How the ideal of the New Man turned into an empty rite that Cubans transformed with humor and resistance
14ymedio, Malaga, José A. Adrián Torres, October 25, 2025 — As a child in Spain, in the camps of the Catholic Scout Movement, I remember that there was also something called volunteer work. It was carried out on Saturdays and consisted of performing tasks, which although they appeared to be spontaneous, were actually assigned in advance. Everything had to be done “of its own accord” but under the eyes of the “pack leaders,” referring to the The Jungle Book that was a reference for the Cub Scouts movement.
That routine, a mixture of discipline and fervor, was clothed in a mystique: to serve others joyfully under the motto vale quien sirve, We Serve. Over the years I understood that beyond youthful idealism, it was also a form of directed moral learning, an obedience wrapped in enthusiasm.
In Cuba, that spirit of cheerful discipline and youthful symbolism had its own version: a kind of tropical Baden-Powell Scouts Association
The so-called “voluntary work” was never exactly a practice of solidarity, but rather an ideological tool designed to shape the new citizen: austere, loyal, cooperative, obedient. As a Cuban friend commented to me, “Its value was not productive but formative, to transform the young person into a collective being, to go from the self to the collective.” The goal was not the amount of cane cut, but the reformed soul with revolutionary spirit.
The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic idiosyncrasies of Cervantes
That moral training project also had its class bias: the intended to ‘proletarize’ the remnants of the bourgeoisie, discipline the professional and domesticate the peasant farmers, who were clinging to their land like the wealthy kulaks did to theirs, when Lenin wanted to make an example of them. But the dreamed-of New Man ended up wanting to be a foreigner–and many did–or he merely got old.
In a way, the system of pioneers with red bandanas — copied from the USSR and countries like Romania and East Germany — recalled the Scout movement, although under another banner and another creed: that of the Revolution.
But the result was different. The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic spirit of Cervantes.
The tropical culture did not fit with parades, uniforms or doctrinal solemnity. Where communism called for fervor and discipline, the Cuban responded with a story — a joke, a chiste, we would say in Spain. Where heroism was required, mockery was born.
Popular humor and passive resistance were disguised in Cuba as “revolutionary participation.” Volunteer work was thus transformed into a layperson’s mass in which the faithful feigned devotion while whispering jokes.
Jorge Mañach had accurately described it decades earlier, defining the joking as “a mockery of any non-imperative form of authority, the art of not taking anything seriously. The Spanish chiste had a close relative: the Andalusian guasa, banter, that sarcastic and corrosive irony that — like the choteo — disarms solemnity with a smile, especially in its most popular and festive form: the carnival, with its satirical chirigotas — limericks — and cuplés, couplets.
Voluntary work, conceived as an academy of socialist conscience, turned out to be a masquerade of appearances
Deep down, voluntary work was the apotheosis of that conflict between obedience and humor. It was a faithless liturgy, an obligatory sacrifice to demonstrate ideological purity. And the Cuban, who cannot stand inflated pomp without a nickname or a joke, turned the ideal of the New Man into a tragicomic character: a hero of the sugarcane harvest with a rogue soul of the Golden Age, apparently devoted but a master in the art of escaping with wit.
That attitude, so Cuban, has deeper roots: it is inherited from the Hispanic spirit, that mocking skepticism that runs through Lazarillo and Quixote, where laughter does not destroy but plays down dogma. Cervantes ridiculed chivalrous dreams with the same ingenuity that Cubans parodied revolutionary fervor: both made humor and sarcasm a form of lucidity.
When the communist ideal traveled from the Russian steppes to the Caribbean beaches, it changed its accent and temperature. The parades were filled with music, slogans were made into songs and collectivism became a pretext for excuses, so classic and “evocative” in more than one sense for Cubans in the so-called schools in the countryside.
Communism, when it arrived in Cuba, was tropicalized: it gained rhythm, but lost gravity. And the voluntary work, envisioned as an academy of socialist conscience, ended up being a masquerade of appearances, in which everyone complied so they wouldn’t be reported. They pretended to obey but laughed inside, in order to not surrender.
Perhaps that laugh was the most Cuban of all forms of resistance. It was not epic or head-on, but effective: an intimate resistance, intelligent, like Sancho Panza, against the pomp of power.
As many said — now with resigned lucidity — voluntary work “builds character,” or even that crueler joke, that you would get “a kick in the butt” as a stimulus. In these minimal phrases a whole philosophy was condensed: obey without believing; laugh without ceasing to survive. Voluntary work, in short, did not create the New Man. What it formed was the national vanguard joker, able to feign enthusiasm while mocking, in silence, the solemnity that oppressed him.
Humor has been, for Cubans, their manual of resistance to the bitter drink that the bartender of the country’s history served them… and which history itself will not absolve.
Acknowledmemts:
I would like to thank Jorge Mayor Ríos for his valuable contributions, comments and suggestions to this text, the result of long conversations that over the years helped me better understand the complex contemporary history of revolutionary Cuba and the peculiarities of the Cuban soul. It was also he who, for the first time, put in my hands the essays of Jorge Mañach, the starting point for many of the ideas developed here.
Translated by Regina Anavy
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
