I am critical of Cuba not
because I am anti-Communist but because I remain a Communist.
We all remember the classic
scene from cartoons: a cat walks over the precipice and magically goes on,
floating in the air—it falls down only when it looks down and becomes aware
that it has no ground under its feet. In the same way, one can say that, in the
last decades, Cuban “socialism” continued to live only because it didn’t yet
notice it was already dead.
It is clear that Fidel Castro
was different from the usual figure of a Communist leader, and that Cuban
revolution itself was something unique. Its specificity is best rendered by the
duality of Fidel and Che Guevara: Fidel, the actual Leader, supreme authority
of the State, versus Che, the eternal revolutionary rebel who could not resign
himself to just running a State. Is this not something like a Soviet Union in
an alternative past in which Leon Trotsky would not have been rejected as the
arch-traitor? Imagine that, in the mid-1920s, Trotsky were to emigrate and renounce
Soviet citizenship in order to incite permanent revolution around the world,
and then die in the highlands of Papua New Guinea soon afterwards. After
his death, Stalin would have elevated Trotsky into a cult, and monuments
celebrating their friendship, along with iconic t-shirts, would proliferate all
around the USSR.
One gets tired of the
conflicting stories of the economic failure and human rights abuses in Cuba, as
well as of the twins of education and healthcare that are always trotted out by
the friends of the revolution. One gets tired even of the really great story of
how a small country can resist the biggest superpower (yes, with the help of
the other superpower).
The saddest thing about
today’s Cuba is a feature clearly rendered by the crime novels of Cuba’s
literary icon Leonardo Padura, which features detective Mario Conde and are set
in today’s Havana. Padura’s atmosphere is the one not so much of poverty and
oppression as of missed chances, of living in a part of the world to a large extent
bypassed by the tremendous economic and social changes of the last decades.
All of the above mentioned
stories do not change the sad fact that the Cuban revolution did not produce a
social model relevant for the eventual Communist future. I visited Cuba a
decade ago, and on that visit I found people who proudly showed me houses in
decay as a proof of their fidelity to the revolutionary “Event”: “Look,
everything is falling apart, we live in poverty, but we are ready to endure it
rather than to betray the Revolution!” When renunciations themselves are
experienced as proof of authenticity, we get what in psychoanalysis is called
the logic of castration. The whole Cuban politico-ideological identity rests on
the fidelity to castration—no wonder that the Leader is called Fidel Castro!
The true tragedy is that the
very remaining authenticity of the Cuban revolution made it possible for the
Castro brothers' government to drag on endlessly and meaninglessly, deprived of
the last vestiges of an emancipatory potential. The image of Cuba one gets from
someone like Pedro Juan Gutierrez (in his “dirty Havana trilogy”) is telltale.
The Cuban common reality is the truth of the revolutionary Sublime: the daily
life of struggle for survival, of the escape into violent promiscuous sex, of
seizing the day without any future-oriented projects.
In his big public speech in
August 2009, Raúl Castro lambasted those who just shout “Death to the U.S.
imperialism! Long live the revolution!” instead of engaging in difficult and
patient work. All the blame for the Cuban misery (a fertile land that
nonetheless imports 80 percent of its food) cannot be put on the
U.S. embargo: There are idle people on the one side, empty land on the
other side, and one has just to start working the fields.
Obviously this is true, but
Raúl Castro forgets to include into the picture he was describing his own
position: If people don’t work the fields, it is obviously not because they are
lazy but because the system of economy is not able to convince them to work.
Instead of reprimanding ordinary people, he should have applied the old
Stalinist motto according to which the mobile of progress in Socialism is
self-critique, and exert a radical critique of the system he and Fidel
personify. Here, again, evil is in the very critical gaze which perceives evil
all around.
So what about pro-Castro
Western Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call “gusanos/worms,” those
Cubans who emigrated to find a better life? With all sympathy for the Cuban
revolution, what right does a typical middle-class Western Leftist, like too
many readers of In These Times, have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave
Cuba not only because of political disenchantment but also because of poverty?
In the same vein, I myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western
Leftists who proudly threw in my face how, for them, that Yugoslavia (as
imagined by Tito) still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique
chance of maintaining Yugoslavia.
To that charge, I answered: I
am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint the dreams of
Western Leftists. Gilles Deleuze wrote somewhere: “Si vous etes pris dans le
reve de l’atre vous etez foutu!”—If you are caught in the dream of the other
you’re ruined. Cuban people paid the price for being caught into the Western
leftists’ dream.
The gradual openings of Cuban
economy towards a capitalist market are compromises that do not resolve the
deadlock but, rather, drag on the predominant inertia. After the impending fall
of Chavismo in Venezuela, Cuba has three choices: to continue to vegetate in a
mixture of Communist party regime and pragmatic concessions to the market; to
embrace fully the Chinese model (wild capitalism with party rule); to simply
abandon Socialism and, in this way, admit the full defeat of the Revolution.
Whatever will happen, the
saddest prospect is that, under the banner of democratization, all the small
but important achievements of the Revolution, from healthcare to education,
will be undone, and the Cubans who escaped to the United States will enforce a
violent re-privatization. There is a small hope that this extreme fallback will
be prevented and a reasonable compromise negotiated.
So what is the overall result
of the Cuban revolution? What comes to my mind is Arthur Miller’s experience on
the Malecon (Havana’s Caribbean ocean-front boardwalk) where two guys were
sitting at a bench near him, obviously poor and in need of a shave, and engaged
in a vivid discussion. A taxi then pulled up to the curb in front of them and a
lovely young woman stepped out with two brown paper bags full of groceries. She
was juggling the bags to get her money purse open, and a tulip was waving
dangerously close to snapping its stem. One of the men got up and took hold of
one of the bags to steady it, while the other joined him to steady the other
bag, and Miller wondered if they were about to grab the bags and run. Nothing
like this happened—instead, one of them gently held the tulip stem between
forefinger and thumb until she could get the bags secured in her arms. She
thanked with a certain formal dignity and walked off. Miller’s comment:
I'm not quite sure why, but I
thought this transaction remarkable. It was not only the gallantry of these
impoverished men that was impressive, but that the woman seemed to regard it as
her due and not at all extraordinary. Needless to say, she offered no tip, nor
did they seem to expect any, her comparative wealth notwithstanding.
Having protested for years the
government's jailing and silencing of writers and dissidents, I wondered
whether despite everything, including the system's economic failure, a
heartening species of human solidarity had been created, possibly out of the
relative symmetry of poverty and the uniform futility inherent in the system
from which few could raise their heads short of sailing away. (Arthur
Miller, “A Visit with Castro,” The Nation, December 24 2003)
At this, the most elementary
level, our future will be decided. The reality that global capitalism cannot
generate is precisely such “heartening species of human solidarity,” to use
Miller's phrase. So to conclude in the spirit of de mortuis nihil nisi
bonum (nothing that is not good should be said about the dead), this scene on
Malecon is perhaps the nicest thing I can remember about Castro.
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