Most people consider smart people diverted to creating dark patterns, to be a bad thing. OP clearly thinks the tourist-dual ecconomy thing in Cuba is bad (for cuba as a whole).

So why should there be a difference? If person A says X is bad, and person B says Y is the same as X, and everyone thinks Y is also bad, where is the contradiction? Its not like there can only be one bad thing in the world.

Pulling a chair onto the beach for someone actually has value?

The "contempt for efficiency" disaster also has other sides: all the time you lose to navigate into what should have been done properly in the first place.

This seems like whataboutism. Sure, capitalism creates some warped incentive structures - e.g. public schoolteachers being underpaid - but the Cuban government goes out of its way to royally screw anyone who tries to educate themselves or to create anything. Even the fact that we have a choice to create great things or create antipatterns presupposes that the free market draws people to acquire skills in the first place.