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Cuba: the end of the "Revolution's" social enchantment

CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG ! ! ! !

via alasbarricadas, English translation by Anarchist News.

by Libertarian Workshop Alfredo López

The repressive social enchantment that kept the greater part of the outmoded international left pacified has vanished. Beneath the “Cuban Revolution”, and against the grain of its benign image, the “Cuban State” has emerged publicly, in all its crudeness and repressive grandiloquence. The same Cuban state that created – in order to confront Yankee imperialism - an omnipresent political police that fights the society kept under its control. The same Cuban state that destroyed - in the name of socialism - all popular and workers organizations that, with their histories of struggle, made the declared socialist conquests a daily reality. That same Cuban state that has turned solidarity into an internationally renown branding, at the cost of keeping us sunk in mistrust and fear among neighbors. The same Cuban state that - in the midst of the intensified Yankee blockade - builds more hotels for foreign tourists than infrastructures to produce food, fruits and milk. The same Cuban state that has produced the only vaccines in Latin America against covid-19, but maintains its health personnel in a condition of salaried employees of the political police.

In these days of July 2021, that Cuban state has shown what it is: a run-of-the-mill oligarchy, zealous in maintaining its absolute power at all costs; a vulgar kleptocracy with humanistic and enlightened pretenses; a pyramid of power as solid and disproportionate as the pyramids of the Egyptian theocracies, only surrounded by the sands of paradisiacal beaches instead.

To make geopolitical arguments about the place of Cuba in the global imperial strategy, to argue that the anti-government protests in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right in Miami, to argue that the protestors are simply delinquents looking to loot, that the true revolutionary people are standing by their government - those are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality to a certain extent, but not beyond a certain point. The people of Cuba have as much right and as much duty to protest as the people of Colombia and Chile. What is the difference? – That they are oligarchies with different origins? With more or less brutal practices? With more or less distinguishable ideological makeup? With more or less servile positions with the US government? With more or less sublime ideals to justify their privileges? All those immense differences between the Colombian, Chilean and Cuban oligarchies are reduced to zero when on a beautiful Sunday morning you discover that, in addition to the mafia oligarchies in Colombia and Chile, the Cuban oligarchy is also – facing an unarmed people – armed to the teeth, a little more or a little less, to crush you and your siblings, your body and your mind, if you even think of verbally questioning the normality that they manage.

Everything that the Cuban State has done to produce national vaccines against covid-19, all the labor subsidies, all the salary improvements that it offered to many sectors in the midst of the pandemic, suddenly evaporate, not only due to the inflationary spiral and the endemic food shortage in Cuba, but also because it became visible that all this was part of the macabre framework of "repressive tolerance", something that any decent person in Cuba can now discover, without having to read any brilliant book on counterculture. To those who come now to sugarcoat that repressive tolerance in this country and raise over it the mirage of militarized concord, we can calmly define them as the new face of that which should have no place in our future. Those who in the name of a future democracy or of the good functioning of the economy, come to discredit the affinities, the solidarity and the energies that sprung up in the protests, or reduce these events to “simple vandalism by libertines”, speak in name of, and with the language of the decrepit oligarchies that shamelessly raise their voice in our country once again.

The "masses" have once again become "the people", with all their lights and shadows, by ceasing to obey the heavy chains of command, and going back to trusting affects, affinities and the minimal capacities to do and think together, which have resurfaced in the disobedience and the solidarity among equals, amid the spiral of violence, the pandemic and the shortages. That is the new reality that was born in Cuba in these days of July 2021, and as anarchists in Cuba, we want to feel part of that new reality.

Related Links / Source: 

https://tierranuevacuba.medium.com/cuba-el-fin-del-encantamiento-social-...