Cuba, the reasons for patience

By Luis Sexto

The common perception and my daily contact with Cubans (like one of many) allow me to draw this conclusion: many people continue to give a chance to the humanist nucleus that remains from the 1959 Revolution.

True, some don’t know how to explain it. Others, the more politicized ones, justify it by comparing the present with the past and the foreseeable future. And the conclusion is similar to the one of an almost-octogenarian poet who not long ago told me what an incalculable disaster the fall of the Revolution would be for Cuba.

When I asked him why, he expounded his arguments. His reasons are more-or-less similar to those of this commentator.

Us Cubans inside the archipelago who still trust in the Revolution and the possibilities of socialism don’t lack arguments, as some Internauts from the so-called Cuban exile say with a tone that ranges from illusion to self-deception. Arrogance does not allow “the hardliners” in Miami or Madrid to look through the cracks and see what truly is the Cuban reality.

From the impunity of exile — an exile that, unlike emigration, is belligerence, the desire to return and regain the power lost — it may be easy and irresponsible to believe that the Cubans on the southern shore of the Straits of Florida resort to two-facedness to maintain a formal militancy or revolutionary faith. When it comes to definitions, all is appearance, opportunism. Or inability to identify what people defend.

But there are questions that in Cuba are dealt with in two different ways: with an answer that is not stated precisely but rather felt, and with an answer that is known and also felt. Let me say to you (without making the same mistake) that we do not arbitrarily deny the circumstances that hamper and embitter coexistence in Cuba.

True, a double moral slithers through Cuba. Opportunism hisses its appetite as it curls into a question mark of political ignorance. In Cuba today, it is not a simple act to enumerate the reasons why we defend the Revolution and socialism.

Today, after almost 20 years of the so-called Special Period, with its aftermath of insufficiencies, deficiencies, shortages, equivocation, mistakes, the absence of a clear program, it cannot be said that the revolutionary task is the first unbeatable argument to defend the cause of 1959. The material accomplishments have deteriorated. For example, although the Revolution built 60 percent of the highways and almost all of the electrical power system, the hospitals and the schools, most people have lowered their standards mainly because of the lack of resources.

Here, we’re short of everything, that’s all. So, needless to repeat, the past 20 years have been a period of resistance, of a refusal to die under the economic and political siege of a neighbor as powerful as the United States, and not to become a victim of the historic readjustments that resulted from the failure of European socialism — the socialism known as “real” — and its eventual death, due to the paradox of its fictional foundations.

Many Cubans today suffer a disconnect between what should have been and what is. They suffer and even doubt. Moreover, burdened by insufficiencies and deficiencies, they feel (rather than see) that the Revolution has been a creative enterprise and that, despite its turbulence and failings, its human and fair nucleus still harbors an opportunity for material and ethical improvement. They are like the coal vendor in the old Catholic anecdote, who defends with his rake the basic elements of a faith that is his, but that he cannot understand or enrich.

Other people suffer but don’t doubt. They know the Revolution was born defending itself and do not mistrust a truth whose detractors dissolve like the surf — the United States and its local and foreign allies don’t like the Revolution because it burst into the nation’s history like the reincarnation of José Martí’s truncated project for a cordial, just and decorous republic.

That is why the eagles of greed realized early that the turnover of leadership in January 1959 was also a change in essence and classes. The hatred shown by the counter-revolution has been lucid. Its reading of the justice contained in the Revolution’s roots was also lucid. So it began to attack it not lucidly but cruelly and selfishly, although it appropriated some key words, like “liberty” and “democracy,” and offered them to us as a panacea against the broken or postponed dreams.

Those who persist in their Quixotic adventure to save or protect the most patriotic and generous aspects of the Revolution of  ’59 do not despair. They also look lucidly at the clock of circumstances, even though its hands turn counterclockwise. Why do we defend the socialist Revolution or its existing nucleus? Because, as the old poet told me, it is the only guarantee to preserve — without any possible option — our political independence in the face of a frustrated metropolis that, in terms of Cuba, lives in Washington and has a subsidiary in Miami.

Try to give a coherent answer to this question: Can the Cubans who collect the price of their actions against Havana from the U.S. budget protect our independence, the foremost project of Martí or Father Varela? As we see it, they act in favor of dependence by contracting a mercenary debt, like the guerrillas outfitted by Spain during the wars of independence of 1869 and 1895.

We also defend the Revolution because, despite its associated poverty and its systematic or circumstantial mistakes, it is the only way to impose and perfect social justice.

Is social justice of any interest to those paladins of noise (and this includes those who until recently passed themselves off in Cuba as “revolutionaries”) who loudly echo the accusations, rumors, intrigues and threats against the survival of the Revolution or accept the tales told in truculent textbooks? They’re as interested in social justice as the lion is interested in the right to live of a fragile gazelle. That may be the true position of the “historic exile” and the “belated exiles.”

Here in the archipelago, through intuition or intellectual awareness, many of us think that the future cannot be reserved in Cuba as a lodge for U.S. companies, or a speakeasy for the descendants of Luciano or Lansky, or as a weekend resort for those “in exile” who hope to eat from the lion’s plate, even if it’s the leftovers usually given to hyenas.

As you see, there are reasons to wait for a national, revolutionary policy that will cure the rigid slogans and arthritic mentality of our concepts by giving them flexibility and realism. Depending on the experience, change is the equivalent of survival; resistance goes through readaptation. Resisting also presupposes depositing our hopes in the bank of patience. But now I can’t tell for how long.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, winner of the 2009 Jose Marti Journalism Award, contributes regularly to Progreso Weekly/Semanal.