Cuba, the smoke and the wheat

By Luis Sexto

As usual, the foreign commentators who analyze the Cuban situation from the right see only the smoke or the dry grass, seldom the wheat. They are, after all, observers intent on “seeing” or foreseeing what they’d like to see happen, never what does happen.

Maybe that happens to all of us who put our words and reasoning in the service of an idea or a salary. I don’t usually make money with my writings about Cuba, at least I don’t make MONEY, in capital letters that mean — in this typographical metaphor — an abundance of resources and luxuries. Here in Cuba, I suffer the same frustrations as almost everyone else does: I postpone old dreams, revive worn-out hopes, adopt anemic tastes.

So, I maintain the same position many have known me to hold for a long time. I speak about Cuba, defending her the way she is. Or the way I wish her to be. Because I wish her to be the way I see her: adapting, advancing, projecting and changing, even though the transformations may occasionally appear to be as unwieldy and empty as smoke, even though the smoke conceals the mass of wheat, the certain promise that the Cuban government does not play with the country or the people. Rather, it moves pieces on the board, behind which the opponents sit in Miami and Washington.

It is very odd. Those who have tried to keep the revolutionary government under permanent check are the same ones who now reproach it for its bankruptcy, failure, aging. Is this geopolitical trick something new? Does anyone forget the scene where the powerful man squeezes the weakest man’s neck and reproaches him for choking? Out of this collection of pious predictions or truculent little lies can only come one conclusion: 50 years after 1959, the other side can show only failure.

Today, both in Cuba and abroad, we commentators can feast ourselves: Raúl Castro spoke. And he emitted signals that can be seen without the need for an expert in Apache or Comanche signals to interpret puffs of smoke.

Thus we learned that the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party has been postponed. Not indefinitely, as described unanimously by the “Cubanophages,” university branches of the white-haired and wrinkled Calle Ocho. It has been postponed until the Party and the government define the strategy of a very near future that will be different from the present because of natural evolution — the historic leaders of the Revolution and socialism will no longer be around. Does that mean that everything will be over once they’re gone?

Therefore, it seems eminently fair that the most lucid ideas aim to perpetuate the Revolution outside the orbit of capitalism.

The revolution, with its intentions and principles, is a guarantee to maintain independence, that cautious and sovereign distance from any dominant foreign power that allows Cuba to maintain its basic achievements in socialist humanism, or Martí humanism, with their predominant moral, i.e., the “cordial being,” rather than the “voracious being” established in societies where the market rules.

The postponement, then, should generate confidence and certainty, rather than anxiety. That’s because the Congress will be organized not to comply with a rule or to anesthetize the doubts of many restless citizens who expect the ruling government to dismantle the “ideological obstacles,” the dogmas that may have been pertinent or plausible in earlier days but that now hamper and limit us.

It seems clear to me that if the future is a pressing time, with unforeseen demands and men and women who are still unknown in decision-making posts, the postponement needed to organize the future is a sign of maturity, a maturity that seeks consensus through reflection and a debate that can alert us to inconsistencies in the face of the precarious balance derived from the political war “defined and sustained indefinitely” from the United States.

It is not the first time that I write that Cuba does not benefit from surviving perennially as an ideal or system. Therefore, the first thing to change is the technique of resistance to being subjected and subjugated. We can resist for a while, not forever, under centralizing formulas that, in the long run, bog down our progress.

Today, the resistance and consequent survival of the revolutionary and independentist ideal require a change in the mindset of remaining in midair until luck comes to our aid. Luck will have to be sought with boldness, with a creative disposition to invent on the island what others deny us outside.

The political future of a socialist Cuba will not be a future of charismatic men and women. The historic conditions that forged unique, original figures filled with historic credit no longer exist. It will be a future of institutions, primarily the Communist Party, which will have to exercise its power with an open and democratic spirit that includes — within freedom — the proviso that the humanist and revolutionary heritage of our history will never disappear.

It behooves us to act shrewdly, like the founding fathers in the United States who made sure that the government of that country would always be in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Do we blame them today for such a far-seeing Constitution, for the closed electoral process that sometimes denies the presidency to the candidate who gets the most popular votes? Then why should we blame socialist Cuba if she tries to perpetuate social justice and political independence as requisites without which she would not be a true nation but a neocolony.

We don’t know when the Party Congress will be called. But a prior step has been suggested: a conference. Have we measured the reach of that solution for continuity? For starters, there will be a Party Conference; the Party statutes allow for it. And that gathering — smaller in number and reach — will perform the necessary substitution of components in the Central Committee, many of whose members are old, and the Committee’s auxiliary apparatus.

And the turnover, I say this with respect, will also propitiate the flow of rejuvenating breezes within the logical rejuvenation of people. It promises, at least to me, an updated push of ideas.

I say again: Cuba is changing. And it changes so it may remain socialist, as desired by an infinity of Cubans, both inside and outside the homeland. They don’t want — and I don’t want — Malecón Boulevard to ever be as pictured in a painting I was shown 10 years ago in Miami, when tragic family circumstances took me to Florida. The painting, whose artist is now forgotten, showed Havana’s seaside boulevard lined with neon signs advertising all the big American businesses and conglomerates.

The problem, as we see and smell it, goes beyond the smoke that some commentators blow so the wheat that we nurture may be obscured by a rhetoric and an art that cannot conceal dependency. The problem goes down to the root and blood of a liberating vocation, of a history that is still hot, from Father Varela and José Martí.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist who won the 2009 National Journalism Award, is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.