In the laboratories of the North, in those think tanks where men in suits "play" with maps and other people's resources, they discovered years ago the best-kept secret of politics: there is no better fuel to overthrow a government than the true pain of its people.
And I'm not referring to invented pain. I'm referring to needs that make life difficult, to inflation that empties pockets, shortages that complicate the acquisition of basic goods. These wounds are as real as the ground we walk on. The trick isn't in creating them—although that's part of it, because the blockade and sanctions bite where it hurts most—but in riding them like a jockey on someone else's horse and steering them toward the ditch.
The method has a name and surname: Gene Sharp wrote the manual, and the CIA and NATO printed it. But the real explosive device isn't the book, but the recipe it contains.
First, you identify an objective need. In Serbia, it was the sanctions that had impoverished the country; in Ukraine, the corruption that was eating away at the state; in Georgia, elections that reeked of fraud. All of them legitimate demands. All of them cries that deserved a response.
Second, you look for young people. Not seasoned activists, not political cadres. Middle-class, depoliticized youth, driven more by fashion than ideology. You give them an attractive logo—a clenched fist in Serbia, a rose in Georgia—and send them out into the streets with a simple message: "We want what’s fair."
Third, you amplify. CNN cameras, the microphones of the "free" press, the spotlights of NGOs that spring up like mushrooms after the rain—USAID, NED, IRI, Open Society—are responsible for turning a protest by young people, students, or some minority, ethnic, or social group into a global earthquake.
And fourth, you divert attention. Because what began as a demand for jobs has ended up demanding the president's head. What started as a complaint about the cost of living has transformed into a "revolution for democracy." And the young people, honest in their grief, don't even realize that their legitimate anguish is being orchestrated from embassies.
Does it sound familiar? It's the same old script. The young men from Otpor, in Belgrade, learned it from Colonel Robert Helvey, a retired military officer who taught them how to convince the police that "we are all victims." Then Srdja Popovic and his group founded Canvas and traveled the world training others: those in Kmara, Georgia; those in Pora, Ukraine; the Venezuelan students who received intensive courses in 2005 while USAID funding multiplied.
The pattern repeats itself like a broken record. They look for a country with strategic resources—oil, gas, an uncomfortable geopolitical position. They wait for the moment of greatest tension, and when real discontent—the kind that truly hurts, the kind that leaves you with an empty fridge—combines with media manipulation and foreign funding, then they light the fuse.
We saw it in Ukraine in 2004, when the Orange Revolution promised Europe and brought oligarchs. We saw it in Georgia, when the Rose Revolution installed a president who opened the doors to multinational corporations. We saw it in Kyrgyzstan, when the tulips withered, leaving behind the same old corruption. And we saw it fail in Belarus, in Iran, and in the Venezuela of Chávez and Maduro.
And this is precisely the lesson they don't teach in the academies of the North. Sharp's manual has a blind spot, a weakness that armchair strategists fail to grasp: when a people has a conscience, the orchestra falls out of tune.
Because if young people are educated in the history of their homeland, if they know the faces of their heroes, if they can distinguish between their own difficulties and foreign aggression, then the script falls apart. The pain continues to hurt, the needs continue to press, but the foreign rider is left without a horse.
It's not that Cuba lacks problems. It's not that the blockade isn't tightening. It's not that the youth live in a bubble of happiness while the empire roars outside. Objective needs exist, and it would be foolish to deny them. But the difference—the enormous, the insurmountable difference—is that this people learned long ago to distinguish between those who suffer with them and those who want to use their suffering to bury them.
That's why, when the empire distributes its manuals and funds its NGOs, and trains its youth with colorful logos, it runs up against a wall of memory. Because here, most young people know that no borrowed color is worth as much as the blue of our flag.
These are not times for naiveté. The strategy is as old as greed. But the antidote—awareness, history, dignity—is also as old.
