“The fun is over / the commander arrived and ordered it to stop”. The guaracha of Carlos Puebla He tried for years to summarize the spirit of a time and a territory: Cuba. The revolution emerged as a promise and egalitarian laboratory. The revelry of a few had no more place on the island. Even Coca Cola hailed the victory in the pages of the weekly ‘Bohemia’. What was offered at that dawn to awaken so much enthusiasm? ““No freedom without bread, no bread without freedom.”said the young Fidel Castro in January 1959 after his triumphal entry into Havana.
Sixty-seven years later, bread and freedom are scarce in the market of desiress by a sum of internal and external factors. These days Cubans do not find room for any kind of “fun” nor do they remember Puebla. Blackouts cause frustration, anger, melancholy and also, under the rigors of darkness, when sometimes it is not necessary to look each other in the eyes, the question so often asked about the moment in which the revolution “went to waste”. The colloquial phrase refers to something that failed or became shit.
Talking about the Cuban turning point means contemplating a very broad calendar or recognizing that the transition from euphoria to sadness It didn’t happen overnight. An octogenarian could say that the problem dates back to 1959, when Manuel Urrutia, the former judge and first president of the revolutionwas forced to resign so that Fidel could assume practically all power. Perhaps his interlocutor alludes in the shadows to the defenestration of the commander Huber Matos, in October of that triumphant year. Then the Castro brothers strengthened the alliance with the Popular Socialist Party, what the unpopular communists aligned with Moscow were called.
There were, from then on, several moments of detachment: the closing of the newspaper ‘Revolution,’the first censorship actions and the “Fidel’s words to intellectuals“who delimited their actions under the motto “Inside the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing“, leaving it in the hands of the State to define who was on one side or the other.
Optimism and intolerance
The memories of that 1961, the year that the “socialist character” is declared of the revolution after repelling an armed force encouraged by the US, they know the chiaroscuros of the heroic dayss. Because it is unleashed at the same time a homophobia of proportions. The call October crisis, in 1962, that put the world on the brink of nuclear confrontation, raised the confrontation with Washington to another level.
The economic blockade became the preferred weapon, while the CIA planned without luck the elimination of Castro in every way possible. The leadership invoked the condition of “besieged square” permanently to justify their intolerance to any expression of difference. The price was high. Yes, for Jean Paul SatrteCuba was in 1960 a “revolution without ideologies”marked by self-confidence, five years later its description no longer fit the changes. It had been createdn single match.
The end of the utopian years
In 1968 Fidel launched the “revolutionary offensive.” All economic activity was nationalizedeven manicure businesses or street coffee sales. That delirious social laboratory coincided with Havana’s support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: It was the beginning of the end of Cuban autonomy. Perhaps a septuagenarian would say that things really went to hell with the call “10 million harvest”in 1970. Due to the delirious obstinacy of the Commander in Chief, men and women capable of using a machete were ordered to produce a miracle for the sugar industry, something that was finally not achieved despite the enormous consumption of social energy that resulted in the underhanded expressions of boredom and simulation.
In that 1970, Fidel threatened with his resignation. What would have happened if the resignation had been accepted, rejected out loud by a crowd of which a disillusioned person today who asks that question to himself could have been a part? Almost immediately, in 1971, there was the ‘(Heberto) Padilla case'”. This was the name of the farcical judicial process against the poet, which caused a significant desertion of European intellectuals and even some Latin Americans. Another unavoidable point on the calendar.
Then the calls began “gray” or “black years”, marked by the insertion of the island into the political-economic space hegemonized by Moscow. Castroism was sovietized. The economy began a stage of growth based on a social agreement with controversial edges: the State provided protection in terms of health and education, the food ration book guaranteed a calorie coefficient. In exchange, it was demanded a loyalty without dissent. That “pact” was finally carved out in the 1976 Constitution, which considered socialism “irreversible.” For the Cuban historian Rafael Rojas, it is the end point of the utopian impulse that had been unraveling in stages.
Mariel and beyond
If it were a gathering of disenchanted people who talk in the dark, and that not being seen enabled a situation of trust and catharsis, someone could say that the social outbreak of 1980, when they migrated more than 100,000 people to the United States for the port of Mariel, It is an inescapable landmark of the decline that followed without haste or pause. But one could point to 1986, when Fidel Castro abolished the called peasant market fearful that the incipient abundance of fruits, meats and vegetables in the markets would allow the creation of an agrarian bourgeoisie that would demand political representation sooner rather than later.
Economic support from the USSR and Eastern Europe always disguised the enormous productivity problems. The falls of the helmsmen of the economy became customary from the seventies to the present. They would not only be inept officials but enemies. A fact from those years explains the limitations of the native project: the island used more tractors per hectare than the United States but could not guarantee food supply.
The “Special Period”
At the time of the soviet implosion, Cuba was the scene of a generational dispute. Young intellectuals who felt they were bearers of revolutionary ideals clashed against the wall of dogmaif not repression, and began a process of exile that continues to this day. Starting in the 90s and due to the lack of supplies of Soviet crude oil, the island experienced its “Special Period” with blackouts, chronic shortages and impoverishment.
Fidel decided -because they were almost always their decisions – that the largest of the Antilles had to open completely to tourism to integrate into the world market. Since then, there have been two Cubas: the one where the dollar ruled and the one that was still associated with the activities of the State. The word “companion” that preceded all exchanges became dysfunctional. It didn’t take long for him to leave everyday speech.
Tourism displaced sugar from first place in economic areas. The second, over the years, was occupied remittances, another form of dependencythis time not from the “generosity” of the allies but from migration. The socialist horizon became more unintelligible and a source of new frustrations. More than a third of Cubans received help from family members. Those who did not have that benefit began a slow and inexorable path towards impoverishment or destitution.
New partners and problems
The arrival of Hugo Chávez to the Venezuelan presidency It made it possible to once again receive an oil injection whose flow was maintained until the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, this past January. Throughout those years, that egalitarian, although austere, society became a territory of growing inequalities due to economic reforms. Between 2006 and 2018, the budget allocated to social assistance went from 2.2% to 0.3%. And then everything got worse. The fact that in the latest report of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Cuba has fallen below Haiti reports on current disasters.
“Go to bowline.” Virgilio Piñera He had an intuition that this was going to happen in 1967, the year of Ernesto Guevara’s death in Bolivia. He wrote a novel, ‘Pressures and Diamonds’, which decades later acquired another reading among those who broke ties. The city’s inhabitants save their lives because they freeze. “The escape here is due to cooling—as opposed to the heat caused by light,” said another persecuted writer, Reinaldo Arenas. The imaginary Havana becomes a kind of immense underground lake where thousands and thousands of ice floes silently drift, each one with a human being inside. “Although they are not dead, they are not alive either.”
Piñera is responsible for the first idea of the zombie that would recur over the years. The story includes a gang of traffickers and merchants who seek a diamond called Delphi. In the midst of numerous entanglements, it is discovered that it is a fake stone, a hoax, and it is thrown down the toilet. Seasoned observers soon discovered that Delphi, in reverse, is Fidel. ‘Pressures and diamonds‘ It was immediately withdrawn from bookstores and its author would have a hard time. Those who invoke her half a century later do so to give Piñera credit as an augur. The Commander died a decade ago and left his brother Raúl as heir, while he has placed children and grandchildren. There are now many settling of accounts with the late leader in unofficial conversations and writings.
After the explosion
In July 2021 there was a social explosion. Since that summer the crisis has accelerated. Everything happens between the interstices of an overwhelming daily life: long blackouts, hospitals without basic medications and schools that function as best they can. Scarcity and black market. “The US embargo, intensified in its energy component under the administration of Donald Trump, is presented as the sole, total and sufficient cause of the Cuban disaster. Trump, without a doubt, has exerted brutal pressure. The sanctions have dramatically aggravated a situation already on the brink. That is real and must be said unambiguously, but the blockade is the tip of the iceberg”Lorenzo Vega-Montoto adds on the CubaxCuba portal.
And he adds: “Under the surface lurks something darker, older and more Cuban: the systematic capture of the national economy by an elite that long ago stopped being revolutionary, if it ever was in the strict sense of the word, and it became an extractive class.” The author refers to the Business Administration Group SA (Gaesa), a military-business entity that controls between 60% and 80% of formal economic activity: tourism, imports, telecommunications, retail trade, medicine and foreign exchange. “This is not the socialism that the posters proclaim on the streets of Havana. It is something qualitatively different: a mafia model of capital accumulation in the hands of the State-family.”
While Silvio Rodriguez days ago, he appeared before the cameras with an AKM machine gun of Soviet origin as a symbol of his willingness to immolate himself in the face of a possible North American invasion. Possible compensation for expropriated North American companies in the early sixties. Rodríguez and Fernández de Cossio simultaneously offered two different ways of turning back time and turning back the clock hands. History is however stubborn in its teachings about second chances. They become more unviable if everything has gone to waste, even if the disagreement regarding the precise date persists.
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