Note: I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Jeudiel Martínez on Facebook chat July 17th after I read the essay, Cuba Libre (below, in English, la versión en español está aquí) a few days after the unprecedented protests that shook Cuba on July 11th. I thought readers might find a little background on the writer of this extraordinary piece useful.
Jeudiel is a Venezuelan of Colombian descent, a sociologist by training. Until just a couple of years ago he worked as an instructor at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) but then, as he put it, in “a variation of the history of millions of Venezuelan professionals that had to escape from collapse and pauperization” he decided to migrate to Brazil.
Like many left-wing Venezuelans, Jeudiel supported Chávez early on and made a living as a public employee of the Bolivarian government. But as he watched friends and acquaintances “ascend the ranks of the chavista bureaucracy” he came to understand the “inner workings of chavista power.”
As a young man (Jeudiel is now in his mid-forties) he admired the M-19 guerrilla and the Tupamaros of Uruguay as they were more urbane and intellectually interesting than the rural guerrillas, and certainly more than the “pro-Cuban people on the left [who] were the most conservative and frighteningly reactionary.” Notably, both the M-19 and the Tupamaros surrendered early on and went on to engage in electoral politics. I found Jeudiel’s choice of “guerrilla” told me a lot about him as the M-19 was founded with the primary aim of restoring democracy and the Tupamaros had a “multi-ideological composition.” Jeudiel put it this way: the “dynamics of those groups wasn’t militaristic…they weren’t dogmatic and they had a political horizon beyond the armed struggle” which was very important to him.
Jeudiel was fourteen when the notorious Caracazo happened. He reminded me that this momentous event occurred just as the Soviet Union was coming to an end, and Leninism and Stalinism were then seen, as he put it, as “just zombie” ideologies, with no validity.” He was part of a left that had different “cultural references: punk and ska instead of folk music, among other things… We had long hair, read comics and manga, were less dogmatic and had little or no problem with drugs or homosexuality” and “we treated the left slang as a joke.”
It was only as Jeudiel recognized the “Castroization” of chavismo after 2005 that he realized “how deep my rejection of the militaristic left that supported Cuba really was.” That was when he came to understand that the “Latin American Left was, in essence, reactionary, conservative in fact, because of the influence of Castroism and the way it mixed up traditional nationalism with Stalinism” and these “conservative features, although extreme in Chavism, Peronism, and Castroism, were the tendencies of all the left.”
Moreover, this “culture of statism and authoritarianism” had, from Jeudiel’s perspective, marginalized all the “pluralistic tendencies and forces,” isolating them from the mainstream Left which had become a “cult to the state and to the leaders.” He distinguishes between movements, which are “multiple and plural” with “many inclinations” and a Left that has “a very singular culture of the twentieth century, formed around the Soviet Union, the great party bureaucracies and state socialism.” Jeudiel sees the authoritarian nature of the Left as being so powerful that “it’s futile to deny it.” More recently it has “gentrified” itself, moved from the “factories and the neighborhoods and now lives in universities and NGOs.”
That left model was there in Chávez’s Bolivarian project in Venezuela, and is now carried on by the pro-Cuban Nicolás Maduro. But it remains consistently top-down, despite any appearances to the contrary. “Venezuela was very different from Cuba, since it had a history of public liberties” so Chavez had to adapt the Cuban model. As Jeudiel put it, “Chávez was not a plagiarist; he was a translator.” He said that “for Fidel Stalinism was more convenience and method than conviction while for Chávez Castroism was also a convenience and a method, but he had the conviction that Castro’s way was THE WAY.” Jeudiel points to the blackouts in the oil-rich nation that go back to 2009 as an example of how poorly this Stalinist-Castroist model has worked out for Venezuela, but he could have pointed to just about anything else in the country to prove that. Or to the millions of brilliant, talented people who are no longer in the country, like Jeudiel himself.
Cuba Libre
by Jeudiel Martínez
It’s not strange that on the Left they’re saying that the Cubans who took to the streets in protest are manipulated. The Left, be it that of the first world, or be it the spoiled middle-class Latin American left, has always believed that it knows countries like Cuba and Venezuela better than those who live there. So obviously they must know better than Cubans what’s best for them. Eternal children, Cubans are easily manipulated, unlike the Leftist who’s a model of enlightenment.
The shock is easily understandable: for that Left (which is nothing more than a province of the university middle class, with its privileges, advantages and prejudices) the tremors in Cuba are shaking the foundation of their beliefs.
Castroism was a pioneer in designing a cultural tourist experience in which a foreigner with little or no knowledge of the country – in the style of Beauvoir and Sartre – could judge himself an expert in a land that he doesn’t know, in a life that he doesn’t live, and in a language that he doesn’t speak: it isn’t a question of identity, but of experience. Castroism, like no other regime, managed to base its politics on a sentimental tourist experience that occludes the experience of those who live the day by day of Cuba: the decay, the rust and ruin of Cuban cities, so fascinating for the Left middle class, reveals all the difference between those who live in that ruined house and those who just take photos of it. From the ridiculous, unbelievably childish kitsch of the Cuban trova[1] to the guided tours and the snobbery of the intellectuals, the stability of Cuba, in the midst of the blockade, was associated with the creation of a theme park in which the common Cuban remains in the same subservient position as the hosts of the Westworld series: Is it, then, strange that the snobs from New York, Santiago or Paris believe that someone has hacked their Cuban androids?
And so it becomes the duty of Cubans to put up with what no one else would tolerate: they have to live in decayed and rusty cities, drive old cars or hang precariously from “guaguas”[2] full of people; they cannot criticize the government; they cannot start a union; they aren’t allowed to choose between two different parties in an election; in short, they are condemned to be faithful and obey not only for the benefit of the nomenklatura that in fact canceled the revolution to take over the country but on behalf of the international left for which the Brave Little Island, double of Thomas More’s Utopia, is the axis of existence.
Intellectually, Cuba’s role is to maintain faith in a form of government that neither works nor is justified: even Vietnam and China, which maintain the one-party regime, have moved away from the old-style Stalinism that Castro mixed so well with militarism and Latin American caudillismo, a hybrid that has dragged along its failure for decades, unable, despite all efforts, to undertake the complex reforms that would have been necessary to modernize. It set course on a path more akin to that of North Korea, where the inability to change and attachment to the past serves as an orientation and compass.
Precisely for this reason, for its neo-archaism, Castroism awakens nostalgia in the really existing Left and, at the same time, reveals its totalitarian character. Finally, what we call the “left” is not the result of the great revolutionary movements of the last century but the inheritance of the parties and governments that liquidated those movements and those struggles. That left does not come from rebels and creators but from the Moscow trials, party bureaucracies, the Gulag, fanatical sects, little university groups, petulant intellectuals, the manuals and the beloved leaders. Its religion is an absolute government personified in an infallible leader who has no need to show that he represents anyone or serves anything other than his own ends. Sympathy for Putin and the Iranian theocracy already shows the character of the Left, but it must be remembered that, in the “DNA” of that culture is Castroism: the rarest Marxism in the world that does not speak of the proletariat or the working class but of “el pueblo” in the same terms as Franco and Mussolini, and smuggles the most traditional authoritarian ideas under the cloak of “anti-imperialism.” Is there anything more aggressive, more oppressive and Orwellian militarist than the Cuban “Comandantismo” that reduces all Cubans to obedient soldiers in an eternal war? The tropical Cuban phalanstery, with its parties, tourists, and sycophantic intellectuals, was always the most seductive image of totalitarianism.
Although fundamentally emotional, the attachment to Cuba is justified by the blockade (with no acknowledgement that the basic freedoms of Cubans have been usurped); by the mythologized medical system (though its failure in the face of COVID seems to be a trigger for the recent protests); and quintessentially by the idea that there is a strange singularity that justifies Cubans being denied the freedoms that the snobbish left from Paris, New York or Buenos Aires would never accept being denied.
For the Left—the majority, the predominant, that segment that sets the pace, and not those splinters of dissent in which naive but well-intentioned people want to believe in “diversity”—Cubans are extras, sexual objects, aesthetic objects, employees, whose function is to bring them mojitos and say “patria o muerte, patroncito,” comfort droids condemned to live a life that they themselves would never live.
But in fact Cubans are people like us: they have the right to decide which party governs them (because even when the options are miserable, the fact of choosing affirms that no one owns the state and that ordinary people have the last word); they have the right to create a union and go on strike; protest in the street; write in newspapers; denounce the state in court; confront the police without being killed; live in clean cities with decent public services; because all those freedoms (that the Left calls “bourgeois” but which they would fight to avoid losing) define our dignity and our quality of life. Without those rights it’s not even possible to think of higher or deeper freedoms. After all, democracy doesn’t express itself in “assemblyism” and the shit-talking which the left loves so much, and not even entirely in the vote, which simply limits the power of the parties, but in the ability to govern those who govern us by imposing a direction and a horizon.
And so the Cubans are not doing anything different from what the Colombians were doing just a few days before or the Ecuadorians and Chileans a few months ago. If democracy still means anything, it is that constituent capacity to shake the established powers, to create from the common a new horizon for life.
So let’s forget the illusions that Cuba is less capitalist or less unequal than any other country on the continent. After all, wasn’t Fidel drinking rum and fishing marlin with García Márquez—and some other professional ass-kissers—while the Cubans suffered through the Special Period[3]?
Let’s stop thinking that the very miserable US policy justifies the Acts of Repudiation and the concentration camps. We all know that a regime like the one in Cuba is unjustifiable and Cubans shouldn’t have to endure it. We don’t know what will happen in the future, and there is no reason to believe that Castrism will fall from one day to the next, but what has happened in these days of protest is irreversible and we should be happy about it. There is no freedom that we claim for ourselves to which Cubans haven’t the right and there is no justification for those who have stolen those rights from them.
Translated by Jeudiel Martínez and Clifton Ross
[1] The “Nueva Trova” movement, broadly called the “New Song” movement in Latin America, began in the late 1960s and early 1970s and included artists like Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés and others.
[2] “Guagua” is the Cuban term for “bus.”
[3] The “Special Period” was that time in Cuban history in the early 1990s after the collapse of the USSR when the island underwent extreme privation, endangering the lives, health and well-being of the majority.