For more than 35 years, accountants and auditors were relics of history in communist Cuba, despised in the official culture as leeches and corrupt criminals from bygone pre-revolutionary times.
Now, like open prostitution and other vestiges of the scorned past, bookkeepers and official corruption are visible again in Cuba as the Marxist island nation desperately tries to stay afloat in the bewildering world of capitalist trade and finance.
Virtually unknown during 3 1/2 decades of communist rule, accountants and auditors now are welcomed as the new guardians of revolutionary morality-Cuba’s watchdogs against official corruption that has accompanied the island’s aggressive campaign to attract foreign investment and tourism.
According to government sources, vice ministers in the key sugar and foreign trade ministries and dozens of lower-ranking officials from government agencies and companies have been removed from their posts in recent weeks for suspected financial wrongdoing.
The identities and government positions of the officials under investigation haven’t been made public in the government-controlled media. But the accusations against them appear to represent Cuba’s most serious corruption case since the 1989 trial and execution of Army Gen. Reinaldo Ochoa and several other officials on drug trafficking and embezzlement charges.
The officials under investigation allegedly accepted bribes and kickbacks in exchange for granting foreign firms concessions in joint ventures with Cuban state-run firms, diverting official funds, receiving trips and expenses abroad, and other offenses, according to the official Communist Party newspaper Granma.
The magnitude of the scandal is unclear. Some government sources said the equivalent of millions of dollars destined for Cuba’s treasury is unaccounted for. But Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly and a senior member of the Communist Party Central Committee’s Politburo, said the sums involved are substantially less.
The emergence of corruption as a major issue of government concern coincides with Cuba’s reluctant move toward market-based economic measures after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, its longtime economic patron.
Key officials often are courted by foreign investors eager to get a piece of the Cuba market, and hard currency from abroad is in greater circulation since the government last autumn authorized Cubans for the first time since the revolution to conduct transactions in dollars.
In some cases, said one source familiar with government audits that unearthed the scandal, the problems are blamed on inefficiency, sloppy accounting and plain incompetence complicated by the need to keep official books in several different foreign currencies.
But some of the officials are expected to stand trial on charges of financial misconduct, and in several cases judicial proceedings already have begun, Granma said.
The problem came to light last week, after Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other senior officials held a three-day meeting with top executives of all state-run companies involved in hard currency transactions at the heart of what the government calls Cuba’s “emerging economy.”
The secretly organized session, reported in Granma three days after it concluded, featured calls by Castro for increased scrutiny of government companies and for tightened measures of financial control.
” … This can turn into a cancer,” Castro reportedly told the gathering.
“We are not talking about a new problem, because in other eras there were cases of malfeasance, of officials seeking the good life,” Granma quoted him as saying. “But these cases of corruption have another character, they hurt more, they affect the image of the country. They hurt as much as seeing young girls in the country prostituting themselves; it all hurts the nation’s dignity, its honor.”
In retrospect, said Castro, accountants and auditors had been unjustly denigrated by the revolution.
“It is decisive to convert auditing into a dignified and well-paid job, with a high moral standing and not the universal discredit of the past,” said Castro, following a report by Finance Minister Manuel Millares that few of Cuba’s 38,000 economists wanted the job.
To that end, Vice President Carlos Lage, the official in charge of managing Cuba’s crippled economy, announced the opening of a national auditing office on May 24. The quasi-independent agency will direct the auditing of state and joint venture companies across the island.
Octavio Castilla, vice minister for foreign investment and economic cooperation, said the need for accountants is only one of the many major challenges facing the island since the introduction of economic reforms aimed at attracting hard currency in the absence of the now-defunct Soviet bloc, which during the Cold War accounted for 85 percent of Cuba’s trade and economic output.
Like the reapparance in tourist hotels and discos of jineteras, roughly translated as “horsewomen,” the local sobriquet for prostitutes, the emergence of corruption is seen in Cuba as an inevitable byproduct of a transition to a more open economy during difficult economic times.
“If you were here 10 or 12 years ago, then you would see this country was very different then,” Castilla said in an interview. “To make all the changes peaceful, without major social problems, avoiding corruption and crime, it is not easy. It is very difficult.”
So far, Cuban officials argue, in comparison to other nations, including the U.S., official corruption in Cuba is not pervasive. But it is a growing problem, and its potential spread is worrisome.
“The point of the meeting was that we are not facing a big problem, nothing that could compare with the pre-revolutionary experience or other countries now,” said Alarcon, the president of the National Assembly, in an interview. “But precisely because of that, it was important that we should address that issue.”
Cuban officials have discussed the problem of corruption with visiting officials from Vietnam and have studied its widening practice in China, two communist nations opening their state-run economies to international capital.
“This is an effect we hadn’t had before. We are convinced today that what has happened in China and is happening in Vietnam and in other places is something we don’t want to see happening in Cuba,” Castilla said.
During last week’s closed-door government meeting, he said, one participant cited Prohibition era gangster Al Capone as he made a compelling case for elevating the prestige of accountants and auditors and strengthening Cuba’s system of financial controls.
“It was joked at the meeting,” Castilla said, “that most of the Mafia people in Chicago went to prison not because of what they did, but because they did not pay their taxes.”
