The characteristic of totalitarianism is to corrupt language and customs: you say one thing, you think another. The Cuban regime is no exception to the rule: you can do anything under your roof, nothing in the street. Vincent Bloch, who knows Havana slang like the back of his hand, paints an edifying portrait of homo cubanus.
Break the mirror
Totalitarianism always holds up a distorting mirror to the society it shapes. Let us recall the dictatorship of the proletariat for communism, or the myth of the Aryan race for Nazism. In the case of Cuba, communist-type mythology is added the slogan of endless revolution, where “everything changes so that nothing changes,” to borrow the expression of the writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Cheetah. “Pioneers of communism, we will be like Che…”, chant the schoolchildren every morning, hoisting the Cuban flag in the playground (one is tempted to ask: Che the minister or Che the rebel?)… The post-Soviet era, characterized by scarcity and resourcefulness (the “struggle”), Fidel Castro has found a name for it: “Special period in times of peace”. In fact, it is no longer so special, since it has lasted for more than a quarter of a century.
To break the mirror, we must begin with the criticism of language. As Octavio Paz stated in Postdata (1970): “When a society is prey to corruption, the first thing that rots is language. The critique of society therefore begins with grammar and the restoration of meanings.” This is the challenge that sociologist Vincent Bloch brilliantly takes up in The struggle, Cuba after the collapse of theUSSR. The fight follows his work entitled Cuba, a revolution (Vendémiaire, 2016) and devoted to the period from the 1959 revolution to the 1980s. Both are from his doctoral thesis, which received the Best Thesis Prize from theEHESS and the Raymond Aron Prize in 2012.
Ethnographic survey
Given the hermeticism of power in Cuba, the poverty of available data on everything related to decision-making, the absence even of a real political sociology on the island (abolished in the 1960s), even the most critical minds of the Castro government fall back on what is public and official: Fidel and Raul, the leaders, their laws and speeches, the institutions. Few foreign researchers spend much time on the island, and even then, given the restrictions on research, they often spend it in more or less official networks. Bloch was a “temporary resident” as a language student during his stay in Cuba, which allowed him to live in the Cuban way, or even to pass for a Cuban, so mastery does he have of Havana slang.
At the end of an ethnographic investigation in Cuba and also in the American diaspora, Bloch offers us in his diptych a detailed empirical analysis of the transition from “revolution” to “struggle,” which he theorizes by drawing inspiration from the works of Hannah Arendt, Julien Freund, Marcel Gauchet, and Claude Lefort. He seeks to understand the links between discourses and social practices, to properly measure the gap between the (false) bright future and what the Greeks called the metisthat is to say the cunning, the intelligence of a population faced with real challenges.
In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, “double talk” is the order of the day: you don’t say what you think, at least not in public. As the exiled writer Ivan de la Nuez sums up, speaking of his profession:
“Say less than we think, write less than we say, publish less than we write. This is our condition.”
Fidel Castro’s famous 1961 instruction, to sum up his views on freedom of expression – beginning of the revolution, todo; against the revolution, nada (for the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing) – has become a saying for Cubans: bajo techo todo, on calle nada (in private, everything, in the street, nothing). Bloch shows well that popular language, with the practices that it shapes and reflects, is neither that of power, nor that of a counter-power (forbidden on the island), but rather a kind of hybrid, which uses the words of power to change their meaning.
Thinking about homo cubanus
The fight consists of a back and forth between theoretical reflection on Cuban totalitarianism and a fascinating series of portraits, which form the heart of the book and which are as many incarnations of what one could call thehomo cubanus. Similarities with thehomo sovieticus by Alexander Zinoviev are striking: in both cases, the “new man” is in reality a man broken by fear and hunger, conformist by necessity, distrustful of the leaders and their henchmen (comecandela, conscience, communion), a critic of the nouveau-riche, a master of double-talk, and obsessed with the dream of exile.homo cubanus seems less lymphatic than his Russian cousin, occupied as he is with the art of survival, that is to say the art of ‘flight‘, of picking, of diversion, of theinvention and other even more ambiguous terms.” (p. 304) Thehomo cubanus par excellence is the jinetero clever, cunning, and an outstanding inventor:
Engaging in licensed ‘self-employment’, selling and buying on the black market, ‘solve‘using rudimentary means for various repairs (homes, private means of transport) that one needs, using one’s car as an illegal taxi, renting out part of one’s home or a personal object that others need, receiving intermediary commissions in the context of various transactions, swindling, committing a crime (measure a play), selling drugs, holding up, prostituting oneself: the range of activities encompassed and combined in lucha have no limits (pp. 304-305).
Thinking about the diet
The originality of the work is to show in detail how the struggle, “the watchword of revolutionary discourse”, is diverted from its official meaning by Cubans to signify practices whose more or less tolerated and systemic illegality is a guarantee of reproduction of the regime in place. The struggle is not simply the avatar of the regime: as a “dynamic of leveling” (p. 129) and “permanent setting in motion of society” (p. 300), it “would then be a manifestation of the spring of the principles that are at the foundation of the Castro regime.” Equality (with order, the other “higher principle” of the Castro regime) is in fact only realized in this struggle, because “it is this equality that is radical and replaces the equitable distribution of wealth” (p. 300). What is more, “the struggle is what remains of the Cuban totalitarian project” (p. 426); it is “a form of politics and a way of being in society that blurs the dichotomy between State and society, official norms and informal norms or adherence and resistance” (p. 427). Here, the great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante would say “suicide” instead of “struggle”: in both cases, it is a way out, in the absence of being able to emigrate.
In short, for Bloch, we are not simply talking about an “effect of the power apparatus, in the sense of Michel Foucault” (p. 435), but rather about a situation, common to post-totalitarian countries, where power is totalitarian in its conception, but where society is no longer. In fact, it is neither totalitarian nor anti-totalitarian: it is not certain that it is even a “society”. It is a collection of individuals, groups and fields of power, which operate in the dark, but not quite, because, let us emphasize again, all of this is part of the regime. This should not make us forget that this phenomenon is the offspring of a Soviet-type and therefore totalitarian system. For Bloch:
The absence of genocidal aims and references to a ‘race war’ or the annihilation of ‘class enemies’ isolates Castroism from the Nazi and Bolshevik experiences. It nevertheless belongs to the family of totalitarianisms in that it is driven by an ideology that aims to explain the totality of reality and whose focus of production is a charismatic leader at the head of a single party, perpetually mobilized to abolish any difference between individual will, civil society and governmental orientation, while simultaneously ensuring that ‘the people’ are launched to conquer the One and to remove, through the relay of repressive organs, the elements harmful to this objective (p. 433).
A scholarly work, even a literary gesture, so fluid and precise is Bloch’s prose, The fight constitutes an essay in the best sense of the term. The marriage between theory and empirical analysis is particularly successful, and echoes a comment by Pierre Bourdieu in The rules of art (1992), where the sociologist explains his preference for authors “who know how to invest the most decisive theoretical questions in a meticulously conducted empirical study”, and for works “where theory, because it is like the air we breathe, is everywhere and nowhere, in the course of a note, in the commentary of an old text, in the very structure of the interpretative discourse…” Soon the “special” or post-Soviet period will have lasted as long as the period before the “post”. We will have to get used to thinking about it in its own terms, and from below, as Bloch suggests in this remarkable book.