For the past two years, President Raúl Castro has been insisting that “we need to put an end to secretismo.” He’s repeatedly promised that all investigations, court rulings and sentences regarding corruption — the big threat to the revolution — would be fully disclosed to the people of Cuba. Yet that hasn’t happened; nobody knows why not.

One month ago, Spain’s Repsol-YPF SA announced that its offshore drilling program had not found oil, and that the company was pulling out of Cuba. But Granma, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, has apparently not heard the news yet, nor has it published one word on the matter.

Not a single Cuban official from the government or Cubapetróleo (Cupet) has made any comments — not even positive onesd to the effect that when oil companies explore offshore, they’re likely to drill three or four “dry wells” before finding one that’s productive.

A similar story is the mysterious $70 million fiberoptic cable from Venezuela.

The corruption scandal surrounding this shady investment is already ancient history (see CubaNews, May 2012, page 6), but the question right now is, why hasn’t anyone seen Internet access improve by 3,000 times its current level, as the official propaganda promised? Many Cubans with phone lines and computers would love to surf the web but cannot.

Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela’s minister of science and technology, has officially stated that the cable is “absolutely operational.” A spokesman for Alcatel-Lucent, the French conglomerate that provided the equipment, also made similar declarations.

Yet Granma hasn’t reproduced any of these statements — nor given any official information as to how this wonderful new Internet access will be allocated, and what percentage will be made available to average citizens who have phone lines, computers and money (pesos and CUC) to pay for an account.