14ymedio, Ariel Hidalgo, Miami, 6 March 2022 — The person who’s writing to you, a former professor of Marxist Philosophy in the high schools in Havana, and author of a book that was chosen as a supplementary bibliography for all writing careers on the history of the labor movement in Cuba and the first Cuban socialists, wishes to alert you of the mistake which, due to ignorance or fanaticism, could tarnish your names before the possible damning judgment of future generations, for placing yourselves on the wrong side of history.
I do not question your good intentions, your loyalty to the cause of social justice and your commitments to all those human beings in this world who suffer from misery, exploitation and oppression, but the Cuban regime is not what you have believed it to be, and it is necessary that I warn you, with words pronounced by José Martí, who was the numen of Cuban independence, about “the violence and hidden rage of the ambitious who, in order to rise up in the world, begin by pretending so they’ll have shoulders on which to rise up, frantic defenders of the homeless,” which did not mean the renunciation of that ideal, since he himself declared that such attitudes “do not authorize souls of good birth to desert their defense.”
I do not question your good intentions, your loyalty to the cause of social justice and your commitments to all those human beings in this world who suffer from misery, exploitation and oppression
On September 23rd, 2019, the New Politics Journal, considered an “independent socialist forum,” published one of my articles addressed to the Democratic Socialists of America, who at the Atlanta Convention had expressed their support for the Cuban Government. In it, I told them that “the social economic system established in Cuba without a plebiscitary consultation was copied from the Russian Stalinist model, an arbitrary and opportunist interpretation of the Marxist theory of socialist revolution, which returned to the most reactionary aspects of Hegelian thought embodied in The Philosophy of Law about a State that should absorb all civil society and all individual wills.”
Teaching classes to workers in the so-called workers’ faculties in the 1970s, I received numerous testimonies from my students of repeated conflicts of interest between the administrations designated by the State and the rank-and-file workers, which made me question the repeated assertion that these were the owners of the means of production, and motivated me to carry out the investigation of the Cuban economic-social system that concluded, as a professor in a pre-university institute, with a manuscript where I expressed my disagreement with the politics and the economic model established in Cuba, which years later would be published abroad under the title of Cuba, the Marxist State and the New Class.
I was just proposing a different model of socialism. However, the consequences were my expulsion from the country’s educational system in 1981 and, later, under the accusation of “left-wing revisionist,” I was sentenced to eight years in prison in a sentence that added: “and as for his works, destroy them by fire.” As if this were not enough, I was held incommunicado in a narrow walled cell in the death rows of the Combinado del Este prison for more than a year. Such was the fear of the words of a man almost naked but not willing to keep the truth silent.
I was just proposing a different model of socialism. However, the consequences were my expulsion from the country’s educational system in 1981
The prison brutalities that I would witness, as well as my subsequent encounter with many other innocent convicts imprisoned solely for expressing their ideas, led me, along with five other prominent political prisoners, to join what would become the first group to defend human rights, which can be considered as the main nucleus of the current dissident movement spread throughout the country today.
I have not yet thanked in the way they deserve many left-wing intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky and many others, both in the United States and Latin America, for having signed letters requesting my freedom, as well as the campaigns of international institutions, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, thanks to whom I was released in 1988 after seven years in prison.
But the left must reevaluate its vision and its position with the Cuban regime, and its peers in Venezuela and Nicaragua, just as they previously condemned Pinochetism in Chile and Francoism in Spain. Tyrannies do not stop being what they are because they define themselves as left or right. On the contrary, they contribute, as Stalin did in the Soviet Union, to spread a denigrating image of just causes, so they must free themselves of that defamatory ballast.
I have condemned in many articles the embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba, above all because it has served as an alibi for the Cuban historical leadership to present itself as a victim, obtain international support, and justify all the economic nonsense of its misrule, because in reality, Cuba It is one of the main trading partners of the United States, and another type of blockade has been more damaging: the one that this leadership has imposed on its own people for more than sixty years.
But the left must reevaluate its vision and its position with the Cuban regime, and its peers in Venezuela and Nicaragua
It is time to tear down the lies raised for many years about what is still called the “Cuban Revolution,” because that revolution ended in 1968 to give rise to what I have described as “reverse socialism,” because in that year, with the so-called “Revolutionary Offensive,” not only were the workers not empowered but, on the contrary, what little they had was taken from them: grocery stores, cafeterias, barbershops, laundries, grocery and food stalls, and even street vendors, such as ice cream carts and shoeshine boys, among others.
It is said that there are no longer monopolies in Cuba. In reality, a monstrous absolute monopoly has arisen, the State itself, which has devoured everything, from which we can affirm what Martí himself said about monopolies: “an implacable giant sitting at the door of all the poor.” The lands were not distributed among dispossessed peasants, nor were the large estates eliminated, but rather they were nationalized, so that the State became the “supreme landowner” — which Marx spoke of in Volume III of Das Kapital — which continued to exploit the farm laborers.
A similar fate also befell the workers of the cities in the different confiscated companies: businesses, industries, banks and the media, among others, at the head of which officials were appointed, not because of their ability, but because of political loyalty, bureaucrats who because of their inability, and above all their proclivity to corruption, have dragged the country into misery and plagued the population with endless calamities.
Many of the struggle comrades of that leadership opposed to this model were imprisoned or put to death. Tens of thousands of people went to jail and around two million preferred to face the rigors of exile.
The thousands of Cubans who took to the streets in dozens of Cuban cities on July 11 were not protesting the problems of the coronavirus, as some media said, but the most repeated word at that event was “freedom.”
The comparison is eloquent. If we call the Batista regime a dictatorship, what should we call this one?
The architects of the assault on the Moncada Barracks during the Batista dictatorship that caused the death of numerous people only received sentences of up to 13 and 15 years and were granted amnesty two years later. In contrast, the protesters of July 11 did not kill anyone or use any violence, but the regime began with a brutal repression, resulting in at least one death, many injuries and more than 1,300 detainees, of which more than 700 still remain in prison, including 32 minors, with prosecutor requests of up to 20 and 30 years in prison.
The comparison is eloquent. If we call the Batista regime a dictatorship, what should we call this one?
I will not tire you with more details that could fill many pages. I only ask you to reason what I have exposed to you without passion and draw your own conclusions, and above all, to take into account from which side of history do you want to be remembered.
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