Cuba: the end of the "Revolution's" social enchantment

CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG ! ! ! !

via alasbarricadas, English translation by Anarchist News.

by Libertarian Workshop Alfredo López

The repressive social enchantment that kept the greater part of the outmoded international left pacified has vanished. Beneath the “Cuban Revolution”, and against the grain of its benign image, the “Cuban State” has emerged publicly, in all its crudeness and repressive grandiloquence. The same Cuban state that created – in order to confront Yankee imperialism - an omnipresent political police that fights the society kept under its control. The same Cuban state that destroyed - in the name of socialism - all popular and workers organizations that, with their histories of struggle, made the declared socialist conquests a daily reality. That same Cuban state that has turned solidarity into an internationally renown branding, at the cost of keeping us sunk in mistrust and fear among neighbors. The same Cuban state that - in the midst of the intensified Yankee blockade - builds more hotels for foreign tourists than infrastructures to produce food, fruits and milk. The same Cuban state that has produced the only vaccines in Latin America against covid-19, but maintains its health personnel in a condition of salaried employees of the political police.

In these days of July 2021, that Cuban state has shown what it is: a run-of-the-mill oligarchy, zealous in maintaining its absolute power at all costs; a vulgar kleptocracy with humanistic and enlightened pretenses; a pyramid of power as solid and disproportionate as the pyramids of the Egyptian theocracies, only surrounded by the sands of paradisiacal beaches instead.

To make geopolitical arguments about the place of Cuba in the global imperial strategy, to argue that the anti-government protests in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right in Miami, to argue that the protestors are simply delinquents looking to loot, that the true revolutionary people are standing by their government - those are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality to a certain extent, but not beyond a certain point. The people of Cuba have as much right and as much duty to protest as the people of Colombia and Chile. What is the difference? – That they are oligarchies with different origins? With more or less brutal practices? With more or less distinguishable ideological makeup? With more or less servile positions with the US government? With more or less sublime ideals to justify their privileges? All those immense differences between the Colombian, Chilean and Cuban oligarchies are reduced to zero when on a beautiful Sunday morning you discover that, in addition to the mafia oligarchies in Colombia and Chile, the Cuban oligarchy is also – facing an unarmed people – armed to the teeth, a little more or a little less, to crush you and your siblings, your body and your mind, if you even think of verbally questioning the normality that they manage.

Everything that the Cuban State has done to produce national vaccines against covid-19, all the labor subsidies, all the salary improvements that it offered to many sectors in the midst of the pandemic, suddenly evaporate, not only due to the inflationary spiral and the endemic food shortage in Cuba, but also because it became visible that all this was part of the macabre framework of "repressive tolerance", something that any decent person in Cuba can now discover, without having to read any brilliant book on counterculture. To those who come now to sugarcoat that repressive tolerance in this country and raise over it the mirage of militarized concord, we can calmly define them as the new face of that which should have no place in our future. Those who in the name of a future democracy or of the good functioning of the economy, come to discredit the affinities, the solidarity and the energies that sprung up in the protests, or reduce these events to “simple vandalism by libertines”, speak in name of, and with the language of the decrepit oligarchies that shamelessly raise their voice in our country once again.

The "masses" have once again become "the people", with all their lights and shadows, by ceasing to obey the heavy chains of command, and going back to trusting affects, affinities and the minimal capacities to do and think together, which have resurfaced in the disobedience and the solidarity among equals, amid the spiral of violence, the pandemic and the shortages. That is the new reality that was born in Cuba in these days of July 2021, and as anarchists in Cuba, we want to feel part of that new reality.

Related Links / Source: 

https://tierranuevacuba.medium.com/cuba-el-fin-del-encantamiento-social-...

There are 10 Comments

And these "anarchists" after 60 years of Stalinist dictatorship have become disenchanted now?

Obviously the anarchists that are writing this article are referring to "the people" that still went along with the government, not themselves.

would say "differently authoritarian".

but perhaps i'm more downtrodden here in the u.s. than you are, SE...

That a given political economy maybe gives you less somatic discomfort in everyday life does not make it any less authoritarian. A fascist country like Italy brought a lot of somatic satiation to the masses compared to what came before it(paid vacay, the modern welfare state as we know it ect) that does not do away with its authoritarian problematics. There's also dropouts who make their own rules who are not affected by 'standards of living'.

Cuba is an even more authoritarian shithole then a place like Barbados(where I grew up) or Jamaica(where I was born).

Also, it's the Afro-Cubans(among others) who've had enough not just the whiter more bourgeois.

True, also Hitler's highly authoritarian Germany had a high living standard than before his policies, and his provisions for the masse libidinous needs of the populace added to its somatic satiation.

Ask anyone in the ghettos of the death camps about those "high living standards", plz.

Oops, was talking about pre-war period 1932-1938 remember Berlin '36 Olympics hahahaaa

Particularly on the Italian side which was not as virulent as ze German variant you would have probably had something like a more repressive FDR dictator for life. And this is not to make it look good. Unlike many of the US left I fucking hate FDR and what he brought to the table. That whole welfare state/command economy epoch was a mark of radical 19th century decline. I can only imagine an even worse world where the appeal of fascism continued and was a sustained 3rd position on a geopolitical level.

Let's not forget that for certain subjects(queers, sexual minorities radical sexual females ect) that whole Fordist era was a gestapo police state. Modern welfare state ideology has always had an ugly side with the exception being the Scandinavian parts for various reasons(not being big military states for one)

We MIGHT be going back to something like a 19th century context if the John Michael Greer types are correct and this could be a preferable set of historical cards for anarchism and anarchy. I am MUCH more concerned about an indefinite Philip K Dick in the ass cybernetic society then I am any kind of contraction or decline which I very much welcome.

Ironically, it was not Hitler who snubbed Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics, but FDR.

Add new comment