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Editor's Note: Jorge Gómez Barata is a columnist, journalist and former official of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and former vice president of the news agency Prensa Latina. The opinions expressed in this column are exclusive to the author.
(CNN Spanish) - Culture, including economic and political culture, is a foreign territory. Individuals estimate that they are their creators, when it is the other way around. She, with her unchanging truths, universal breadth, undeniable interrelationships and concatenations, conditions and protects them. To ignore the dictates of culture or pretend to twist its course is bad practice. Nor should we resign. It is the dialectic of the historically viable.
Except for the Amish, no individual, community or country, can live governed by exclusive and local codes, elaborated according to their own criteria and alien to standards that arise spontaneously as a result of civilizing processes. No one invented the state, money or power, and no one devised freedom.
This is because humans are social and gregarious beings, and countries integrate communities also called civilizations. Children are more like times than parents, and the inhabitants of a time share cultural heritage, practice faith, join philosophical notions, as well as ethical, moral concepts and legal precepts. Nor is it possible to omit that tradition and legacies exist for the worse. The satrapies of the Middle East that reproduce their archaic practices are tests.
The countries of the world side included in the geographical environments of Europe and the Americas, with a Judeo-Christian cultural matrix, in addition to faith and Greco-Roman cultural references, have in common political and legal creeds predominantly liberal, which assume the geopolitical structure of the State -Nation, as a political doctrine democracy and ensure the safeguarding of coexistence with the law.
Such premises do not lead to cultural or ideological uniformity, although they imply some coherence in these fields, and give rise to collective identities, shared goals, and standards that cannot be ignored.
In that journey spontaneously appear leaderships and models reinforced by the attractiveness exerted by industry, artistic culture, architecture, economy and political work. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the future of the United States, the only country in the New World that managed to develop, consolidate political stability and become the most unique geopolitical phenomenon of the modern era, are some evidences.
Dominant ideas and customary practice set limits that cannot be ignored. The idea that there are democracies, moral norms, precepts of human rights, local and exclusive, as well as that God created predestined peoples, are alien to the truth.
In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution triumphed in Russia, whose program not only rejected European liberalism, but also cherished the idea of projecting its influence on the world, creating societies sustained by economic, political, and cultural structures built at will. Finally, it was not sustained.
The idea of enthroneing new institutions and practices aspired to a climax in conceiving the complete nationalization of the economy, the collectivization of the land, the ideological exclusivity, the neutralization of the faith through atheism, and the creation of a political system based on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which challenged, among other things, the rule of law, secularism, the separation of public powers, due process, the relevance of human rights, dragging unsustainable deficits.
The export of these behaviors to the countries of real socialism, especially to Europeans, in some of which, such as Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, failed to establish themselves, weakened the general project that, after 70 years, deposed its belligerence.
The intention to carry out advanced political and social programs at the level of complete societies sustained by improvised structures, unfounded assumptions, and inconsistent arguments has never been a good idea. The experience has been recorded and the facts are in sight. See you there.
* I have taken this expression from the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari.
