Category: José Gabriel Barrenechea

We also regret that the transcription of the panel (by the way, very badly assembled) on the draft constitution that was held on September 28, 2018 at the Padre Félix Varela Cultural Center has not been available to the readers of this magazine. In it two respectable jurists were moderated by one of the most brilliant intellectuals and Cuban politicians of the moment, Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada. As expected, the panelists and the audience itself serve only as an introduction to the frequent interventions of someone who, by its nature, is more likely to need moderators than to moderate. José Antonio is the whole panel, and in fact, we recommend that you save time and just read what he said. It will create dependence.

There is much more of interest in this magazine but I will comment on just two items: The murder of Professor Ramiro Valdes Daussá, by Paul Llabre Raurell, a historian living in Miami; and Aracelio Iglesias: the story, the legend, by the narrator and folklorist Tato Quiñones.

In the first one you will find a narration of the death of Ramiro Valdés Daussá, one of the most interesting characters of the Revolution of the 1930s. Thanks to the thoroughness of the author you will find that there is something more here than the description of a murder that occurred on a distant night in August 1940.

This article is a brief history of the emergence of university gangsterism, el bonche. Remember that in Cuba very little serious historiography has been written about the phenomenon of political gangsterism of the late 30’s and the 40’s and that, in any case, the works of Newton Briones Montoto or Aguilar stand out, but, to make matters worse, the same is the case in the mature phenomenon, from the assumption of the Auténticos to power, not in its very origins under Batista, both as colonel and president.

A very well written work, the author has armed himself with the support of abundant interviews with significant personalities, for example, Antonio Morín Dopico and Mario Salabarría, key actors with Emilio Tro of the Events of Orfila.

There is also, by the way, a brief look at the beginnings of Manolo Castro, the one whose 1948 death some contemporary press blamed on, among others, Fidel Castro who at that time was taking pictures with leather coats and Edward G. Robinson poses.

The second article is part of a controversy. It is the answer to the one published by Newton Briones Montoto in the previous issue of this magazine: The Murder of Aracelio Iglesias: Approaching the Truth.

Article that is somewhat extensive, and that Newton could have reduced to one or two pages, revolving around a campaign of electoral propaganda that seemed to demonstrate the membership of the communist port leader to the Abakuá sect, a topic that has always been a subject of discussion among historians and Cuban politicians for its obvious implications on the consequence or not with which the Cuban Communist Party (PSP) respected its supposed dialectical materialist philosophical bases.

Quinones gives us an admirable work, very documented in interviews with Aracelio’s colleagues, in which he tries to prove otherwise. His key arguments in this case are another flyer, also written in bríkamo (the secret language of the sect), but supporting the Matancera candidacy of the liberal Carlos Miguel de Céspedes, who supposedly was not Abakuá either; and what was said to him by Domingo Cárdenas Valdés, an important member of the ñáñiga sect.

According to this “if they had sworn, Aracelio would have entered into commitments of brotherhood with members of his power that would have put him in the difficult situation of (having to) privilege them over other workers,” which in the long run would have affected the undoubted leadership that he had and retained among Havana dockworkers and Cubans in general.

However, if Quiñones almost convinces us that Aracelio Iglesias did not belong to the ñañiguismo (Abukua secret society), on the other hand he reveals to us that as of 1937 the communist had become a babalawo, with which he puts us back to the theoretical origins of the controversy: the party He did not respect his philosophical principles when doing street politics.

The new installment of Espacio Laical also contains the gloomy predictions for the Cuban fifties of Lourdes de Armas and the positions of the director of the publication, Andújar, on gender ideology. The magazine can be found in the Father Felix Varela Center and is available on the website of Espacio Laical.
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This is not Aristides’ first letter, nor has he only denounced censorship in his letters. Not is it the first movement of intellectual concern from here. Not to mention that in the now distant nineteen-nineties, there emerged more than a few groups of challengers and even open opposition in the world of pilonga* letters.

The first movement I remember in those times of raulato was that led by a group of young authors back in 209: they demanded a less crazy tax framework, having suffered the anger of certain cultural officials, they managed to collect a number of important signatures in support of their petition. One of the most outstanding figures of this movement that soon transcended the limits of Villa Clara was the narrator Anisley Negrín, the best graduate of my course in the Onelio Literature Center, and winner of the 2008 David Prize**, someone who has apparently left our city, in the current move of the best of our writers to the United States.

Ultimately, the question is that some seem to have suddenly discovered this little corner “of the interior,” and avidly launch themselves on the first scandal they come across, with which they create the false impression that it is now Santa Clara that is moving. Thus they forget, in my mind, two complaint letters from Otilio Carvajal, one from Perez de Castro, another famous one from Aristides himself, denouncing the badly handled finances of certain cultural organizations here, and one from Pedro Llanes in which he complains about the discrimination against certain of his friends on the guest lists of the Provincial Book Fairs.

Nor do they take into account two posts demanding profound changes in the Cuban State that Ernesto Peña published on my blog, El Hidalgo Rural Cubano (The Rural Cuban Gentleman), and that as a result of the harassment he was then subjected to by the “compañeros” of State Security, he had a nervous breakdown. Or in the semblance of insignificant arm wrestling that, under the name of the baseball team from here, Lorenzo Lunar and Feliz Julio Alfonso have maintained for the last two years with none other than the province’s first secretary, in the egregious ears of whom a gray sportscaster and snitch with political police license plates never tires of dispensing accusations against those two as “restorationists” – that is supporters of capitalism.

That the literature in this city is in a keen state of restlessness is demonstrated by Otro Lunes (Another Monday) or Árbol Invertido (Inverted Tree), the two most serious Cuban cultural magazines edited from the opposition camp. What other city in the country, including Havana, has provided a similar number of collaborators? In what other city, besides the Havana of Voices, have the intellectuals dared to collaborate massively with a magazine with as few antecedents as Cuadernos de Pensamiento Plural (Notebooks of Plural Thinking)?

As for Vanguardia, the June issue is not the first clash in the last three years. In Ranchuelo Yandrey Lay Fabregat is now dedicated to narrative, and is perhaps one of the best cultural chroniclers of this region, to whom they have made it very difficult in Vanguardia, with the usual censorship in the country compounded by the abysmal mediocrity of those who lead or have led it in recent years.

In Santa Clara those who dedicate themselves to literature have worked in silence for a long time, without so much adherence to the tremendismos***. If you are not aware of this it is because you never had the opportunity to attend some of Aristides’ gatherings, especially the so-called “The Moment of Truth,” where more devastating truths than those of his letter of long ago have been heard.

Translator’s notes:
*Pilongo/a is a term used to refer to someone from Santa Clara, Cuba. It is a reference to those baptized in the huge baptismal font – called a “pilón,” hence “pilongo” – opposite the Cathedral which was demolished in the 1920s.
**The David Prize, awarded by the Artists and Writers Union (UNEAC), is one of the most important literary awards in Cuba (see Wikipedia).
***Tremendismo is a literary narrative technique developed in the Spanish novel in the 1940s which features violence, sordidness and direct, hard language (see Wikipedia).

Among the causes of this marked decline are the late delivery of the assurances needed to start up the plants, but especially the very low agricultural yields and scant maturity of the reeds. This latter, by the way, is a result of last season’s cutting ahead of time much of the cane that would have reached its full development only this year, as a result of last year’s government stubbornness to meet that year’s plans, whatever it took.

The cane cutters are saying that this year they have cut fields that are yielding less than 30,000 arrobas (a measure of weight that varies by country; in Cuba it is 25 pounds) per caballeria (about 33 acres). In addition, the small size of many fields and their less than optimal location prevents a rational distribution of the cutters and resources needed to transport the cane to the mills, which is also taking a toll on the season.

The provincial authorities have insisted, however, that this disastrous season is the fault of the rains, a statement completely at odds with their frequent pronouncements that the province is experiencing a drought. But in Villa Clara, it seems, it is a question of drought when they are talking about aqueducts, and of rains when they are talking about sugar harvests.

In choosing this small selection of the author’s columns in Diario de las Américas, Vitalina Acuna, its compiler, has managed to give Cubans on the island an introductory view of Uva de Aragon’s life, work, and dreams. The book is structured into nine chapters, combining Family Stories, reviews, or small essays investigating the lives and circumstances of people such as Max Aub, Gregorio Maranon, Charles Dickens and Mark Chagall, memories of the Mariel boatlift, far from complacent views on the political life of the United States, heartfelt defenses of personalities from the world of culture—like that dedicated to Domingo del Monte—travel and a very great deal about Cuba…

So much that, on writing about Gerald Ford and his political sacrifice to restore confidence in democracy in the United States, we clearly see the well-known Cuban inability to value the kinds of acts she talks about. Not forgetting the man she calls her “second father,” Carlos Marquez Sterling, who carried out a similar sacrifice when, at the end of 1958, he tried to remove the Batista dictatorship by running against him at the polls.

With regards to the physical separation that has failed to break the spiritual unity of the Cuban nation, the reception of this book on the island is a good example. The book is now in a print run of 2,000 copies from Holguin Publishing. In fact, one of the reasons that it took me almost a month to finish it is that, before I could start the book I had to wait for all the women in my family, and even my super leftist Old Man to read it before me.

It happened in April or May of 1980. The teacher Delfa, in love, decided to leave the country to follow her husband, trying to escape the usual pogrom. Those were days of infamy, when the power of hatred fed the base instincts of their followers, or those who simply craved some entertainment. A group of lunatics was running up and down the block after the woman who had taught them their ABCs. On the corner Lieutenant Talavera and Corporal Habichuela laughed about it and protected them.

All doors were closed before the passing of the woman and the horde. Until suddenly, unusually agile at nearly 60, Rafaelito appeared in the middle of the public torture session, grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her into the house. Surprised at the response, the horde stoned the house and tried to force the door. On the corner, Talavera continued to spit invective at the “piece of shit worm,” and if he didn’t knock down the door it was because of strict orders he’d been given not to intervene in any way, unless the Revolutionaries were attacked.

Worse was yet to come for Rafaelito. After that, he and his family were social outcasts. By direct guidance from the First Secretary of the Communist Party in the city, according to what the secretary himself told me many years later, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) in plenary sessions focused on repeating nearly detail by detail the harassment experienced by the Batiste family in the novel La Barraca by Vicente Blasco Ibanez.

It got to such lows as forcing the wife of the eldest son to either divorce her husband or resign from the Young Communist League. She chose, something not so easy to do then, to leave such an unworthy organization. Her husband, a teacher, lost his job and most of the ‘80s passed before he got another. As for Rafaelito, pushing 60, he retired almost immediately with a miserable pension.

Rafaelito and Caridad could have left, but they never did. They both loved the land where they had been born too much and they remained happy even in the midst of hatred, poverty and cowardice. “It wasn’t me who had to go,” he told me from time to time.

I remember Rafelito and Caridad, now almost deaf, sitting in their living room while they sent some greeting to my parents and some other errand, “tell Joseito (or Zoilita) to send us a little coffee.” Monuments to human greatness, for whom the weight of the years never managed to erase the marble or bronze of their skin and the shine in their eyes. Heroes should not remain anonymous, and now that they have gone together, if they are in some other place, it is where good people go.

Hopefully someday we can go there to greet them.

Even in the highly biased The Cry of Moncada, by Mario Mencia, a complete representation of Castro-regime historiography, we find nothing to support the official version according to which the Americans inspired and even led the coup; it only manages to draw on an alleged “approval by omission” by the Embassy, having not warned President Carlos Prio.

According to the author, not only did the members of the US military mission know what was being cooked up in Columbia and Kuquine, the well-known hacienda of the “Mulato Lindo” – as Batista was called – but so did almost all of Havana and even the country. If no one took this stew seriously, it is due to the circumstances of that time in Cuba, where almost all shared the same blind confidence in the solidity of democracy.

At the end of February, in the face of the warning from the Venezuelan Romulo Gallegos – fired three years earlier – of what was afoot, someone as sharp as Raul Roa responded with absolute certainty that something like this had no place in the Cuba of 1952.

The latest example is Batista, the Coup, by two historians closely linked to State Security, Jose Luis Padron and Luis Adrian Betancourt. The central thesis of this book is that in essence there is nothing to prove American inspiration behind the barracks coup, and that, on the contrary, everything seems to demonstrate that the coup was not very well received by most of the institutions of the United States.

This work admits that it was not the United States that was among the first to offer de facto recognition to the regime, but rather among the last, at least in the Americas. It goes on to detail, based on abundant declassified documentation from the US State Department, the tense process of recognition and the subsequent chill that the American embassy in Havana maintained for months toward the de facto regime. The authors do not fail to clarify that the motives for it were the well-known links between Batista and the Cuban communists, who generated great suspicion in the circles of American power.

We can affirm that this lack of a link is no longer based only on the opinions of the intellectual authority, but on simple and plain common sense. Still, through covert operations, during the dawn of the Cold War, Americans have only intervened where it was clear, or at least highly possible, that the advance of the Communists, or any political force which by its nature had some chance of allying itself to the USSR (this breach of tolerance was what allowed the consolidation of the Fidel regime soon afterwards). This kind of situation could not have been further from that of the Cuba of the late forties and beginning of the fifties.

The Communist Party, the PSP, had seen how the masses withdrew their already low support historically during the democratic period. If in the 1948 elections they got 142,972 votes, less than 6% of the total, in the reorganization of the parties in November of 1949 and 1952 it fell respectively to 126,542 and 59,000. This last figure was just a few thousand votes from the 2% required in the Constitution to legalize a political party, and, therefore, its electoral demise.

Moreover, to pretend that the Americans promoted the coup to stop the certain victory of the Orthodox party is complete nonsense. Would the Yankees have feared the party of Chibás, which was entirely in the hands of the most implacable and popular enemy of communism in Cuba? Not to mention, the only Cuban politician of the first-rank who opposed the leftist government of Juan Jose Arevalo in Guatemala or who sent a parliamentary commission to investigate the violation of human rights during the uprising of independence supporters in Puerto Rico in 1950… that is, the Cuban politician of the first rank least likely to upset Washington.

It is not very well understand how it served the foreign policy of the United States to get rid of what was then its democratic showcase in the Southern Hemisphere. It was an alliance that played an extremely important role in the defense mechanisms of the hemisphere, in a moment of incomparable popular approval in Latin America, and in which there was seen no immediate possibility of marked retreat.

On the contrary, there is abundant evidence of the American displeasure with the coup, and the supposed complacency of the military attaché in Havana suggested by Batista, the Coup is highly doubtful. In the post-coup report the barracks attack was called a danger for American interests on the continent, which leads us to interpret differently the efforts of those officers to convince many military of the academy and great technical capacity to remain in the Constitutional Army. The American military in reality did not try to strengthen the Batista regime, but rather to leave a door open for the return of institutional democracy without the need for a popular insurrections, that is, thanks to a future civilian-supported military coup.

With regards to the Americans finally giving recognition to the de facto Batista government, its doing so more than two weeks after it had usurped the Presidential Palace, and when all of Latin America had already done so, was the best possible attitude for the continuity of Cuban political independence.

Calmly analyzing the last 64 years, we understand that the U.S. Department of State ended up adopting the recognition promoted by the Democratic administrations since 1933, very knowledgeable about our susceptibility on the subject, such that we could not accuse them of interfering with their enormous force of gravity in the seriousness of our internal issues. The lack of support from the United States is clearly what got Batista to leave power in less than six months, as was well-known by many Cuban politicians of that time, but in turn it profoundly discredited our independence, or at least our capacity to manage our own sovereignty with a minimum of responsibility.

It is here where the inextricable relationship between our two nations becomes transparent: having denied recognition, having demanded the immediate return of the previous government, in the face of a situation that after almost three weeks did not seem to result in civic rejection by Cuban citizens, the United States would in consequence become the de facto guarantor of our democracy and real sovereignty.

From that moment, our authorities could be elected in the most free and democratic way, but at the end of the day their remaining in their jobs would depend on the will of the United States to maintain them in the face of our own authoritarian and anti-democratic forces. This would have ultimately led us into a quasi-similar position to the years of the Protectorate, or an even worse one.

It is worth remembering that the alleged control over Cuban society of the institutions of American intelligence is belied by events occurring after the 1952 coup, as it failed to discover the massive conspiratorial movements of Fidel Castro, who came to gather more than one thousand men who trained for months around the University of Havana.

Marx believes in the superiority of industrial workers derived from their special position in the productive process of modern western society. Their concentration into great productive units, where complex forms of cooperation and socialization are created, from the level of the company to the planet, and where science and technology completely replace the natural landscape, allows them, unlike the lumpen and the farmer, to have the ability to construct a sophisticated society capable of overcoming the deficiencies of capitalism without, at the same time, renouncing its achievements. Having, in short, the progressive values necessary to arm a post-capitalist society, still based on the science and technology that overcame capitalism.

It is this supremacy based on constructive circumstances – not on a race or on a position in the income pyramid – that supports the industrial worker in building the society that Marx prefers to call socialist. And he is absolutely certain that this is something that those natural reactionary elements, opposed to progress – the lumpen and the peasant – could never achieve.

If we look at current Venezuelan society, we immediately notice the main difference between this socialism and the Marxist model: the support base of 21^st century socialism is more than ever the lumpen, not the proletariat. In fact, it in “Madurism” (support of president Nicolas Maduro) it has gone so far that, to a large extent, its supporters are found today in the most openly criminal, in the underworld in the hills.

We ask ourselves: Why Maduro, or this gavel-wielding caveman, who, reluctantly from the presidency of the National Assembly, cannot manage to reduce the incredible Venezuelan crime rates? Quite simply because this criminal element is one of the most important bases of support for 21^st century socialism.

More than a few thugs from the collectives dedicate their free time to smuggling, robbery and even assault, which should not surprise anyone: at the end of the day, if one inhabits the hills, one is subjected daily to the continuous and interminable nonsense that Nicolas Maduro launches on national television, which only ideological obsessives like Atilio Boron or Luis Britto could classify as political speeches, and so one couldn’t help but find it fair and morally justifiable to “redistribute” the wealth at the barrel of a gun, á la Robin Hood. Isn’t the Caracazo – the 1989 Caracas riots – one of the most memorable events of Chavez-Maduroism? During those disturbances it wasn’t just food that was looted, but home appliances and even luxury items.

I invite anyone who can bear it to listen to hours of Manichean phrases, barrio bluster, puerile lack of respect for the other, obvious contradictions, the worst chants, ridiculous gestures of fidelity and greetings to former comrades in the struggle discovered in the crowd, and you will soon discover this terrifying truth: Maduro’s rants are nothing more than incitements to hatred. Hatred of the rich by the poor, but also of the brilliant and creative by the mediocre, of the intelligent individual by the deficient intellect.

Madurism is by no means an experiment leading to a post-capitalist society. In essence, it is nothing but populism That is, today’s Venezuela is nothing more than a capitalist society in which all the progressive classes and sectors in the country have been stripped of power by a horde of lumpen-proletariat who are dedicated to consuming, or rather destroying, all the wealth previously created, without bringing anything new or making any kind of effort. Venezuela today is, therefore, something like a new Rome occupied by barbarians.

Hopefully the resulting Middle Ages will not be very long and soon Venezuela can rejoin the legitimate world seekers of a society that will truly surpass capitalism, and so prevent the return to pre-capitalist ways, a barbarism greatly feared by Marx in his later years.

The truth is that, despite all the supposed integrationist advances in Latin America, territorial or maritime claims are the order of the day. This persistence is due to the Latin American tendency to use the differences that these claims generate to divert public attention from domestic policies. There is no Latin American government, elected or imposed, of the left or the right, which in the face of a scenario of enormous popular disapproval doesn’t immediately look at a piece of territory that, supposedly or truly, some neighbor grabbed at some time in their history.

No Latin American government in the face of massive popular disapproval fails to remember the piece of land that a neighbor grabbed at some point in its history

The most emblematic case is the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina’s military dictatorship which was foundering in a difficult economic and social internal situation. Emblematic because not only did it go beyond threats and rhetoric, but because the opponent was nothing more than one of the nations with the strongest fighting traditions and most prominent navies in human history: the United Kingdom.

The most recent, and the most pathetic (not to say cowardly), is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, with its pretension to claim from a much poorer country a piece of its territory rich in petroleum. A piece that, incidentally, represents half of Guyana. Thus, after the Chavez-Maduroism of the last two decades launching continuous and daily diatribes against imperialism, now takes off the mask and behaves like it actually is: a deeply ideological imperialist.

Thus, we can see the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela now practicing a blackmail diplomacy throughout the Caribbean, in a manner more unsubtle than almost anything Washington has done in its entire history.

How can we reconcile the integrationist Venezuelan discourse with this despicable and cowardly act? It does not make demands of the power of Great Britain, but rather of the poorest country that emerged through independence from that colonial power. Nothing changes, they shout to the four winds, with the resources in dispute in Venezuelan hands as they will also be available to the Guyanese people thanks to the extensive cooperation with the country “in solidarity.” On the contrary, this justification better shows the true nature of the “integrationism” and the Chavez-Maduro solidarity. It is Maduro’s Venezuela that decides and has the last word. In the end is it not our oil? Well do and think as we dictate from the Caracas fascism… I’m sorry, the socialism of the 21^st century.

Venezuela seeks to strip from Guyana, a much poorer country, a piece of its oil-rich territory

The ultimate reasons for this infamy are the same ones that led Galtieri to assault the Falklands in 1982. With a barrel of oil under 38 dollars, and with increasingly meager support, Chavez-Maduroism seeks to distract attention from the difficult internal situation and, at the same time, put Venezuela in a state of war that gives it a free hand to close the few remaining spaces for democracy in the country. Because something that must be understood by the opponents to Chavez-Maduroism who, however, support this imperialist adventure: the principal objective is nothing more than to annul them as opponents, presenting the opposition attitude as treason “at such difficult times.”

The fear is that attitudes like that of Chavez-Maduro’s Venezuela are being repeated by other leftist regimes in these difficult times for them in the region. It should not surprise us when very soon the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, sitting on an erupting volcano, remembers the half of the country that Peru snatched from Ecuador more than a hundred years ago. As for the land of the “Great Indian Chief of the South,” Bolivia, we have already mentioned where the ideas of Linera have currency, his Great White Brain: a guy to be reckoned with and a bomb thrower.

However, as a revolutionary or as a tyrant, it is indisputable that Fidel Castro has truly brought about a dense darkness “in our house.” It is quite possible that only Captain General Valeriano Weyler was more disastrous for Cuba than what has resulted from this offspring of one of the little soldiers Spain sent here to fight against the desire of our ancestors to be free and independent.

Fidel Castro’s refusal to act For example, his refusal to act as a politician, that is with responsibility, put the country at the edge of the abyss during the missile crisis, in October of 1962.

For example, his refusal to act as a politician, that is with responsibility, put the country at the edge of the abyss during the missile crisis, in October of 1962. Indeed, one can admire and be proud of the fortitude with which the Cuban people faced the threat of nuclear holocaust, however frightened they were and opposed to the way in which their leader was stubbornly dragging it towards them. Nor did he channel in realistic ways the explosion of Cuban vital energy of the mid-twentieth century. Fidel Castro behaved not as a hero, but was a huge disgrace to his countrymen.

On assuming power in 1959, Fidel Castro took over a country that needed to find a new base of economic to assure the level of prosperity previously — but no longer — enjoyed, that had been shared out, with its vagaries, for more than a century. Since 1926, more or less, the Cuban economic model. based on the production and export of huge quantities of raw sugar, was in crisis. Such was the magnitude of this crisis, that from that year productive investments were not realized in the sugar industry. Despite the general will of the nation to improve the living standards of all its members, it was impossible to do so in the case of farm laborers. As would be shown in the sixties, it was absolutely unsustainable to increase the wages of the manual cane cutters, without destroying the profitability of the entire sugar industry.

After achieving full national sovereignty in the Revolution, it was a fundamental duty of the new rulers to put Cuba back on the path of prosperity.

However, Fidel Castro, in his nearly half century of governance, did nothing realistic with respect to it. Absolutely unable to deal with complex and non-linear economic problems, he always thought that, as on any feudal estate in his native Birán, the omnipotent will of the owner was enough to advance a modern economy of the then not insignificant size of Cuba’s.

Fidel always thought that, as on any feudal estate in his native Birán, the omnipotent will of the owner was enough to advance a modern economy of the then not insignificant size of Cuba’s 

Ultimately, his solution was not to convert the sugar industry into a modern sugar-chemical complex, as Ernesto Guevara had dreamed in the early sixties. Fidel Castro, pathologically incapable of doing anything good in economics, decided call on that other field that he seemed to give himself to so well: politics. If Fidel’s Cuba has experienced anything, at least from 23 December 1972 until today, it has been the economic exploitation of a dispute with the United States, more or less exacerbated any time it suited him. How? By presenting himself as the ideal ally of everyone who, in a world fill of such characters, had some ax to grind with the Americans.

By not solving the principal economic problem he just exacerbated the main danger to the nation: the lack of an non-precarious economic base that would assure credible levels of prosperity in a nation that had previously enjoyed a fairly high standard of living. Combined with very close proximity and easy communication with the United States, 1950s Cuba was in the same situation as a small planet that gets too close to an extremely massive one, ending up shattered into pieces with its remains devoured by the giant.

It was already clear in those years that, with no solution to its economic base, the nation would confront in the ‘60s and ‘70s a massive exodus of Cubans to the United States. Without any perspectives of work that would assure them the level of prosperity of their grandparents, or at least one that would compare to the neighbors to the south, there was no doubt that many Cubans would end up leaving with their families for the US. On the horizon, in addition, was the fear of the possibility of a resurgence of the previously overcome tendencies to desire Cuba’s annexation to the United States.

As would be expected in someone so impetuous, a Fidel Castro was caught flat-footed on the economic problem and tried to attack the danger directly… and to extract some advantage. As a leopard doesn’t change its spots, he tried to politicize it.

Those who left Cuba were businessmen, doctors, technicians, artists and generally a contingent of people with the values, skills and knowledge necessary to build a modern and prosperous society.

In a complex feedback process, Fidel Castro exacerbated the internal differences to the same extent that an ever greater human contingent continued what was already in the 1950s a natural tendency of Cubans to move. By 1965, a tenth of the population had emigrated to the United States, a human capital that few nations in the world of that era would have been able to display. Businessmen, doctors, technicians, artists and generally a contingent of people with the values, skills and knowledge necessary to build a modern and prosperous society.

After that, in the 1960s, we lost the sector of the population with the least affinity to his absolute authoritarianism, and he established immediate and complete control over the movements of the citizens who remained. Anyone, even the most humble seller of lollipops without any special knowledge or skills for national development, needed the express authorization of the Castro regime authorities in order to emigrate.

And at first it was almost impossible to get, at least until the eighties. Beginning in that decade Fidel Castro, by the confluence of many factors, increasingly relaxed his immigration policy. The main reason was the growing unrest.

Under his government, he had created a technical and professional sector much larger than the needs of the island. A large sector that found no possibilities for personal fulfillment in a country that first experienced the gradual withdrawal of the Soviet aid, and later its total disappearance. An extensive new opposition anticipated on the horizon, against which he might appeal to violence, although certainly not with the expected results, because already the international context wouldn’t support it. Alternately he could dip into the old standby of opening the path to emigration. Thus, this became the Cuban substitute for the Soviet gulag. Those who didn’t get on well in His Cuba could emigrate, or at least he was hoping they would, and this neutralized any desire they might have to fight.

The result of the total politicization of the life of the Cuban nation could be evaluated as of 31 July 2006. The day that, though he himself did not yet know it, Fidel Castro left power forever.

The result of the total politicization of the life of the Cuban nation could be evaluated as of 31 July 2006. The day that, though he himself did not yet know it, Fidel Castro left power forever.

By then, Cuba was (and is) without an economic base, no longer like that prior to 1926 with regard to a level of assured prosperity, but also one that brings some possibility of something more than survival to the absolute majority of the Cuban people. Even the sugar industry, with a respectable capital of accumulated knowledge of more than two centuries of evolution and with so many possibilities in new times, was eliminated by Fidel Castro in 2002. He tried in this way, it seemed, to avoid that on his departure from power, someone would dare to try to exploit the production capacity for biofuels.

But it is in the exacerbation of the danger to the survival of the nation, provoked by this lack of a non-precarious economic base, where we discover the darkest legacy of the half-century of the absolutist government of Fidel Castro. This, paradoxically, stands out still more, because Fidel Castro always presented his absolutism as indispensable to the survival of the “homeland.”

Fidel Castro’s regime has promoted the desire to escape from the island on such a scale that today, despite the enormous difficulties in doing so, almost a quarter of Cubans live outside of Cuba. What’s more, the principal danger in this is not in the proportion, but in the particular pattern of the Cuban migration with the flight of those people who are most educated.

Fidel Castro’s regime has promoted the desire to escape from the island on such a scale that today, despite the enormous difficulties in doing so, almost a quarter of Cubans live outside of Cuba.

From a Cuba in which initiative was a highly suspicious quality, and therefore under close surveillance by the secret police, the best prepared have necessarily emigrated, the most active, those least given to respecting the opinions of authority. In other words, the problem is not that emigrants are a quarter of the population, but that this quarter has been systematically selected to rob the nation of its members most likely to put themselves forward and lead a prosperous future, and an orderly one… democratic of course.

As this pattern of emigration continues, and even has even intensified since Fidel Castro left power, though his regime continues, it is not so fanciful to suppose that in the near future we might see Cuba converted into the most backward and poor nation in the western hemisphere. A position it is not far from today, despite the fact that in 1959 this same society only yielded to the United States and Canada and was equated with Argentina and Uruguay.

The damage Fidel Castro caused the nation has, in the end, been so great — a nation where in the 1950s there were only inklings on the horizon — that today there is a strong current of furtive opinion, although not openly expressed by hardly anyone, that suggests the only solution to the problem of having a country without an economic base is to annex the island to the United States.

This current, expressed only in private, remains dormant only because of the fact that the Castro regime’s propaganda still manages to be somewhat effective in promoting nationalism. However, it is to be expected that a nationalism without an economic base, or one in which the remittances of those who emigrated to the United States rapidly occupy this role, will end up eventually losing any prestige among ordinary Cubans.

The main legacy of Fidel Castro is precisely this: Never before have Cubans had less confidence in ourselves and, consequently, never has the idea of annexation had so many followers.

*Translator’s note: “Candil de la calle, oscuridad de la casa” (a light in the street, darkness at home) is a common Spanish expression meaning that a person is effective (“lit up”) away from home and with others, but useless (“dark”) at home.