07/24/2021 19:03
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 07/24/2021 19:04
For 60 years, I have been following with a critical spirit the totalitarian drift of the Cuban regime that, at first, was involved in a utopia: the home of the new man and of an anti-imperialist passion that spread to the south of the continent.
Militants and intellectuals were captivated by that revolutionary epic that had heroes and martyrs: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
From this combination was born a persistent myth rooted in the caudillo tradition of Latin America.
In effect, the omnipotent figure of Fidel Castro invaded the entire scene.
With him, as is often the case with charismatic legitimacy, there was no middle ground.
Fervently in favor, hostilely against, Fidel established a totalitarian order consisting of a complete reduction to the unity of the State of Cuban society.
There would be much more to comment on after such a prolonged experience, but I will content myself with pointing out some paradoxes, then a method of totalitarian normalization and, finally, the implicit challenge in any process of succession of the charism in totalitarian scenarios.
The paradox is in sight: Fidel Castro's exhilarating anti-imperialist revolution survived thanks to two protectorates.
This dependence, hidden behind an overwhelming rhetoric, had as references to the Soviet Union and later to the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez.
the USSR starred in the protectorate in the early part of the revolution until it imploded in the 1990s.
The myth of the revolutionary then merged with the calculation of a Fidel Castro who played on the board of world geopolitics.
Through the protectorate, Fidel assembled the Soviet model as an example to be imitated in Latin America and to carry out three plans: outside its borders, the development of the revolutionary guerrillas;
inward, education and health.
The guerrillas failed in the hands of the military power in Latin America;
free and equal education coincided with cultural repression;
health, influenced with propaganda effectiveness in the countries that requested it.
The collapse of the USSR left Cuba in the open, with a sharp fall in the economy, protests to the regime, such as the "Maleconazo" of 1994, and the collective feeling of how little could be done in the absence of that protector (who was on the brink of a war with the US during the Kennedy presidency over the missile crisis).
From the dependent revolution there was a transition to autonomy without resources.
These deprivations had, however, the unexpected rescue of a tropical hegemony as generous as it was ambitious in its desire for continental expansion.
Hugo Chávez dispensed abundant petrodollars and embodied a charisma of short duration, comparing it to that of Fidel, although enough to rescue an island besieged by shortages and a US embargo, incessant to this day.
The 90s were therefore years of reorientation: tourism, remittances, export of services and oil at a good price.
The death of Chávez broke that idyll that could not be replaced by the collapse of the Maduro government.
Again in the open.
However, the method of normalization of the totalitarian regime that Fidel had implemented remained standing.
This method differs from the tragedies of the classic totalitarianisms of the communist revolution.
Terrifying massacres: the shadows of Stalin and Mao are projected on these innumerable victims, direct products of the confinement camps and of the famines caused by the blindness of these “secular religions” in Russia and China.
That version of totalitarianism thus stabilized on extermination.
However, the airs on the island were less cruel.
Although there were executions, jail, torture and clandestine deaths, the massive method that Castro used to normalize the regime was the expulsion of the population.
Today between 5 and 6 million Cubans live in exile out of a population of 11 million.
It is an intergenerational method that responds to successive waves of expulsion with its cohort of rafters desperately thrown into the sea.
So strategic were these measures that today they are applied as a carbon copy in Maduro's Venezuela.
Hence a second paradox arises because, while the United States was declared enemies of the regime, it also contributed, for humanitarian and undoubtedly plausible reasons, to normalize the Castro regime, receiving, mostly in Florida, two and a half million Cubans ( an integrated population that determines its foreign policy).
The mass expulsions eased the pressure cooker of discontent, but did not take into account, like the rest of the world, the impact of the planetary virus.
With the closing of borders caused by the pandemic, without remittances, energy and tourism, nor sufficient domestic production of food and medical supplies, where to direct a collective anger that was encouraged to take to the streets?
Cuba is in a trap in the middle of a succession process of Fidel's charism that, even with the interference of his brother Raúl, has not yet yielded positive results.
The succession in Cuba is not for now renovating but sclerotic and repressive.
It will then be necessary to see what paths are opened for the future.
Hypothetically they would be the following.
First, the formation of a new protectorate;
It does not seem that China has the imperial style of the USSR and neither, due to lack of resources, Putin's Russia.
Second, the spread of social networks and the demand for freedoms, especially from young people;
The totalitarian capacity of the regime and the tenacity of popular resistance will be measured here.
Third, a transition that opens up the economy and gradually grants freedoms;
What was said last Sunday in this newspaper by the writer Leonardo Padura and the historian Manuel Costa Morúa (both live in Cuba) conveys this desire.
Will there be room for the voice of freedom, or will the law of total power continue to rule?
It is an urgent appeal to the democracies among which, with their reprehensible silence, ours is not counted.
Natalio R. Botana is a political scientist and historian. Emeritus Professor of the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT)