Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I’ve been thinking about how we were tamed… and how we could be tamed again.

More than 66 years have passed since January 1, 1959. That Cuba of 1959 was not perfect—no nation ever is or will be, because human creations always carry some imperfection.

It was a Cuba that needed change, but that was moving toward it, because despite our mistakes we were a thriving society, growing not only economically but also in political and social awareness.

How was it that that island, with so much human potential, so much social life, so much political effervescence, came to be turned into a prison of misery and hopelessness?

Any society can be “tamed”; any people can be manipulated if one knows how to do it and has the right ingredients.

 In Cuba, the ingredients were ready: we were a people desperate to free ourselves from Batista’s dictatorship, and we have always sinned by being a caudillo-oriented people. And a caudillo arose among us—dazzling, hypnotic.

 The rest was just applying a script. I cannot assert that Fidel was inspired by the Nazi propaganda manual written by Joseph Goebbels. But what is evident is that its principles took shape on this Caribbean soil.

Goebbels spoke of “simplification and the single enemy,” which seeks to reduce the complexity of reality to a simple, direct message, concentrating all explanation in one single, straightforward idea—emotional and easy to understand.

Thus, suddenly, our people “knew” they had one single, clearly identifiable enemy: Yankee Imperialism, that became our “ enemy” and one single cause for all our ills: let’s blame the Blockade—or the Embargo, if one prefers. And all our problems, our economic difficulties, our discontent, our anger… found someone to blame.

 Progressive shortages, runaway inflation, lack of medicines, blackouts, massive emigration… everything is the consequence of the Embargo. There is no mention of how the centralization and state-control of the economy were leading to productive inefficiency; no mention of how the lack of productive freedom and the abusive state controls have discouraged and blocked citizen initiative; no mention of the corruption of those who govern us.

 In the same way, every dissident, opponent, or independent journalist is presented as a “mercenary of imperialism,” a “salaried agent of the North American Empire,” reducing the diversity of legitimate criticism to a single category: “agents in the service of the single enemy: the United States,” because every criticism is, by decree, an enemy of the Revolution and, therefore, any criticism of the Cuban government is censored and anyone who criticizes is labeled as an enemy of the nation.

And when the people desire a change in the situation, everything is once again simplified into a single path: “defend the socialist revolution” versus “submit to imperialism.”

The problem is not considered to be the citizens’ rights, nor the need for reviving of the economy, nor seeking freedom, not even the Cuban’s cry for a dignified life. The problem is “you agree to submit to the government’s ideas and to resist yankee imperialism”—they insist we constantly resist the so called onslaught of American Imperialism, since the “ Yankees” are labeled as “our enemy” we are expected to resist until there is no strength left, resist one day, and another, and another, until simply… you die without having lived, proud that you did not give up or surrender.