Notes on the Nation’s Criticism (I)

The modern Cuban intellectuals have always denied that Cuba is a political world power as a result of the revolutionary process that initiated on the island almost fifty years ago. Let's rephrase that (to avoid hurting the polished sensibility of the reader): Cuba became one of the political centers in the second half of the twentieth century, to be fair. Two of the most respected journalists in Miami, Andres Reynaldo and Alejandro Armengol, have each just written excellent (and historically connected) samples of the state of denial in which the Cuban exile community lives. Both articles are unpretentiously written from their own convictions and beliefs. I disagree with the tone of their writing, with their hopelessness and pragmatism that provide but a flat view on Cuba's historical past.

 

Cubans from Miami live with the conviction that history stopped on its tracks on January 1, 1959; that this has been a sort of hiatus opened by a voluntaristic (and criminal) enterprise conducted by a demon whose only goal is gold and glory, and who knows no god but himself; a mix of a crusader, conquistador, and mobster – (Fidel) Castro, the Terrible. It is particularly discouraging to realize that there is no way to change this dull apprehension —there are many interests plotting to avoid a significant reverse in this matter. Reynaldo and Armengol are among the most educated and sincere voices in this disenchanted vision on Cuban history. And it is not that bad. My only objection is that those voices should be heard and read and printed in Havana, however untimely they may be. A nation needs its critics. But it so happens is that those voices —shouted, cried, or calmly written in the United States— work as part of the "final solution" strategy the American political class has set for the Cuban revolution —its dissolution into the normalcy of the market, its renunciation to be an alternative, a possibility, to today's state of affairs. There are other minor voices, chorus voices claiming new interpretations, new nihilisms, that should not be mentioned —entertainers, clowns, essayists, historians, self-called writers and poets who work hard to carve a lot in their new existential and academic environment.

 

Andrés Reynaldo's article swings from the greatness of a prose to the poverty of an argument that actually weakens any political position or opinion taken against, or in defiance of, the Cuban revolution. How is it possible that a disenchanted intellectual, an against-all-flags rebel can write such pathetic words? How is it possible that a "read and re-read" person like him look back (before 1959) on the Cuban past so bucolically? Among other things, the Cuban revolution —that is not strange to the historical process of the Cuban nation— is our entrance to the realm of tragedy, the end of the chambelona era, the death of the swindlers as makers of the national history. There was no such a thing as a placid republic in which everything flowed progressively to a happy end –revolutions do not happen in history because of the will of individuals no matter how devilish and criminal an intellect can be. The argument that an ordinary, everyday life should weigh more than a heroic life, an extraordinary life, is quite an ode to mediocrity, a hymn to a perfect bourgeois lifestyle. Then I ask myself about the extraordinary lives Reynaldo should love: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Verlaine, Valery, and so forth. Can they be reduced to "arroz con picadillo y plátano frito" to satiate their hunger? What about those lives that were paradigms of facing the boring lives proposed by both tycoons and shopkeepers? It is a matter of opinion, and a healthy one, to disagree, to confront decisions and actions of the Cuban government. It is also legitimate to be distant, however far, from the ideological and political foundations of the Cuban state as well as to want and work to introduce changes in the social, economic and political order of the country. But it is unethical, and illegal, to plot against the government, and the state, that beyond any other consideration, represents the conditio sine qua non that makes it possible to ask questions such as Reynaldo's; if Cuba is swallowed by the normalcy of being a small neighbor to a big one, if Cuba loses its personality, its singularity, then Reynaldo's and Armengol's diatribes have no sense.

 

Alejandro Armengol's article is more assertive, and perceptive as well as preceptive, than Reynaldo's. Armengol is not detoured by political issues –he goes straight to the heart of his own questioning: is it possible to have a nation without sacrifices? It is a rhetorical question, one that helps him to dig deeper: corruption as the engine that has moved Cuban struggle for independence. According to Armengol, behind the mask of the hero, or the heroic, is hidden a sort of rascal changing places and faces. Armengol's article lost me at times; one expects to read more, like it was left unfinished. There is, or are, missing argument(s). One thing we have learned from Armengol: you cannot put the Cuban history in few words and fewer pages without leaving behind a lot of things that are critical and essential to the Cuban process. I do not know if our insular temperament determines our will to be writing incessantly the final thesis on Cuba in newspapers and journals – I find myself doing the same thing. A subtle attack on Cuban heroism is given in this paragraph: "It was a fight in which the Spanish troops suffered a lot of casualties, due to the Cuban generals' strategy. But this military capacity is shown mainly in using guerrilla tactics, hit-and-run, and not facing the enemy. Mambí talent is at its best when exhaustion and illness ravage the enemy. As always, a dirty war. A war in which the utmost heroism was an ordinary thing –staying alive." There is no other part of the article that better targets the author's ultimate intention. In fact, I have not read such an argument to disqualify Cuban wars for independence and at the same time to impugn Cuban independence itself. Guerilla warfare is not a dirty war. It is a way of fighting an enemy which outnumbers in troops and logistics. Dirty wars were conducted by military regimes in Latin America during the seventies and eighties with the full support of the US government and its intelligence agencies. But going back to the author's argument, it is symptomatic that guerrilla tactics were associated to dirty war in our wars for independence. If we put aside the heroism of the Cuban patriots in their struggle to have a sovereign country, or as Julio Sanguily used to say during the Constitutional Assembly of 1902, an "independent entity," we take the national floor away. And the normalcy of being nothing but a TV commercial for American tourists will come true, as in a fairy tale. The paragraph just quoted led me to a book published just two years ago, War and Genocide in Cuba (1895-1898), by John Lawrence Tone. As the author acknowledged in the preface, Cuban participation in the military conflict was relegated by both Spaniards and Americans by many years –Americans won the war because of Spanish decadence. Mr. Tone also acknowledged "the more one knows about what the Cuban insurgents did between 1895 and 1898, the more unacceptable this perspective appears." (Tone, xii). But Mr. Tone takes an equidistant position when he begins analyzing what he calls the Cuban "view of the war" and summarizes it in a sentence: "They [the Cubans] defeated Spain with no need of outside help," and quotes Emilio Roig Leuchsenring and his work Cuba no debe (sic). Mr. Tone states "There are many problems with this line of reasoning". And provides a list of reasons: 1) "It is too mechanistic…"; 2) "It overstated the 'countless thousands of casualties" inflicted by the Cuban insurgents (…) the number of Spanish casualties … is both easy to count and quite small."; 3) "It denies the importance of events in Spain." And now fanfare for the scholar: "My research shows that neither side in this debate is entirely correct." This book should be read for the nation's critics, for the Cuban nation's critics –it could give them plausible material to doubt Cuban patriots' heroism, the existence of Cuban nation, the importance in being independent. They criticize Cuba, but in regard to American traditions and patriotism they have nothing to say. This book should also be read by those who walk along (and alone) Cuban history, accompanying her through its dark and light periods, to understand the weakness of those who are looking for the smallest detail to make her disappear. I strongly recommend reading Philip S. Foner also; a reading that would shatter all concerns on the heroism of the Cuban patriots and what it meant to the generations that followed. In The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, the American historian gives a detailed account of how Cuban mambises were defeating Spanish troops, the tactics used by both the Spanish army and the Cuban Ejército de Liberación, the American motivation to intervene in the conflict, and so forth. Foner's text is obligated reference to have an informed opinion on the events between 1895 and 1898 in the island. Mr. Tone's detachment is not convincing –there is no such thing as being impartial and objective in a conflict that was the origin of a new world: American expansionism had begun (between the end of the Spanish-Cuban-American War and the beginning of the Great Depression, the United States sent troops to Latin American countries thirty-two times, the nightmare of Martí ridiculed by the Nation's critics), the European powers got ready to fight for a redistribution of the world in zones of influences (WWI), capitalism entered a new stage of its historical development (Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism). Foner's account is more credible. There is no doubt at all that Foner sides with the Cuban patriots, but readers can find that sources are reliable as is his account. Take this, Gómez's military strategy was based on two axes: to extend the war to the western region of the island and to damage the economy to cut Spanish from profit to finance the war. Gómez's decrees are reproduced entirely, so that readers can form their own opinion on the pertinacity and effectiveness of them. This is the difference between a biased but academic study and a so-called detached research that ends up as a storybook instead of a history book.

 

Is Cuba a cornerstone in the current international political scenario? Is Cuba that important in the international political arena or, at least, in the American one? Has its smallness created a delusion of grandeur in its population? I was going over the issues on this electoral campaign covered by the influential and non-suspected-of-assigning-to-Cuba-an-exaggerate-role Council of Foreign Affairs website and they identify twenty issues on which the candidates have taken positions since last November:

 

Defense policy / Israeli-Palestinian Conflict / Trade / Iran / Energy Policy / Cuba / Climate Change / Russia / Homeland Security / China / Democracy in the Arab World / Africa / Domestic Intelligence / North Korea / Nuclear Nonproliferation / Pakistan / Military Tribunals and Guantánamo Bay / India / United Nations / Immigration / War on Terror

 

On the issues affecting countries or regions, Cuba is listed. My guess is that if Batista's army had defeated the Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro in the last offensive of the summer of 1958, Cuba would be on the very same list, but for other reasons, like its convulsive and violent environment seasoned with a drug-trafficking network that would make Colombia pale in comparison. A country that the United States would dislike more than the current Cuba –one with no social discipline and order, uncontrollable and unstable, sending myriads of real emigrants without the elegant label of "political refugees." Batista in 1958 was not the American strongman in Cuba. American politicians did not as dearly call him in the 1930s "our S.O.B. in Havana;" he was the Mafia's man in Havana. I read somewhere that Meyer Lansky was one of those fleeing Havana on December 31, 1959 (What a coincidence!).

 

It is quite easy to scrape out those idyllic images Cuban exiles have based the illusion of what Cuba would have become if Castro had not existed, just by reading and researching a little on the years prior to 1959. Now that many so-called Cuban scholars appear interested on Batista's Cuba and government is time to write the truth: it was a society run by gangsters and apathy. [Is it is not Cuba's reality today —you would ask—a society runs by gangsters and apathy? Can a society run by gangsters and apathy show the social accomplishments the Cuban society can show? Is it possible to maintain order and control just by being repressive? Why does Cuba matter that much to the American government? Is it just because of the free elections, human right violations, and political prisoners that the American government is upset? I do not believe that for a second. And I do not believe that the so-called Cuban opposition has its own political discourse based on historical truths.] If Cuba is on that list as a singular affair that cannot be integrated into the Latin American agenda is because Cuba is a critical topic, which presidential candidates have to use to define their own political views. Cuba is at the epicenter of the American politics because it challenges the core of postmodern America in which the traditional values of hardworking, honesty, and generosity have been put to sleep while greed and profit are thriving successfully. In some way, Cuba represents a new way to order social relationships based upon solidarity, not selfishness, where quality of life is calculated taking into account the universal access to the basic social services provided by the state, and in which the democratic participation is assured by the political education of its citizens.