Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I have been thinking about one of the foundations of Marxism–Leninism.

When I was a child, one night I was watching television with my family. They were showing a play in which a group of young Bolsheviks organized themselves as a revolutionary command.

A couple within the group had begun to fall in love, and there is a moment when the group’s leader laments this situation to another member. His reason was: “They will be lost to the cause.”

That reaction, placed within the context of a group that sought “the good of all society” and “the end of oppression and injustice,” made the ideal of the revolution appear as the supreme good, before which it was worth sacrificing everything.

But my childhood passed, and with it my naïveté, and into my life came that gift called critical thinking, which is nothing more than learning to think for oneself instead of automatically accepting ideas.

 In that light, that expression—“they will be lost to the cause”—went from being a romantic ideal to a conclusion that horrified me and still horrifies me: that for Marxism–Leninism and all the offspring it has engendered, the individual does not matter. Their life does not matter, nor their personal project, nor their present, nor their future. Their family does not matter, nor their children, nor their parents, not even their partner.

What matters is “the cause,” the ideal of a revolutionary society which, moreover, does nothing but suck up all your energy, all your vitality, to keep the new masters in power and then discard you when you are no longer useful to the cause.

Your life does not matter. It does not matter if you die. In fact, the death of the 32 Cubans killed in Venezuela is simply “one more” on an already far too long list.

The list of millions of Cubans on the island who for more than 60 years have given everything for the “Revolution,” everything in exchange for nothing.

The list of thousands of dead we have left here and there—in Algeria, the Congo, Bolivia, Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Ukraine… just to name a few examples.

Dead in conflicts completely alien to our homeland. Deaths that mean pain and loneliness for their families, because those who sent them to die from the safety of their own lives and their children’s lives can no longer bring them back, nor will they offer their families—partners, parents, children—support to lead a better life.

They will congratulate them on the “bravery” of those who died, and then forget everyone, except when they need “the families of the heroes” for some act of revolutionary reaffirmation.

And the immense list of people who separated from their families to go on “missions,” in order to earn a little more and give their loved ones a more dignified life, but who paid the price of irreparable damage to those they wanted to save: broken marriages, abandoned parents, children emotionally wounded forever.

All for an empty “cause,” for a dictatorship that sells itself as the ideal of the peoples and makes you feel like a hero while it uses you to the very end. And faced with this, do we have any defense? Yes, and it is simple; it can be reduced to two letters: “No.” I will not enter the game, I will not allow myself to be used, I will not put myself in a situation where I can be manipulated and from which it then becomes practically impossible to escape.