What is our lesson after 55 years of the Castro regime, more than there were before Batista in Cuba (“Castroism” predates Castro), and there are still more to come, as long as the Castro brothers don’t die (there will be no Castroism after Castro), and the violence of freedom finally begins? Is there a lesson? What a perverse historical pedagogy! But yes. And if there isn’t any, then there should have been.
Like the good teachers in the public elementary schools, I would like to reduce everything to a couple of elemental points, although they will seem farfetched juxtaposed on the blackboard. I promise to be brief. Also, the chalk disappears quite easily before a damp rag leaving no trace in the classroom’s memory.
1. From the beginning, the Revolution was a fallacy in our national imagination. It wasn’t betrayed by Fidel Castro, far from it. In fact the Revolution was the foundational cause of our independence and it was this we were playing at during the Republican period, aborting any instant of understanding. We believed in the violent transformation of society. We tried our contemporaries so as not to criminally succumb before them.
Castro was carefully incubated by Cubans, until he accumulated sufficient critical evil to become what he is: an evil unbeatable without applying sufficient evil. With luck, or as revenge, Castroism should mean, then, the end of that string of Cuban Revolutions.
We have to stop thinking and acting revolutionarily, because all of the initial allies of the Revolution, betrayed, imprisoned, exiled or murdered, also committed the sin of complicit naiveté: they purposely ignored that no Revolution ever in the key of death has brought anything but that, more death.
2. Organized communism has committed genocide in Cuba. It sold the nation to foreign powers, under a popular and nationalist disguise. It made a pact with a charismatic gangster, a permanent dictator, watching while he and his clan lived. It cauterized all civic life: meaning it disintegrated the nation, fostering an exile that irreversibly diasporized Cuba.
It abolished the idea of the individual, and it did this from Marxism not as a concept but as a historical juncture (we now know that a capitalist communism is viable).
It debased the god in man that lived in Cuba, leaving us as a people despotically exposed before the State. Left without any hope of change in the future. Thus it has lost is right to form any part of a more inclusive future, after the debacle that will follow the fall of the Castros.
Although few Cubans have the courage to mention it (an exception is Oswaldo Payá Sardiña’s Transition Project), as long as organized communism on the island is not illegal, there will be no national reconstruction that isn’t controlled or hijacked by organized communists.
Like every good elementary public schoolteacher, I earn no salary for my chalk lesson on the blackboard. I’ve fulfilled my promise to be more than brief. I don’t lie to the students. Now they can erase me. Or leave the classroom.
25 December 2013
