Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I have been thinking about the needs that shape us and the experience of the Cuban people.

Most specially when we live under a government that controls our thoughts and actions.

There are needs around which our personality is structured, these three needs are: affection, security for survival, and the experience of having control over our own lives. 

Feeling loved, safe, and in healthy control of our lives allows fear not to overcome us.

When these conditions are absent, we protect ourselves, we raise our defenses, and if we are not aware of it, we end up confusing our defenses with our identity. We begin to act from those defenses in order to feel protected.

 In this way, we end up doing what we do not want to do, or saying what we do not want to say. We act from a “self” in which we do not recognize ourselves, with which we do not identify, but which gives us a sense of security. We are acting as if manipulated by others but we are not genuine.

The same thing happens at the level of an entire group of people.

A dictatorship does not love its children. It controls them, manipulates them, uses them for its own ends, but it does not love them. Their lives, their hopes, their desires… do not matter.

 A dictatorship is not capable of offering security. Everyone lives in constant fear: those who dissent, because they know they can be prosecuted at any moment; and those who serve it, because they know that no matter how much they have given, a single slip, a single mistake, is enough to “fall from grace.” And since there is no rule of law, there is no independent judicial system that can defend them. There is no freedom.

Under a dictatorship, control over one’s own life is impossible. Everything is already controlled: education, the mechanisms for meeting basic needs, what can be said, the horizons that can be reached…all aspects are controlled

Even our personal life is controlled, one option is to create defenses and live from them: we become “obedient,” we participate in everything, we approve what we are told to approve and disapprove of what we are told to attack. We learn to live with fear and teach it that way to our children, while generating a sophisticated collection of justifications: “it’s for our own good,” “let’s not get into trouble,” “there is no other way to survive,” “we have to adapt”…

All the while we feel that this is not our true self, while deep inside something cries out that we do not want a life like this. And when we grant ourselves a few moments of truth, we realize that we have built our lives on falsehood, fear, and pretense.

It is then that it becomes possible to see that the path splits, we can choose to live disjointed, alien to our own feelings, a life of comedy, acting according to a script written for us; or we can begin to build a different reality—one that starts by recognizing what we truly feel, think, and believe, and then we can move from thought to words, and from words to concrete actions. We can learn to live in defense our own purpose, in pursuit of the life we truly want to live.

Everything changes when we decide to awaken from the amnesia produced by dictatorships, and realize that we have rights: the right to a social system that takes our needs into account . A right to fulfill our aspirations and projects; a right to a system that protects us. We have a right to laws that provide security in the face of injustice; yes, even a right to decide the direction we want to give to our lives. Because we have the right to live a genuine life without fear overcoming us or ruling us.