals,” per a 2010 article in The Independent that chronicled her transatlantic misadventures. Beckles shot to stardom in 2006 when the BBC aired a documentary, “Don’t Mess with Miss Beckles,” which followed her attempts to improve the academic performance of disaffected teenagers in the suburbs of London. One of the participants in the documentary later told The Guardian that he felt “manipulated” by the BBC and refused to see or speak with Beckles again.

In 2007, investigative journalists uncovered her involvement in a long trail of financial scandals in the U.K. charity sector — including 19 court judgements levying fines totaling almost £70,000 at her various defunct businesses, unpaid debts of £125,000 (some of which she left former employees to pay), personal expenses financed with work credit cards, and unauthorized personal loans totaling at least £10,000. The investigation culminated in a front-page story in London’s Evening Standard that year revealing that Beckles had taken £12,000 from underprivileged children in East London to fund “an educational trip” to the Caribbean that never happened, and then went to South Korea, where she reportedly attended a convention of the Moonies, a controversial religious movement often described as a cult. A friend of one of the British creditors Beckles allegedly swindled subsequently set up a website — “Beckleswatch” — to “inform and warn new business partners, investors and collaborators about Yo’s former life and activities.”

Beckles decamped to California, and proceeded to open up more educational non-profits that were shut down due to improper activity. The important thing is that Beckles supports all the right causes, especially that of equity.

Click here to read the rest.

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In my recent appearance on the Russians With Attitude podcast, I made note of the fact that the biggest success for the Russians thus far hasn’t been a military one, but rather an economic one. The prevailing assumptions on the first day of the war was that the Russians would quickly defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, and that they would need to hurry, as the US-led sanctions regime against Russia would destroy the Ruble and annihilate its economy.

How wrong we all were!

The fact of the matter is that the Russians were building up a war chest for years in advance of the invasion of Ukraine, in order to “sanction-proof” its economy. This is called “foresight”. Germany’s Der Spiegel recently interviewed Alexandra Prokopenko, an economist who worked at Russia’s Central Bank until the war began, leading to her resignation and relocation to Germany. In this interview, she explains the successes of Russia’s economic strategy, some of its drawbacks, and also highlights some areas of concern:

DER SPIEGEL: Russia’s good growth figures have long been doubted. What is the real situation?

Prokopenko: The official figures largely correspond to reality. The economic situation is not great, not terrible. The economy grew significantly last year. On the other hand, however, we are seeing clear signs that the Russian economy is overheating.

DER SPIEGEL: What does that mean?

Prokopenko: The economy has grown faster than its potential actually allows. The labor market is at its limit, as good as empty. Unemployment is at a record low. This shortage of skilled labor is already having a negative impact on production. In short, it is an unhealthy situation and the Russian economy does not have the necessary resources to expand so rapidly in the long term. Exports are also unlikely to expand any further. If we look at the statistics, we can also see that a large part of last year’s growth was attributable to defense-related i