Cuba: The end of the social spell of the "Revolution" July 23, 2021
Channel: Anarquistas
Date: 2021-07-31

Cuba: The end of the social spell of the "Revolution"

  July 23, 2021

  The repressive social spell that kept and pacified the museum of much of the international left has disappeared.  Under the "Cuban Revolution", and against its benevolent image, the "Cuban state" emerged publicly, in all its crudeness and repressive grandiloquence.  The same Cuban state that created - to confront Yankee imperialism - an omnipresent political police force that fights the society kept under its control.  The same Cuban state which destroyed - in the name of socialism - all the popular and workers' organizations which, with their histories of struggle, had made socialist conquests declared a daily reality.  This same Cuban state that has converted solidarity into a mark of international identity, on the basis of keeping us in suspicion and fear among neighbors.  The same Cuban state that - amid the deepening Yankee blockade - is building more hotels for foreign tourists than infrastructure to produce food, fruit and milk.  The same Cuban state that has produced the only vaccines in Latin America against covid-19, but maintains its health workforce in salaried employee status of the political police.  This Cuban state in those days of July 2021 has shown what it really is: a common and banal oligarchy, jealous of maintaining its absolute power at all costs;  a vulgar kleptocracy with humanist and enlightened pretensions;  a pyramid of power as solid and disproportionate as the pyramids of the Egyptian theocracies, but surrounded by the sand of paradisiacal beaches.

  Support today geopolitical arguments on Cuba's place in the imperial world strategy, invoke that anti-government demonstrations in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right in Miami, argue that the protesters are simple criminals in search of looting, that the  true revolutionary people are with his government - are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality, but do not exhaust it at some point.  The Cuban people have as much the right and the duty to protest as the Colombian and Chilean people.  What is the difference?  - That they are oligarchies of different origins?  With more or less brutal practices?  With more or less differentiable ideological makeup?  With more or less servile postures with the American government?  With more or less sublime ideals to justify their privileges?  All these 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 - in front of a people without weapons -  armed to the teeth, a little more or a little less, to crush you and your brothers, crush your body and your mind, if you had the idea to question the word of normality that they manage.

  Everything the Cuban state has done to produce national covid-19 vaccines, all the labor subsidies, all the pay improvements it has offered to many sectors in the midst of the pandemic,  suddenly evaporate, not only because of the inflationary spiral and endemic food shortage in Cuba, but also because it has become visible that it is all part of the macabre web of "repressive tolerance", which anyone  decent in Cuba can now find out, without having to read a brilliant book on counterculture.  To those who now come to water down this repressive tolerance in this country and lay upon it the mirage of militarized harmony, we can calmly define them as the new face of what should have no place in our future.  Those who, in the name of a future democracy or the proper functioning of the economy, come to discredit the affinities, the fraternities and the energies that have germinated in the demonstrations, or reduce what has happened these days to "  simple vandalism of social scoundrels ”, speak in the name and with the language of decrepit oligarchies who, once again, shamelessly raise their voices in our country.

  The "masses" once again made themselves "the people", with all their lights and shadows, ceasing to obey heavy chains of command, and trusting in affections, affinities and minimal capacities to do and to think.  together, which resurfaced in disobedience.  and solidarity among equals, amid spiraling violence, pandemic and shortages.  This is the new reality that was born in Cuba in these days of July 2021, and from this new reality, as anarchists in Cuba, we want to be part of it.

  Taller Libertario Alfredo López (Atelier Libertaire Alfredo López)

  Extract from the bulletin "Correo de los Caraibes"