A Brazilian friend visiting Cuba for a few days in her capacity as journalist, told me, astonished, how every Cuban she talked to knew who Bolsonaro, Dilma and Lula were, something she did not experience in other countries of Latin American she had recently visited.
Cubans follow international events with exceptional interest, something that those who live in this country may overlook. Events like the social outbursts in Haiti, Chile, Panama and Ecuador; the power struggle in Peru, the endless repressions and killings of social leaders in Honduras and Colombia, the inherited ungovernability that has forced Mexico to release a drug dealer, the unfair imprisonment of the leader of the left wing in Brazil to prevent him from a certain win in the elections, the elections in Bolivia and in the United States, or the constant aggressions of the United States towards Venezuela, can be topics of conversation in any place in Cuba, from the domino game table on the corner to a university classroom.
Of course, these conversations do not avoid the serious difficulties of the Cuban economy, and the new measures the US dictates every week against it, nor any of the deficiencies in the services faced by the population every day, in which the impact of the blockade may blend with bureaucratic indolence and cause inconveniences and dissatisfaction. However, this mix of economic warfare with internal shortages does not provoke social uprisings. When the single-party Socialism system has gone to referendum, such as the constitutional one held last year, the results are overwhelmingly in favor of the revolutionary leadership that Washington has been trying to overthrow for the last six decades, despite the intense propaganda to which the United States allocate dozens of millions of dollars and a well-funded ‘Cuba Internet Task Force.’
The explanation supplied by the mainstream media machinery is that the mix of “intense internal repression by the regime” and “Cubans’ lax attitude” prevent a social outburst from happening. However, in the history of Cuba – from the reconcentration of Weyler to the dictatorships of Machado and later on, Batista– no regime based on repression managed to stay in power for a long time, despite the ‘lax attitude’ that made corruption the dynamics of politics and economy at all levels.
On the contrary, if the constitutional referendum would take place today amidst the intensifying of the blockade, instead of February of 2019, maybe the percentage of approval would be higher than the one obtained that date. It would owe, undoubtedly, to the combination of three current factors and two structural ones.
Current factors:
- The intensifying of the hostility of the US government strengthens the patriotic feeling and the national unity.
- Political efficiency of the Cuban government, explaining in a clear way the relation between the shortages of supplies and the increase of the hostility, and the strategy the government will use to face sanctions in order to mitigate its effects on the Cuban people.
- International state of affairs where there is a clear failure of the neoliberal policies and discredit of the formulas of the bourgeois democracy.
Structural factors:
- Cubans have a vast political culture consolidated during 60 years of teachings by Fidel Castro on the nature of imperialism and the project of social justice and national sovereignty of the Revolution.
- Engagement of the leadership of the revolution and the population, which has continued under the leadership of Raúl Castro and Díaz-Canel, reinforcing the notion that the Government listens to the people and works on their favor.
None of the Latin American countries currently repressing social outbursts with shots and gas and/or openly violating the rules of formal democracy they uphold to, has been the target of economic warfare, or receives multi-million funding to create an artificial opposition. None of them has their leaders and political and social project subjected to a global academic and media lynching on a permanent basis.
In spite of all this, there are people who are not satisfied in Cuba, and many of them migrate to Miami. The migratory privileges accumulated for almost six decades, together with the free education and health services provided by the Cuban Socialism, make them more competitive compared to other non-native communities. However, it does not make them freer: over a million of Cubans living in the U.S. suffer from serious limitations to keep in touch with their families in Cuba due to Trump’s measures. We never read or hear news of major protests to change this there. We never read that the lack of public disagreement is the result of corruption and the repressive non-democratic practices that the Cuban dominant class who fled Cuba from 1959 on seems to have installed in Miami during their overdue stay in that city. And let’s not forget, the edifying example of a system that today puts Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a race of corruption and insults.
