The challenge of intellectualism

By Esteban Morales Domínguez

From his blog

HAVANA – In April 2010, I wrote that corruption was the most difficult and dangerous challenge we had to face. A problem of national security.

Today, I want to alert you to the importance of intellectualism under the circumstances our country is going through.

I explained in a recent article that science is a form of power. Therefore, we cannot ignore its dynamics, much less treat it with antidemocratic mechanisms.

Cuba is the only country in this hemisphere that has no illiterate citizens, whose average level of schooling is the highest in the region, including the United States and Canada. As if that weren’t enough, more than 10 percent of its population has a university degree. And Cuba has a “human capital” whose penetration in the field of scientific activity is enviable everywhere else.

In other words, the country has an extraordinary potential, if it is capable of utilizing it to promote the tasks it must perform to change the economic model and – what’s even more complex – to match that change with the social dynamics and the shift in mindset that come with it.

Within those dynamics, the Social and Humanistic Sciences are called upon to perform a fundamental role, along with cultural work, because they are closest to politics.

However, some phenomena are greatly harming the role of scientific and cultural work within the social dynamics of this country. Among them are:

• Our press, with an attitude of sectarian and exclusive mistrust, generally excludes intellectualism from its pages, directing its products toward the alternative media, such as the Intranet and the Internet, to which less than 10 percent of our population have access. I’m speaking in terms of the daily-news dynamics, which is the most complex, because it determines the political circumstances in which the country must behave daily.

• The relationship between politics and science is still very weak. We can clearly see a great intolerance to everything that is written in the spirit of criticism, or anything that deviates from the established standards.

• Access to information about sensitive topics is extremely difficult, placing our revolutionary intellectualism at a disadvantage within the debate that takes place in the foreign media, the press, the Internet and the intelligentsia outside Cuba.

• Criticism is promoted (Raúl Castro has encouraged it explicitly) but at the same time it is curbed. Seemingly, there are two policies, one promoted by our president and the other by a bureaucracy in power, even contrary to the general guidelines.

• Some initiatives have led to the creation of centers for debate of our reality, such as Espacio Laical [Lay Space], the magazine Temas [Topics], Cofradía de la Negritud [Brotherhood of Negritude], Observatorio Crítico [Critical Observatory], the magazine Criterio [Opinion], UNEAC [Union of Cuban Writers and Artists], but we don’t see the nation’s ideological leaders promoting a relationship with those centers or taking advantage of their output.

Rather, it seems that these centers exist despite the fact that they don’t please the political leadership. Therefore, their debates seem to be carried out in an ambiguous environment of tolerance and clandestinity.

• Television does not sufficiently utilize the potential available within intellectualism to debate and clarify the issues of greatest interest among the population, especially if those issues are domestic. Such issues circulate via word-of-mouth within the island, but in practice we give them away to the foreign press and allow foreign journalists to speculate with them and dominate the information that reaches our people. Issues like: What happened with the cable? What about the dynamics of corruption? And others.

Therefore, amid the extraordinary ideological struggle being waged today, we are put at a disadvantage in terms of our population coming to our side.

In other words, the relationship between the Social and Humanistic Sciences, culture and politics still doesn’t work to make that mechanism a formidable work tool (which in fact it could) to perform the tasks the country must develop at its most difficult crossroads of survival. Although our principal task is to build a New Economic Model, our challenges remain political and ideological.

Of course, for the mechanism of a relationship between politics and science to work adequately, certain conditions are necessary which we still have not achieved to the degree required. They are, among others:

• It is necessary that open criticism – as proclaimed by Raúl Castro – cease to be little more than a political guideline and a slogan, to become a political way of life.

• It is necessary for every political and mass organization, beginning with the Party, to make that guideline from Raúl Castro a permanent work tool. Some say that you can voice criticism but not of the Party. How are we to interpret this, when the Party is the highest leader of society and the State?

• The lack of separation between Party, State and government sends criticism into a no-exit alley, engaging politics in an exercise that renders any corrections impossible.

• It is necessary for the people to gain the confidence that opportune and transparent criticism can be effective.

• We must avoid seeking shelter in mere individuality and promote everything that allows the full exercise of social responsibility in the face of wrongdoing. That means informative transparency, democracy within organizations, an absence of impunity, and respect for individual opinions, even if they are mistaken.

• The shift in mindset must strongly include cultural work and intellectualism. Intellectuals must feel that they have society’s trust, the highest appreciation of their creative spirit and their freedom of creation. Otherwise, a struggle will ensue that will separate the great majority of intellectuals from the road of socialism. Those who do not turn away will end up losing their ability to guide the others.

In all the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, political work with culture and intellectualism was an unsurmountable challenge. The ballast created by Stalinism and the inability of the communist parties to eliminate it prevented socialism from surviving.

Economic inefficiency, lack of productivity and corruption were not the only culprits. The incapacity of the communist parties to lead their respective intelligentsia also produced the spiritual collapse of those societies.

Esteban Morales is an outstanding Cuban intellectual and university professor. For 18 years, he presided over the University of Havana’s Center for United States Studies. He is a member of numerous Cuban academies.