The Art of Speaking Without Speaking / Yoani Sánchez

When you grow up decoding each line that appears in the newspapers, you manage to find, among the rhetoric, the nugget of information that motivates, the hidden shreds of the news. We Cubans have become detectives of the unexpressed, experts in discarding the chatter and discovering — deep down — what is really driving things. The Draft Guidelines for the Communist Party’s VI Congress is a good exercise to sharpen our senses, a model example to evaluate the practice of speaking without speaking, which is what state discourse is here.

Its more than thirty pages of text contain only economic proposals, more appropriate for the Ministry of Finance than for the compass of a political party. It’s true that it lacks the language of the barricade, resolving everything based on slogans, but it suffers from being a sugar-coated list of what could be done if the system really worked. For those who think my skepticism is exaggerated, take a look at the points from past congresses and check to see how many of them really came to pass.

Scrutinizing the verbiage, one positive is that the “state-budgeted sector” — this colossal blood-sucker that feeds on me, on you, on all of us — is going to shrink. Expanding the stage for self-employment is also comforting, but whenever I ask someone if they’re going to take out a license, they tell me they don’t think they’ll “take the bait” to start paying taxes. It’s hard to overcome the distrust, and a government that sinks the national economy with ts voluntarism and its idiotic programs has little credibility when it announces to rescue it.

It is disappointing that not a single line refers to the expansion of civil rights, including the restrictions suffered by Cubans in entering and leaving our own country. Nor is there a word about freedom of association or expression, without which the authorities will continue to behave more like factory foremen than as the representatives of their people.

The Party will meet in April, will approve some guidelines very similar to those in the pamphlet and, within a year or two, we will all be wondering what happened with so much ink on so much paper. What happened to that program where it said “perfect and improve” instead of “change or end”?

November 10, 2010