What’s with the constant ‘repayments’ to Cuba? SA’s poor would like to know

Every day, it seems, we ordinary South Africans fall down another ANC rabbit hole into yet another completely divorced-from-reality socialist Wonderland.

(The phrase originates from Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novel Alice in Wonderland, where Wonderland is a strange and absurd alternative world.)

This week’s ANC invitation to the strange and absurd came via parliament’s announcement that the country would be donating R50 million to the people of Cuba, who are allegedly suffering from food and other shortages as a result of the United States sanctions against it.

Let’s leave aside for a moment that Cuba is an agriculturally rich island and the fact that many countries outside the US do not have embargoes against it, let’s consider the supreme irony in the ANC’s generous donation of our taxpayer money.

And that is the fact that, despite sanctions, Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita – which is an accurate gauge of the real standard of living of people – is almost twice as high as South Africa’s.

According to official figures, Cuban per capita GDP in 2019 stood at just under $9 100 (about R139 000), while South Africa’s was just over $5 000.

This is the latest in a long line of siphoning off of South African financial resources to support a Marxist regime in Havana through supposedly strong “fraternal ties”.

Those ties hark back to the liberation struggle, when Cuban troops – in the ANC’s version of history at least – helped bring about the end of apartheid in this country.

No, they did not. They fought a proxy war (and were paid to do so) in Angola on behalf of the Soviet Union in the ’80s.

That conflict ended in 1989. So why the constant “repayments” to Havana?

That’s a question many South Africans – without houses, water, power or proper schools and health facilities – would like the answer to.