Generations emerged conditioned to accept an immutable political order vertically imposed by the State.
By Karel J. Leyva (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Being part of a nation goes beyond inhabiting a territory or sharing a common history. As Benedict Anderson maintains, the nation is an “imagined community,” a collective project that is born from the ability of people to identify with a wider group and commit to a shared future. This concept is not inherent; it is actively built through institutions, culture and, fundamentally, citizen participation.
The nation is not defined by a specific territory. The Kurdish nation, for example, persists without a recognized independent state, while the Kurds are scattered across several countries. The same can be said of the Inuit, whether from Canada, Alaska or Greenland, and of the Sami, present in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. No one, unless they aspire to tell the truth, could say that there is no Inuit, Sami or Kurdish nation. These peoples share more than a common language or culture. They are nations not by their territory or by their genealogy, but by their collective identity. It is this identity that allows individuals to think in terms of “us” no matter where they are, and without renouncing either their rational autonomy or their collective project.
Thinking collectively as a nation is antithetical to submitting to a collectivism imposed vertically by the State. In the same way that a nation exists when the same political, social and cultural status is shared, it is fractured when the national identity ceases to be the binding link of the various plural identities that coexist in society and becomes a space of exclusion.
This explains why, while the caudillos and sycophants of the Cuban communist regime defended the Marxist-Leninist ideal of a collective identity for the Cuban people, in reality what they did was destroy the very essence of the Cuban nation, diminishing the ability of Cubans to think collectively, freely, without fear of offending the despotic narcissism of a tyrant. The cornerstone of the revolutionary project was never a national ideal, because national ideals do not divide citizens between loyal and disloyal, friends and traitors, heroes and villains. The national ideal, by nature, is plural, because it does not depend on a unitary doctrine, much less on an imported ideology with the purpose of colonizing minds and dominating wills.
The communist narrative exalted the collective as the only means to overcome the inequalities of capitalism, but this ideal implied the total subordination of individual interests to a single, exclusive and authoritarian party. Behind the rhetoric of the community was hidden a project of centralization of power that stripped Cubans of their political agency. The nationalization of private property and the means of production did not seek so much to redistribute resources as to strengthen a structure that eliminated any form of opposition or pluralism.
Stripped of freedoms, rights and autonomy, the Cubans were subjected to a single political party that stood as the only guarantor of national objectives. This implied a redefinition of the collective: no longer as a space for deliberation and participation, but as a mechanism of subordination, dependence and emotional control, validated by the State. Citizen dispossession, social control and the suppression of any autonomous organization fostered a culture of mutual distrust, weakening the social fabric and replacing cooperation with obedience.
Spiritual leaders became public enemies. Art and creativity were co-opted as censorship instruments. Children were subjected to an indoctrination that could only nullify the capacity for critical thinking, homogenize their perspectives and prepare them to think not as a nation but as subjects of a political apparatus. Instead of individuals capable of imagining and building alternatives to the regime, generations emerged conditioned to accept an immutable political order.
The consequences of all this created a politically disjointed population structurally dependent on the State, and an ideal of national collectivity transmuted into an ideological machinery of conformity. This explains, in large part, what Cuba is today: a fragmented society, where individuals are forced to focus on daily survival, rather than on collective national transformation. Meanwhile, the political elites plunder the country with total impunity, while indefinitely postponing the progress of the Cuban nation.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.
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