Cuba: silence and fear

Under the effect of what strange charm is produced the silence that the Latin American democratic left keeps regarding Cuba ? What image of Cuban society, and of the Cuban people, nourishes this silence ? Where does this attractive image come from? ? Even more, what is this image of revolution which encloses the word and, fundamentally, the plurality that it carries with it, more than fifty years after the burning events of Havana? ?

Perspectives on the Revolution

In his essay Silencio, CubaClaudia Hilb seeks to unravel the mystery contained in these questions. His address is, in principle, aimed at the Latin American democratic left, but his arguments also discuss a number of commonplaces surrounding the island. These are based, in large part, on a conception of politics which reifies the capacity of individual wills when understanding circumstances. It is generally considered that Cuba’s problems stem from a political will which masks the existence of an egalitarian society, or that Cubans live without freedom and prisoners of the designs of a despotic leader who once manipulated the most disadvantaged to quickly gain power. From different ideological positions, the gaze is always directed towards personalities, either to deify them or to demonize them, thus diverting attention from the social frameworks that support the regime. The question about the intrinsic nature of this regime thus remains unanswered.

But the author focuses particularly on the Latin American democratic left, the left that interests her (p. 16). As the argument previously explained assumes, this considers that it is possible to separate the social advances of the regime (which we will see at the end of the book are not so important) from the process of concentration of power in the figure embodied by Fidel Castro. Taken to the extreme, the reasoning is as follows: Castro’s excesses are a veil that obscures or tarnishes a society structured on the basis of social equality (access to health, education, housing). These would then be simple accidents or unintended consequences, a product of external pressures which contributed to the degeneration of what was, a few years ago, a socialist paradise. The hypothesis that Claudia Hilb advances and supports consistently throughout the text undermines precisely these embarrassing rants and the lack of debate that derives from them: the social aspirations of the regime and its form of total domination cannot be dissociated. They have been intertwined since the beginning and constitute the pillars of the regime, this being understood in the broad sense of “ web of institutions, meanings, behaviors and beliefs which depict a certain understanding of what a community understands as legitimate and illegitimate, just and unjust, adequate and inadequate » (p. 18). Thus, the political analysis of the book is mainly oriented towards the first decade of the regime (1959-1970), in order to show the reader that, from the beginning, the aspiration for the equalization of social conditions was accompanied by no less strong vocation to transform and shape society from its top, making it homogeneous and transparent. As the author points out by taking up Miguel Abensour’s comments on the classic Discourse of voluntary servitude of Etienne de La Boétie, the claim of “ All One » was endogenous to the egalitarian process. How to deploy, now, the elements of such a massive argument ?

The nature of the regime: fear and total domination

The first chapter shows how the Cuban ruling core reformed society under the egalitarian dynamic: redistribution of land, nationalization of health, education and production, reduction of rents, delivery of social services, etc. It highlights how we tried, not without divergent perspectives quickly silenced, to “ transform the relationship between work and remuneration » (p. 29), which led to the dismantling of a good part of the regime’s initial support and led to successive crises in production. Of course, the condition of possibility for all this lay in the extension of the attributions of the State. And, as the author points out very precisely, in the spectacular increase in the power of the Egocrat who embodies him, that is to say Fidel Castro. Indeed, throughout the pages the mode in which the framework of the regime was structured appears: the students, the workers, the intellectuals and the party itself, lined up behind this Other who condensed the meaning of the Revolution and bluntly closed any possibility of dissension.

The second chapter describes the processes of mobilization and organization of society in the previously described context of the equalization of conditions and the concentration of power. Particularly through the study of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, voluntary work and forced labor, we glimpse the evolution of the meaning of daily practices. On the one hand, Cubans’ involvement and commitment to revolutionary fervor is transformed into conservative behavior guided by conformism, resigned acceptance, and fear. On the other hand, the ruling core, which very quickly reduced to Fidel Castro, uses participation in an increasingly instrumental manner, ruling out any attempt to build a “ new man » and increasing coercion as well as exploitation of individuals (this, at the time of attachment to the pattern of Soviet Party dictatorship). What types of links were then configured through these dynamics and these devices? ? Once again, what is the nature of the political regime to which the Cuban Revolution gave birth? ?

Although it is clear that all the pages of the book are imbued with the answer – said in a synthetic and recurring way, a “ model of social organization which, in the name of freedom, established a new form of servitude » (p. 66) – the last chapter endeavors to take up this question in detail. In dialogue with the experiences of “ actually existing socialism », the author shows how fear became the predominant principle of action in Cuba. Not through paralyzing effects, but, in a more complex way, by accompanying every calculation, interpretation and daily behavior with a strong impulse to avoid dissent. Within a framework where law and power were incorporated into the words of the leader (perhaps in an even more personalized way than in the cases of Russia and China), the project of The equalization of consciousness has been transformed into an equalization through fear, the great democrat in Hobbesian thought, transforming all the participants in the web into fellow human beings, right down to the ruling core. Furthermore, according to the author, all this presupposes the decay of initial revolutionary virtue, a radical depoliticization and the disappearance of public space. The final argument of the chapter destroys any hope of resplendence in these times of darkness: the practices of “ the struggle » that the Cubans build through the “ double morality » (one directed towards public demands, the other towards survival in the private domain), far from constituting “ new beginnings “, to escape the illusion of a full body, only reproduce the entire framework of the diet…

As we have already suggested between the lines, this book has a certain number of merits: reconstructing a social form and not remaining fascinated by the mastery of certain political wills ; think about the mode of structuring a regime and not its decadence or corruption, to use the classic categories ; use political philosophy to think about empirical problems and not classify the latter according to the requirements of the former. But the work also allows us to break the spell that surrounds revolutions in general, by which we mean the existence of a single discourse and the silencing of the hermeneutic struggle. Indeed, as you read, it is difficult to escape reflection on the logics of institution and maintenance that revolutions have developed in modernity: how power is generated, what links are established with those who reject the revolutionary project, what are the principles of action, what types of freedom and equality are promoted. Claudia Hilb’s work asks these questions and promotes the debate without pretending to close it, thus contributing to placing indeterminacy as a vector of action and judgment.

Translated from Spanish by Arnaud Trenta.