The Myth of Progress: Notes on Cuba Before and After Communism

The Power of the Imponderable

 "The 11^th of July Popular Uprising (11J) of 2021 marked a watershed moment for the communist dictatorship in Cuba."

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Hannah Arendt argued that the totalitarian mode of exercising power was structured to reduce humans to objects. This was not just an effect of the non-democratic operative model. It was a methodical necessity to maximize control and curtail political action against it. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt equated spontaneity with freedom. Once a regime manages to crush popular spontaneous activity, humans, by becoming atomized entities, are dehumanized and serve the political power as tools. From a practical standpoint, once political action regains the ability to act spontaneously in public, the totalitarian regime is in trouble.

The 11^th of July Popular Uprising (11J) of 2021 marked a watershed moment for the communist dictatorship in Cuba. It is true that opposition to Cuban communism has been an ongoing phenomenon. Since 1959 until this day, Cubans have incessantly charted courses of liberation, both by violent and nonviolent means. Thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have served prison terms fighting for Cuba’s freedom. However, the Castro regime had never confronted mass popular demonstrations, from one point of the Cuban archipelago to the other, like that eventful midsummer Sunday in 2021.

Castro-Communism was caught completely off guard. Over seventy-two localities in Cuba witnessed popular demands for the end of socialism and tyranny. The Marxist dialectical motor of history had suddenly deviated from the Leninist script. This revealed two important facts. One, the Cuban people, despite having suffered over six decades of communist counterculture inculcation, were decidedly calling for deep-rooted systemic change. In other words, no more communism run by an oligarchic clan. This meant that Marxist, godless propaganda was no match for universal truths and principles that subscribe to a transcendental order. The Cuban people were exercising their natural rights and appealing to the preeminent morality of natural law. 

 

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Dissecting the Trump Documents Indictment

“No one is above the law” is a phrase that once had depth in the U.S. It has become a lame cliché

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Few who believe in a free society can challenge the notion that the rule of law and uniformity in its application are systemic staples of a democracy. “No one is above the law” is a phrase that once had depth in the U.S. It has become a lame cliché. There is an adage that is gaining momentum among observers of American democracy. “No one should be below the law, either.” This addition to the popular statement reflects the legal climate in America today. The recent indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on 37 charges exemplifies the crisis in U.S. jurisprudence. This fact poses an overarching threat to the republican model of government.

The perception that there is currently a two-tiered justice system in the U.S. is fast becoming self-evident. The legal terrain is now a war front. Ideological enclaves of American leftism offer far-left activists the proper human fodder to get prosecution validations via grand jury schemes that they would not get in most of the country’s other court localities. These are the American version of “revolutionary tribunals.” Judicial districts in places like Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco, for example, are being exploited to undermine the principle of a fair trial and the common law tradition, which relies on precedent.

The charges against Trump contain 31 counts of alleged willful retention of national defense information. The others are single counts for supposed conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding documents, concealing and plotting to conceal documents, hiding a document in a federal investigation, and making false statements. The underlying premise of the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) action against Trump, deals with the handling of presidential records, who they belong to, and whether there was malicious intent by the former president, who happens to be the lead opposition leader and a 2024 presidential candidate.

Since 1978, the Presidential Records Act has served as the guidepost that delineates what is U.S. government property and what are personal records of a former president. The items at hand include memos, letters, notes, emails, and other written communications during a president’s tenure as the chief executive and that of his staff. The law seeks to establish norms and is enforced by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

 

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The Cuba-China Espionage Nexus: New or Old?

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The use of alien elements to assist in Cuban communism’s longevity is old stuff. When will the U.S. and the West figure this out and finally decide to act with valor and common sense?

A June 8 article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the communist regimes of Cuba and China had reached an agreement on a cash-for-spying scheme. Beijing would pay Havana billions to install a state-of-the-art electronic eavesdropping facility on the island. The WSJ credited the information to an intelligence source. CNN also claimed to validate the WSJ report from its intelligence information pool. Both media outlets imply that the Cuban dictatorship has granted China permission to do this. Would this be a novel occurrence?

Since 1949, Mao declared a hundred-year marathon to extend its hegemony over the world. This informal declaration of war smartly changed strategy upon its revamping of the economic model from an orthodox socialist economy to a mercantilist socialist variant in the 1970s. This politically and centrally guided economic system of state capitalism, targeted market manipulation, and intense foreign investment courting opened the way of a shift in war tactics. China perfected the use of asymmetric warfare and developed the bankroll capacity to do so. 

Cuban and Chinese communism never severed relations or contact, despite the overarching symbiotic affair with the USSR. The fall of Soviet communism and the subsequent 8-year hiatus of the short-lived Russian democratic experiment (1991-1999) which died with Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, brought Castroism closer to Mao’s heirs. Excluding Venezuela, which is a virtual Cuban colony, China has become Cuba’s most important trading partner. The bond has not just been commercial.

Putting the Caimanera Protests into Context

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Maintaining political power by force is an art. It is not an ethical practice or an exercise of a moral task. Nonetheless, it is a chore that requires strict form, constant application, and pragmatic ingenuity and in this sense acquires an artist format. Regimes that adopt the totalitarian variant might even consider it a science. The Cuban dictatorship has mastered the job of non-democratic rule, judged by its capacity to retain power. They have been able to pull this off for a good part of six decades. Explained philosophically, this preservation of tyranny has been achieved by dogmatically applying Machiavellian principles, harnessing the Hobbesian total domination leviathan model, and successfully presenting it in Rousseauean-Marxist verbiage to appeal to the emotional. Decomposition, however, is a natural occurring phenomenon in artificially controlled political schemes. This is what has been happening in Cuba. We are witnessing its symptoms.    

Havana’s communist regime owes its ability to illegitimately maintain power to zealously following key strategies. Hardcore state terrorism has been one of them. This has been manifested in a combination of approaches such as heavy-handed prison sentences, political killings, historically by way of firing squads, torture, family division, limiting access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment. An immigration escape valve has also proved functional. Infiltrating real or potential opposition and dissident groups, inside as well as outside the island, has been a mainstay and is the third principal method. Yet, despite past success, Cuban communism appears to have lost its firm grip on social control, a fundamental piece of totalitarian governance.

 

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