This is a lie that is regularly parroted about by the Cuban exiles and other rightwing anti-Cubans. They claim that the Cuban military operates as a business and has a tremendous amount of money and resources. In some countries, this is indeed the case. I am told that the Iranian military has a lot of money and resources somehow and that they actually run a lot of profitable Iranian businesses. There are suggestions that the Chinese military may also be into the business end of things.
There is a good reason why this lie has shown up. In recent years, most of the state stores and outlets and possibly many of the manufacturing plants are now run by the Cuban military. This is not a bad thing; actually, it is a good thing.
The reason this had to be done boils down to one of the problems with any Communist country – the tragedy of the commons. All public property in a Communist country is owned collectively, owned by the people. It really is owned by the people, not by the state – the state just assumes ownership in the name of the people – in other words, the state is the people, and the people are the state.
So the people figure out that all state property is owned by them, and it is true, it is owned by them, formally. So logically people conclude that if this irrigation pipe in that field is owned by me, then it’s obviously mine, and I can just steal it and take it home and do whatever with it. So all Communist countries have been plagued with mass pilferage of state property. People stole equipment on farms, so farms did not function well. There was mass theft in factories, and this effected output. And in particular, there was a lot of theft at the retail level in the state stores.
Obviously this made whatever shortages were around even worse. Where do the pilfered products go? Surely many of them are simply taken for personal use, but a much worse problem was theft of state property for sale on the black market. This exacerbated serious problems – shortages of goods in state outlets and a large black market full of overpriced products.
This problem got so bad in Cuba that the government decided to put the military in charge of most state stores. The military is running most of these outlets. Most of the employees are in the Cuban military. This has actually been a good thing because theft of state property has crashed to very low levels since this was done, as the servicemen steal little property.
But all the military does is run the stores. They do not get any of the income from the sales of these outlets.
