In No Man’s Land / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

By Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Life has led me to two basic conclusions. The first: the solution to the world’s most serious problems will not be capitalism, because although it fosters creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit, it’s also an exclusionary system that exacerbates man’s most primitive instincts.

Despite the few dozen countries that have achieved a good economic status under this scheme, more than 150 are in a more or less dramatic state of poverty — a dynamic consistent over several centuries and that persists in relation to the social stratification within countries — and given its speculative nature, it has been proven to be incapable of avoiding the economic crises that characterize it.

This scheme has failed to rid the world of hunger and its neoliberal variant only ended up accumulating political and economic power in a select block of nations that have turned global institutions in a casino that articulates the strategies of domination against the poorest countries. Capitalism seems to me an intermediate stage or step on the way, perhaps a necessary one, but never the end goal of the human species.

The second conclusion: the solution is not the “socialism of the barracks,” a sequel to the Soviet model, whose Stalinist variant produces dire consequences for the individuality of man. After 50 years of implementing this scheme, the economy of my country is destroys, my people are subjected to a constant and unjustified impoverishment, directly opposed to the entrepreneurial spirit of man and his freedom of expression, generating a sickening climate of immorality.

If the Cuban Revolution triumphed specifically to end class privileges, half a century later there persists a caste that lives above the law and that enjoys privileges denied the common people. Although in Cuban well-stratified social classes still persist — an exclusivity that some ideologues attribute to multiparty capitalism — because if someone earns 100 times the income of a doctor and looks over his shoulder, it’s because he feels he belongs to a different social stratum.

So far I would only consider that what point societies governed by democratic socialism, but despite their boasting enviable standards of living and social security, they are not exempt from political corruption, nor do they escape the consequences of capitalist crises like the current one, which left the world bankrupt when the bubble burst.

When I venture into these neophytes meditations — very personal, indeed — I am stepping on a minefield and run the risk of being stranded in no man’s land, but to assert otherwise would be dishonest on my part, or would be speculating on matters that remain, for us, too distant in time.

The name does not define the essence, but whether it’s called communism, or Project Venus of the Reign of God on the Earth, I am referring to that future society that we all want to live in — which would make us all potentially communists or Venusians or Christians — where man freed of selfishness finally thinks of his neighbor as himself; a world without famines or wars, generator of the most advanced technology that would function exclusively for the progress of humankind; a future where states would be supplanted by a superstructure that would harmonize the pulses of a single global society in the midst of universal peace.

But before this can happen man would have to be reborn. This hypothetical world — which would be the final solution — is still not visible, it’s far beyond the horizon and in any case it remains to be seen whether it would be possible within the next 500, 1000, or 2000 years, and if so it would be only if we escape the annihilation that threaten us because of human greed and stupidity.

Never has man known his world better, never has he launched a deeper or more profound look at the universe or at the details of a cell, and yet never has there been more spiritual poverty or known less about himself; never has he been so helpless against his own demons.

Thus, I conclude that the next leap must be qualitative: it would be a profound ethical transformation that would be called upon to save humanity. So far these are just chimeras for a being that carries with him too many miseries. But sometime will happen that brings us the humility and reminds us that we are only ephemeral stardust left by chance by God navigating the universe. Even if after everything the end of the world doesn’t come, perhaps he wants to say that the forgotten, condemned to 100 centuries of solitude, this time will have a second opportunity on the earth.

2 December 2013