The Selective State

The Selective State

What a Collapsing Cuba Reveals About the Anatomy of a Functioning State — and Why Abundance Is No Guarantee Against the Same Disease

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September,2026

There is a phrase making the rounds among diplomats in Havana that deserves a longer life than a single dispatch: “authoritarian anarchy.” It describes a state that has retained, almost undiminished, its capacity to repress political expression, while every other function of government: health, education, public order, basic service delivery — quietly comes apart.

The security apparatus gets fuel when nothing else does. The prisons are staffed when the hospitals are not. The state, in other words, has not disappeared. It has simply chosen, function by function, what to keep and what to let go.

Cuba’s collapse is its own story, produced by seven decades of one-party rule, a foreign oil cutoff, and a sanctions regime with no real precedent. Guyana’s condition is not that. This editorial board has no interest in flattening the distance between a country running out of everything and a country awash in more capital than it has ever had to govern. The comparison being drawn here is not of circumstance. It is of method — a diagnostic test that travels well precisely because it does not depend on scarcity to work. Ask of any state: which functions is it keeping sharp, and which is it letting atrophy? The answer tends to say more about a government’s actual priorities than anything in its own communications.

WHAT GETS MAINTAINED

Consider the Ministry of Health’s contract nurse payroll, which this board has tracked as it left nurses unpaid for months at a stretch — not for lack of money, but for lack of a functioning administrative pipeline to move it. Set that against Guyana Water Inc.’s entry into commercial bottled water production, a function the state stood up with evident speed and no apparent difficulty, even as its regulatory mandate over household sanitation infrastructure remains legally unresolved.

One function; paying the people who deliver frontline care — sits idle. Another; a state enterprise entering a profit-generating consumer market it also regulates — moves without friction. The capacity clearly exists. It is a question of where it gets pointed.

The same asymmetry shows up in the constitutional architecture itself. Commissions with standing constitutional mandates — the Judicial Service Commission, the Police Service Commission, the Public Service Commission, the all important Public Procurement Commission — sit in states of appointment limbo or contested composition for years at a time, GECOM’s own commissioner dispute under Article 161(3)(b) being only the most visible instance.

This board has already named that pattern elsewhere: a bite with no teeth. Cuba’s diplomats would recognize the shape of it, even if they would not recognize the country.

A third instance is more pointed still. The MV Barima disaster produced, in its aftermath, an extraordinary mobilization of state capacity — a Commission of Inquiry, a salvage tender, ministerial resignations under pressure, a formal wreck-status process. What it has not produced, months on, is a resolved answer to the far more basic question the disaster raised: whether the vessel’s own defect and repair paper trail was ever acted upon before the sailing– that killed its passengers. The state moved fast and visibly on containment and process. It has moved far more slowly on the underlying function those processes exist to serve.

THE REPARTO PROBLEM, APPLIED WITH CAUTION

The Foreign Affairs piece that prompts this editorial describes something Cubans call reparto — a divvying up. As the state opened limited space for private enterprise, the gains flowed disproportionately to those with proximity to power, while the majority absorbed the costs of an economy in retreat. Regime insiders positioned themselves at the front of a very narrow door.

The result was not broad prosperity but a widening gap between a small class of winners and everyone else — inequality manufactured in real time, alongside institutional hollowing, not despite it.

This board has been building, in a separate and more extensively sourced piece, the case that Guyana is watching its own version of that mechanism take shape — not from scarcity, as in Cuba, but from abundance. A new domestic wealthy class, without precedent in this country’s history, forming in the oil era through proximity to the ruling party rather than through the broad-based lift oil revenue was supposed to provide. We will not rehearse that argument’s evidence here; it deserves its own reckoning, on its own terms, and is forthcoming.

What is worth naming now is the structural kinship: whether a state is retreating under pressure or expanding under windfall, the same mechanism — concentrated capture through access, thin distribution to everyone else; can operate underneath very different weather.

The direction of the economy does not determine who captures its gains. Proximity to power does.

THE PRICE OF DELAY

The strongest argument in the Foreign Affairs analysis is not really about Cuba’s politics at all. It is about time. Institutional decay left unaddressed does not stay a temporary condition — it calcifies into the baseline any future government has to build on. A hospital system allowed to hollow out for long enough stops being a hospital system in need of repair and becomes, instead, the new normal a country has quietly accepted. The same logic applies to a state that lets its constitutional commissions sit vacant, or that responds to a fatal ferry disaster with process rather than accountability, or that permits a new class of insiders to consolidate gains while the mechanisms meant to check that consolidation remain unfunded, understaffed, or unconsulted.

Guyana has an advantage Cuba does not: resources, and time that has not yet run out. But advantages of that kind are not self-executing.

Capacity not spent on the functions that matter now does not sit in reserve, waiting to be spent later. It is capacity a country has simply chosen not to build.

Cuba’s ruins are the argument for urgency in a country running out of everything. Guyana’s oil wealth should be the argument for urgency in a country that has, for once, no excuse.

— The Board